Should Schools Be Accountable for Special Education?

Yes.

Ian was rocking his summer college class — Introduction to Computing — with a bunch of A’s on assignments, so I wasn’t paying attention until he got a 69 on his last quiz. After looking at his Moodle platform, the problem was rather obvious — with 2 hours to complete this open book exam, Ian whizzed through 34 multiple choice questions in 13 minutes and 22 seconds. So, we had a long chat about test strategies — he should have used up his exam time, checked his answers, looked up words that he didn’t know, and prepared ahead of time by preparing a Quizlet (online flashcards) for himself with keywords.

Good exam strategies are just one of many huge gaps in Ian’s education. Want to hear another horrible gap? He can’t read. He can figure things out enough to get through his college tech classes, but he can’t really read. He won’t be able to get through the English class requirement at his community college without us ghostwriting his papers for him.

Ian has an above average IQ and scored in the 99.9th percentile for decoding in kindergarten, but was put in the lowest level English class in elementary school by some idiot administrator who thought that all autistic people had cognitive disabilities. Once he was put in that educational basement (it was literally a basement, too), he learned nothing for the rest of his school career.

I knew that Ian wasn’t learning anything in his English classes and complained. The school was happy to have meetings with me to discuss the issue. Then they would give him a bogus test that said that he was “average.” All those meetings and tests would take months, and then they would just walk away. I would bring up the problem again the next year. Meetings and tests. Rinse and Repeat. And nothing. I wrote email after email* begging the school for reading help, but even with all that effort, I was never able to score even an extra five minutes a day with a reading teacher.

Reading, in particular, is a tricky subject for schools. For years, they have been doing it all wrong by relying on the now discredited Teacher’s College system. Parents finally know that reading methods that emphasize phonics, like the Orton Gillingham system, are excellent, but schools don’t want to pay to retrain their entire staff.

The school district wrote my son off after he turned 10, as they do every special education student. If he couldn’t read well by ten, they thought, then he would never read and any cent spent on a reading specialist was a wasted cent. The growth mindset only applies to typical kids, apparently.

School accountability is only something that applies to typical kids, as well. Theoretically, an IEP should keep track of a student’s goals and showing improvement over time. But that doesn’t really happen. Many special education students never take the state standardized exams, and nobody is responsible for making sure that a student has the right supports to improve. Schools aren’t held responsible for the education of their special ed kids. Responsibility only happens when a pissed-off parent hires an attorney.

Schools prefer students with lower cognitive abilities, where nobody has any expectations for them academically. They’re okay with babysitting those kids until graduation. But kids who can learn, provided they get lots of specialized extra help, are a nightmare for schools. An expensive nightmare.

Just a couple of months ago, we finally had a professional evaluation of Ian’s reading ability, which confirmed that Ian’s reading level was below average and that there was a significant gap between his intellectual ability and his reading level. Now that he’s 20, he will finally get some extra help for reading at a special program.

Hindsight is 50/50. I should have given up on his school and hired a reading tutor (or an attorney) ten years ago. Instead, he’s going to get that extra help now. He’s going to become a better reader, while he also learns for the first time about test strategies, note taking methods, and writing letters to professors without slang. Ian will catch up eventually, but it’s been quite a battle.

* Always save your emails to case managers and teachers. Tag those correspondence and/or put them in a separate folder. This information could come in handy, if a lawyer is necessary in the future. And always document every meeting and every conversation; save that info, too.

---

LINKS

I’ve been neurotic on my general newsletter:

What Me, Worry?

Crisis Mentality

On the blog, I’ve been sharing pictures of little local trips with the family and other festivities.

Covid learning loss is a global disaster.

PHOTO: Below: Back in May, Ian and I went to the Cloisters in New York and grabbed a great breakfast on 181st Street.