Big news in the edublogosphere is that Joel Packer of the NEA is now blogging.  Joel is simply one of the best people in the DC public education community. When I first started at AFT I was on a summer fellowship.  As part of that I covered some committee meetings on the hill for the AFT legislation department. Joel went out of his way to be kind and supportive during my very brief sojourn in that world.  Hopefully we’ll be able to return the favor here on the Internets.

Eduwonk wants to know if this means my blogging brother John is losing some sort of status as a result.  John’s a cult figure, a populist icon and a true friend to educators everywhere. There’s no way that the creation of a mere blog can change that.  My big concern is that Joel is podcasting. Having listened to the Gadfly’s podcasts a couple of times, I am uncertain as to whether this is a wise course of action. 

Posted by Ed at AFT at 01:27 PM | Permalink

Sometimes the blogosphere seems to me to be a fever of words. That’s a phrase that Richard Nixon used in his first inaugural, supposedly decrying overly partisan rhetoric, but probably really decrying rhetoric aimed at him. Reading blogs, you might think we have too many words. And there are days that I agree.

But really, too many of us have too few words.  If you caught Richard Rothstein’s rap at NYSUT’s conference, this was one of his main points about the creation of the achievement gap.  Our friend Mr AB has a great post on how the number of books his kids reading aren’t a great indicator of the number of words they were learning.  A good book is more than the sum of its words, but the words do matter.  And, of course, there’s the National Endowment of the Arts report.  I understand the argument that NEA didn’t measure on-line time properly. But even if that affects aggregate reading, I suspect that there’s still a digital divide there. And things like E-books and Kindle, in the near term, have the potential to widen the gap not narrow it.  As we enter the Thanksgiving weekend, I’m thankful for the words we have, but I’m eager for us to get more. 

Posted by Ed at AFT at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by John at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I appreciate Dick Dalton’s thoughtful post about the differences in thinking inside and outside the Beltway re special education. I'll start by saying that I have tremendous respect for special education teachers, especialy those who do the work of Mr. Dalton.  I can't imagine the patience, dedication, and passion that they give to their difficult jobs.  Their students, their families, and society at large are lucky to have them. 

I'll also readily admit that after 7 years in DC, I am an inside-the-beltway thinker, so I have some differences with Mr. Dalton: NCLB concerns itself with the education of all k-12 students in the country, including those like Larry, the 17-year old with an IQ in the single digits. Its grand design doesn’t make exceptions for the 16-year old who arrived in the U.S. last week never having attended school before, nor does it make exceptions for students like Larry. (Though its implementation details do make exceptions for these types of students.)

No one wants federal law to decide what exactly instruction and assessment for a student like Larry should look like. But, once we start to say that students like Larry can’t do anything academic, we lose 40 years of civil rights progress and we should stop calling it school for Larry and call it day care or something worse.

IDEA, a civil rights law, mandated inclusion of students like Larry into schools to the extent possible. NCLB, an education law, tried to move further toward full inclusion.  Some are saying it has moved too far.

Mr. Dalton should be frustrated that the law doesn’t fit his classroom. I agree that NCLB requirements for students with severe disabilities and their teachers are not a good match. Mr. Dalton suggests that the IEP team should decide how students with disabilities should participate in academic assessments.  The AFT agrees. But I'm worried about an even worse inside-the-Beltway mistake: that the feds would choose a certain percentage of students or those with certain IQs or those with certain disabilities, and say that NCLB, the law intended to support education for all children, doesn’t apply to these children.

Posted by Beth at 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Dick Dalton, a special ed teacher and blogger, was encouraged when he started reading a recent Washington Post article about two congressional bills that would undercut NCLB.*  But then he kept reading and learned that states could "exempt any education program but special education" from NCLB.

Dalton's response, "So this means that special education still has to be shackled and cuffed to this leaky, stinky bureaucratic barge?" 

I spent a couple hours at a congressional hearing on NCLB last week and didn't hear any language as lively as that.  For that reason, if for no other, Congress should invite more teachers to testify about NCLB.

*The AFT opposes the bills and, for the record, doesn't think NCLB is a "leaky, stinky bureaucratic barge." After hearing from members who, like Dalton, are frustrated with the law, we've proposed these changes.

Posted by John at 08:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of my absolute favorite bloggers is Mr. AB of From the Trenches. He’s been writing about one kid in particular, who the faculty suspect is a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome.  Once instruction was adapted to try to take this into account (with a lot of computer assistance) the kid, called “D---“, began to show progress.  Mr. AB blogged about this in a post called “D---: Triumphant.” 

When I read it I was moved, but scared at the same time.  As a special education teacher, I’ve seen kids make amazing progress but not be able to hold on to it.  In fact, one such kid was a key factor in my decision to leave teaching. 

After arranging my algebra classroom for weeks to allow time to work one on one with “W”, he got the concept that if 4x=12, then x=3.  Not a big deal for most, but for this kid -- a twenty-year-old with severe learning disabilities -- it really was a triumph.  It happened on a Friday, and I remember going out with my college roommates that night and celebrating. 

Rather than join in, they told me that they were very concerned that I was living and dying by my kids to the extent that I was.  It was like an intervention.  It didn’t matter to me. I was flying.  But the next week, when W again couldn’t begin to solve for x, I crashed.  Graduate school applications soon followed.  I subbed full time in my first year of grad school, and when NYU offered me a fellowship to study full time instead, I left K-12 teaching behind. 

Mr. AB has a follow-up called “D----: Resilient.”  It turns out that D---- never quite passed the multiplication test that he had been progressing on. Mr. AB wonders if the pressure to succeed got to a kid who is clearly fragile in many ways. More than a decade later, I’m now wondering if that is part of what happened with W in my algebra classroom.  The good news is that Mr.AB has calibrated his approach to fit with this concern and there are signs that D---- is making steady progress at division.  

Also, in response to this, I don’t see why more teachers don’t graft their consciousness to a cyborg body so that they can teach 24-7 without having to eat or sleep.   Kind of like robocop with chalk. Then every teacher could really have eyes in the back of their head. And sonar, for all the good it would do them.  I think that’s what Jay Greene is going to recommend next.

Posted by Ed at AFT at 12:31 PM | Permalink

Posted by Beth 

Lots of folks talk about how NCLB and IDEA conflict, but here’s an article that highlights a real school where the conflict has created consequences. Per IDEA, students’ IEPs allow them to use calculators when taking an assessment. Per NCLB, these students are not validly participating in the assessments, so the school doesn’t meet the 95 percent participation requirement, and therefore doesn’t make AYP. 

What’s a school to do? Probably continue allowing the use of calculators and risk missing that participation requirement of AYP. The alternative—not following the IEP—is educationally unsound, and would possibly result in students not meeting the proficient target.

I’m sure there are  plenty of similar examples for education reporters. I wonder if the subject is too complex and wonky to make a readable story.

Posted by Guest at 08:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)