Two Teachers Talk Special Ed
Special education is one of the most controversial areas of our schools today. Even though thousands and thousands of research hours have been conducted, teaching disabled students is still uncharted waters due to its very nature. The needs of each individual vary drastically from one student to the next. According to Ahram, Fergus, and Noguera(2011), there are many issues that must be fixed like the disproportional amount of minorities making up the bulk of special ed students as well as the false science approach used to decide which kids need special education. After interviewing two veteran teachers with years of experience in this field, I feel there are two parts of special education that must be addressed. These two components are the lack of appropriate testing as well as the not so inclusive, inclusion programs.
Kristi Horne, a special needs teacher of 29 years at Hillcrest Middle school, has extremely strong opinions when it comes to her students and standardized testing.
Horne says, “I do not feel that the tests are beneficial for any of the kids, especially the SPED (special education) kids.” She shares similar qualms that regular education teachers have with standardized testing. Horne says the testing can take up to “5 weeks out of the school year”. These tests cause a major disturbance throughout the schools, which is felt tenfold in the special education department. Horne expresses this dilemma to me by saying, “The speed of the content presented is very hard for the SPED students at a normal pace. When you throw in the teacher stress to get everything presented before the testing, the SPED kids get lost and miss valuable content.”
This is yet another example of our system putting far too much stress into scoring well on tests. A setback of five weeks for a regular student slows their learning down for five weeks. But setting a special ed student back five weeks can very well slow their learning down for a much longer period of time. Jackie Bost, a retired middle school teacher of 32 years who has taught honors, mainstreamed students, and special ed inclusion, explained to me the damage she has seen done to the special education students due to testing. “Academically fragile students are put into a tail spin with the stress of testing. The amount of testing in a school year is ludicrous, and the loss of academic time is felt by all students but not nearly as much as students with special needs.”
Jackie Bost says inclusion, while set up with good intentions, “falls flat on its face. The intent is to level the playing field but instead it has created bigger hurdles by pointing out student weaknesses in a bigger, less forgiving arena.” What Bost means by this is most special needs students suffer from tremendous social and academic anxiety. When thrown into the mainstream classroom setting, we are setting special needs children up for embarrassment and often times failure in front of their peers. Also, one of the main goals of the inclusion program is to make the kids feel like one of the mainstream students. But Bost says this is laughable, as, “A special ed teacher or aid is in every class the inclusion student has, along with the regular teacher. All the students know which of their classmates the special ed teacher is there for, which is not by design.” This certainly does not make the special education students feel included, if anything it makes them feel excluded.
Just like the regular school system, special education has some ways to come before it will be everything that its students need it to be. The main problem with teaching students with special needs is a lack of valid measurements of academic growth, as well as, a failing inclusion system. Once these issues are fixed, we will be that much closer to providing an equal and fair education to all students in America.
Works Cited
Ahram, R., Fergus, E., & Noguera, P. (n.d.). Addressing Racial/Ethnic Disproportionality in Special Education: Case Studies of Suburban School Districts. In Teachers College Record(10th ed., Vol. 113).
Horne, K. (2016, May 26). [Interview by C. H. Bost].
Bost, J. L. (2016, May 26). [Interview by C. H. Bost].
