NCLB: Special Education Teachers Worry About Super Subgroups

Like everyone else, special education teachers and administrators are both excited and fearful about the new NCLB waivers coming down the pike. Excited for among other things for the day when they and their kids won't be blamed for a school not making AYP. Concerned about the disappearance of a special education subgroup that "counts" the same way as it did under NCLB.  Read this new article from the Harvard Education Letter for more: With the Rise of “Super Subgroups,” Concerns for Disabled Students Mount. NCLB has become increasingly important to educators who work with students with disabilities, even though it provides no dedicated funding stream and is in many ways much weaker than IDEA.  

Comments

[Mary]

This actually breaks my heart, Alex. All the links are open at the bottom of my screen. Who pays you, really?

Your headline here says "special education teachers" are concerned. In your article, you cite statistics showing (I hope) a dramatic rise in the proportion of handicapped students who actually get diplomas. I study the website for the NCLD: it lobbies "on behalf of the 2.4 million students with learning disabilities..."

What's an advocate? The mainstreamed children in my classroom have only us human beings who are in actual daily contact with them. Somebody keeps getting between them and the resources everybody is trying to set up for them, and diverting all the $$$ to vendors of smoke and mirrors. I'm left with, say, a sixteen year old LD student in front of me, for 80 minutes a day. There's nothing available to help her but what I can scrape together. That's a fact on the ground.

On to your next citation. The NASDE is an association state directors of special education, ostensibly public servants. Here's what they lobby for:
"JUST PUBLISHED - State Blueprint for RtI - NASDSE has just released the final volume in a series of three Blueprints for Implementation of Response to Intervention. The latest guide, Response to Intervention — State Level, provides a step-by-step approach for implementing RtI at the state level and taking implementation down to the local district and school building levels. The guide includes a self-assessment tool to help guide state efforts."

I know what the RtI industry vendors have actually done to the children in front of me. Do you?

You know all the gears that are moving, and you've had a career moving them. You're a link in the advocacy-lobbying-capitol-hill-insider network. If you wanted to be an education reporter, could you do that?

There is so much capital out there now, looking for a way to sink its teeth in the public sector, that it can employ its own army of "advocates". I can't follow the money, but you can. It follows you, in fact. It owns the Harvard Education Letter, and you can get a byline there.

[Will]

Very good information. Thank you.