“Who,” grumped Tracy, “is Physical Ed?”
The same question might be asked about “Special Ed.” All that most people know about “Special Ed” is that he is a very expensive guy. In California, billions of dollars go into “Special Ed” each year. More adults are hired to supervise special education students per pupil than to any other public school category. So while small classes are considered an optimum learning atmosphere, it is only “Special Ed” classes that regularly get away with creating a learning atmosphere with only five or six students in a classroom.
A person need not be much of a taxpaying homeowner to ask – perhaps with the sort of peevish envy of a Spencer Tracy – “Who is Special Ed?”
I have started asking that question myself, and here is what I got from some teachers who know what’s going on right now with the program. First of all, to begin any story, we need to establish its setting.
Our setting includes the eerie factor of more than one out of every 100 adults in California is now behind bars. Considering that in California it costs taxpayers about $50,000 per year to take care of each state prisoner, Californians are for the first time putting more of our tax money into state prisons than in state colleges. Obviously, our schools share some blame with parents for bringing up California kids so wrongly.
Meanwhile, our state is running out of money to institutionalize so many more people who are too immature or too insane with anger or too uneducated to take care of themselves in a responsible way.
Clearly, a great hope of the new California testing program for special education students is to cut into costly subcultures like that of our prison populations. And yet when you look carefully at California schools, it looks like the California Special Ed program is less mainstream and self-reliant than ever before.
The same teachers and the same instructional aides are there in the same classrooms. The classrooms continue with usually only up to dozen boys, with one to three girls, if any. Boys are the traditional warriors, and when they find out how difficult things are with their communities and their situations, they are the ones who create the greatest uproar until they are switched into these “special day classes.”
The students usually have the same average intelligence that practically all of us share. However, because they rebel against teachers and adult authority figures, they are kept at a distance with their own educational “packets” with worksheets they have to complete as their own responsibility. Even in high school grade levels, the quality of the math, English, science and history in these packets is usually of elementary school level.
It is very difficult to present directed teaching in this atmosphere. The students get used to doing easy work and are given to believe that they will not have a challenging or a unique day, but an easy day. The adults in the room – the teachers and the instructional aids – also speak hopefully of each day becoming an “easy day.” The teacher will spend most of the day watching for any disorderliness as the students tend to their worksheets. Usually the instructional aides will walk around and tell certain students to “get moving” on their packets.
When I have addressed these classes, I have found that the one thing that the students are not used to is an adult – especially not a new adult going into their space– talking to them as a group. They get noisy, they throw paper, they say rude things with the hope of drawing supportive laughter from their peer group. They are basically deprived of the experience of anyone getting trained in something or taught something. Heaven knows how they would respond to any industrial or even military teacher ever trying to tell them how to do something.
So from what I see as an educator myself, the multi-billion dollar special education program in California in its present style is largely a big waste. Anyone can see that the young people in these classes suffer more obstacles to climb than the average student, and so placating them with soft and easy work packets just puts them even much farther behind those students who are seriously refining themselves. It doesn’t work. It isolates them from the give and take of directed teaching. Surely no successful person has ever said, “I was educated from work packets.”
The great mathematics teacher Jaimie Escalante in Los Angeles saw correctly that the last thing a disadvantaged student in a special education program needs is soft and easy work. Escalante’s approach was to teach high-risk students the most complex work – the highest calculus, one small footstep at a time, even if it took 30 hours of homework a week and Saturday morning classes. His record of raising the Advanced Placement calculus scores of his East LA students to the top in the nation was precisely captured in the 1988 movie, “Stand and Deliver.” One only wonders why so few have even tried to do what Escalante has succeeded in, only if it is for the purpose of some real professional satisfaction in California schools.
My one experience is that like all other human beings, the kids in special ed acquire a new gleam in their eye when they are last respected enough to be given challenging school work. My own mathematical aptitude is only average, but with the help of computerized Power Point even the most powerful and highest mathematics can now be explained on a level that can reach everyone with an average mind. And so I make it a point to give to the special ed students I visit an experience only shared by less than one percent of our high school population – an introduction to the most simple differential calculus problems.
Months later, I have found some of those students still saving those equations.
I am certainly not unique as an educator who has the viewpoint that we should be giving challenging school work to our alternative education students. Everything I have heard about the Bowman High School in Santa Clarita – a continuation school that offers alternative education to give students a second chance – is that the teachers and administrators earn their professional satisfaction in awakening the intellectual potential of “average intelligence.” At Bowman, you just don’t hear teachers and students looking for an “easy day.” It’s one of the reasons why Bowman was selected as a Californian model school.
Instead, there is the experience at Bowman of each new day to be one of directed teaching and learning excitement. That’s exactly the same kind of teaching and learning excitement that a person can expect at a Princeton or a Harvard.
Why not? Princeton and Harvard students surely benefit from impassioned directed teaching just as any Bowman student.
Chris Sharp Commentary
Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.