Morning Shots

Too many children with learning disabilities do not receive the education and services they need.

More than 30 years after Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), achieving the law’s goals of restoring parental control over children’s education and guaranteeing services for special-needs students in public schools remains elusive.

A number of states implemented policies to fulfill the IDEA’s intentions by alternative means. Scholarship programs succeed in making it possible for parents in Florida, Ohio, Utah and Arizona to place disabled children in alternative schools. Citywide projects flourish in Milwaukee and Cleveland, despite strong-arm legal tactics by opponents designed to stop or diminish their effectiveness.

In Kentucky, a prefiled bill by Lexington Rep. Stan Lee would not only make the commonwealth the fifth state to offer such scholarships, it would also be the Bluegrass State’s first statewide school-choice program controlled by parents.

State law currently allows special-needs students to attend schools providing educational services not available in their resident district schools. However, this system is largely ineffective and relatively few students participate because school districts – not parents – control the process.

To move a child from an unsuitable public school, parents must open a complicated process wrapped in red tape and without any assurances. They must be prepared to fight – and even sue – local school districts that have both administrative means and economic motives for keeping students within their boundaries.

This constant specter of controversy and litigation has created an atmosphere in which paperwork comes before pupils and bureaucracy increases at all levels. Through his scholarship proposal that would require no tax increases or additional education funding, Lee’s program would offer parents a way around the courtroom instead of through it.

A body of evidence suggests that Kentucky’s special-education situation is serious … and worsening. For example, during the 2005-06

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British Conservative Party leader David Cameron is presenting a “mid-term” review of Tory education policy on Tuesday, just after both Ofsted and Tony Blair have conceded that the Government has failed to achieve its primary objective: to provide a good start in life for every child, including those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. Less than two weeks ago, Ofsted found that just over half our secondary schools were failing to provide a good standard of education and Mr Blair announced last week that the number of city academies is to be doubled to 400, a tacit admission of nine years of failure.

Here was an open goal for the Tory opposition, but the response from Conservatives has been lame. The effective opposition has come from one of Labour’s half-banished outriders, Alan Milburn, who advocates a voucher scheme that would allow parents with a child at a failing state school to use government funds to buy their child a place in a private school. But why would vouchers help the poor? Aren’t they criticised by egalitarians for reinforcing existing patterns of disadvantage? And haven’t the Tories just ditched their own voucher scheme as proof of how compassionate they now are?

Once more, Mr Cameron has picked precisely the wrong moment to turn his back on market reform. The evidence that parental choice backed by vouchers benefits the disadvantaged is now so overwhelming that many on the political Left have become converts. In America, the Democrat mayor of Milwaukee has introduced vouchers for children whose parents fall below the US poverty line. Even Sweden, the social-democrat’s idea of heaven, has a voucher scheme.

Since 1992, parents in Sweden who are dissatisfied with the local state school have had a right to send their child to an independent school and to receive state funding,

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This is the eighth in a series of articles from an ed school student working towards certification as a math teacher.  Click for his first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth and seventh columns.  As always, he prefers to remain anonymous. -ed. 

After last week’s missive quoting from Dr. Cangelosi’s textbook, I expected he would have left a comment expressing his eternal gratefulness for the exposure I gave his book.  But he lives in Utah, where the state legislature there recently adopted a resolution that calls for the Utah State Board of Education to give Utah’s math standards an overhaul.  That may have him worried and I’m sure that’s why he hasn’t written.

From what I see and hear in ed school, Dr. Cangelosi doesn’t have a thing to worry about. The milieu-controlled ed school environment of discovery/inquiry based/NCTM-standards-based/constructivist-based/brain-based/knowledge-based/critical thinking-based/ and higher order thinking skills-based learning is ever expanding.  

Indicative of this brave new world is a comment that Mr. NCTM left on a lesson plan I turned in—an assignment that called for a lesson which made use of technology.  

My lesson plan had students explore the graphs of quadratic equations using graphing calculators.  I borrowed heavily from exercises in a math book by Gelfand on functions and graphs.  In one of Gelfand’s non-calculator based exercises, he asks the students to graph y = x², and then y = 5x² and asks “What scale unit would have to be taken along the axes in order that the curve for y = x² could serve as a graph of the function y = 5x²?”  Students are to provide a rule linking the shape of curve to the x coefficient, based on their answer to the

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