Teachers Address Education Law

I appreciate the question. The hard truth is that since the tests are very stringent about making accommodations for learners with special needs, times are quite tough for students with learning disabilities in today's classrooms.

To begin, I am being euphemistic when I say "the tests are very stringent." A more accurate description would be that the tests are preposterously inflexible and unaccommodating. From what I have heard - and it's the only excuse anyone has offered to me which seems to be grounded in some sort of solid reasoning, faulty as it may be - is that the government agencies are so maniacal about making virtually every student take the test without consideration of their individual learning profiles because the government education agencies view "learning disabilities" as a slippery slope. Or a Pandora's Box. (Some sort of something that is grounded in fear over logic.) Anyway, their fear is that once they begin to make accommodations for one type of learner, then they are going to have to make accommodations for another type of learner and since the tests are so high stakes and there is so much riding on the outcomes, the schools will start to find a way to "label" all the kids they know will not perform well on the NCLB tests as "learners who need special accommodations," and thus school test scores will rise artificially because only the better students will be tested. To put it another way, their worry is that making accommodations for pupils with special needs will be a loophole through which many, many other pupils will inevitably jump, whether through their own volition, that of their parents or that of the administration personnel who are desperate to do anything they can to edge up their NCLB test score performance.

Of course, no one will go on the record to actually admit this type of thing. It's a dirty little, behind-closed-doors type of thought process. What they do is couch their reasoning behind catch phrases like "high expectations for all learners" so when people lobby for learners who have special needs the argument thrown back in their face is that "you don't really believe this child can be successful, do you?" And thus they paint educators as the bad guy with low expectations while assuming the role of standing on higher moral ground by claiming they want the best for disadvantaged learners.

Obviously, the reality is far different. Students with learning disabilities most certainly do have special needs and to not accommodate for such is to rob them of the opportunity to actually grow to the best of their own ability. The best remedy for educators today (it's also the "buzzword du jour") is differentiated instruction. Teachers structure their classes towards meeting a uniform academic goal but within that learning objective they craft and tailor individual lesson plans to best meet the demands of individual students with unique needs. It's like teaching lessons within lessons to get to same point for everyone. Some students will learn best through reading, others will learn best from visual/spatial representations, yet others respond best to kinesthetic instruction, etc. Differentiating instruction makes a great deal of sense and is quite effective. I use it all the time. However, when classes are impacted and teachers teaching at a ratio of 35 to 1 (quite common in many, many schools) differentiating classroom lessons becomes a Herculean task. First off, a teacher has to learn the needs of all their students. At 35 to 1 five times a day a teacher is required to therefore learn about the different needs of 175 different individuals. With so many kids, it takes time just to learn all their names much less their different proclivities for education and penchants for best absorbing academic material. And no, the files that we keep on kids that ostensibly should be a resource to inform the teacher about all of this information prior to the child with special needs arriving in class are not rife with accurate information. It's more the case of discovering that the IEP records are woefully inadequate.

All of this adds up to one simple question. Do you teach the student in a way that you feel as a professional educator will best serve the needs of this child or do you teach this student to pass "the test"? At times the two are diametrically opposed to one another, particularly in the case of students who have learning disabilities.

Excellent question, John. Before NCLB, too many of us were satisfied with "most" of our students passing. Some even believed that a few students had to fail in order to make the bell curve work. Unfortunately, it was our students with any type of disabilities who always found themselves at the bottom of the bell curve and locked out of an education. While there are still too many students who do not receive adequate academic services, that number has decreased dramatically because of NCLB.

One of the best changes I have seen recently is the focus on the individual child. We can no longer believe that a 97% pass rate is acceptable when 3% of our students have failed. Education has shifted its attention to that 3%, and rightly so. The challenge of this century will be to ensure that every student makes progress, regardless of how they compare to their peers.

I have had the great fortune of teaching at 5 vastly different schools. Each has changed my approach to teaching, not because of testing, but as a result of diverse students. Therefore, my classroom instruction focuses on multiple learning styles, differentiated instruction, and developing critical skills. This will always be the focus, regardless of the test that "measures" our success. If we can work with students to develop the necessary skills to be successful in life, how they do on one specific test, on one given day, in US History or Algebra makes no difference.