I was told my first year of teaching (many moons ago) to never fail a student who had an IEP. It was acceptable to give them a 60% (D). Some students had a provision in their IEPs that they were never to receive anything lower than a C.

Teachers are required to follow the IEP and learn quickly not to make waves. And I totally understand passing a student so you wouldn't get stuck with him another year.


A good question would be: Who scheduled a student with such low skills to enroll in an advanced math course? Unrealistic parents? Ineffective administrators or guidance counselors? A teacher would not encourage that student to take such a challenging course.

Perhaps the pool of students was low on skills to begin with. Not because of aptitude, but because disruptions made by other students prevented teachers in lower grades from being able to teach.


Ain't Nobody Be Learnin? Nothin?: The Fraud and the Fix for High-Poverty Schools

"As a professor at American University, I set out to explore why our university had such a minuscule enrollment of African-American students from D.C. public schools. When I began teaching in a high-poverty high school in 2010, it took me a year to grasp the severity of the challenges my students faced. It took another year to see that, amazingly, roughly half of them could still make it. Some had a determined, proudly competent parent who rigorously managed their behavior. Others provided their own seemingly magical inner motivation. When I managed to separate a large math class into two smaller ones, based on behavior and effort, the motivated students remarked on how easy it had suddenly become to learn without the usual disruption.

"In our economically segregated society, ZIP code does matter. It is an excellent average predictor of how easy it is for a school to educate a child. The mechanism for this correlation is the physical and psychological damage of growing up in poverty, which leaves large numbers of alienated and disruptive students in the classroom. These students have the power to make everyone's education impossible. The situation is dramatically different for poor children who attend "admission" schools public, charter, religious, or private. These schools push out disruptive students, either under the radar or as a matter of explicit policy. At these schools, nearly all of the surviving students master middle-class social skills and college prep or vocational academics, and graduate with a shot at the middle class.

"And herein lies a partial answer to our ongoing national waste of potential. Every public or charter school should strive to replicate the academic achievement of the admission schools, yet keep embracing the commitment to educating every child." --Excerpted from Prof. Rossiter's OpEd in the Washington Examiner, May 5, 2015

http://www.amazon.com/Aint-Nobody-Learnin-Nothin-High-Poverty/dp/1628941022

that retention only works in cases with a few narrow parameters. Those who are retained without those parameters are MORE likely to be high school dropouts than those that don't.

If you don't like "social promotion," support candidates who will fund education to the level that students can be given enough resources when failing to help them move forward BEFORE they are years behind. A different alternative than social promotion OR grade retention.

Also, when delivering IEPs giving students "extra time" to master a skill, please insist on the funding, the resources, and the ability to CREATE extra time.

Giving children "extra time" to master skills should begin in PreK. Also many children fall behind because they have very little educational support at home.

I don't think funding is the problem.

http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/29/how-states-are-spending-money-in-education

It's usually not the problem.

Failing schools all too often have lower-quality teachers not because they pay less but because the teachers want to teach and not spend most of their time managing the class.

Failing schools all too often lack adequate lab ware and equipment not because it was never purchased but because students sometimes just abuse it. Even things like wooden rulers for measuring and drawing straight lines--after a class I typically find that some kids just pull them to pieces or break them when I'm not watching. Why? They won't say. (Same with the bathrooms. Nobody "accidentally" shoves a roll of TP into a urinal. The only power they can exert is through disruption.)

Failing schools often have unprepared students. We're not just talking about students whose classes didn't teach them certain things. But in Houston, I have a fair number of students who have never been to the beach, 50 miles away. They've never done a lot of things that I expect them to have done, routine things when I was a kid and still routine in many of the middle-class and upper-class kids' lives, usually years before the experience is needed in class. Replicate the experience and bore the middle-class kids to tears; don't do it and lose the low SES kids.

The shit deal these kids have been given by the rest of us.

We were allowed to give failing grades to I.E.P, students but the school could only suspend a % of those students at a given time. The result was an approximate 5% of the students disrupting any chance of an education for the other 95%.

But you'd better have documentation like you wouldn't believe.

I don't have the time to document every intervention, repeated intervention, etc., etc. It takes too long. If I miss a couple of days I can't adequately document what I did and I refuse to make up crap.

So they pass.

I've gotten more than one kid transferred to my class with an administrator-assigned grade of 70 because his/her previous teacher didn't or couldn't implement the IEP or failed to document why the kid was failing. It was transfer the kid or face down the lawyer(s). It doesn't take many of those to put a school's budget on the ropes.

Sometimes they worked. Many times their self-assessed function was to warm their asses on the radiator unless one of the sp-ed kids acted out.

Most of the time, I arranged for them to be actively teaching the class on alternate days. Some of them were too dumb to participate in teaching activities.


Others were wonderful.

To give teachers who are tough graders the protection they need from whiny point-grabber students, helicopter parents and spineless administrators.

There's the problem.

But pre-AP kids are typically well behaved. I've heard teachers talk about classes of 30 when no sub showed up. The kids find the lesson plan.

The next day the teacher looks over the work and says the sub must have done a good job. The kids say "nobody showed up, so we did it on our own."

I've had classes of 23-24 where a group of 4-5 kids made life almost impossible. Under those circumstances you *will* commit "educational malpractice." You just have to pick the malpractice that works best.

One teacher I knew just encouraged a few students to nap. At the end of the year they failed. They'd slept through most classes. But the other 25 or so students could be taught during the disruptors' naps. Fail 3-4 to help the other 25 seemed like a good idea to him.

Only two of our high school math teachers were certified by the local college to teach dual enrollment pre-calculus and calculus for both high school and college credit. The teacher I took calculus with had a strong interest in space science and astronomy and actually went through the trouble of putting together a curriculum and getting it added to the list of classes my high school offered. That was her first time teaching non-college material in several years.

I was a senior back in 2006, and I was one of 11 students in the space science class the first semester she offered it. My calculus class with her had 28 students. I struggled heavily with Calculus, and I remember my teacher mentioning toward the end about the irony of me being the only student in her space science class with a grade higher than a C (I got a 99% in that class), but the only person in her calculus class with a grade lower than a C (I received a D-, barely passing by the skin of my teeth). It had taken her aback as to how run of the mill students are not as motivated as college bound ones.

Heck I loved it. Get nuns back in school and education and discipline will return to school. I didn't get the ruler that was before my time. I got a great education through my MBA.


Just kidding about the nuns but they were pretty amazing at getting a group of kids to pay attention.

the church basement with their parents standing on street corners begging for money while they still had to pay taxes for the public schools?

I am not a fan of mainstreaming kids who cannot be helped but this very honest discussion in the thread really disturbs me.

should not be awarded a grade D in Algebra II. Where is the part about special ed kids not belonging in the school?

talking about how impossible it makes it to teach when there are disruptive children in their classes. I actually understand that part. And I did say I do not like mainstreaming. But what is the alternative they would like to see? That was the gist of my question. Going backwards is not an option.

As a social worker (MSWQMRP) I think what is happening is that schools need to find another way to handle this situation. But there are benefits to having the special ed children in among the regular classes. The children get to know the special ed children - they are being taught to care about them - or at least that was the goal. That may not work completely but at least most of the regular students are no longer standing around calling them names and even worse things.

One thought acting out behaviorally seems to be the biggest problem for teachers. That is one of the things special ed classes are supposed to deal with or at least in my area that is what happens. No student who is still acting out (being disruptive) should be taken out of the special ed classroom until this behavior is corrected. Correcting this behavior is the first goal to prepare a student for the work place. Schools should make this a priority before placement in any other class.

The original idea of mainstreaming was that only those who could benefit from another class should go into those classes. It sounds to me that this is not happening. And I assume that much of this is the parents fault. I had a friend who insisted that her daughter be allowed into the girl scouts. The request was ridiculous because she was not able to do most of the things the girls did.

But most parents do not demand that we cure their child. It should be the responsibility of the IEP team to determine the level of benefits each student is capable of getting in the classes they attend. If a student cannot do more than 2nd grade math that is the level they will have to accept. It should be fairly easy to determine levels. Testing. No classroom should have a child who cannot do any of the work. It is a waste of tax money and a disservice to the student himself.

My sister taught special ed in a school in Delaware that was just for special ed. In most states that is not allowed but it worked very well. The classes were divided up according to the needs of the students and class subjects were taught at that level.

And this is something that the ARC should be equally worried about. Talk about warehousing. If the special ed student is not learning anything in a classroom because he/she has been place in a level they cannot hope to achieve that is no different than why we did not like institutions.

Edited to thank these teachers who are willing to speak out.