Teach Effectively!

Two professors, George Giuliani (Hofstra University) and Roger Pierangelo (Long Island University), announced the formation of the National Association of Parents with Children in Special Education (NAPCSE), an organization aiming to help parents by “providing the latest special education news updates, laws, information, resources and a forum to help them become their children’s best advocate.” The organization’s target audience appears to be parents of children with virtually any disability. It is seeking members in various categories of membership and it has headquarters in Washington, DC (US).

The National Association of Parents with Children in Special Education (NAPCSE) is a national membership organization dedicated to rendering all possible support and assistance to parents whose children receive special education services, both in and outside of school. NAPCSE was founded for parents with children with special needs to promote a sense of community and provide a national forum for their ideas.

The Web site has dozens of pages, some of which mention the word “effective.” We’ll have to see to what extent the organization champions effectiveness in the long run.

Good objectives are an important part of teaching effectively. Professor Plum (AKA M. Kozloff) has a fine introduction to the topic of objectives. Using lots of example and not-examples, he illustrates (with humor) why they’re important and what good ones look like.

I dropped a comment on the good Professor’s EducatioNation entry on objectives in which I referred to Bateman & Herr’s “Writing Measurable IEP Goals and Objectives” and that reference bears repeating here. If you need to write goals and objectives, this book tells you how. It’s filled with examples that clearly illustrate the critical concepts and use problems for which teachers commonly must write objectives.

While I’m at it, here’s a gratuitous comment: Most objectives can be written with just a few verbs. Those verbs are “say,” “write,” and “touch”; I’ll give a little on “read,” provided it means “read aloud” (which is a lot like saying). More on this in another post.

I stumbled across a Web page billed as “a plethora of information about autism interventions all in one place!” The site is maintained by a person who identifies herself as “Liz.” Liz refers to lots of therapies. Here’s partial list from the page:

• Behavior
• Communication
• Social Stories
• Auditory Training
• Music Therapy
• Vision Therapy
• Medication and Autism
• Cranio Sacral Therapy
• Facilitated Communication
• ‘Son-Rise’-The Options Institute
• Physical Therapy
• Pivotal Response Training
• Play Therapy

As far as I know, apart from the first one (discrete-trial training) or two (augmentative communication) and PRT, the research on these therapies is quite weak. Of course, I don’t keep up with all the research, so I could have missed something indicating that cranio-sacral therapy (a variation on chiropracty), for example, is actually helpful. Also, I didn’t read through all the pages.

I should note that the author also has a link to a page providing guidance about evaluating therapies; it provides ideas that are defensible for the most part. On another page she provides a list of questions to ask, one of which refers to scientific evidence. Sadly, though, these pages do not debunk any of the therapies in the list. Simply put, there is no critical analysis.

Liz enters appropriate disclaimers (“BBB Autism does NOT endorse any particular therapy or intervention. We DO, however, endorse your right to learn about them!”), but listing these therapies without evaluation consitutes an endorsement of sorts. Each time facilitated communication, for example, appears in a list such as this, it gets some cachet. When they are mentioned repeatedly, parents (and, unfortunately, some teachers) get the idea that there must be something to these therapies.

We need some system for helping consumers to discriminate between those therapies that have some minimal level of empirical support and those that have, at best, testimonials. How can we create that resource and, equally importantly, how can we disseminate it to parents and teachers?

Link for the discussion of therapies, link for questions to ask, and link for the overall Web site.

Ed Kame’enui has been appointed to lead the the National Center for Special Education Research. The center is a section of the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education and Ed will be it’s first commissioner. Ed has the technical expertise, the leadership skills, and the content knowledge needed for this role. He shares the perspective of many who want to promote evidence-based instruction, so we think the proponents of teaching effectively will like this news.

Link for the press release.

I’m a little late picking up on this story, but it’s worth capturing here. The Chattanoogan (TN, US) reported that Weatherly Law Firm has charged two local education agencies (LEAs) $1.7 and $2.1 million in cases revolving around provision of special education services. The LEAs are in the Chattanooga and Altlanta (GA, US) areas.

One obvious issue here is the echo of the flap about fees during the 2004 reauthorization of IDEA; these two instances may be isolated and, therefore, now worthy of policy making, but if they’re common, something should be done.

A second concern is just why LEAs don’t avoid these things or, at least, settle them early and at lower costs. An LEA could buy a lot of materials and teaching assistants with that kind of money.

Thanks to Sanford Hausler’s blog on special education law Other publications covering this and related stories:.

• Disability Law
• Schafer Autism Report
• Palo Alto Weekly

The Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) is employed in 30-some schools around the US. I’ve perused the Web site briefly and read two other discussions of it. According to the Web site, the program is predicated on “five pillars”: high expectations, choice and commitment, more time, power to lead, and focus on results, but I haven’t been able to locate data on outcomes. None of those say much about instruction. I’m hoping that this is one of the approaches using effective instructional practices, but it’s hard to tell.

If anyone has first-hand information, please let us know.

Link to KIPP site.

James Dean of Florida Today (Melbourne, FL, US) reported surprisingly low pass rates for the Florida high-stakes assessment.

Most seniors who took the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test in March won’t graduate with regular high school diplomas this month.

Of the 304 [Brevard County School District] 12th-graders who took the reading test, 22 percent passed, while 37 percent of the 174 students taking math passed.

Does this sound a bit strange? Those pass rates are low overall, no? But, elsewhere in the article, there are indications that these students may be a selected sample, that perhaps others have already passed and are not in the pool about which Dean is reporting. Still, one has to hope that Brevard schools are using effective practices with these students. I have to bet that they didn’t get effective practices when they were substantially younger, though.

The US Education Department (ED) announced in April that it would allow states to exempt an additional 2% of students from the standards associated with high-stakes testing and the law referred to as No Child Left Behind. On 10 May, ED described the guidelines by which states will be able to alter their goals for annual yearly progress (AYP) so that students who have substantial difficulties with mastering academic material may be assessed in alternative ways. The 2% of students affected by this policy is in addition to the 1% already eligible for alternative assessment because of significant cognitive deficits.

ED described the policy in a press release. The topic has also been the subject of reports by multiple news organizations, including:

• The NY Times (U.S. Provides Rules to States for Testing Special Pupils)
• New London (CT, US) Day (Schools Get New Options For NCLB Testing)
• Thompson Publishing (Spellings Offers ‘New Path’ for NCLB, But Devil Is in the Details, Critics Say)

Others are sure to report on this story soon. The Division for Learning Disabilities will post a statement on TeachingLD.org in the next few days. The Council for Exceptional Children will surely have something, too.

The original announcement in April was a welcome development in the education of students with disabilities. ED appears to be hoping to implement the change in a way that will not permit states to use it to shirk the instructional obligation for those who will be covered by the 2% rule. Even when we use the most effective teaching procedures, some students will still not achieve as well as we hope (see our note about failure rates in Follow Through), as Secretary M. Spellings acknowledged in her remarks at the press conference. We just can’t allow schools to revert to discredited practices because of this rule. For those students who will be covered by the new rule, we are still obliged to teach as effectively as possible. Otherwise, we’re mis-serving them, not giving them the best chance we can.