school reform denies rights of special education students

After surfing for school reform ideas and information and finding so much verbiage on the subject, I find myself reluctant to add to the heap. Curricula are controlled by economic and unexamined textbook acquisition practices. Teachers are not learning about learning. Schools are unfocused on the finer aims of achievement and character. School systems are fraught with budget inequalities and misuses. The litany of problems and issues makes me wonder how we have gone so far astray of simply teaching students to be responsible, thinking citizens.

Has the whole process become so large and fractured that we cannot see the woods for the trees? Have we lost our essential compass for determining right from wrong or more accurately truth from untruth? There can be no philosophical juggling of ideas when a tweny year old who can not read or write is graduating from High School.

The new thinking arising from the nut shells and ashes of present reform efforts seems to be that schools should be small, personal and controlled by a locally supported principal.

Here in NYC this year, the chancellor is calling for less guidance and support from district and regional offices and more focused leadership emanating from school buildings. He proposes to do this by cutting administrative staff from regional and district offices. Unfortunately this is another case of school reform two-step. You know, two steps forward, three steps back.

The city has begun to establish “Regional Learning Centers” which housed local instructional superintendents, instructional specialists and content regional specialists as a major part of its reform. These people have begun work in each region to set up the kinds of research-based academic and school management programs that have been proven to be effective in raising school achievement.

Many Principals find it difficult to find the time to take supervision from regional sources. Divided up into school cohorts of ten, Principles had never had so much supervision. Many resent it.
But the regional directives have been formulated to create a network of fairness, consistency and efficacy. Pulling as many as one hundred schools into line under ten local superintends is no easy task. Just getting the superintendents to begin “thinking together” and cooperating after years of working in a system fueled by a competitive paradigm can take a few years.

Getting the system to work on the regional levels is a major school reform in itself. Competent supervision and guidance of schools leaders is a rational way to approach the task of planning and implementing research based strategies into common practice.
Like any other change this one has been met with a good deal of resistance from schools and a common share of ineptitude on the part of regional operatives. But the idea is a good one and ought be given a chance to function before the chancellor turns about on his own plan.

Many of the principals he proposed to further empower were, are and will be inept. Just as there are very few programs that really train teachers, there are even fewer resources to prepare principals for the multitudinous arrays of issues that will daily confront them in their chosen profession. The case that I have seen this demonstrated in over and over is the one of special education.

New principals are selected according to regional or district need and the chances that they may succeed. Unless they have had previous success it is a shell game. Even when a principal is chosen from the ranks of supervisors of special education the services for those children almost always suffers. It is as if it is policy that special needs children should not get anymore than what is mandated and OK if they get less.


A lack of understanding of the rights of students with special needs along with personal and systemic neglect of the correct research based procedures for dealing with them allows institutional discrimination against the handicapped to continue.