The U.S. Department of Education has given remarks on North Dakota’s plan to conform with a brand new federal education regulation called the Every Student Succeeds Act. State Superintendent Kirsten Baesler said she spoke Monday with Education Department officials through a smartphone convention name. She referred to as “superb, substantial and cordial.” an example of feedback statements. Education Department officials have asked for extra data in several parts of the nation’s plan. The department’s evaluation of the plan and notes from the expert peer reviewers who tested it’ll be made public this week, in line with Baesler’s sample feedback to your manager.
The North Dakota Department of Public Instruction will meet with a statewide ESSA making plans committee on Monday to provide an overview of the remarks and gather contributors’ responses to the modifications, Baesler stated. DPI is needed to post a response to the Education Department by giving and receiving feedback
North Dakota is certainly one of 19 states and the District of Columbia that have submitted their ESSA Kingdom plans, with greater states making plans to do so the subsequent month. ESSA changed No Child Left Behind in 2015. The new law diminishes the federal authorities’ function in education and bolsters the state’s involvement.
“We look forward to continuing our appropriate operating courting with the Department of Education as this process goes ahead,” Baesler stated. “All of us are preserving in thoughts that the cause of this process is to improve the schooling of our students and to make our training machine extra accountable to the students, mother and father, and taxpayers that it serves.”
Perhaps the largest and most pervasive issue in special education and my own journey in education is special education’s relationship to general education. History has shown that this has never been an easy, clear-cut relationship between the two. There has been a lot of giving and taking, or maybe I should say pulling and pushing for educational policy and the educational practices and services of education and special education by the human educators who deliver those services on both sides of the aisle like me.
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Furthermore, I have received a mainstream Dakota regular education teacher feedback who taught regular education inclusion classes trying to figure out how to best work with some new special education teacher in my class and his or her special education students. And, in contrast, I have been a special education inclusion teacher intruding on the territory of some regular education teachers with my special education students and the modifications I thought these teachers should implement. I can tell you first-hand that none of this give and take between special education and regular education has been easy. Nor do I see this pushing and pulling becoming easy anytime soon.
So, what is special education? And what makes it so special and yet so complex and controversial sometimes? Well, special education, as its name suggests, is a specialized branch of education. It claims its lineage to such people as Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard (1775-1838), the physician who “tamed” the “wild boy of Aveyron,” and Anne Sullivan Macy (1866-1936), the teacher who “worked miracles” with Helen Keller.
Special educators teach students who have physical, cognitive, language, learning, sensory, and/or emotional abilities that deviate from those of the general population. Special educators provide instruction specifically tailored to meet individualized needs. These teachers basically make education more available and accessible to students who otherwise would have limited access to education due to whatever disability they are struggling with.
It’s not just the teachers, though, who play a role in the history of special education in this country. Physicians and clergy, including Itard- mentioned above, Edouard O. Seguin (1812-1880), Samuel Gridley Howe (1801-1876), and Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (1787-1851), wanted to ameliorate the neglectful, often abusive treatment of individuals with disabilities. Sadly, education in this country was, more often than not, very neglectful and abusive when dealing with students that are different somehow.
There is even a rich literature in our nation that describes the treatment provided to individuals with disabilities in the 1800s and early 1900s. Sadly, in these stories and the real world, the segment of our population with disabilities was often confined in jails and almshouses without decent food, clothing, personal hygiene, and exercise.
For an example of this different treatment in our literature, one needs to look no further than Tiny Tim in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843). In addition, many times, people with disabilities were often portrayed as villains, such as in the book Captain Hook in J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” in 1911.
The prevailing view of the authors of this time period was that one should submit to misfortunes, both as a form of obedience to God’s will and because these seeming misfortunes are ultimately intended for one’s own good. Progress for our people with disabilities was hard to come by at this time, with this way of thinking permeating our society, literature, and thinking.
So, what was the society to do about these people of misfortune? During much of the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth, professionals believed individuals with disabilities were best treated in residential facilities in rural environments. An out of sight, out of mind kind of thing, if you will. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, the size of these institutions had increased so dramatically that the goal of rehabilitation for people with disabilities wasn’t working. Institutions became instruments for permanent segregation.
I have some experience with these segregation policies of education. Some of it is good, and some of it is not so good. You see, I have been a self-contained teacher on and off throughout the years in multiple environments in self-contained classrooms in public high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools. I have also taught in multiple special education behavioral self-contained schools that totally separated these troubled students with disabilities in managing their behavior from their mainstream peers by putting them in completely different buildings that were sometimes even in different towns from their homes, friends, and peers.
