Study shows what ed psychs determine is why students need sp ed. Shocking?

[buddy]

http://www.wrightslaw.com/advoc/articles/ALESSI1.html

Study shows what factors were found to result in a child's placement our need for special education. It's 100 percent the child's fault, with home life contributing..... This from a study asking school psychologists what their reports concluded. Read what they think vs. what they wrote in their reports.......ugggg.

 

[BusynMember]

Which is one reason my kids have never gone to school psychologists. They sure don't hire the best and brightest. If they were, they'd be in private practice.

 

[Hound dog]

Well................... I will say that Travis did find quite a lot of help via an excellent school psychologist fighting on his behalf. Of course the next year the guy was in private practice of his own because he couldn't tolerate the SD attitude anymore.

This is why I armed myself with evaluations and reports from outside specialist, as well as any medical tests to back it up. Still I ran into brick walls, I just refused to back down. They couldn't possibly accuse us of being uninvolved parents, not when we showed up at every single IEP meeting.......a couple they attempted to not even tell us about (I had inside sources who leaked the info to me).......and forced them to reschedule others when they attempted to hold IEP meetings without us. I also made them call emergency IEP meetings if I felt there were new issues that needed to be addressed or Travis' IEP was not being followed. (this one drove them nuts lol )

I had a war going on with the head of our Special Education for the county for years. She would try to override and intimidate only to find out I don't intimidate and I don't back down or give up. I fought her with detailed doctor reports on various dxes and what they meant for Travis specifically, as in neuro cases there can be a broad spectrum of severity depending on the individual case/underlying cause. Travis' neuro in cincy used to chuckle because I'd not only have him spell it out in detail but in layman terms to the point where anyone could understand it. Unfortunately he had experience with our SD before and knew already what he was dealing with. ugh When that didn't work.......I pulled in the state board of education. Now that was helpful to the nth degree!

I will admit though, that when I first ran in to how utterly ignorant those who are supposed to be working with children with special needs can be despite their supposed extra education.......I had trouble believing it. The teacher who abused Travis happened to be a man with Special Education qualifications and was supposed to be one of their "best". (when in fact he ruined many a child's life....documented) So it's not just the school psychologists by any means. Thankfully we also ran into really good ones who knew their stuff, really cared for the kids they helped, and fought tooth and nail for them. But they never seemed to last long.

This is why there is no better advocate for a child than their parents. No one will fight for your child like you will, no one can understand them like you do. Well........unless it's maybe a grandma who's already been there done that. There is a reason I attend Alex's IEP meetings. lol

 

[Liahona]

Lisa your grandkids are lucky to have you.

I determined to homeschool my own kids while I was an office helper in high school. I couldn't stand the way they treated the "problem" kids and I knew I went to a very good school for our area. If the good schools were like that what were the bad schools like!

What the article says is true. I've seen it from the other side of the IEP table. Drove me nuts. It was one reason I liked first year teachers. They (mostly) were willing to admit they didn't know everything and would change their teaching for a child.

 

[muttmeister]

I was a teacher for 35 years. Special Education is one of those programs that started out as a good idea and has evolved into a mess.
There are a lot of kids who need Special Education because of their mental disabilities. What with political correctness, I'm not sure what it's supposed to be called these days but there are some kids who don't have the mental abilities to function in a normal classroom. In the old days, those kids just didn't get an education at all; they stayed home of were sent to an institution. That was bad. Now they all end up in public school. I'm not sure that's the answer either. They need an appropriate education but with the no child left behind laws and all of the other **** that government officials who haven't seen a child in 40 years have written, they aren't getting what they really need. I've seen kids who should be learning to count to balance a check book with the help of a calculator being, instead, led through high school math classes by the Special Education teacher because it is required by the powers that be. It is stupid.

Add to that the fact that any kid who becomes a problem, usually through behavioral problems, gets recommended for SPED too, you have an unholy mix of kids with various special needs that cannot be met by what we have now. As members of this board, we know that behavioral problems are often nothing to do with home life, etc.

Our education system sucks. We throw millions of dollars at the kids in SPED without addressing their real needs, we pretty much ignore the most intelligent of our kids, and the kids in the middle get lost in the shuffle. It is a wonder anybody learns anything at all.

 

[InsaneCdn]

It's not just Ed Psychs.
It's everybody. Ed Psychs, school counsellors (usually Soc Workers), teachers, admins, Special Education teachers, the ministry of ed... It's rampant on this side of the border too.

To the credit of the system we're in now, when we DID come back with outside professional diagnoses and recommendations, they have tried to make it all work. Just... absolutely no help in even identifying the problem, much less figuring out what difficult child needed.