Sunday, June 21, 2009

Instructionally Disabled

The Seattle Superintendent Dr. Goodloe Johnson has been concerned about an excessive number of educationally disadvantaged learners being classified as Special Education students.

Consider the following from
http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american _educator/issues/fall04/prevention.htm

"District administrators became convinced that most kids identified as learning disabled are actually “instructionally disabled” meaning they hadn’t received the instruction appropriate for their needs."

Sure sounds like Seattle math to me.

How else can the SPS WASL Math pass rate for Grade 10 Blacks be 16%?

Was it just random chance that all 6 SPS measured achievement gaps increased on the 2008 4th grade math WASL?

Is is just bad luck that WA NAEP math achievement gap changes for 2003-2007 were among the worst in the nation?

Yet the plan is apparently to keep traveling the reform math road.

To improve a system requires the intelligent application of relevant data.
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From the Rocky Mountain News
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/education/article/0,1299,DRMN_957_5157346,00.html

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is what happens when you have a curriculum that is terribly disconnected from kids - you have parents enrolling their kids into special ed programs, when probably there is nothing to differentiate them from regular kids - mostly the issue is over literacy.

The textbooks not only have no clear instructional purpose, but the reading level is too high. Particularly, you see this in the Hispanics and the Blacks. Its easier passing school if you pretend to be stupid or pretend to not understand English. Across the board, unless the kid is having to make it on their own, kparents in general regardless of their ethnicity hold extremely high standards for their children. In fact, the more children fail, the more concerned and unreasonable the parent becomes. At some point, parents have got to make the decision that the child is doing the best they can - and we're talking more than just doing homework.

MGJ pushed for this, so she and her staff gets to live with it.

Anonymous said...

You know what she's hinting at? Let's cut bilingual and special ed programs, so we can improve academic 'performance'. Its fun thinking like a Superintendent.

Anonymous said...

'improve' here is a euphemism for 'fund'.