Transforming Education

Luke's Blog

2006-12-19T20:23:00.000-05:00

Hi, I’m Luke Baker.

I invite you to comment on the Lukesinclusionworks web site.
Please ask questions, make comments or describe a situation that may spark some useful discussion or debate for any folks who may visit the blog.

Any discussion topic is acceptable but for now I will start the ball rolling by recalling that teachers unions in Great Britain want to outlaw inclusion of some special needs students in schools because the schools fail to give them the support that they need to educate the students in a manor that is satisfactory.

Teachers come to the profession with a strong desire to take part in the transformation of children to young adults and young adults to adults. As individuals they do all they can and sometimes it seems even more. But individual efforts are not enough. To make inclusive models work schools must find ways to create a dedicated team built on trust, cooperation and collaborations.

All to often schools structures tend to divide teachers from each other and encourage them to stick with status quo rather than search for new liaisons and solutions to the problems and issues that are by nature ever presenting themselves to schools and communities.

How do we get people to become people oriented, to learn to listen and cooperate for the sake of our children? Is this a good idea at all?

Please comment on this topic or any that you wish.

Luke

The Time for Radical Evolution In Education Is NOW

2006-11-14T12:04:00.000-05:00

Council for Exceptional Children in New York State Conference

I am an advocate for growth and evolution in education. And I want to see it happen now. Reasons for change are all around us. The world is changing at an incredible speed.

People are constantly finding themselves in novel situations. The whole concept of terrorism and war constitutes a new and novel context for our entire nation. The information age with the attendant international business and its effect on local employment opportunities has altered the field of employment opportunity dramatically. A polarization of political beliefs has seized the United States with an icy grip that until recently has made us look like a one party, one idea, one belief State.

All of these influences are “under the skin” of daily life but individually and together they affect each of us and our behaviors as an “aggregate group of individuals”.

I am looking toward education as the one influence that can transform us from aggregate to group, from individuals out for singular survival to social members focused on the good of all. In a world that is increasingly walking and crossing that thin line between war and peace I believe that it is essential that we recognize the gravity of our situation and apply the best remedies now.

The field of education appears to be moving backward. More aptly it is becoming more “convergent” in its objectives and goals. Students are being taught to pass tests at the cost of other learning opportunities like music, sports, arts, and creative applications of academic curriculum (projects). The problem with this is that a significant percentage of learners will not achieve in this “single approach” educational environment.

Some learn from tests, and some don’t. Testing can be very valuable and used for much more than simple summative assessment. Life if filled to the brim with tests and as such tests can be given in a million different ways. Life’s tests are teaching tools and their results are natural reinforcers or natural punishers. I think that we need to broaden the way we understand testing.

Simply there are two reasons to test. One is to see how the child and the school are performing compared to the norms. The other is to teach. Given this dichotomy it makes sense that we ought to use tests as teaching tools integrated into our curricular mapping plans and unit designs for understanding. If we are really teaching and if we strive to understand exactly what the state or city test is testing I believe that we can identify and address the overlapping goals of each.

Back to exceptional children. The conference was sparkly attended. The ideas and approaches presented were based on solid research and each provided more than reasonable rational for implementation. But there were few takers. Few seem to be interested in the cause for effectively teaching to every student. Even with a law called “No Child Left Behind” I did not find many school people searching for the best research based solutions. The solutions are there. Where is the interest? Where is the application? Where is the spirit? Where is the belief that in order to have a great nation we must have a great and enlightened system for opening, freeing and expanding the minds of our citizens?

Has eight years of republican rule cut the air hose (spirit) and the food (money) tube to our movement for equal educational opportunities for everyone? Is the patient dead or can it be revived and if so by whom?

I want to see democrats put their actions where their words were. I think America needs some very deep thought and reflection at this juncture in history and I want a nation where the citizens are familiar with that process.

I have a new website called Lukesinclusionworks.com and can be reached at Luke@lukesinclusionworks.com

Lets us work together to begin a new spirit for evolution and enlightenment in the ways we look at learning and teaching.

Inclusion. What is it?

2006-11-04T15:19:00.000-05:00

hi folks,

This is just a brief blog to say in the shortest way possible that our schools are very creative in finding ways to keep kids with learning differences a far as possible from "other" kids. Rather than including special students in regular classes they often make a new catagory of classes that have "attributes of regular classes" like regular teachers and some regular students but they are not really regular classes.

This happens because school people do not believe that kids with special needs really can be serviced in regular normal environments. So, they don't try. Instead they make up new kinds of environments and give them nice names. They put these new classes on a "continuum of services" and their job is done.

Kids with special needs are still segregated from the mainstream. Job not done!
Kids with special needs are grouped in low performing, low expectation classes. Job not done!
Mainstream teachers and students do not get the opportunity to be enriched by sharing space and challenges with a very
important segment of their communities. Job not done!
People continue to see learning needs, differences and challenges as deviance and/or sickness. Job not done!
Regular education teachers do are not required to deepen their understandings of curriculum and student learning. Job not don't.
American education continues to give less than adequate preparation to its citizens because it resists growth, effort and change.
It is a real "no brainer" my friends. The reason for so many uneducated people on the streets is that public education has failed to keep up with the needs of individuals and families in modern society.

Wake up.

Inclusion abuse

2006-05-24T11:22:00.000-04:00

Great Britain
“The National Union of Teachers dramatically reversed decades of support for “inclusion” and demanded a halt to the closure of special schools. It called on the Government to carry out “an urgent review of inclusion in policy and practice”.

I am so happy that the word "abuse" has turned up in the Inclusion debate. But I think that “neglect” is a better word. Simply put; No one appears to have thought the school operations and wider social implications of equality of educational access (inclusion) through.

Re-enfranchising a portion of our society that has been discriminated against and sequestered in "other" facilities for hundreds of years because people in general did not see outside of their own experiences and their own (mostly false) beliefs is a big job. It will take some persons with clear and unfaltering vision to get the message across to all that the benefits of society are for everyone, not just those who fall into the normative curve.

Abuse is what we have been and are continuing to subject children with special needs to when we don't provide them with a flexible, continuum of services in which they are empowered to move outward as much as possible.

One trouble is that many educators see this continuum as one of “spaces and places” when it needs to be seen as one of "instructional models and specialized services”. Is anyone getting this message out? I have tried for twenty years and it’s been two steps forward and three steps back most of the way. Perhaps we have to sound the alarm. Abuse is occurring but what is the best way to deal with it?

For inclusion to be “implemented right” schools first have to come to grips with the veiled practice of “tracking” and the belief systems that many teachers, administrators and community members have that supports it. They believe that when student are grouped by ability they will achieve more. The believe that higher-level readers are higher-level thinkers and that lower level readers will catch up best by moving up the incremental steps dictated by basal readers and curriculum companies.

Most school officials will deny that tracking is used in their schools but a close examination of course offerings and students’ programs will un-veil the programmers and an unspoken school policy leading to “fast” and “slow” classes sometimes taught by “fast” and “slow” teachers. With this “unspoken practice” supported by the “unexamined belief” that children learn best when grouped by ability firmly in place it is no wonder that school communities do not grasp the feasibility of a concept like inclusion.

They can’t understand inclusion until they re-think the fundamental ways in which persons learn. Once they understand that academic achievement is a linear element that cannot be separated from equally important and influential social and personal development strands they may see that they are shaping a world of human beings, not just creating brains that can compete in world markets.

Inclusion requires the re-embracing of humanism in a world where human value is sharply decreasing. In Great Britain teachers are not complaining about having special learners in their rooms. They are complaining about the lack of appropriate supports to educate them. Find who is responsible for neglecting to follow the guidelines that educational research has drawn out to help all learners and you will find out who is guilty of this continuing discrimination, neglect and abuse.

Inclusion class is not real Inclusion

2006-04-27T17:34:00.000-04:00

Transforming Education

Before having your kid go into the inclusion class you ought to find out exactly what kind of inclusion model the school is using.

In my experience, schools take kids with IEPs (40% allowable by NYS) and mix them with (60%) other students who school officials think could benefit from having two teachers (one of them a sped teacher). This "other sixty percent" is where they make a mockery of the whole meaning of the word "inclusion". Inclusion's full name is "Inclusion in the mainstream of school academic classes and social life".

By taking kids who have learning difficulties and putting them in a class with kids who have learning disabilities the school is making a new kind of special placement which is definitely not "inclusion in the mainstream of academic classes". The result is a class with two teachers who must find ways to work together (not easy and really new to American education) and a large class of kids with learning issues.

It is really no solution at all. It is just another way of keeping sped kids and children with what we call "diverse learning needs" away from the real mainstream.

Why?

They want to distance these kids as much as possible from taking part in the schools evaluative process. Their score will certainly lower the schools ranking. While in special placements, expectations can be lowered and grades inflated.
It might even be easier to "touch" standardized test scores or file for waivers to reduce the amount these special scores count in the schools Annual Yearly Progress goals (required by No Child Left Behind).

Find out what specific models and strategies the teachers will be using to address the needs of all the learners in the inclusion class.

Have they chosen any of the researched methods for co-teaching?

Do they have an understanding of the fundamentals of Differentiating Curriculum?

If the answers are not ready now, then don't expect them to be ready in September.

Find out who are the "other sixty percent" and what is the criterion for being in that 60% of regular kids in the inclusion class.

I think you'll find some monkey business.

Inclusion is not easy to do right and is being done wrong all over America today mostly in our Middle and High School grades. Inclusion class is not Inclusion.

Transforming Education: Special education inclusion deception

2006-04-27T11:22:00.000-04:00

NYC Teacher Duct Tapes Two Children In Their Chairs.

She also tapes their little mouths shut and leaves them like that for longer than just a few moments.

What is scary to me is that I can empathize with this teacher. I know what it is like to be pushed to the edge of rationality by an untenable situation. This teacher “lost it”. She lost her connection to the foundations of her purpose in the classroom. The thing to understand is that teachers don’t just “lose it” overnight.

It takes weeks, months, and years of inadequate administrative support. By inadequate I mean irrelevant staff development, denial of requested books and materials, shunning of ideas and suggestions, and even institutional intimidation.

If you don’t shut up and do your job as told you find yourself in the basement with the “worst kids”, the worst schedule, no advancement opportunities, and a few extra eyes on your time card. You could receive personal letter in your file about your untidiness, lack of collaborative spirit or your lack of sufficient planning. You may simply receive a U rating when an administrator observes your class and finds that student who lives in a group-home asleep at his desk.

Year after year the school system flaunts the research about inclusion and mainstreaming and continues to give you groups of students who have been labeled as unmanageable. They have been labeled this for so long they belief it. You’re the only one that doesn’t believe it because you are their educational manager.

They can’t learn with the presser of each others conditions dampening the atmosphere like off colored wall paper and filling the room with words to make truck drivers blush. Each of them needs individual plans, instruction, intention and attention but the school insists that you can teach them like the others because you have fewer of them in your (smaller) room.

Smaller class size does not make an education “special”. Distinctive focus on learning profiles, emotional and personal disposition and careful incrementally scaffolded learning plans that include objectively measurable social, academic, and transitional goals and objectives are what make an education “special”.

But, back to our teacher. You have tried for fifteen years to teach in a place that is not properly conceived in its “environmental architecture” for helping children and you have gotten so frustrated that you want to lose it. You can’t just quit this job. Your brain will not let you but you can sabotage yourself. Your guts know you have had enough but the only way you will leave is if they drag you out.

One day you make it so.

Step up young men and women. Who wants to teach special education?

Who wants to see all they have learned in University ignored by the school community?

Who wants to be treated like an outcast among the faculty because they teach “those kids”? (and never see this prejudice never dealt with)

Who wants to deal with parents who are on their last nerve with a school system that discriminates against their children? (and denies that it is discrimination)

Who wants to take the pressure of meeting AYPs required by NCLB without a “whole school support Model”?

Who wants to hold up the mantel of persons who think, feel, and function in diverse ways?

Who wants to open the doors of creative and technical possibilities that finding solutions for those who learn or function differently unlock.

Who want to reclaim our national foundation and mission of liberty for all?

Ready to fight for what is right?

Then.

Welcome Aboard.

Special education inclusion deception

2006-04-25T18:07:00.000-04:00

Special Education Inclusion Deception

Many schools today have a new classroom placement for kids who learn differently. It is called “inclusion class”.

Since the latest re-authoration of the Individuals with Disabilities Act (formerly the Education for all handicapped Children Act, 1976) the federal government has gotten a message to States that (as provided in the IDEA) students must be educated in “a least restrictive environment”. Research has clearly shown that sequestering kids by ability level (reading, writing, math) in school placements like self contained classes leads to substandard educational opportunities and substandard overall education quality for those students.

States have responded by mandating schools to find ways to get students with special needs out of self-contained rooms and into regular education venues for learning. In the old world this meant “mainstreaming” special education students into some or all regular classes with varying levels of support. The least restrictive of these supports was called “resource room” in which students attended all regular education classes and got help with specific learning issues, homework and class-work assignments in a one period a day class with up to fifteen students and one teacher.

In 1986 the Supreme Court eliminated the idea of “Equal Educational Opportunity” with the “Rowley Ruling” in which it rejected that legal standard for a standard of “Appropriate Educational Services”.

The intention of this ruling was two fold.
First, it followed a line of previous civil rights for handicapped rulings that supported rights to special (medical) services. Second, the judges believed that districts should not be compelled to provide any more educational attention than necessary to get students to pass standard tests. (a ford not a cadillac)

School district’s reaction to State mandates (motivated by federal funding guidelines) to educate students with special needs in normalized settings has been to create a class that is called regular but functions to serve students with special needs. In New York State these “inclusion” class are permitted to have forty percent of the students with special needs. The other sixty percent can be any mix of the regular population. I have worked in schools for over twenty years. Let me tell you a few ways I have seen this mix constructed so that the real regular population never has to come into contact with special education students.

NYC, 1993. I am the mainstream coordinator at a large Manhattan vocational High School. Our special education students are scheduled into English as a Second Language classes so they sit with others who have English language problems. The only difference between my sped students and the ESL students is that my students all speak English fluently. The internal politics of the school made it easier for my supervisor to place our students with English language learners than into real content area classes where they might benefit from the expertise of our content teachers.

These teachers and their supervisors did not want sped kids in there rooms. They saw sped students as social and academic rejects that the school was required to house but not really teach. In the opinion of most of the regular teachers and administrators all sped students and their teachers were misfits to be avoided.

I explained to the assistant principal of the English Department that our scheduling of sped students in ESL class was of no benefit to our students and very taxing on the ESL teachers. I lost my post as mainstream coordinator.

In 2002 I was the District Chairman of Special Education in a wealthy Rockland County school district. I worked as a cooperating teacher in an inclusion sophomore Biology class. This class was made up of forty percent sped students and sixty percent students “at risk”. In other words, it was “the slow class” and it was presented and taught just that way. It was as watered down and academically un-ambitious as the group of students gathered in the room dictated.

This was exactly the kind of thing that putting sped students into mainstream classes was supposed to eliminate. I found myself the director of a program that was perpetuating the same practice that I experienced in school as a teenager in 1964! The reasons for this kind of placement were the same.

School administrators, board members and teachers had never come to grips with their own negative beliefs and stereotypes about persons who learn differently. The result is that they don't follow through in finding the best ways to really meet the spirit of the law.

Inclusion class is just another title for kind of special education class. As long as the percentage of kids with special needs exceeds ten percent (or whatever is the ratio of person with special needs to persons without in the surrounding community) then the class can’t help but become a special needs class itself thus making the regular students attend a special education class. With the reputation of special education what parent wants that?

Here is the answer.
Stop regarding needs as special and realize that we all have different and unique needs.

Next:
Train all teachers to deal with students as individual learners with individual learning profiles. Finally, recognize the problems of attention, memory, language, ordering, cognition and motor development and address them in understanding and teaching curriculum and in finding ways to teach and assess students and their capabilities.

Mostly, don’t make a new special education class placement and call it regular. Half normalization is not really normalization. It is just another way of stopping schools from having to learn to teach all learners.
I just can’t say enough. But for today. I guess.

special education labels

2006-04-21T19:18:00.000-04:00

I read a great blogg to day written by a NYC special education teacher who works in the Bronx. She did a great job describing the conditions at her school simply by telling a story about one boy’s lateness to class.

You might not think that one simple quasi- disciplinary issue could evoke such powerful feeling in me but if you were a special education teacher twenty years ago in just about the same place and pretty much daily experienced precisely what this blogger reported, then you might get very depressed and perhaps justifiably angry that this exact thing is still happening twenty years latter.

What the hell happened to all answers that were answered twenty years ago when the federal government issued its Nation At Risk report? There have been innumerable plans and initiatives. Books have been written and grants have been granted, the money spent and the time and effort has resulted in what? Conditions for kids with special needs have not changed.

The only thing that has changed is that there are many more students with special needs. Parents have been forced to resort to litigation if they have wanted to obtain the kinds of services that are available. Otherwise, schools simply give parents and students what they think ought to be sufficient to provide a free and appropriate public education.

Sometimes people values and beliefs about disabilities and persons who are labeled with them can get in the way of clear thinking about what is “appropriate”. After reading the teacher blogger’s account of a students behavior and its impact on her, her class and her soul I remember again what is not appropriate about being in special education.

The students take the label to heart. Our or our societies unexamined and unconfirmed beliefs about different being somewhat lower or less deserving come through these labels. The labels serve as archetypal visions* or Mandela that roar as loud as the rap music through an ear pod to a very creative and needed (and getting larger) portion of our youth. When we perpetuate the use of these labels we are responsible for distorting their images of themselves at a time when they need healthy ego development the most.

It’s not just the ignorant and malevolent politics of education that has many districts chasing ghosts while the real issues remain addressed by unsolved. It is need for all of us to wake up and see the value in every other one of us. And then act as if we all have great value, great purpose and great beauty. Imagine.

* hunchback of Notre Dame

school reform denies rights of special education students

2006-03-19T18:28:00.000-05:00

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.

National intellegence at risk

2006-03-04T19:39:00.000-05:00

I am reponding to a querry about the reason for this blog. It is simple. Our world is either a big machine which consumes us or a big apple which we consume. I believe that it is our birthright to be in control of our own destiny. I am wondering how much the American educational system really empowers citizens to be so. I am seeking those who would participate or at least discuss a critical anaysis of the fundemental procedures and functions of "schools" today. The internet is a very big and potentially powefull took. It is all about the power of communication and understanding. Are schools, (including the state and national insitutions that fund them) really making an effor to get on and stay on a research driven "right track"?

this is about saving America.

Lets talk.

Emergency in education across the USA

2006-02-27T09:53:00.000-05:00

Hi. I am just checking in this morning to remind all the hopefully to be elected politicans and the other world be pundits of the world that we have a world class emergency on our hands.
Put simply, the world has morphed so fast in almost every aspect of fuctioning and by this I mean global economics, information age technology, cultural transformations and migrations and upheavals and overturning of long thought sacrosanct values and beliefs, that it has become imprerative for individuals and systems (if they want to be effective) to update and get ahead of this curve or wave of change.

If the medium is the message, today catacliysmic, rapid and unexpected forms of change is both the meduim and the message. Today's educational systems do not prepare individuals to deal with this kind of world. They are stuck in a "control"
"teacher knows best" "do as I say and I tell you when you have it right" mode. Even thought there is much research and rhetoric about "students based learning" and "teaching to the whole child" as well as curriulla models like Understanding by Design that analyse important factors and plan for the aquisition of nessesary skills and abilities, these models are under utilized and not even well understood by most educators who are too busy getting kids ready for tests that are designed by folks who are still thinking in the last decade.

The results are clear and observabe. Our population is poorly educated and we are having trouble competing in world markets with countries that have identified this problem and already begun to remediate.

Someone has to shake some trees in Washington and in evey local school district. Smart kids are graduating because they are smart but not nessesarily becasue they have been instructed in a "smart" way. Don't believe that your school district is so great just because all the students go to college. There in is the next problem which I call the dummy down college syndrome or "if beer makes you smart then we are all geniuses here. But that is a blog for another day.

Please respond.

Gates Foundation gives Millions to NYC DOE for "Transfer Schools".

2006-01-07T12:21:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago I heard a news story. It seems that Bill and Melinda Gates are donating
millions of dollars to the NYC Department of Education. Under the guidance of
the Department of Education a decision was announced to use the funds to open a large
number of new “Transfer” High Schools.

“Oh good”, I thought. “Now those awful kids who cannot read or write and behave so badly will get what’s coming to them. They’ll go to a strict school with real rules and no nonsense teachers. It will be like the army. We will send them all to military school just like rich people do with their kids who get in the way of their plans. If you act up, you’re out; Shunned, deported, exiled, excommunicated from the regular public school system. It will fix everything”.

The issues facing the new New York City Department Of Education are a little more complicated than a military model could handle. But there is a feature that schools like this could share with the military. That is a the presence of a “spine”, a “core”, a central value that is clearly communicated to and understood by all in the organization, a value that finds expression in every practice and policy. People need a “Big Idea” that brings everyone back to the same ground when things get really tough.

Maybe they ought to create “The Same Page School”. When you think about it, the very nature of being human puts us on separate pages constantly. We need to organize ourselves very carefully if we expect to resist realities constant march towards chaos. This is a march in which high school aged “students of the untoward” can find places to escape from learning. Effective instruction has eluded them for eight years. They have had various interactions with school authorities. Now they have their own conditioning. They are, in effect, trained to hide, to cover, to redirect, manipulate, overstate, understate, accuse, attack, and confuse anything that might make them accountable and thereby vulnerable to that gang of strangers and oppressors we call teachers and principals.

How about the teachers and administrators who have been “through the ringer” of school programs and positions and now find themselves in one of these “new schools”? What do they need? Does anyone think for one moment that any of these persons have received intense and focused training for dealing with the specialized issues that are inherit with At Risk students in small school settings?

Small schools do not mean easy schools. Lack of size (population) translates to less funding and scarcity of teaching resources. Most every staff member must wear multiple hats and wear them well. Everyone must perform in a fashion that is extraordinary. The group interpersonal dynamic in a small setting can be your greatest tool or your biggest impediment to success. If anyone needs a “same page” it these folks.

There are a number of ways that one can think of a school with a mission to educate students who are unwanted by neighborhood or standard schools. One is to see them as “second chance schools” with staff and programs tailored to meet students’ special needs. Consistent and compassionate discipline systems and differentiated or compacted curricula to help some catch up while not holding others back would be a good idea. Comprehensive counseling and academic support services to address the issues that lead students to need a second chance in the first place would be another must.

Another way to plan a “transfer school” is for use as a place to send discipline problems that the regular schools will not or cannot deal with. But, with students coming in all times during the year the learning environment is always in flux and it would be pretty near impossible to teach in a school like this without all the necessary afore mentioned extras.

So, you tell the teachers and parents that the school is a “Theme” school. You screen incoming freshman students for interest in your Theme area to create a stable student body base, all the while continuing to intake students that other schools do not want whenever the district placement office tells you to. You follow though by funding programs that focus on your school’s theme art or specialty areas even if the primary needs of the students are for counseling and academic support.

I don’t know just what kind of “Transfer Schools” the Gates Foundation will be funding
in the new DOE plan now, but I can tell you from my experience that dumping untoward students into Theme School programs that are not specifically directed and designed to meet the needs of the populations being brought in will result in no good.

Creating new special schools as a method of taking pressure off of already overworked regular school educators is a way for public schools to avoid learning to educate all students in a normal environment. It very well could result in the sequestering of children with social and learning problems to special, separate, and (due to high rates of miss-behavior) sub-standard and dangerous institutions.

Some where in the medieval past of the Board of Education they had schools for students who were problematic. They were called 600 Schools. I have often heard teachers and
administrators speak wistfully of a time when “bad kids” were sent to places where they
“belonged”. In trying to re-create these ana/chros/ities they are asking principals
and teachers to play the game with a deck that is “stacked” against them. This is because most of the bureaucrats in power only know about moving students and funds and not a thing about providing the kinds of services kids with the special needs are entitled.

The students who show up via these school referrals are by no means “bad seeds”. They generally are world weary and creative survivors of what life has dealt them so far. They deserve a chance but they have baggage. Schools need rooms to keep that baggage and systems for going through it when kids are ready to” unpack”. If Bill and Melinda are going to donate money, let that money be spent intelligently. Check the research on working models for kids who have not been successful in regular schools and use it as a guide.

Most importantly, “Place. Don’t Dump!” Make sure that sending schools have the proper supports in place to help students where they are. Transitions are not often helpful to a person in crisis. Let the “door swing both ways” for students who wish to return to the regular school.

I am not in opposition to small schools. I am opposed to creating special schools without special knowledge and understanding. And I mean understanding about what they are doing not about some other facet of education. You don’t send a generalist to do a specialist job. Its time for educational leaders to get educated!