"Now everything's a little upside down..." ~Bob Dylan
Some years ago while driving to work I heard, on the local NPR affiliate, then Commissioner of Education Richard Mills say something to the effect that "We have to get out of the mindset that these kids can't do it." He was discussing the performance of special needs students on the new assessments mandated by No Child Left Behind. Fortunately, I maintained control and avoided needing AAA to drag my car out of the drainage ditch.
He was talking about my students. At the time I was a special education teacher in a self-contained class. Half my students were profoundly learning disabled. The other half were developmentally delayed, meaning that their IQ's were below 90. In fact, they were well below 90. That was the year the high stakes testing madness began, and since my students were technically eighth graders and they had a legal right to be subjected to grade level expectations, they sat for those assessments.
I recall one passage on the English/Language Arts test was about the architecture of the Italian Renaissance.
A few of my LD kids were reduced to tears. A couple of my DD kids thought they did just fine and that it was fun. None of them belonged in the same room as the paper the tests were written on. The same school. County. State.
Planet.
No one was surprised that our middle school wound up on THE LIST as a SCHOOL IN NEED OF IMPROVEMENT. I work in a high poverty district with everything that means. Around 20% of our students have special needs.
In order to get off THE LIST we had to develop a school improvement plan. I was a member of the committee. We met regularly with representatives from State Ed, who acted as partners in this process. Partners. Don't forget that part. We were given funds. We hired consultants. We attended workshops and implemented new instructional strategies. The Camp Philos, Andrew Cuomo and the Rise of the Corporate Democrats | Clemsy's Corner:
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