An op-ed in the New York Times calls for more oversight of private special education schools. A new report found that certain private contractors were ripping off the state.
Over the last few months, the comptroller’s office has cited several private contractors who stole or misspent millions of dollars, including billing the program for no-show employees and for services that were never delivered. The brazen overbilling suggests that many of them had been at it for years, getting bolder as time went on.
Yesterday, I spent an hour in Ian's class. I'm allowed one observation per month, but I haven't taken advantage of that opportunity enough. With a new teacher right out of college, I'm a bit nervous, so I'm keeping a close eye on his class this year.
After an hour of sitting in a tiny chair, my biggest concern wasn't with the teacher, but the practice of breaking the kids into small groups and having an aide provide direct instruction. The aides don't have teaching certificates. In fact, many of them don't even have college degrees. They are paid minimum wage. Legally, they really should not be providing direct instruction to kids at all.
Ian is at a fifth grade level for math. His state standardized tests were quite good. But when I saw him in his group with one other little girl, he looked bored out of his mind. The aide read from a teachers' manual a lesson on intervals. She didn't have a good enough grasp of the material herself to deviate from a word for word reading from the manual.
Aides have to do so much of the instruction, because the teacher is busy with scheduling and IEP paperwork.
The classroom had too many adults in the room and was set up to make life convenient for the adults. It wasn't a happy, vibrant, learning environment for the kids.
In the old days, I would have gotten on my soap box, held meetings with administrators, and demanded change for all kids. These days, I know better. I'm instead holding Ian back a year and insisting that he gets mainstreamed for all his classes. The aides can supplement what he's learning from a real teacher. I'll hire a tutor to plug in the gaps.
Special education does need a lot more oversight. However, if I was doing the oversight, it would probably end up as a more expensive program rather than a cheaper one.
Apt. 11d 
The in-class aides for mainstream classes are usually top-notch. I loved E’s 4th-grade aide. She really *got* him and made 4th grade bearable for me (didn’t much like his teacher, but I knew Mrs. A was there). I haven’t met his 5th grade aide yet. She wasn’t there at parent-teacher night. The key thing for E is to get him out of Dodge if he gets overstimulated because then he can be disruptive (vocally–he gets loud. I swear, I’ve never heard of or seen other kids doing this. It’s not Tourette’s. It’s something else).
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I worked as an aide fresh out of university. That is exactly how it worked at that time too – 1993. I did not go into education partly as a result of that experience. I loved teaching the kids but it was pretty crazy even then.
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“However, if I was doing the oversight, it would probably end up as a more expensive program rather than a cheaper one. ”
Me too, but then, I feel the same way about all education. I think there are lots of cheaper solutions that work for motivated children working in their areas of strength, but that there are few cheap solutions to help unmotivated children or children who aren’t working in areas that come easily for them.
My kid is easy to teach academically, but difficult to teach in physically. Since you can give up on the physical skills, we almost did. But, money/attention/tutoring (we could call it special education) has vastly increased her skills. It’s taken money, though, and will continue to do so.
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(oh, yeah, and lack of motivation is often correlated with the difficulty of the task for the kid)
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We’re pleased with Autistic Youngest being mostly mainstreamed (she has a resource period to work on homework and/or a separate culinary and gym class she attends with her ASD classmates). Certainly at the higher levels, the academically capable kids will do better in academic classes rather than being taught by aides who don’t necessarily know the curriculum.
That said, sometimes things still go south. We’ve got her home on a suspension today sparked by a banana on the lunch table yesterday. *facepalm*
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“We’ve got her home on a suspension today sparked by a banana on the lunch table yesterday.”
There’s a story here that I think I’d like to hear. 🙂
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Yelling at people? Or just high volume?
My husband and eldest both increase in volume when they are over-stimulated. It can make things really confusing to people who don’t know them as the volume is frequently mistaken for vehemence, when it’s really just an out of whack feedback loop. Overstimulation is definitely the trigger.
From what I’ve learned one ear processes what you say in a conversation while the other one processes what the other person says. The information needs to cross the mid-line of the brain, but should do that only once. If it crosses twice or crosses at the wrong point in the sequence you get a range of communication problems including a difficulty with judging volume levels appropriately under strong stimuli…K
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Kyndra, that’s fascinating! Thanks! It is an increase in volume, but not yelling. It’s like he doesn’t realize he’s too loud.
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“From what I’ve learned one ear processes what you say in a conversation while the other one processes what the other person says.”
This is not true.
There are interesting language perception effects that occur when different language is sent to the two ears separately and some experimentation on whether higher level auditory processing and filtering might be disrupted in some people (so it’s possible that those effects play a role in volume control). But, the two ears do not process different information in any simple way.
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OK, I have to correct myself and say that there are studies that suggest that there is a right ear speech perception advantage (one study that says that music is processed preferentially in the left ear v speech in the right, though neither music nor speech were used in the study, and others that suggest that request/language perception might be better when they are heard in the right ear.). I’m have to have to try that one out on my kids!
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Wendy, fresh fruit, particularly bananas, are a trigger for our girl. She gags at the smell and it makes her feel frantic. Even the sight is enough to send her spinning on her heels, trying to escape. Apparently, after a culinary activity, there was fresh fruit debris at the counter or table where she was directed to go. And someone, unknowing, added a banana or banana peel to the mix.
That was enough to send our kid into a non-verbal self-damaging freakout. This is a kid who’s on the honour roll and mainstream in university-prep classes the rest of the school day. I don’t say that part to brag but to show how much a trigger can bring her out of her normal behaviours and surprise us all!
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I worked as an aide in 1996 in RHS. I never taught a lesson- the idea was completely unheard of. Then, after my certification, I taught for ten years in middle and high school, usually with at least one class with an aide. Again, that just would never happen.
I wonder: is it different in elementary school for some reason?
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Let’s bear in mind that approved contemporary pedagogical practice is for the kids in small groups to teach each other and for the teacher to be a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage. A hands-off teacher is regarded as a feature, not a bug.
Having an adult involved with the small group (even a minimum wage adult) is actually a major step forward.
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“I wonder: is it different in elementary school for some reason? ”
I can imagine that it would be, because people presume that all adults know the content in elementary school. I think that’s an incorrect presumption in many cases (even I have forgotten some of what’s taught, in elementary school, for example, about worms, or christopher columbus, and I know plenty of adults my age who have forgotten some very elementary math). And, of course, the even bigger problem is that knowing the content doesn’t mean you know how to teach it, especially with children who learn differently.
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I’ve found that I’ve forgotten how to write out words phonetically. It hasn’t really come up often enough since grade school.
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