In my previous piece, I began to explain why I had made the tough decision to leave my job as a teacher after two decades. I explained that I hadn’t been as eager for each new day as I once had been, and I shared one of the main reasons: unsupportive parents.
While it would make a huge difference if students’ parents did all the things I mentioned, like checking homework, reading with their kids from an early age, not using electronic screens as babysitters, instilling basic manners, providing consequences at home for actions and performance at school, and always being respectful to their children’s teachers, there are other reasons that I left teaching.
One of them is a contentious one: the ever-increasing role of “special education.” What is special education? I would define it as a collection of programs, plans, and systems originally designed to help students with physical or mental difficulties learn what their peers were learning. And let me state this clearly first: There are many students who struggle with disabilities through no fault of their own or of anyone else. School can be a challenge for them, even if those students and their parents work hard at home to gain the academic and/or behavioral skills necessary for those students to perform at the level expected of their peers. During my experience as a classroom teacher over the last twenty years, however, the special education system in public schools has exploded to the point where it now has a detrimental effect on the well-being of many of the students it purports to help, their general education peers, and yes, their teachers, too.
Perhaps the biggest launching point for students into the world of special education is the ubiquitous IEP, or Individualized Education Program (or Plan). For many parents, administrators, and teachers, the IEP has been seen as the magic ticket to address students’ learning or behavioral shortcomings, so long as there’s some diagnosable disability that can be discovered. Parents don’t really understand just what the IEP really is at its core, in my experience, and I would say that many teachers and administrators aren’t much wiser on the subject. Essentially, an IEP involves a bunch of adults (“stakeholders”) getting together and deciding how they can reduce the expectations of school to create “goals” the children can reasonably meet and determining what changes (“modifications” and “accommodations”) the teacher and school must make so the students’ experiences are easier. (An accommodation might be extra time to take a test; a modification might be an alternate test with fewer questions or a test that covers less material.)
IEPs cause a whole slew of problems. Part of that is because they seem to be given out now like candy on Halloween. The number of IEP students who are placed in the general education classroom each year keeps increasing. There are legitimate learning or other disabilities (or “differences,” as some prefer) that exist in any population, but not only do those who run the system (school district and local school administrators and special education personnel) rush to address them with an IEP, but also, they lump plenty of other behaviors into the general category of disability that don’t belong or should be addressed through other means. One such example is Oppositional Defiant Disorder, which is code for “talks back to adults.” When children are suspected of having one of these disabilities, regardless of what it is or what the best way to truly address it is, we now send students off for what is often a barrage of special ed testing. Students may be diagnosed this way with conditions such as dyslexia, autism, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). While there are plenty of children who were just born with these special needs through no fault of their own or anyone else’s, it should come as no surprise that students who have been raised to alleviate boredom from a young age with video games or YouTube videos on continuous loop also get identified as having ADD or ADHD. Regardless of the diagnosis, if it is deemed to have an impact on learning, the student is likely to receive an IEP.
Oh, your children have a hard time sitting still or staying in their seat? Let’s see about an IEP. Oh, your children don’t focus on what the teacher is saying or follow along with the rest of the class? IEP time!
The second issue relates to what an IEP actually does. An IEP requires two main actions – accommodations / modifications and “services.” Again, accommodations and modifications change what is expected of special education students. Besides extra test time or an alternate test, these changes could be reduced homework or classwork, or extra break time. Meanwhile, the other students get nothing. Shame on them for coming to school and scoring at grade level. With the guise of making things less unfair to students with special needs, we’ve now made it incredibly unfair to everyone else. (To alleviate this unfairness, I provided all the students with extended time on tests, gave everyone a break if I saw that they could benefit, and reduced the workload for all my students without decreasing the rigor. Some colleagues have tried this only to have administrators complain. But regardless, teachers shouldn’t have to find workarounds in the first place just because a bureaucracy wants to demonstrate that it’s trying to help kids with special needs.)
The second component of an IEP, services, includes things like assigning students a one-on-one Behavioral Interventionist Instructor – basically a paid adult who monitors those students in class, making sure they’re paying attention to the teacher, and even possibly accompanying them throughout the day to help with social issues. Other services may include time with a personal tutor a.k.a. resource teacher, psychotherapist, speech therapist, occupational therapist, or even an adaptive physical education teacher. In my experience, all of these involve removing the children from the class for these special services. If the children are unruly, this may come as a welcome break for the classroom teachers, but the truth is that the students miss lots of classroom education time, which only further sets them back academically and socially. School simply can’t be the place to provide every medical service under the sun to children with special needs.
The third issue I have with IEPs is they require the students’ teachers to be away from their students frequently. We usually have the IEP meetings during instructional time, which means I have to be away from my classroom and have a substitute, often sent at random by the district since they’re in short supply these days, fill in for me. Who knows if the sub will cover what I’ve left for her while I’m gone? All the students fall behind because the adults in charge decided they needed to sit and talk about a single student for an hour or more. That’s not fair to me or to my students.
Fourth, does the IEP meeting itself actually accomplish anything? It’s basically a scripted bureaucratic process in which the “team members” report on their findings concerning that specific student and discuss whether that student has met the specified goals. Goals are then maintained or adjusted. The members review the modifications and accommodations and see if they need to be adjusted. What happens if the child doesn’t meet the goals? Nothing. The whole thing is rather pointless. Just a way of saying, “Hey look, we’re doing something for our Special Education kids!”
Fifth, there’s a disturbing trend of a lack of consequences that the IEP provides for students who are a threat to other students. Students with IEPs, at least in my school district, were not allowed to be suspended even after physically assaulting other students. There was at least one incident in which a student tore apart a classroom and then assaulted students with a broom, causing multiple injuries. Not only could the student not be legally grabbed by teachers or administrators to be stopped (that’s another problem) but also administrators said they were unable to suspend the student because the student had an IEP. Imagine being a parent of one of the students who was injured, or hearing about this attack and knowing your children could be the victims the next day.
Along with the problems of the IEP, the special education system itself is problematic. With the full-day inclusion model that is now in place, special education students with varying levels of disability are included in the general education classroom. Often, students are welcoming of peers that have differences in learning speed or ability, or who face special challenges. It can be a great chance to expose students to those with different experiences and backgrounds. Far too often, however, special education students placed in general education classrooms are a huge disruption to their peers. They may constantly talk out of turn, interrupt others, scream, or even throw tantrums making it hard for anyone else to learn. Worse yet, some physically destroy the classroom or other students’ property, or even threaten the safety of the students in the classroom, as discussed earlier. In recent years, there have been too many stories of teachers who had to remove all their students from the classroom because of the destruction caused by one child whom no adult was physically allowed to remove. Whether it’s because of their disability, or because their parents excused the behavior because of their disability varies from student to student. That is irrelevant though when we look at the outcome: entire classrooms of students are made to suffer in the interest of an educational bureaucracy trying to appear inclusive of one student who would be better suited in a different environment.
Don’t get me wrong. There are obviously students out there with real medical issues or learning disabilities who fit in well in the general education classroom. I’ve taught many of them and have marveled when they sometimes exceeded the expectations others had for them and that they had for themselves. They’ve succeeded because they worked hard and their parents didn’t make excuses for them and because they supported me as their children’s teacher.
But as with anything, the system has been abused and has gotten way out of control. In many cases, I don’t believe it’s actually helping kids with disabilities. Imagine having one-on-one Behavioral Instructional Interventionists walk around with students all day and reminding them how to play nicely, being a failsafe to remind them what the teacher said in case they weren’t listening, or contacting their mom on their behalf if they were upset that they didn’t get the sandwich they wanted in their lunch. That’s not helping them gain personal responsibility and effectively deal with their disability. By giving things like extra time or breaks to students who don’t need them, we’re also not really helping them in the long term. Real life has none of that. We’re actually handicapping their growth and their ability to adapt. In fact, the way IEPs and special education are administered now seems to ask not what parents and students need to work on at home in order to achieve success at school, but what we can do to change the entire environment around students so that their learning years are as easy as possible. While we certainly do want to help students with true disabilities smoothly transition through their difficult lives into adulthood, by eliminating so many obstacles to the point of making students unprepared, we’re only setting them up for failure once they get into the real world.
What’s the real answer? Instead of completely changing the world for our students with special needs and without, we need to help our students learn to face the world as it is. That doesn’t mean leave them out to flounder. Good teachers, with the support of parents and administrators, know how to help students with actual disabilities succeed without removing every challenge from their paths. They know when to spend extra time working with students who need additional support, when to pull students aside who are having a rough time emotionally for a reassuring chat, and certainly when students need extra time on tests. But good teachers also know when students, even those with disabilities, need extra practice at home on a given concept, or aren’t finishing a test because of a lack of interest, not a physical handicap, and teachers should be able to adjust modifications/accommodations as they see fit. That may lead to some frustration for students at first, but it will also lead to empowerment and resilience when they grow up, helping them to be capable of tackling the hardships of the real world, knowing that they’ve overcome obstacles along the way.
We also need to tighten the gates on new IEPs by reconsidering what disabilities qualify and whether those students would better be served by further academic and behavioral support at home rather than lowering requirements or pulling them out of class for support at school. Accordingly, we need to put the onus on parents to follow the ideas set forth in my previous piece about how to prepare children properly for school. We need to let teachers have a much greater role in determining what accommodations/modifications are necessary for the students in their care, not just administrators who have never met those children, don’t know what they’re capable of, focus more on potential lawsuits than on individual student growth, or are just following the whim of some politician who wants to look like a champion of education. And we need to make sure that students are placed in classrooms appropriate for themselves and for the other students in the classroom, no longer putting the desire to be politically correct above the needs of a majority of our children.