The Green Cup

I answered a question for myself this week. It was a longstanding, nagging question that cut to the core of what I do as a special ed teacher. I can’t remember exactly how it was phrased, but in my own words it was something like this:

Under what circumstances is it justified to remove a special education student from inclusion in the general education classroom?

One of the teachers at my school has a daughter who is majoring in education in college. The daughter volunteers at our school occasionally. The kids love her; she loves the kids. One day last week she asked me if I’d answer some questions for her for a class. And question number four (I think) out of six was this question.

Out of the mouth of babes…, I thought.

The question is a controversial one. There are plenty of patronizing people around who think that most children with disabilities are better off, socially and educationally, in a separate room. Someplace where they can get more attention. Someplace where they can be with other kids “like themselves.” Someplace where the risk of failure and frustration isn’t so great.

There are also people out there who advocate for the rights of those who aren’t disabled in some way. They say that special education children can be a distraction to the class. Their needs, their immaturity (or developmental delays) can be disruptive, they say. Some go so far as to say that exposing “normal” children to kids with disabilities can be traumatic for the normal children. Normal kids should learn about Down Syndrome in their early 20’s from a doctor who’s caring for them or their spouse during a pregnancy, not by having a Down Syndrome child in their kindergarten or first grade class.

So there I sat, shuffling through my brain in the back of a classroom where a student with a profound disability is well accepted by peers and achieving academically better than some of the “normal” kids in the room, trying to come up with a good answer for a 20ish year old college student with a servant’s heart and a few freckles.

I started my career as a special education teacher sincerely believing that kids who where mentally impaired or had learning disabilities were better off outside the general education setting. They were mine. I understood their needs. But now I have a few years’ experience…

Kids in America have a right to a free, appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment possible. – whether they have a disability or not. “Normal” kids don’t have a right to be sheltered from real life.

My answer: It’s justified to remove a child with a disability from the general education classroom (from “inclusion”) when the general education environment itself becomes an impediment to meeting the child’s needs. Students with disabilities have a legal right to be in the general education classroom.

And if someone asked me. “What about the rights of the ‘normal’ kids?” Well, they have a right to be there, too…

I’ve heard it a few times from people in educational leadership: we’re building a plane while we’re flying it. Usually, I get the urge to get off when I hear that. It doesn’t strike me as inspirational – unless the goal is to inspire fear…

Brian Eno recently talked about the nature of the coming change:

We’re either at the start of a renaissance, or at the end of civilisation. Increasingly, from facts and figures and arithmetic, we’re building the intellectual tools to decide which it will be. While some shrill conservatives cling to the past, the rest of us are moving forward to something still in the process of being defined. That’s why, compared to them, we look a bit untogether. They know precisely what they don’t want, but we can’t yet clearly articulate what we do want. That’s the nature of the future—it’s a collective act of informed imagination. And the quality of information is improving. (Emphasis added.)

My friend John Connell commented on Eno’s idea of how data impacts our decision making. Here’s Eno’s quote:

In the absence of data, you theorise. In an abundance, you just need to do the maths. And, because of all those super-efficient search engines, we share more and more data. Data dissolves ideology.

Connell disagrees; and so do I. Connell points out that not only do we still have to make assumptions, but the energy in the current debate about the future comes about because we’re not able to agree on those assumptions – assumptions that Eno thinks are so obvious (in light of all the data available), they’re inescapable (just a matter of doing the math).

I like the metaphor of a coming Renaissance when we talk about change and about new direction. Airplanes are, well, mechanical; and if they don’t work, we crash and burn. The Renaissance was a more productive form of chaos.

Eno has muddied an important distinction. There’s a difference between facts and truth. Truth is more real, but less tangible. And while it might seem like an abundance of facts would lead to obvious conclusions, the truth is that facts are manipulable. Individual facts may not be malleable, but a collection of fact usually is manipulable. And people manipulate them to draw conclusions they’d already suspected (or hoped) to be true…

The National Journal published a short piece recently and asked that question: How should teacher effectiveness be measured? They start by referring to a recent study on teacher effectiveness measures (or the lack of them):

In a report titled “The Widget Effect,” the nonprofit New Teacher Project found that in public schools nationwide, teacher effectiveness is not measured, recorded or used to inform decision-making in any meaningful way. The result, according to the study, is a system where teachers are treated as interchangeable parts.

My first thought is that the answer can’t be a binary one. We can’t confine ourselves to the narrow box of saying that a teacher is either effective or not effective. It’s more complicated than that.

Neither can the answer be related solely to student achievement measured in a single year.

The National Journal’s blog post had 25 comments on it when last I looked at it…

I’m not really an advocate of school choice for the simple reason that in my sparsely populated, physically rugged part of Appalachia it is a somewhat impractical approach to providing students with improved education environments. If little my school (about 110 students this year in 7 grades with 10.4 teachers) doesn’t adequately serve the kids in Jenkinjones and Anawalt, it’s a hour or so on the bus to the next closest school (which probably doesn’t have room for them).

Simply closing “bad” schools might be a marvelous idea in Chicago (we’ll come back to that idea), but in rural America it takes a few years of planning and usually requires that districts find outside resources. It’s also a gamble in the sense that you can close an old school if it’s “bad,” but if you decide in six or eight years that the new school is just as bad, academically, you’re pretty much done with the school closure option. No district in my part of rural Appalachia is going to close a 10 year old building for any reason short of a natural disaster. Closing an old school and reopening it with new staff is also problematic because we are chronically short of teachers in key areas.

The Chicago Tribune looked recently at a study of school closures in Chicago. The study concluded that the effort to close poorly performing schools in Chicago between 2001 and 2006 resulted in only 6% of the students from closed schools ending up “at top schools, as measured by standardized test scores.” The study also concluded that students at closed schools regressed during the period of time between the announcement that their school would be closed and the time it was actually shut down. Then they showed no change in educational performance at their new school.

The Special Education Law Blog draws a fascinating conclusion in a post on the topic: Closing really bad schools doesn’t accomplish much of anything if you don’t have room for those kids at good schools (of if you don’t have good schools at all). School choice puts the cart before the horse. Step one is not closing bad schools, it’s building good schools. When a district succeeds at that, then it can argue about whether to close the “bad” schools or apply what they’ve learned from building the good schools to the bad schools in the hope that they’ll improve.

The Associated Press made news this week by warming up an old (and undated) quote from President Obama:

Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas. Not with Malia and Sasha, not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom.

The lengthy article quoted Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, saying that we are no longer an agrarian economy. The idea is that parents in Chicago (and even in rural Georgia) don’t need their kids to help harvest the corn these days. So why shouldn’t they be in school if they’re not in the fields?

The story quotes a couple of students who, predictably, are against the idea. It also cites statstics on class time in countries like Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan – places that are evidently “beating us” on tests in core subject areas. The irony is that in those countries kids spend less time in school than we do – not more. They go more days, but fewer hours.

The article also talks about charter schools – and uses the example of a single charter school as evidence that longer school days and school years can result in better test scores. But the fact that charter schools generally receive mixed reviews makes news on a regular basis.

I think there’s pretty good research to support the idea that students do better in a “year round” school year, where the normal summer break gets divided up into two or three week vacations at then end of a nine week school term. The tradition school year with it’s large chunk of down time results in regression. Students lose skills and knowledge over the summer; year round school prevents that.

Longer school days and longer school years mean more money for teachers and probably more teachers. I’m skeptical that keeping primary school kids in class longer would have positive effects. I’d consider the issue, if there were research to look at. There might be, but I don’t know about it if there is.

The obvious first step would be to go to a year round school calendar. That wouldn’t require increased funding or staffing changes. Yet it’s a step no one is really talking about – despite the fact that the idea seems to be supported by research. That puzzles me…

One of my colleagues watched President Obama’s speech to students on Tuesday – during her lunch hour. Her students were at lunch, as well. IN fact, every student at my small school was at lunch. So none of them saw the speech live.

I had planned to show the canned version of the speech in the afternoon. Whitehouse.gov said it would be available at 1pm. It wasn’t. In fact, it wasn’t available at all as a recording on Tuesday afternoon.

This morning I discovered that the speech was available as an Mp4 file and as a flash video from YouTube. Of course, YouTube is blocked at our school (and statewide, I think), so I downloaded the file. The result was frustrating. It took an hour on the first attempt. I left the computer working and came back to discover that Windows had decided to update in the middle of the download and the computer had restarted. I tried again and succeed. But then I figured out that most of the older XP computers in our building couldn’t play the MP4 file.

I succeed in playing it for a group of third graders. Their classroom has the school’s newest computers – and. thus, had the software needed to play an MP4 file. For other classes I’m going to have to take my laptop in to the school tomorrow.

Reaction from the third graders? The sat gathered around a PC and watched the video on a normal-sized screen. The general ed teacher an I kept our distance and watched from a distance. When it was over the third graders applauded spontaneously. It wasn’t a reaction we expected from third graders. A pleasant surprise…

My issue of Educational Leadership arrived a few days ago. It included an intriguing piece (What Would Socrates Say?) that contrasts the view of Socrates with the pop culture of today’s digital generation.

The author, Peter W. Cookson Jr., sums up his worry for today:

My greatest fear about 21st century education is that Socrates’ humility will be turned on its head. The noted philosopher once said, “I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.” My fear is that instead of knowing nothing except the fact of our own ignorance, we will know everything except the fact of our own ignorance. Google has given us the world at our fingertips, but speed and ubiquity are not the same as actually knowing something.

I share some of his concern. We stand surrounded by a fog of information, a mist of data and opinions that often does more to obscure the truth than to help us discern it.

I liked the article in part because it gives me a chance to use one of my favorite words: epistemology. I’m not quite as humble as Socrates. I know a few things – and I know how I know them.

I Google. I Twitter. I blog. Those tools serve their purpose. But the idea that I found something on Google (and that that somehow makes it true) is a pitiful epistemology.

Cookson’s article reaffirms for me the need to teach digital literacy as an essential 21st Century skill. I agree with him that critical thinking skills (even when they are not used in a technological context) are more important than ever today. And I think Cookson’s has an insightful point when he argues that metacognition (or ability to monitor our own learning) is growing in importance.

You can read What Would Socrates Say? here.

I got my copy of Reading Today in the mail a couple of hours ago. There’s a front page story on questions that reading professionals should ask at their school about Response to Intervention (RTI). I found it encouraging because at my school we have pretty good answers for most of the questions.

The questions (my paraphrase) are:

• What is your school doing about RTI?
• What approach to RTI is your school taking?
• How are you monitoring student progress?
• What are we doing to ensure that the classroom instruction (which could prevent the need for intervention) is “increasingly effective.”
• What specific interventions do we have available for students and why are we using those interventions?

The Reading Today piece has some useful tips for how to think about answers. If you’re not a member of the International Reading Association, find me and I’ll let you look at my copy of the newspaper…

I’ve been too busy with professional development (among other things) to blog about professional development much these last couple of weeks. So let’s summarize briefly…

I attended the Special Education Teacher Leadership Academy (SETLA) in Charleston, WV from July 26 to the 30th. I got a new laptop out of the experience. I sat through a brief intro to Vista and learned (among other things) that it has its own screen capture tool (the Snipping Tool) built in. I attended a workshop on INTEL’s online classroom tools. And I spent a little while in a podcasting workshop.

There was lots of other stuff.

The podcasting is something I’ve put to immediate use. My page at the SETLA website has links to two podcasts on it, on one why life long learning is important in our society and one on something called cognitive dissonance. The podcasts are produced using a program called Audicity.

Learning to use a new technology often results in the need to learn more about other technologies. MY podcasts are part of a book student. I need to do at least six or eight more. And that presents some online storage problems. So I’m exploring ways to solve that through some kind of a webhosting service. Podcasts usually open in Window’s Media Player or in RealPlayer. Both can show pictures connected to an audio file. With commercial mp3 files, that’s usually an album cover. I can’t help but think there’s a way I can brand my podcasts with a logo or icon of some kind in that same way, but I haven’t figured it out yet…

Last week (July 26-30), I attended SETLA - the Special Education Teacher Leadership Academy - in Charleston, WV. Three other professionals from my school district attended. Over 300 professionals (special education teachers, technology integration specialists, central office staff, and special education directors) were there to participate from across the state.


One of the things we did was live tweet the event. What does that mean? And why would we do that?


To "live tweet" an event means that you have your Twitter account open and you post comments (or "tweets," in the vernacular of Twitter users) as the event progresses. Probably you also employ a #hashtag in your tweets, a #word preceded with a number sign that informs Twitter that your post should be cataloged in its search engine under a particular topic.


Why? There are a couple of answers. First, it creates a background conversation where participates at an event can discuss a speaker's ideas or a workshop's content while things are actually happening (instead of later, when it's over). Second, it allows the outside world a glimpse of what's going on at the event. Third, it creates a permanent record of your thoughts that you (and others) can refer to later - like putting your notes on an event online. And final, I suppose it gives you something to do if you're a little hyperactive or you have a case of hypergraphia.


Hashtags only show up in a Twitter search for one week, so the #SETLA tag will disappear from the search engine over ther next few days. But the posts themselves can still be found by visiting the individual pages of event tweeters.


I counted about 400 posts using the #SETLA hashtag. In no particular, here's a list of the 17 event participates who used the tag:



• Valerie Wilson - the event's organizer.
• Marla George
• me
• Ellen Shepherd
• Devan Simmons
• Sonja Phillips
• Pam Butcher
• Becky Moore
• Denise Shipley
• Melissa Given
• Shelby Haines
• Diana Nash
• Courtney Curran
• Ali Stevenson
• Stephanie Simmons
• Amanda Shelton
• Kim Nicholas

WVTIS wasn't there, but commented on the event a couple of times and used the #hashtag. Keri Baldwin, a Kanahwa County algebra teacher used the tag to comment on the event, but I don't think she was actually there. Tracy Rosen, a Canadian teacher, blogger and friend of mine did the same.

Of course, that doesn't count individuals who commented on the event without using the #hashtag, like

• Jonathan Becker, Assistant Professor, Department of Educational Leadership, Virginia Commonwealth University
• Sally Boone, a WV technology integration specialist who was on vacation in Australia when the event started
• Angie Abbot another WV technology integration specialists in the state.

I think the live tweeting of #SETLA 2009 was a successful experiment for those involved in what can be done with Twitter. It will be interested to see how what we learned gets applied down the road at future events.

Perhaps the biggest lesson was that it helps to have the support of the event and to announce a hashtag for the event. Without that, most of our 17 participants wouldn't have known about each other... (Thanks, Val).