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Education News Blog Archives
Education News Blog posts insightful comments on the latest international news that render us taken-aback in the domain of the education facet of life. Education News Blog: Special-Education News 1 Many question timing of Norfolk special education plan: July 30, 2007 by AMY JETER  NORFOLK School Board members and parents are questioning the timing of a plan to reshuffle about 300 elementary students with disabilities to different classes or schools. The change will move more special education students to regular classrooms. It is intended to help the school division raise test scores, meet new state standards, and even out the number of students with disabilities among Norfolk's elementary schools. Administrators decided in April to implement the plan this fall, but some people disagree with that time line. Education News Blog: Special Education News 1 (Continued) "It's ill-conceived," said Ginny Bobby, whose 7-year-old daughter, Lilly, has autism and might need to switch classes or schools. "They're not preparing the children and the families." Board member Stephen Tonelson, a professor of early childhood and special education at Old Dominion University, worried that the plan might not give schools enough time to adjust to the change, including making sure there are enough staff members in the schools to meet special needs, such as speech therapy. "I'm not sure that we didn't pull the trigger a little quickly on this one," Tonelson said. Education News Blog: Special Education News 1 (Continued) After hearing about the plan this month, School Board members scheduled a two-hour work session for Tuesday to discuss it more. The meeting will begin at 5 p.m. on the 12th floor of the School Administration Building. The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires that students with special needs spend as much time as possible with their peers in a regular classroom. In Norfolk's elementary schools, many students with disabilities typically have been grouped together in classes headed by a special education teacher and an assistant. T he children often traveled out of their attendance zone for these classes, and had to change schools after a few years because of space considerations. Education News Blog: Special Education News 1 (Continued) The new plan calls for transferring about 118 students from self-contained classes in 13 schools back to their home schools, said Joan Anderson, senior director of special education services. The change would affect some students with learning disabilities, developmental delays, autism, and orthopedic or mild cognitive impairments. It will not pose an extra cost to the school division, Anderson said. "Our goal is to always give kids the opportunity to be academically and behaviorally successful in general education," Anderson said. Education News Blog: Special Education News 1 (Continued) Up to 200 other students who are considered "trainable mentally disabled" or who have autism, multiple disabilities or disabilities that are severe or emotional will continue to be in classes away from the general population, Anderson said. Several of the classes would be moved to different schools, however. "They need to be in an elementary K-5 (school), the same one, and know they will not be moved," said Mary Beers, principal of Crossroads Elementary and a member of the committee that worked on the plan. Education News Blog: Special Education News 1 (Continued) A proposal to integrate Norfolk elementary special education students had been in the works for years. It has taken on more urgency in recent months, after the Virginia Department of Education published new benchmarks for special education students in order to comply with new federal regulations. One goal states that 14 percent or fewer of special education students should spend most of their time outside a regular classroom. In Norfolk, that number was 27 percent in 2005-06 - the highest percentage among South Hampton Roads school divisions. The overall academic performances of Norfolk's special education students also missed state targets. In Norfolk, 55 percent of special education students were proficient in English/reading, and 46 percent were proficient in math. The Virginia Department of Education's benchmarks are 69 percent in English/reading and 67 percent in math - targets that no local school divisions met. Education News Blog: Special Education News 1 (Continued) Norfolk officials think students with disabilities will learn more if general education teachers handle as much of their instruction as possible, with assistance from special education teachers when needed. Elementary principals also said they would like to change the uneven distribution of special education classes. That distribution meant that some administrators were required to handle more of the additional responsibilities associated with special education classes. Also, if a high number of special education students post low scores on the Standards of Learning tests, they can drag down pass rates used to determine a school's state accreditation status. Education News Blog: Special Education News 1 (Continued) Muriel Hecht, a parent who chairs the school division's Special Education Advisory Council, said she generally supports the school division's plan, but is worried that families are learning about the change just weeks before school starts. "They will be going cold turkey to a new school and a completely different type of learning environment with many more children in the classroom," Hecht said. "The transition would be much smoother if teachers had time to prepare their students during the school year and gradually transition them into their new classrooms." Education News Blog: Special Education News 1 (Continued) Anderson said a letter was mailed to parents on June 15. School Board members requested a formal time line for the move, but Anderson said there wasn't one. They worried that parents had been cut out of the process and requested additional information about the plan, including ramifications of delaying it. Tonelson said he is concerned that the board was unaware of the plans as they were being made. "We really didn't know anything about this," he said, "and it does seem to be a fairly significant policy shift." Education News Blog: Special Education News 2 With a high IQ comes need for special education: August 6, 2007 by Charles Murray When it comes to education of the intellectually gifted, Australia and the United States share a common dread of admitting the obvious. The intellectually gifted exist, and they end up running the country whether or not we recognize them for what they are. By "intellectually gifted" I do not mean the rarefied few who can become theoretical physicists. I am referring to the much broader set of people who are intellectually capable of standing out in almost any profession short of theoretical physics. Research about IQ and job performance indicates that this definition embraces roughly the top 10 per cent of the population, or about a million people out of Australia's labour force - a lot of people, not a tiny group of IQ nerds. Education News Blog: Special Education News 2 (Continued) In professions screened for IQ by educational requirements - medicine, engineering, law, the sciences, and academia - the great majority of people must, by the nature of the selection process, have intellectual ability in this range. Evidence about who enters occupations for which the screening is not directly linked to IQ indicates that people in this range also occupy large proportions of jobs in the upper reaches of corporations and government. People in the top 10 per cent of intelligence produce most of the books and newspaper articles we read and the television programs and movies we watch. They are the people in the laboratories and at workstations who invent our new pharmaceuticals, computer chips, software, and every other form of advanced technology. Education News Blog: Special Education News 2 (Continued) Please do not understand me too quickly. I am not saying that everyone with a high IQ achieves these positions, or that character and industriousness - luck too, for that matter - don't count. I am not saying that one cannot become a corporate executive or journalist with a lesser IQ. Rather, I am saying that those who reach leadership positions are overwhelmingly drawn from the pool of those in the top 10 per cent of intellectual ability, thereby putting Australia, the United States, and every other advanced nation in the same bind. The top 10 per cent of the intellectual distribution has a huge influence on whether our economies are vital or stagnant, our cultures are healthy or sick, and our institutions are secure or endangered. The furiously resisted but simple truth is that our futures depend crucially on how we educate the next generation of people gifted with unusually high intelligence. If amount of education were the only measure, Australia is doing just fine with the gifted. Most Australian children with IQs in the top 10 per cent get an opportunity for higher education, and large numbers of them end up attending the most prestigious universities. The allocation of this human capital can be criticised - it would probably be better for the nation if more of the gifted went into the sciences and fewer into the law. But, for practical purposes, enough of the gifted are getting advanced education. Education News Blog: Special Education News 2 (Continued) The problem with the education of the gifted involves not their professional training, but their training as citizens. We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. Australians, famous for their egalitarian outlook (your tall-poppies metaphor has become internationally known), are even more sensitive than Americans on this score. But this very devotion to egalitarianism creates a blind spot in the treatment of the gifted. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully, and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom. Education News Blog: Special Education News 2 (Continued) The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It requires, first of all, recognition of one's own intellectual limits and fallibilities - in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously missing part of today's education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, "I can't do this." Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall, just as all of their less-talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them. That level of demand does not necessarily mean shipping the gifted off to special schools, but it does require at least some classes of their own. The point is not to coddle them, but to create a setting in which their feet can be held to the fire. The encouragement of wisdom requires mastery of analytical building blocks. The gifted must assimilate the details of grammar and syntax and the details of logical fallacies not because they will need them to communicate in daily life, but because these are indispensable for precise thinking at an advanced level. Education News Blog: Special Education News 2 (Continued) The encouragement of wisdom requires being steeped in the study of ethics, starting with the classical writings from both West and East. It is not enough that gifted children learn to be nice; they must know what it means to be good. The encouragement of wisdom requires an advanced knowledge of history. Never has the aphorism about the fate of those who ignore history been truer. All of the above are antithetical to the mindset that prevails in today's schools at every level. The gifted should not be taught to be non-judgmental; they need to learn how to make accurate judgments. They should not be taught to be equally respectful of tribal cultures and classical Greece; they should be learning the best in the arts and sciences that has come before them, which will mean a light dose of tribal folkways and a heavy dose of Greeks. The primary purpose of their education should not be to let the little darlings express themselves, but to give them the tools and the intellectual discipline for expressing themselves as adults. Education News Blog: Special Education News 2 (Continued) In short, I am calling for a revival of the classical definition of a liberal education, serving its classic purpose: to prepare an elite to do its duty. If that sounds too much like Plato's Guardians, face reality. Plato wanted to choose an elite. We in America and Australia alike are stuck with one. Our economies and cultures are run by a cognitive elite that we do not choose. It is a reality embedded in the nature of modernity. All we can do is try to educate the elite to be conscious of, and prepared to meet, its obligations. For years, we have not even thought about the nature of that task. It is time we did. Dr Charles Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is in Australia as a guest of The Centre for Independent Studies and will be speaking at the CIS Big Ideas Forum "In Praise of Elitism" in Sydney on August 13th. Adapted from an essay published in The Wall Street Journal, January 18, 2007. Education News Blog Comment: The special education we are talking about is to deal with the 10% lowest and the 10 % highest mental stuff of the population. We are in a hurry to 'fulfill' our duties when it comes to deal with the 10% lowest chunk as far as educating them is concerned. Why aren't we patient with them? Is it simply because we don't have a passion for the cause and we are just giving a lip service to a cause that hasn't come straight from our heart but from our moral faculty only? We don't have an insight into the problem. And when it comes to deal with the top 10%, we are simply baffled as to what to do with them since we don't have any insight into how to deal with the insight! Only insight can train insight. Where are the trainers? Where is the insight? Will the insight of humanity go on getting wasted like this? I invite you to subscribe to my E-zine titled Life Coach, free of charge. This E-zine publishes insightful comments on the latest international news that render us taken-aback in the domains of various facets of life. A not-to-be-missed opportunity! Subscribe to it here: I also invite you to subscribe to my Life Blog - no need to provide your e-mail address here. This RSS feed keeps you informed about new developments taking place on this site. 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