Equal Educational Access for Students with Learning Disabilities
By Jerelle Hendon, Ed.S., Strategies for Student Success blogger
Students with learning disabilities are slipping through the cracks of America’s broken educational system. In 2016, a HuffPost article described American schools as “dropout factories” for students with special needs. The article included a map (see below)showing the states with the highest dropout rates among students with learning disabilities. The American Federation of Teachers is working to ensure that educators are supported in their classrooms so that every child has an opportunity to be successful.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act entitles all children with disabilities to a free and appropriate public education to meet their unique needs and prepare them for further education, employment and independent living. This means that if students with learning disabilities need additional help, we must provide them with individual support, differentiated instruction or scaffolding opportunities. Placing students in classrooms with wide variations in ability levels, without providing teachers with sufficient training, resources and support, is a clear path to failure. For example, asking a teacher to support a high school student with an elementary school reading level, while at the same time ensuring that the other students who are on grade level continue to progress, is unfair to everyone in the classroom. As a result of these demands, school systems across the country are seeing an increase in teacher frustration and burnout.
The challenges of being a teacher are endless, but some of these challenges can be resolved by effectively allocating funding and resources. As a former classroom teacher, I remember observing a classroom that contained about 15 students with learning disabilities mixed in a single class with the general population. I remember seeing how frustrated the teacher became in her attempts to balance the juggling act of meeting the students’ individual education plans and trying to stay on pace with the required curriculum. The teacher’s frustration was compounded by the fact that she was a first-year teacher who didn’t have a paraprofessional or inclusion teacher to provide regular support. This left the burden solely on the teacher to figure out her own solutions.
Schools should be required to earmark a portion of their funds to ensure that properly trained paraprofessionals and inclusion teachers are hired to support our classrooms. In compliance with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which protects students with disabilities, we must demand that administrators justify in their Title I budgets how they plan to use their resources to ensure that students with learning disabilities aren’t disenfranchised from the environment. It is time to increase consumer confidence that our public schools are the key to success.
The AFT’s Strategies for Student Success program offers a great teaching module, “Making Parents Partners!” Making our parents partners in education gives our classroom teachers an additional ally who can fight to ensure that educators receive sufficient classroom support. As we build a collaborative teacher-parent network, the support for our classroom teachers will increase. For more information about offering this training at your school, contact Rosalind LaRocque in the AFT’s educational issues department at rlarocqu@aft.org.
