Special Education Law Blog

Teaching Your Child to Read: Read 180, System 44 and Beyond

It is remarkable to me how many IEPs provide for reading programs that are not individualized to the student’s needs and do not produce meaningful results.  A one-size-fits all approach simply doesn’t work for students with reading disabilities.  What may be an otherwise perfectly acceptable reading curriculum often is inadequate to meet the individualized needs of a particular student.  More and more frequently I am finding myself attending IEP meetings for students who are repeatedly failing to meet their IEP goals and am confounded by the insistence of the IEP team to continue implementing a program or curriculum that is clearly not working for the student.  This posturing is denying the student access to FAPE, or a Free Appropriate Public Education.  In many instances, students with specific reading disorders, such as dyslexia, are slotted into a specific reading program for intervention that isn’t even designed to address their needs.  What is provided to the student is based on expediency, availability of programming in the district, and not the needs of the student.

Defending Public Education under Secretary of Education DeVos

President-elect Trump offered few specifics about his education policy during the campaign other than promising $20 billion in federal money for school choice initiatives in response to our “failing government schools.”  Where this money is to come from is unclear, but the sum represents more than a quarter of the total budget of the department of education.   Educational advocates are fearful that the funds will be cannibalized from the $15 billion earmarked for low income schools through Title I funding in the form of school vouchers.  The use of the Title I funds for vouchers that follow students to expensive private and religious schools as well as charter schools will further deplete the scant resources currently allocated to poorly performing schools. This nebulous education policy will be overseen by President-elect Trump’s selection of Betsy DeVos as education secretary, which is sending more than shudders through the education community. Educational historian Diane Ravitch said of Ms. DeVos, “Never has anyone been appointed to lead [the Office of Education] in the past 150 years who was hostile to public education.”  Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, has decried Ms. DeVos as “the most ideological, anti-public education nominee” in the past 40 years. Ms. DeVos, a billionaire conservative educational activist who has never sent her own children to public schools, has laudably argued that a child’s zip code should not confine him to failing schools.  But her solution, unfortunately, is to embrace adoption of school vouchers, as well as the expansion of privately-operated charter schools, leaving critics fearful that our new education secretary will “gut” our public schools. This appointment may be one of the rare time where many parents of students with all abilities and unions and schools are all united.