A career of teaching special ed students has clarified a number of important issues for me.
Critical among them are these three issues.
1. The Push to All-Inclusion
Full Inclusion is coming. The Los Angeles Unified School District will soon begin placing most special education students (most classified as Learning Handicapped) in regular classes. In preparation for this event, about three years ago, the District began requiring that special ed students be taught at grade level (no matter the grade level at which they were functioning), and tested at grade level on the year end state examinations (no matter that almost all boxes were bubbled in by wild guessing).
What will surely happen, within two to three years after the Inclusion program begins, is that many parents of regular ed students will howl foul (read that as lawsuits) because their children’s education will be interrupted by the need to slow down and/or address behavior issues of the included students in the class. This will likely happen even though special ed teachers will be assigned to rotate through classes to assist the special ed students.
Certainly there are advantages for placing special ed students in regular classes. The regular ed students can act as appropriate role models for the special ed students, both academically and behaviorally.
So what solutions are there? See the Solutions section at the end of this article.
2. The Need for Excellent Assistants
Some teaching assistants are wonderful. Others are not. What the special ed teacher needs is a person who anticipates the needs of the students and the teacher, who understands and demonstrates appropriate language and interactions with students, and who is committed to the job.
To be without an assistant, even for a week, or to have several different assistants throughout the year, will not do. In order for the special education teacher to teach, the assistant must help to maintain class discipline. How frustrating (a euphemism) it is to want to teach, to try to teach, but to end up spending eighty percent of your time handling discipline because you don’t have an assistant.
So what is the solution? Stay tuned — to the final section.
3. The Need for Family Intervention and Counseling
The family and the school counselor need to be involved with every special ed student. Perhaps someone in the family can be motivated, via a counselor, to take an interest (or more of an interest, in the case of those lucky children) in their child’s education. Then we might see more students bringing back homework and other papers, trying for better grades and better classroom behavior reports.
So what is the solution? Here it comes.
Proposed Solutions for the Above Three Issues
(1) More Money for more special ed teachers, so that when Full Inclusion takes place, there will be a whole, qualified, teacher for every class in which a special ed student is placed.
(2) More Money (but not very much more) for creating programs linking university education departments with the School District. The aim is to provide regular and special ed student interns to work as assistants in the Inclusion classes.
(3) More Money to hire more school psychologists, so that every special ed student will be on a psychologist’s list — in order to meet with and counsel the students and their families.
Funny, but there seems to be a unifying thread through all of my solutions. But what is not funny is that there often seems to be a different priority for where the School District’s money goes.
Why go back and forth between School District programs every few years? Why wait for lawsuits from regular ed parents? Instead, why not direct more monies to assisting special ed students in the regular classes, in order to preclude those litigations.
Finally, why do all this for a minority of special ed students? The answer: So that all of these students have a good chance of developing into honest, law-abiding, and responsible citizens of our community.
Thanks for listening.
Editors Note: Robert Jansing, if you had not guessed, is a former teacher of special ed students.