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Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Quite Possibly the Stupidest Thing To Come Out of the US DOE

In announcing a new emphasis and "major shift," the US Department of Education will now demand that states show educational progress for students with disabilities.

Arne Duncan announced that, shockingly, students with disabilities do poorly in school. They perform below level in both English and math. No, there aren't any qualifiers attached to that. Arne is bothered that students with very low IQs, students with low function, students who have processing problems, students who have any number of impairments-- these students are performing below grade level.

"We know that when students with disabilities are held to high expectations and have access to a robust curriculum, they excel," Duncan said. (per NPR coverage)

And I'm pretty sure we don't know any such thing. I'm pretty sure that the special needs students in schools across the country are special needs precisely because they have trouble meeting the usual expectations.

But who knows. Maybe Arne is on to something. Maybe blind students can't see because nobody expects them to. Maybe the student a colleague had in class years ago, who was literally rolled into the room and propped up in a corner so that he could be "exposed" to band-- maybe that child's problems were just low expectations. Maybe IEPs are actually assigned randomly, for no reason at all.

And that's not even the stupidest thing. We're not there yet.

Kevin Huffman, education boss of Tennessee, also chimed in on the conference call, to explain why disabled students do poorly, and how to fix it.

He said most lag behind because they're not expected to succeed if they're given more demanding schoolwork and because they're seldom tested

That's it. We should just demand that disabled students should do harder work and take more tests.

When Florida was harassing Andrea Rediske to have her dying, mentally disabled child to take tests, they were actually doing him a favor, and not participating in state-sponsered abuse.

Don't tell me reading is hard because of your dyslexia, kid. Just do it. And take this test.

We don't need IEPs-- we need expectations and demands. We don't need student support and special education programs-- we need more testing. We don't need consideration for the individual child's needs-- we just need to demand that the child get up to speed, learn things, and most of all TAKE THE DAMN TESTS. Because then, and only then, will we be able to make all student disabilities simply disappear.

This is just so stunningly, awesomely dumb, it's hard to take in. Do they imagine that disabled students are just all faking, or that the specialists who diagnose these various problems are just making shit up for giggles? Either way, Duncan and Huffman have set an entirely new high bar for ignorance, insensitivity, and just plain flat out stupidity.

25 comments:

  1. I didn't realize it was possible to laugh and seethe at the same time. It's almost impossible to accept that the person in charge of Ed Everything in this country is so completely idiotic. I'm sort of mad at you for writing this.

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  2. All kids are different and all kids have some needs that are special, and no, they don't progress the same no matter what curriculum. Take them from where they are. geezzzzzzzzz

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  3. Thank you for taking on this insanity with your customary rapier wit. Throw away those wheelchairs dammit and walk! Such a crutch....

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  4. The have taken ignorance to a new level, when I heard the broadcast today I was in shock. Have any of these so called experts ever been in a classroom? Have they ever been with a student who is working as hard as they possibly can struggle with tasks? Experience the frustration when others solve a problem so quickly? The shame, embarrassment, and blows to their self esteem because it does not come easily? Well there are may teacher training courses which have the teacher wear glasses that simulate what an visually impaired or dyslectic student may see when reading something, let Arne try them on and give him a test! Until these "experts" and politicians have the day-to-day tasks of working with students with a variety of learning differences they have no justification in making claims that all these students need is more rigorous instruction and testing. As I always say, I challenge them to have the fortitude to work with students and I mean all students of all abilities for one week, being fully responsible for the students, to the administration, and to the parents. These "experts" and politicians would be begging to get out of the classroom, ask the teachers to come and save them and bless the parents for the monumental tasks they have everyday all year when raising a child with "different" learning styles and abilities then get off the teachers and children's back and let the true and real learning begin, each in their own way and own time.

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  5. Welcome to my world- a double dose of Duncan and a bit Huffman to wash it down. um. um. good.

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  6. The Onion strikes again.
    Sorrry, but this is true.

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  7. When I saw this article yesterday, I literally couldn't wait to hear what you were going to write about it. "Maybe blind children can't see because no one expects them to." Lol! Thank you for giving us something to laugh about when the awful absurdity of King Arne is just too much to handle.

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  8. Amen sir - A - expletive - MEN.

    http://10seckid2secworld.blogspot.com/2014/06/exercises-in-futility.html?_sm_au_=isV4FSfm23PqMrVr

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  9. Thank you for YOUR article! Finally...some common sense!

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  10. Thank you for blogging about this. My BP shot up several points when I heard the broadcast...I wanted to cry, scream, throw in the towel, and dig in my heels...all at once. How DARE these men treat our children this way, and have the audacity to act as if they have children's best interests at heart?!

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  11. I wrote on the same topic last night! But I concede, you're funnier.

    http://teacherslessonslearned.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-miracle-workers.html

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  12. Well, I now look at it as akin to a very farout new religion. This is a tenant in this farout new religion. They look at us as if we are the crazy ones.Harm does not come up on their radar or just is of so little consequence to them. If we got with the program we would see the "enlightenment" of what they know is the world's only reality: the money train.

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  13. The mantras: "high expectations" and "differentiation." Almost every special education teacher I ever worked with, including myself, had very "high expectations" about the academic achievement for their students. Not that I expected much from this alone but at least once a week I explained to my students that passing the RCTs was "nice" but that what I expected was for all of them to score at least a 55 on the Regents Exams...we chanted and yelled "What do we want?" "The Regents Exams." Sounds a bit pitiful by itself but it was part of communicating regularly and very loudly what we expected to do. As for "differentiation", which is the hardest part of a SpEd teacher's job, when I was told to by my principal to "differentiate" more completely in my classrooms, which meant essentially writing a separate lesson plan for each student (I taught algebra and geometry to Regents standards in my self-contained classrooms), I asked her to demonstrate how I might differentiate more appropriately the factoring of quadratic equations. Of course, she had no idea what an quadratic equation was and promptly threw me out of her office. Thanks, Arne, for all the good and spectacularly useless advice and policy changes here on behalf of my fomrer struggling SpEd students who in high school could not simplify low order equations such as 3/9=1/3. My principal would not let me diverge from the Regents curriculum to do a unit on fractions so, of course, they could never solve a Regents problem that included a fraction in the question. No wonder that of the 200+ Algebra Regents exams I scored for my students while at my former school exactly three were able to score 55 or better, despite my high expectations, serious test prep and my own, inadequate attempts to differentiate lessons to ten students in my class all at different levels of math competency.

    Harris Lirtzman

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    1. Exactly. I have found that most administrators have no idea what these students are dealing with. Sometimes even other ESE teachers don't get it if they have only worked with academically capable EBD students. The wide variety within the LD spectrum doesn't help.

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  14. #FireArneDuncan There really is no other option at this point.

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  15. Crazy, just crazy. I have so many anecdotes of Sped students that don't test well. As a teacher I am shocked. As a parent I would be furious. Many Sped parents work with their students on homework everyday, and those students work so hard, only to perform low on state tests. How dare he imply that our expectations are not high enough.

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  16. So it wasn't enough for Arne Duncan to boost CCSS by slamming Soccer Moms about their "dumb" kids, now he's slamming "disabled" children for not measuring up?

    I call for an assessment for Arne Duncan's "disability"….He is unfit for any public office!

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    1. I was thinking the same thing! He has a DISTINCT disability to get a clue!

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  17. What I value most in your posts is the way you have of so precisely expressing the deep frustrations that I feel with every new blow that comes from the D.O.E. Thank you , thank you, thank you for putting into to words the anger I feel at the idiocracy that's blooming from our fed. govt.

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  18. The ideas you attribute to Duncan could not possibly have been uttered by anyone but a basketabll-playing buddy of the chief executive. When a CEO favors companionship to competence, the enterprise is in deep do-do.

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  19. Please read, sign, and circulate the petition entitled: DUMP ARNE DUNCAN. Thank you.

    Here is the link to the people’s petition to rid the nation’s public school system from this one man disaster:

    http://www.petition2congress.com/15685/dump-arne-duncan/

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  20. Great blog post sir! No one in TN despises Kevin Huffman more than I do. He is a phallus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yytldVPhY0A

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  21. It is true that kids with disabilities will sometimes do less because you dont expect them to do for themselves, but Im not talking being up to grade level! I had a non verbal autistic student who we were trying to teach to get her coat from her cubby for over a year. She was 9 years old. One day, she was excited to go home and got up, grabbed her coat and her book bag and ran to the door laughing. You can bet we expected that from her and even more after, but no she will never be up to the states standards of a 9 yr old...

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  22. Let's start a national invite a politician or business person to school day so they can see first hand what we know.

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  23. How DARE these men treat our children this way, and have the audacity to act as if they ... 1childrenofmen.blogspot.com

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