Thoughts on Special Education

After taking the Exceptional Learners course I was lucky enough to be invited by a friend to attend her daughter's yearly IEP meeting.   I attended this meeting both to learn more about IEPS and the process of crafting one and to support my friend.  This article was extremely interesting because I have been thinking quite a bit about the importance of the IEP as a legal contract or document that really shapes and determines a child's educational growth.  The article is titled
 "Special Educators Look to Align IEPS to Common-Core Standards" by Christina A. Samuels.  It discusses the movement towards linking IEPS for students with disabilities directly to the grade-level standards that are in place for general education students.  Apparently, this standards based IEP-movement was part of the reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1997.  This mandated access to the general curriculum for students with disabilities.  I was fortunate enough to be able to observe in an ERC for deaf and hard-of- hearing children at a school here in Salem.  This classroom was for children in Kindergarten through second grade.  I was absolutely impressed by the teacher and the high academic level of the work the students were engaged in.  They were essentially working with the second grade curriculum, with some modifications.  They also spent more time on each unit.  The students had read a story with the teacher called "New Shoes for Silvia".  The day I observed, the teacher used re-telling beads to model re-telling the story.  She used sign language, exaggerated speech (lip-reading), and speech to provide rich language input.  The students then re-told the story.  The students also crafted their own sentences, using what I thought were relatively sophisticated grammatical structures for second graders. ( Sentences like:  Silvia's shoes were as _____ as _____).  The students were then asked to personalize this ability to compare by making up sentences about themselves.  One student came up with this sentence:  "My hair is as brown as mud." It was brilliant!  The students were also working on punctuation, capitalization, and reading.  It was a vibrant, academically-oriented learning community.  In this classroom I could sense that this teacher had high expectations and was serious about her students learning.  Although I think it is important to hold all children to high academic standards, I can see that a policy which dictates this may be a cause for concern.  The whole point of an IEP is that children with disabilities need individualized instruction.  Although a child may be 8 years old in terms of chronological age, she may be developmentally at the level of a 3 year old in terms of letter recognition.  It would be unfair to expect this child to be reading, just because this is the standard for a third grader.  From the article it sounds like it is critical that the goals written in a student's IEP be specific and thoughtfully constructed. These goals also need to be academic.  It is too vague to say that "Tommy will have preferential seating" or "Lucy will work on communication skills."  In my friend's IEP meeting for her second grader, the teacher spelled out that she would like for her student to start using more complex 5+ word sentences like " I would like to have the purple crayon", now that she has met the goal of being able to articulate what she wants using 3 word sentences like "I want purple."