Teach Effectively!

Federal Resources for Educational Excellence (FREE) provides a database of US federally supported teaching resources. It provides links to resources that participating agencies have recommended as potentially useful for education. In the fall of 2006, FREE was redesigned and it is now available in its new guise.

Although I’m sure that FREE is provided in the spirit of altruism and collaboration, and although it links to many appealing Web sites, it misses the mark on at least two points.

• FREE appears to make no effort to report whether the resources to which it links have evidence of their effectiveness. In an era when evidence-based education is touted by FREE’s parent organization, the US Department of Education, absence of empirically demonstrated effectiveness in support of educational recommendations is a substantial oversight. In my view, many of the examples I saw illustrate the cosmetic-cardiac approach to education: If it looks good on its face and feels right to our hearts, it must be good.
• Those few FREE resources (out of the reported 1500) that I examined had no adaptations for students with disabilities. Indeed, using terms the disability, disabilities, disorder, disorders (each separately), a search of the FREE data base yielded only seven hits; several of those came from sites discussing scientific studies of neuroscience and referred to, for example, sleep disorders. I guess the reauthorized Rehab Act doesn’t make rules about providing accommodations and adaptations for individuals with disabilities apply to US federal agencies’ offerings for education.

I greatly appreciate the effort to provide a data base of resources, but I think it would be better if the data base tagged resources for presence of evidence (a) indicating efficacy and (b) validated adaptations for students who have disabilities or are at risk for failure in schools. But, don’t take my word for it. Follow this link to FREE and see what you think.