Origins of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act

by Jennifer Parker

Published January 06, 2009 @ 09:14AM PT

[Editor's note: As promised, this post by guest blogger Jennifer Parker is our first to focus on special education. It won't be our last. I'm excited to have Jennifer on board. See more of her work at her "Best Policy Practice." Now, here's Jennifer (and note that all images below are from Willowbrook):]

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I have the great fortune to be an education advocate for chronically ill children. It's rewarding and frustrating work that combines my public school teaching experience with my legal background as an attorney for parents of children who happen to have special needs.

Every week I talk to parents about the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, federal laws that entitle children with disabilities to a free, appropriate public education. Most of the parents I work with have not heard of these legislative acts or want to know more about them. I look forward to helping guide this community through discussions on IDEA and special education in general. But before we get there, let's go back a few years. Just a few - because to discuss where we are, we need to examine where we've been.

Before 1975, when Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, later reauthorized and renamed Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, a child deemed "uneducable" could be (and often was) legally barred from entering public school in most states. Uneducable children were children who were - or who were thought to be - mentally deficient, "crippled," blind, deaf, "defective," "delinquent," epileptic, or "diseased" .

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Crowdsourcing for Edu-Change: Help Us Find Education Non-Profits to Support

by Clay Burell

Published January 05, 2009 @ 09:03PM PT

The Vision

There are a million education blogs, websites, and non-profits out there advocating for change. One beauty of change.org is its mission to bring together millions of people interested in change, and connect them to existing nonprofits already working to make the changes so many of us want, and in need of our support.

That vision - of serving as an activist portal that supports and grows existing groups collaboratively, instead of splintering them by creating redundant causes that compete with, and dilute, the work those groups are already doing - is what makes change.org unique.

Education.change.org is only four days old, so it's early days here. One of my top priorities right now is to identify and contact as many education non-profits worth supporting as I can. And there's no more sensible way to do that, as far as I can see, than to ask you all to pitch in by "crowdsourcing."

Huh?

Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.

A Simple Way You Can Help

Real simple: Hit "leave a comment" below, and paste links or contact info for the education non-profits you want us to support. We'll take it from there.

Eine Kleine Synchronicity: A Closing Story

I'm one of many thousands of educators who, after drinking the social-media-and-web 2.0-in-education koolaid a few years ago, has been blogging and networking (hey, follow me on Twitter) for education reform like the sanest of madmen. And while so many of us have been able to cause ripples with our work, the inherent solitude of being one voice among tens of thousands on the world-wide web has kept all of us from being able to make waves.

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On Arne Duncan: Open Thread

by Clay Burell

Published January 04, 2009 @ 04:54PM PT

I'm boarding a plane for Bangkok in 5 minutes, but before doing so wanted to point to a conversation on three separate spaces about Obama's nomination of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education.

Many people have expressed shock and disappointment - see Gary Stager's Huffington Post article for a forceful example. Then check out Dale McGowan's more interesting take on the similar outrage Obama set off over his tapping of Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation.

What McGowan says there about why, on second thought, he's not quite ready to join the chorus of outrage at Obama - will somebody please shut that airport announcer up? - echoes my own response to Stager on Duncan here (short version: the buck stops with Obama, and though I don't trust Duncan much, I do still give Obama the benefit of the doubt for possibly having a method to what looks, on the surface, like cop-out madness).

Beyond all of that, though, and most importantly: What are your thoughts and, more interesting still, experiences with Duncan and Chicago Public Schools?

It's early days yet on this space - we've only been up for three days - but one of my hopes is that it can become a repository of first-hand accounts by readers of direct experiences unavailable in the mainstream press. Those accounts can have value, I'm convinced.

I'm boarding! See you on the other side - assuming we land there.

(And PS: A guest-blogger will be addressing special needs education this week to start elevating that topic.)

"The Better Angels of Our Nature": Improving Public Education #2

by Clay Burell

Published January 04, 2009 @ 01:15AM PT

"What does a kid think you are saying to him, about her, if you're sending them to a crummy building every day? If you send them to a building that not only needed repair this week, or this month, but has been in need of repair for the whole time they've been a student?"
--Voiceover from the Hands on D.C. video, below

"The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
--Abraham Lincoln, "First Inaugural Address"

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They clear rats from school ventilators. They wire schools to gift them with the world beyond the walls and walled-in textbooks.

If they have money, they give college years to those who otherwise would not have them. If they have no money, they give things as precious: their own things at hand, their expertise, their skills and muscle and labor - for one single day each year.

In hallways and classrooms, dingy grays give way to azure blues, daisy golds.  In bathrooms, paintbrushes wave, wave like wands, and conjure flowers into bloom on walls where once gloom reigned.

And at day's end, the hands wave too - human hands, in multitudes, too like flowers, like wands - and conjure different things to bloom, from within each waving self. At day's end.

Here's some magic for you: four minutes bottled timeless from one such day. Watch, and try to see those conjured things:

Did you see them at all? See them faintly flare, then faintly flare away? Those evanescent wings, Mayfly-like, of the better angels of our nature?

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(Hm. Sue me. Typical English teacher. But things like Hands on D.C. bring That Side out of me. Especially on Sunday.)

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Seeing the D.C. student graduate at the end of that film, thanks to the effort of others - seeing the whole lovely clip - reminds me of Habitat for Humanity.

Anybody who's volunteered for Habitat has probably experienced it. The joys of the backaches, of the conjuring with hands and other magic things a better reality than what was there before.

I experienced it in Sri Lanka a few years ago. In one week, my team of three dug a cesspool ten feet deep and six feet square - with square-shaped hoes. The villagers owned no shovels. (The grandmothers, by the way, dug alongside us and outworked us by orders of magnitude.)

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Top 10 Actions You Can Take to Make a Difference in Public Education, #1

by Clay Burell

Published January 03, 2009 @ 02:45AM PT

Hm. How to say this. I love Change.org and its team, and totally understand their out-of-the-gates requests that we new guides write the background pieces for these newest blogs - the Primer, "Top 10 Reads," "Top 10 Videos," and "Top 5 Controversies" so far - as an orientation for people wanting background resources to learn more. It's smart: all of them will be there on the "About" page for new readers evermore.

So I'm with 'em. I see it. I'm not biting any of my Change-homeys' hands here; I'll lick 'em to my dying day for their vision and heart, and their growing of such an incredibly stimulating and inspiring community of readers, commenters, action-takers, change-makers. I mean that.

(Now for the expected "but.")

But: I feel like St. Sebastian (sans halo, sans "Saint") when I write these pieces, but with a twist: the arrows are self-inflicted. It just seems a fool's errand, in a subject as vast as education, to think I can satisfy myself - much less everybody else - with the entries on any of those lists. It pains me to even try.

So after first thanking everybody for the tact and support as you noted the inevitable omissions on the earlier posts, I want to suggest this: A (Crowd-Sourced) Top 10 Plus Plus Plus Actions You Can Take to Make a Difference in Education.

In other words, here comes my original - only the first one, followed by more over the next week, which I'll consolidate later. You weigh in with extensions of them, and/or additions of your own - one, three, ten, fifty - and we'll get all democratic about it. That's the beauty of blogs: they're shared writing spaces, poly- instead of mono- or dialogical.

So here comes the first of ten:

Participatory Democracy #1: Get involved in your local school board politics

Americans have a strange way of fetishizing the politicians in DC - Congresspeople, and moreso Presidents - and completely ignoring their local politics. In education, that's fatal: your state and local education officials make a much larger difference on the quality of schools where you live. States and local school boards set standards, dictate policies, and set budgets (only 10% of which budgets, at most, come from Washington DC).

I see local apathy towards school board elections as one of, if not the, greatest tragedies in public education. When local voters ignore these, and fail to run for office in them for the sake of their kids and communities, they abandon the field to much smarter special interests who run candidates to serve their agendas. Case in point: The Texas Board of Education is currently controlled by creationist ideologues fielded and funded by the "Discovery Institute" - based in Washington State.

Their agenda? Undermine science literacy by writing anti-scientific standards into Texas state science curriculum. If they succeed - the battle will end in April - then the creationists succeed at undermining science nation-wide because, as the Discovery Institute knows, textbook companies write their texts aiming to please Texas and California - the two biggest markets - above all. All the other states have to pick from textbooks written mostly for Texans.

As I wrote elsewhere last month,

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A Cheap Baker's Dozen Videos on Education Reform

by Clay Burell

Published January 02, 2009 @ 08:21AM PT

Grab that popcorn and get ready to be schooled with the following edu-film festival. And don't forget to submit your own! Curtains!

1. Progressivism in Education Debate - c. 1940

This 1940’s newsreel offers a sobering reminder of how little the debate on “good teaching” has moved since then. Progressive John Dewey makes an appearance to argue the project-based approach, while a number of traditionalists line up to warn such an approach spelled the end of Greek civilization. I kid you not: it wasn’t the Peloponnesian War. It was project-based learning.

2 - 3. CBS News Education Overviews: A Couple of Quickies

Katie Couric’s Notebook: Standardized Tests

Couric’s one-minute overview of the uses and abuses of standardized testing in NCLB breaks it down for the mainstream. Especially resonant: the elimination of arts and civics classes for the sake of higher reading and math test scores. A hidden curriculum to read between the lines: “Creators and an informed citizenry are less important than workers for the economy.” The short version: “You work. We’ll rule.”

Pros and Cons of Charter Schools

Another mainstream overview of charter schools - the hype versus the lesser-known facts.

4. Obama on His Education Plan, March 2008

Candidate Obama on the main components of his education plan in less than 8 minutes. But this is a campaign moment, so it avoids controversies like charters and vouchers.

5 - 6. Obama’s Education Team: Linda Darling-Hammond and Arne Duncan - a Study in Contrasts

The pair of videos below are meant to introduce Linda Darling-Hammond, the progressive educator who advised Candidate Obama and led his transition team, and Arne Duncan, the more deregulatory privatizer and “C.E.O.” of Chicago Public Schools. Obama chose Duncan as his Secretary of Education.

Linda Darling-Hammond: Debate: Education and the Next President

This October 21, 2008 debate between Obama’s adviser Linda Darling-Hammond and McCain’s adviser Lisa Graham Keegan gives an idea of Candidate Obama’s education stances. Darling-Hammond was the favorite of many progressive educators for the post of Secretary of Education in the Obama administration. Her experience and expertise in the many factors that make up quality teaching and learning are evident in the debate below. (Full transcript here, more on Darling-Hammond here.)

Debate: Education and the Next President - Full Archived Webcast from Education Week on Vimeo.

Arne Duncan on “Improving Public Schools” Hearing at the House of Representatives Education and Labor Committee on July 17, 2008.

Arne Duncan, “C.E.O.” (not “Superintendent” or “Chancellor,” perhaps tellingly) of Chicago Public Schools, is Secretary of Education nominee for the Obama Administration. Here, Duncan testifies on his “successes” as a reformer of Chicago’s schools. Many have contested his claims.

Part I:

Part II:

7. Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?

Robinson’s TED Talk has become viral in educational circles. When more and more schools are eliminating arts programs to spend more time on test-prep for NCLB, it’s a timely talk indeed.

8. Ann Cooper: Reinventing the School Lunch

Ann Cooper forcefully argues that school lunches are a pressing issue in school reform, and her campaign to feed fresh-cooked, healthy foods to students in her school district is a strong reminder that “improving schools” means far, far more than improving math and reading scores.

9 - 10: “Did You Know?” and “Did You Ever Wonder?”: A Video Dialog on the Future - and the Purpose - of Education

Karl Fisch’s and Dr. Scott McLeod's “Did You Know?” is probably the most-watched education video on YouTube. It’s vision of the future of the world, and of how America must face up to that future with necessary changes in education, starkly shows that “our past is not their future” - so maybe our schools should not be either.

William Farren, an advocate of education reform focusing on well-being and the elephant in the edu-living room called environmental stewardship, produced “Did You Ever Wonder?” as a response to “Did You Know?” Pairing these videos brings out fundamental questions about the purpose of education.

BONUS: New American Schoolhouse

Filmmaker Danny Mydlack’s Voices from the New American Schoolhouse is a full-length documentary film - viewable in its entirety on YouTube - about an altogether different alternative to education exemplified by The Fairhaven School. From the trailer’s blurb:

Voices from the New American Schoolhouse explores life outside the usual educational box. Narrated exclusively by students, the film chronicles life and learning at the Fairhaven School in Upper Marlboro, MD which practices an undiluted form of freedom and democracy that turns mainstream education theory on its head. Filmmaker Danny Mydlack enjoyed unrestricted access over a two-year period to produce this candid and unblinking encounter with kid-powered learning.

View the whole film on Youtube.

Photo: Cinema Seats by mark lorch

Quizzing the Experts: Welcome Notes from Your Suspicious Edu-Guide

by Clay Burell

Published January 02, 2009 @ 07:14AM PT

Charter schools are the last best hope for low-income families; Charter schools are Trojan horses poised to pillage, plunder, and raze public education, and ghettoize the least privileged permanently - while the Charter-preneurs pocket millions evermore.

Teachers unions are the enemies of education reform, and non-unionized teachers from such elite ranks as Teach for America are the solution to getting better teachers; Teachers' unions are the bulwark of professionalism and retention of master teachers, and the likes of Teach for America are emperors in new clothes, five-weeks-of-training wonders who serve their two years with intentions to quit immediately afterwards and parlay their "public service" into lucrative careers in think tanks and edu-businesses as "education experts" - an expertise, again, of two-year rookies.

Standardized tests measure the quality teachers and schools; Standardized tests poison the quality of teachers and schools, relegating both to functions of teaching to dumbed-down tests.

You see where I'm going with this - and I could go much, much further. My point in that little exercise above is to establish, here at the outset of this blog, my take on the education policy discourse, interest groups, and players, and my own slants ideological, pedagogical, socio-economic, and more.

Your Guide as an "Expert Skeptic"

1. A Think Tank is an imposing thing. It provides research, amasses data, and shapes that data into influential policy arguments. But a Think Tank is also an ideological machine. It has its vested interests, and too often hides its motives behind that vest, its connections to lobbyists working for private gains. So I'm skeptical when I read Think Tank thinkers. Not closed, mind you; skeptical. They're so well-funded, I always suspect they try to buy us with their bias.

2. A union is also an imposing thing. It protects its members from exploitation and injustice, and provides standards of professionalism to keep out the charlatans and incompetents. That's no small service. But I'm a teacher, and actively read and talk to teachers in cities and towns across America, and that context makes me skeptical of unions too, in many ways. If unions resist innovations in teacher training and development, if they block attempts for superior teachers to receive superior pay, then we may have a problem with unions.

3. Education journalists from top-shelf newspapers - the New York Times or Washington Post, L.A. Times or Atlanta Journal-Constitution - deserve skepticism too. As a radio news-writer myself here in Seoul, I know first-hand how a managing editor, worried about offending big advertisers or those in charge of his/her career ladder (who have their interests too) can control what staff writers do and don't report, and how they report it. But things get weirder with the mainstream presses: they seem to all be writing from the same press releases these days, and in a baldly ideological way. Case in point: for a good three weeks leading up to Obama's pick for secretary of education, almost all the banner papers published reviews of the front-runners using the same slanted frame. They labeled pro-NCLB educational free-marketeers like Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, and Arne Duncan as "reformers," while labeling NCLB opponents who advocated reforms of a more progressive stamp as "traditionalists." The repetition of this meme through most of our most-respected papers was not only bizarre; it was disturbing. It amounted to a propaganda campaign to demonize the anti-NCLB candidate. (And let me pre-empt the predictable commenter by quoting Henry Kissinger's old saw, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you're wrong.")

--and most deserving of skepticism of all? How many of our education experts lack a pretty basic prerequisite for that title: experience in the field? How many of them have ever taught 200 kids a week, been an administrator or counselor or nurse or social worker for a school and its community - especially a poor one? Of those who raise their hands and say, "I did," a follow-up: for how long? And how long ago?

The short version? How do any of these experts deeply know whereof they speak? And who pays their rent?

Parting Shot: Your Guide Shows His Hand

I like that Change dot Org calls us subject editor-writers "guides" instead of "experts." Guides are especially useful for expert-filled mazes like public education.

I plan to guide here, as I teach in the classroom, with a heavy mix of Socrates. Rather than play the expert and "teach the truth," it's more profitable to sting the truth-preachers with skeptical questions. Think tanks, unions, wonks, journalists, policy-makers - they all need their gadflies.

And my own bias? I do believe in equal opportunity for all. And I do question whether unregulated business and free market fundamentalism will serve education any better than they've served, um - business and the free market. Anybody want to talk Wall Street?

But maybe I'll learn I'm wrong.

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And welcome, by the way.

Call me Ishmael Clay. And know I'm bummed right now. I'm excited by this new marriage, but am down with a nasty flu as I write. Talk about an anti-climactic honeymoon.

Photo by phauly