I just had a disconcerting thought. What if the "No Child Left Behind" Act is actually intended, not to improve education, but to destroy all the gains made under IDEA (the "children with disabilities"Act)? Mind you, I don't agree with all the provisions of Special Ed, but there are a great many conservative Republicans who absolutely loathe IDEA (and no, I'm going to resist making a wisecrack about Bush and "ideas" in general). I should tell you straight out that I have a learning disability ( which I may have mentioned before, but I'll risk boring you again), but there were no provisions for Attention Deficit Disorder, etc, when I attended school back in the fifties and sixties. If you couldn't learn, you were labeled Mentally Retarded and placed in either a special class or school; most parents opted to institutionalize a child, out of social pressures and fears of ostracism. Sad, very sad. Babbitry ruled then, I'm afraid.
My problems were mainly ADD and an inability to learn math. The first made me impulsive, immature, etc, but the second impacted my prognostic tests negatively---SO negatively that my IQ score was once thought to be a measly 93. As IQ scores are believed to fluctuate up or down about ten points, you can see that something like THAT on my school records didn't endear me to many teachers. Mathmatical Reasoning, as it was known then (and may still be, for all I know), was a test-able quantity that pretty much defined intelligence. I tested poorly, so obviously I didn't have much "intelligence", as the conventional wisdom went. In order to go on to college, you needed an IQ of at least 110, the "experts" said. Many years later, at 42 ( having been out of college---which I managed to finish---since 1972), I learned my son had ADHD and, as these things are usually hereditary, I was tested myself. It came as a shock to find that my IQ had actually increased, from 93 to 119! Now, if my math isn't TOO bad, that's about 27 points, right? A "standard deviation" is only 15 pts. , and I'm not going to go into the Bell Curve Theory here. Suffice it to say that a standard deviation is the MOST an IQ is supposed to fluctuate, and NEVER in an individual that old. Again, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that's basically the formula even today. I took one of those IQ tests on the internet a month ago, and came out with a score of 122. Hmmm.
Getting back to my main point, Special Ed isn't so great, but without it we'd have lots of perfectly intelligent kids being shuffled off to institutions. My son, who will be going to college soon, was a "graduate", for want of a better term (actually, I can think of several, but they're not printable), of a Special Ed program here in NH, but his education came straight out of my husband's checkbook, not from what he "learned" in public school. God knows, I can't blame his teachers for lack of trying, but Congress has been reneging on their agreement to fund 40% of Special Ed ever since 1973. Conservatives have been screaming about "unfunded mandates", and over the years I've seen and heard many ingenious (and ingenuous) arguements for abolishing them (the mandates, not the Conservatives. Sigh, if only the latter COULD be abolished).
Now for the scary part. What if, as I said above, this NCLB Act was meant to be a kind of "backdoor" attempt to abolish IDEA by making Special Ed impossible? Think about it. This law relies on nationwide school testing, which is stupid but I won't bore you with the details here. Kids with learning disabilities have problems with tests; some, like my son, never learn to write legibly, and others have problems with processing information fast enough to finish on time. These are REAL issues, folks, not just some "Liberal Propaganda"(as I'm sure you've heard Rush Limbaugh bloviate about on his radio show). When these kids take tests that rely on a specific amount of time in which to answer questions, they fail---often miserably. In the past, it was customary for schools to test these students separately, applying the time rules as specified in the state's special ed guidelines. Yes, I often thought that time was extended a bit too much for these students, but now I see that I might have been wrong; with nationalized testing, many schools will be forced to test special ed kids no differently than the rest, which will result in many schools being ranked poorly. Naturally, parents will be furious, and I can hardly blame them, yet I have to wonder if anyone will realize just WHOSE "fault" this is. Not the poor special ed kids, surely. They will be blamed, though, as they have in the past. What next, then? It frightens me. It should frighten you, too.
