How Backward Reforms Waste Time and Hurt Students with Special Needs
We should be beyond this in America. Every school district should be providing parents public access to top notch regulated education services, including utilizing cutting-edge research for all students, and especially for students with disabilities and/or our gifted and talented young people.
Right now many teachers and parents are fighting to get decent services from their public schools for their students with special needs. The lucky ones get access to good teachers and programs that provide meaningful instruction, but many others are frustrated, even withdrawing their children to home school, or they are placing them in private schools though most private schools, despite their expense, have little to offer. Sometimes they have smaller class sizes.
But, in general, we aren’t focused on the right things right now and students are missing out today!
Yesterday, The New York Times had a fascinating article about children who they say are beating autism. Two moms connected over their children displaying autistic tendencies. They tried various treatments including “sensory integration, megadose vitamins, therapeutic horseback riding, a vile-tasting powder from a psychologist who claimed that supplements treated autism.” Nothing worked.
Then, through a chain of events, the parents began working with specialists from the University of California. UCLA is known for their research in autism, specifically Applied Behavior Analysis (A.B.A.). It was also home to the late O. Ivar Lovaas who is considered one of the lead researchers in autism.
In 1979, I attended a workshop at Florida State University featuring Lovaas. I remember How Backward Reforms Waste Time and Hurt Students with Special Needs: