45% of students who come to PATHS have IEPs ("individual education plans"). These students are classified as "learning disabled" for a variety of physical and emotional reasons. Large teams of specialists discuss each one of these students at length in meeting after meeting. Last year I either wrote a report for or attended between 2 and 6 meetings for each student with an IEP. Given the amount of support for Special Ed required by law, you can see why a lot of parents want to have their children classified as "learning disabled": resources, resources, resources. It's truly mind-boggling.
I have several students with IEPs this year. Every one of these students has a list of "accommodations", modifications to their learning environment that I am required to provide by law. Some of them are relatively impossible ("provide a quiet place to work" with 17 students packed into a classroom full of people discussing their computer projects?) and some of them are easier ("should have the option of doing all exams orally" or "receives twice as much time on assignments"). I seriously question whether we are helping prepare these kids for the real world with some of these accommodations, though. Is my student who hates to write anything going to be able to do everything orally in the world outside of school?
During the year I have visitors in my class, students who come for a day to see whether they might enroll in my course for the next year. Today I met a young man who came to my class because he was "interested in game programming" but couldn't give me any specifics, and who currently uses the computer for "everything", (which, when I asked him to be more specific, turned out to mean playing games and chatting with friends). I have a few short tasks for visitors to do at the beginning of class to help me gauge their reading and math skills. This student made a complete mess of the elementary algebra, but could follow it OK when I drew out a more visual way of solving. Then I asked, "how would you write 5/2 as a mixed number? You know, as a whole number plus a fraction?" Student: "I don't know." I asked, "well, how do you do fractions in class?" "I use a calculator". Same thing for multiplying fractions and canceling. Nope. All done with a calculator.
More sleuthing ensued. It was interesting. He could do simple math in his head, but because he has an accommodation that says he gets to use a calculator on his math assignments he has never had to practice doing fractions out by hand. I explained to him that in my class, the way you get to the answer is just as important as the actual answer, and he looked at me blankly. I suggested that he ask his math teacher to show him how to do problems on paper, without the calculator. I wondered if being able to punch algebraic equations into his calculator in Algebra class is helping him at all. Sigh.
Progress reports come out tomorrow. They always make me squirm, because the kids who have IEPs that specify "extra time on assignments" do half (or less than half) as much as other kids. They're graded on the work they do, even if it's half as much work as everyone else did. And they get the same number of credits. Does this mean that they have to take my 2-year course for 4 years? The sending schools don't think so. They just want to get those students to graduate. Argh. Trying to shove differentiated learning into our current grading scheme just doesn't work.