Over on D-Ed Reckoning there is a post about an odor emanating from education research. The item was picked up in a post on NCLBLog: Let’s Get it Right, a product of the American Federation of Teachers, and I dropped a comment on that one about the evidence about effectiveness in special education practices.
Faithful readers of Teach Effectively (both of you!) know that I champion the idea that effectiveness can be assessed with strong empirical research and that data coming from those studies can be aggregated to assess relative effectiveness of educational practices. I’m republishing here parts of a Web site I created in the ’90s on this topic.
If you’re comfortable with the idea of meta-analysis, jump to the section labeled “Practices.” For a review of how to make those evaluations, please consult the links in “Introductory Materials” (in sequence).
- Introductory Materials
- The Practices
Please review the published papers that examine this same literature (see Forness, Kavale, Blum, & Lloyd, 1997; Lloyd, Forness, & Kavale, 1998). There are many other meta-analyses that I’ve not had a chance to drop into this format. I need to create a new template and update the contents…arrrgh.
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Over on I Speak of Dreams Liz Ditz has expressed concern about whether inclusion is appropriate for all students. Liz comments on the series of three articles about inclusion, one of which I covered here on Teach Effectively a couple of days ago. In these articles Rachel Powell Norton argues for full inclusion, meaning “Students with disabilities spend all of their time in general education, receiving supports and modifications to help them participate in the class work to the fullest extent possible.”). Liz simply wrote, “I am not sure that full inclusion is always in the best interest of the child.“
Link to Part I, Part II, and Part III of Ms. Norton’s promotion of full inclusion.
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There’s apparently a great need for tutors who can help students from schools that NCLB requires to provide tutoring, according to a story in the Washington Post (DC, US) by Amy Goldstein. Ms Goldstein’s story, “Mandate Aside, Private Tutors Aren’t Always An Option: When Education Firms Say No, Rural Schools Find It Hard to Obey ‘No Child,’” focuses on difficulties sercuring tutors in rural areas. It points to, but doesn’t detail, the potential problem with schools using tutoring services that are available.
With such scanty options, some schools have turned to grass-roots tutoring companies that have sprung up with little track record, such as a small Arkansas firm started by a former basketball player. Some are trying online tutors. But many, such as Mandaree, are doing nothing at all.
“For us, it’s sort of a fake help, because it’s just not there,” said Linda McCullough, superintendent of public instruction in Montana, where 20 of the 14,000 eligible students this year at 66 schools are getting the tutoring the federal government envisions.
I need to learn what the qualifications are for tutoring companies. If you know, please let me know.
Link to Ms. Golstein’s article.
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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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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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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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New York City (NY, US) schools are giving three in four special education students certificates of completion rather than diplomas, although across the state of New York 50% of special education students receive diplomas, according to Beth Fertig of WNYC, New York Public Radio. Ms. Fertig’s story, “Disabling Diplomas: How NYC is Failing Its Special Education Students,” includes comments from Tom Hehir, who prepared a report about NYC special education (see Teach Effectively “Missing Element“) as well as Carrie Meyer (manager of a private tutoring company), Bonnie Brown (acting director of special education for NYC), and Elisa Hyman (Advocates for Children).
Ms. Fertig uses the case of Yamilka, a 23-year old who is receiving tutoring paid for by NYC schools because of action by Advocates for Children, to illustrate the outcomes of apparent maleducation. Advocates for Children has reported about the high proportion of children with disabilities who are do not receive diplomas from NYC schools. Dee Alpert reported that the percentage of students in NYC who graduate has declined nearly 10% in 2001-02.
You can read Ms. Fertig’s article or download an MP3 of it. Links to (a) Avocates for Children’s site and a pdf of the report on special education graduation rates and (b) an article by Dee Alpert for Wrightslaw on NYC graduation rates.
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What appears to be a home-grown approach to teaching early decoding has remarkable effects, according to Michael Crist of Daily Local News (Philadelphia, PA, US). There’s a feature to the method—sounding out words “from the inside out”—that I’m struggling to understand. Here’s Mr. Crist’s introduction:
While they might not be ready for the national spelling bee, the kindergarten class at Ss. Philip and James School may be on their way.
The students showed off their skills reading words like embellish, terminate, skeptical and indulgent.
They also read full sentences ranging from a first- to third-grade level.
The success of the students is credited to a system developed by Karen Truncellito, a former teacher who has tutored children over the past 25 years, called “Easy Steps to Reading.”
“It uses a multisensory approach and teaches children to sound out words from the inside out, instead of right to left,” Truncellito said.
In cases such as this it is important to remember the words of Og Lindsley to which I referred in an earlier entry in LD Blog here: “Show me your data!” Mr. Crist reported that Ms. Truncellito has assessed performance with DIBELS. That’s a plus, but we need to know more.
It would be important to understand the basis for claims that Easy Steps to Reading works. How was it tested? What are the characteristics of the students with whom it was tested and how were they selected for study and assigned to group? How many teachers participated in the studies and what are their characteristics? Against what alternative methods has it been compared? How was student performance assessed and how were the assessments conducted? Were the results replicated with other students, other teachers, other measures? If that sounds like a research project, it should.
Link to Mr. Crist’s story.
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