Teachers should be free to teach
There are no comments for this page [ Add Comment ]Sunday, April 29, 2007
Being a teacher of special education in Utah must be doubly frustrating.
First of all, the poorly fashioned No Child Left Behind law ignores students' obvious inability to perform up to the level of other students. This means everyone's performance appears diminished at the end of the day -- pressure to perform is placed on precisely the wrong students and teachers.
But perhaps even more frustrating -- after all, who counts on the feds to get much of anything right when it comes to education? -- has been the historical insistence on Utah education officials to load up the paperwork and make teachers' tasks that much more time-consuming and complicated.
It remains to be seen whether or not Congress will reform the NCLB during its upcoming reauthorization process. There is some reason to hope that, at the very least, lawmakers will amend the portions dealing with special-ed/exceptional students to reflect reality. So everyone's keeping their fingers crossed.
On the state level, the outlook is also more hopeful. As reported by our own Lynze Wardle last week, Utah's special education teachers appear to be making some headway when it comes to convincing state officials to throttle back on the requirements for documentation and leeway in the class in order to meet individual challenges and react to emerging science on the best ways to teach children who face sometimes severe obstacles to learning.
As Wardle reported, Utah used to be in the habit of adding rules and regulations to federal guidelines for teaching special-ed classes. Now the state is rethinking its approach. An example, she wrote, is that teachers used to be required to "document what was tried in a child's regular education classroom before they were moved to special ed." It was terribly time-consuming -- actually diminishing instruction of the students.
Thankfully, that requirement has been trimmed, and others may yet be dropped after the current process of public comment and review by the State Office of Education.
The danger, as we see it and as special-ed teachers have informed the state, is that flexibility in the classroom has been curtailed in an effort to provide more rigid instruction. But what works for one student may not be the best for another -- or most others. As long as teachers and administrators are accountable to parents for the education of our children, and as long as progress is being made in helping them function at higher levels, teachers should be given a little more leeway.
In other words, they should be free to do their jobs.
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