In cost cutting moves, the New Orleans (LA, US) local education agency will reduce its teaching staff by 520 teachers, 150 of whom will be special educators, according to Brian Thevenot of the Times-Picayune. “It’s unclear whether the cuts, while in some cases severe, will affect the system’s delivery of services to students,” Mr. Thevenot reported.
Responding to concerns over the cuts to special-education teachers from 950 to 800, [Interim superintendent Ora] Watson said the reduction stemmed in part from a plan to stop the inappropriately high identification of special-education students. Many, she said, have no learning disability other than the year-after-year failure of the city’s public schools to teach them properly.
Moreover, a study unearthed some special-education teachers who seemed to be hardly working, teaching as few as two class periods per day while students rotated into regular education classes.
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Humane discipline policies that recognize students’ difficulties are needed in schools, according to Charlotte Observer columnist Kay McSpadden (who is a high school English teacher). Ms. McSpadden recommends that policies eschew simple punishment in favor of, “addressing the underlying brain dysfunctions or social ills.” In addition, she argued for greater support of and better training for teachers.
Frontline classroom teachers need to be better trained to recognize learning disabilities and mental illnesses in young children. Special education teachers need more time to collaborate with regular education teachers to craft meaningful individualized education plans for those children.
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The Institute for Educational Studies (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education is inviting comments about the priorities that it will propose to its advisory group, the National Board for Education Sciences. These priorities will guide the research that the IES will fund. The general priority is described in this way:
The Institute’s over-arching priority is research that contributes to improved academic achievement for all students, and particularly for those students whose education prospects are hindered by inadequate education services and conditions associated with poverty, race/ethnicity, limited English proficiency, disability, and family circumstance.
The full document develops the priorities in a more fine-grained way.
Links to the Federal Register entry as a PDF or as HTML.
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