Daily Archive for June 6th, 2006

Failure recipe

Published on 6 June 2006 in Musings, News and Social behavior. 0 Comments

Over on The Life that Chose Me, Dick has a post about futile approaches to teaching social skills. He discusses two examples of extended school year (ESY) programming and explains why they are likely to fail.

The problem with the current ESY arrangement and Mrs. Deering’s social skills class are the same. Basically, taking a group of autistic kids and placing them in an unfamiliar environment which they will probably never see again, and then trying to teach social skills in isolation for very short periods of time and then releasing them back into their regular environment is not terribly productive.

I suspect Dick’s got it right here. Social skills training has routinely produced negligible results with students who have Learning Disabilities and Emotional and Behavioral Disorders, as reflected in the effect sizes shown at these links (use this slide to help understand the graphs). One of the possible reasons the effect sizes for studies with those populations are small is that just what Dick’s talking about: Training that is too infrequent and disconnected from natrual social situations is unlikely to produce benefits. With students with autism, the importance of those factors is probably even greater.

Link to Dick’s commentary.

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Failing logic

Published on 6 June 2006 in Administration, News and Research. 2 Comments

Last week Rachel Powell Norton had an entry in BeyondChron, the site for an alternative news source in the San Fransisco Bay area (CA, US), entitled “School Beat: Reaching Special Education Ideals is Still Far Off-Part 1″ that, sadly, perpetuates mis-information about special education. Ms. Norton’s entry, the first of three promised, that promotes full inclusion. Thre is much to discuss in the article (it runs nearly 900 words), but salted away in the middle of it is this statement:

[Full inclusion] was not just another educational fad. In 1995, the National Longitudinal Study of Special Education Students found that those students who were removed from general education were more likely to drop out and to be dependent on public assistance in their post-high school years. These students were less likely to be living independently, and more likely to have criminal records. Sadly, scholars and advocates agree that the findings of this decade-old study are still current.

Had children with disabilities been randomly assigned to general and special education, then the finding that those who received special education had bleaker outcomes would be a very important result. Of course, the children were not randomly assigned. They were purposefully assigned, with those who had greater needs being assigned to special education and those with fewer needs getting general education.

I’m waiting for someone to report that the number of minutes of special education services children receive correlates with their scores on the National Association of Educational Progress (or some other outcome measure). The more special education you get, as represented by the number of minutes, will be negatively correlated with the score; as minutes increase, scores decline. Someone will conclude, therefore, that the way to improve reading scores is to eliminate special education. Then I’ll get to write about faulty reasoning again.

Link to Ms. Norton’s article.

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SpEdWatch

Published on 6 June 2006 in Administration and News. 0 Comments

A parent whose daughter has autism and receives special education supported by local education agency (LEA) funds at a private school, has formed a group called SpEdWatch to monitor special education programs in Massachusetts, according to stories by Hillary Chabot of the Lowell (MA; US) Sun and Matt Gunderson in the Boston (MA, US) Globe. Ellen Chambers formed the group with the intention of taking on LEAs for systemic failures.

Advocacy for individual special education students is not a new concept, but the idea of a proactive organization tackling systemic issues within special education is, said Chambers.

The group, which now has 66 members, all disgruntled parents from across the commonwealth, uses hard line publicity tactics, such as waging media campaigns and talking to local realtors, in an effort to warn incoming residents about school districts that have allegedly violated special education laws.

So far, the group has taken on Somerset Public Schools and is planning to tackle problems it perceives in Reading and Tewksbury public schools.

Here are links to Ms. Chabot’s article and to Mr. Gunderson’s article (from which I extracted the quote). Also, there’s an under-development Web site for SpEdWatch.org.

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