Did you know that failing to address bullying can be the cause of schools having to pay for private placement of students with Learning Disabilities? Bullying has justified parents’ decisions to move their children to private schools and seek reimbursement for tuition. So, bullying isn’t only something that educators should address because it’s the right thing to do. Bullying might be a reason that a student can claim she is denied access to a free and appropriate public education (FAPE).
Continue reading ‘Bullying and FAPE’
Mildred Hope Fisher Wood, long-time teacher and advocate for Learning Disabilities, was inducted into the Iowa Commission on the Status of Women Hall of Fame 27 August 2011. Ms. Wood, who began teaching in 1939, later became a speech therapist, and eventually migrated to higher education, was 91 years old at the time of recognition. According to published reports, she has served on boards for both the Iowa chapter and the national Learning Disabilities Association.
Dr. Mildred Hope Fisher Wood is a pioneer who brought special education for learning disabilities to the forefront in Iowa, empowering thousands of students each year to lead productive, respected lives. Born in Alta in 1920, Wood earned four degrees from the University of Northern Iowa, did postgraduate work at Syracuse University and the University of Oregon, and earned a doctorate at Indiana University – all to study learning disabilities in children and to develop practices to transform them into learners. She created and taught the first courses on learning disabilities to future teachers at the University of Northern Iowa and conducted hundreds of workshops for teachers, principals, parents, psychologists, and juvenile court officers. Not only is she an advocate for children, she is a mentor for parents and has bettered the lives of innumerable families – often through volunteer work in communities, the church, and throughout the state. Wood is a recognized leader and is a charter member of the National Association for Children with Learning Disabilities and the Iowa Association. She has also been the president of the Iowa Learning Disabilities Association. Wood is a published author, a co-author of a diagnostic test for pre-school children, and the recipient of many awards. Wood was inducted into the Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame in 2011.
News coverage of the Ms. Wood’s induction is available: “Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame inductees announced” by Danielle Plogmann; “Innovative educator, Fischer Wood, inducted into Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame” by John Molseed; “Four Iowa women cited for honors.”
Sphere: Related ContentWriting for the Los Angeles (CA, US) Times, Matt Stevens leads an extended story about the importance of sports in society with a section on Julius English, a 39-year-old behavior therapist who couldn’t read until he was 10 but developed strong basketball skills during his adolescence and now uses those skills as part of his repertoire for working with children. Mr. Stevens’s story is about sports, but the section on Mr. English has enough about LD that it will be of interest to some readers of LD Blog.
I was particularly taken with with a quotation in the caption for a photo: Mr. English said, ” You can teach a kid with special needs anything. You just have to figure out how.”
Link to Mr. Stevens’s story, “Why sports matters: A behavior therapist with a learning disability, a blind baseball fan and a high school football player all have something in common: a love for the game.”
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Do not click play if the words n- - - - or
f- - - - offend you.
As the beginning of school approaches, many schools will be considering what to do about bullying, a problem the plagues many students with Learning Disabilities (LD). But, what do we know about the connections between special ed and bullying? Can bullying mess up a student’s IEP? Here’s a little background and some suggested resources.
As one might suspect, one of the difficulties for students with LD is that they are perceived as victims of bullies. Nabuzoka and Smith’s (1993) analysis of sociometric data from ~180 pre-adolescent students, about 20% of whom had LD, showed that those with LD were more likely to be victims of bullying than their non-disabled peers, despite not being judged more aggressive. Estell et al. (2009) reported that teachers considered fifth-grade students with high-incidence disabilities likely to be victims of bullies. However, both teachers and the students’ peers rated them to as likely to be bullies. Those students with disabilities who behaved aggressively were the ones who were more likely to be nominated as bullies.
Continue reading ‘Block those bullies’
The National Center on Learning Disabilities (NCLD), a US advocacy organization, has released its annual report about its views of the policy situation for individuals with Learning Disabilities. NCLD calls the report The State of Learning Disabilities: Facts, Trends, and Indicators and says that it includes US national and state-by-state data about Learning Disabilities and their impact.
The report documents significant advancements for students with learning disabilities as well as continued challenges facing older students, college students and adults with LD. Key findings include:
- The number of school-age children with learning disabilities has declined by 14% during the last decade.
- 2.5 million public school students have learning disabilities and are eligible to receive special education – representing 42% of the 5.9 million students with disabilities, down from a high of over 50% a decade ago.
- Learning disabilities do not include conditions such as Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, intellectual disabilities, autism, deafness and blindness yet such conditions are often confused with LD.
- More students with LD are graduating with a regular high school diploma (64%) than only a decade ago (52%) and fewer students with learning disabilities are dropping out of school (22%) than in 1999 (40%).
- People with LD are more likely to live in poverty than those in the general population.
- Students with LD attend postsecondary education at lower rates than their non-disabled peers. Only 10% of students with learning disabilities enrolled in a 4-year college within 2 years of leaving high school.
Interested readers may download copies of the The State of Learning Disabilities: Facts, Trends, and Indicators.
Sphere: Related ContentHave you been hearing a lot about subtypes of LD lately? Perhaps it’s just that I’ve been especially alert to it, but it seems I’ve heard a lot of mentions about subtypes of Learning Disabilities in the last few weeks. I want to write a longer, more thorough discussion of the topic, but I’ve found myself repeating a few foundational comments, so I thought I ought to post them here and let others have a go at them.
First, the idea of subtypes of LD is essentially a given. It has to do with the heterogeneity of LD. Because LD is essentially an umbrella category for a diverse array of learning disabilities (note the plural), there are bound to be subgroups. Some students will have problems primarily with reading, some primarily with arithmetic and mathematics, some with writing, others with combinations of these. That makes for lots of subgroups right there. That is, one could start with dyslexia, dyscalculia, and dysgraphia!
Continue reading ‘Subtyping LD’
I’ve seen a couple of messages recently in which inclusion or mainstreaming has been lamented. One of them appeared on Bignity, the new group blog devoted to students with disabilities. In it Jaime Openden talks about the importance of having all teachers prepared to work with students with disabilities and her misgivings about mainstreaming.
For better or worse, mainstreaming is the direction our educational system has been heading in for years. Mainstreaming to me is like communism or a giant hot fudge sundae with the works. Sounds pretty sweet in theory; in practice, not so much.
The second appeared in correspondence on the mailing list associated with Association for Direct Instruction. These are the DI folks, people who are, with some justification, pretty well convinced that they know how to teach students with learning problems successfully, to help them succeed. It’s a bit longer and covers a lot more concerns.
I am still teaching in xxxx county and special education is a mess….in fact teaching in FL is not fun at all anymore. The state and county have gone test crazy. I have not been able to implement Reading Mastery correctly with all its components for several years now. We have to leave our ESE kids in the classroom for instruction and we are supposed to co-teach in the reg ed room. Often our kids sit there with dazed expressions on their faces. They do not pass the state’s FCAT reading test. They cannot spell. They have difficulty writing a complete sentence with correct grammar, punctuation, capitalization and spelling. But conventions don’t matter on FCAT writing, Next year we planned to put about 12 of our severely learning disabled, ASD, and IND (Intellectually disabled….formerly educably mentally handicapped….formerly mentally retarded….it’s the same thing…..I think they change the name so lay people won’t know what it means) 3rd, 4th & 5th graders who are reading at a beginning first grade level back into a self contained ESE classroom which I volunteered to teach. I was so excited because I really do love to teach….but then the bigwigs in the ESE department said they all have to be in regular homerooms because they learn so much from being in reg ed and the “research shows that they don’t learn as much in a self contained ESE room because the curriculum is not rigorous enough”. What research are they talking about? I just would like the time I need to teach these kids to read and to understand a little math….they can’t add or subtract……they didn’t have one-to-one correspondence by the third and fourth grades!! Being in reg ed homerooms means that I will have to deal with the schedules of six or more teachers to try to find the time to teach…..and I won’t get to teach them science and social studies at their reading levels.
Lots of people interested in LD are full-speed-ahead advocates for having students with LD included full time. Others have reservations, arguing that students with LD need specialized instruction delivered in classroom environments that are not available in the mainstream.
What about you? What are your thoughts? What are the pros and cons in your experience?
Sphere: Related ContentIn a puzzling case of a student who appears to have had problems throughout the primary grades and did not get help until fourth grade, Liz Ditz asks the question, How Often Does This Happen? Teacher accused of testing fraud to avoid special education referral for her student. Not until the parents had pushed for years were the child’s problems recognized. Was this a well-meaning, but misguided teacher? Has anti-LD sentiment become so strong that folks cheat to keep kids from having the label?
Sphere: Related ContentSheldon Horowitz and colleagues at the National Center for Learning Disabilities published a multipage supplement about Learning Disabilities in USA Today in late May of 2011. If you missed the print version, you can snag a PDF from this link.
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Not LD still going strong
The misrepresentation of Learning Disabilities as a generic or catch-all term continues. I just stumbled upon another instance of it.
I elected not to link back to the site so as not to provide traffic for the it. Sigh.
To get an idea of how many times we’ve talked about this problem, please follow the tag “Not LD.”
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