MCPS wasting money on thoroughly debunked practices?
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Anonymous
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From page 22of above cited report:
One of the goals for this evaluation was to address concern about authorship of messages for FC users in the FC pilot. To have confidence that each student’s typed message about schoolwork demonstrated the student’s knowledge and learning (as opposed to the facilitator’s), it was important to examine whether the facilitators implemented FC as intended and whether the students acquired the necessary FC skills. Based on observations, the level of implementation by facilitators was moderate for physical and emotional supports, but low for communication support. Students demonstrated a high level of physical skills, but a low level of message production and independence skills. Further, there was a low or moderate level of implementation for the school-based best practices that address authorship. These areas of less than full implementation, although not unexpected for the initial year of a project, make it less certain that the students’ typed messages about schoolwork demonstrated their own learning. However, school staff interviewees were relatively confident that the messages produced through FC—especially work done at school—could be attributed to the student users. |
Anonymous
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This is a long but really informative (and horrifying) article about FC and how it can be misused.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/the-strange-case-of-anna-stubblefield.html "The results of these experiments matched those from published studies that used a similar controlled approach — asking typers to name objects their facilitators either could or couldn’t see. In almost every case, it seemed that the messages nonverbal people typed were not their own. One early review of this research found just four subjects whose communications might be valid out of 126 people tested. A subsequent review of 19 studies of facilitated communication performed during the 1990s found zero validations across 183 tests." |
Anonymous
| Anything negative that any kid says about MCPS must be true. No need to identify the school. Let’s just get the pitchforks ready. |
Anonymous
who cares. MCPS has a $2B+ budget sloshing around. |
Anonymous
| I worked at an MCPS school where we had students using this. It was the parents/advocates insistance and they got it on the IEP. I didnt think it worked. |
Anonymous
Would you say the program exists because parents are insisting on it? |
Anonymous
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Correcting info from down thread:
Greg Edmundson is not the right point of contact for big legal stuff — he’s doing compliance work related to students. It’s a position that was filled by someone else before him. It just seems to have a new name for some reason. Still not on the website. Someone needs to update data there, it’s really out of date now. |
Anonymous
So you don’t want to name the school and you post a thread that says MCPS is wasting money on a therapy based on your minor child’s assessment? OP, you don’t sound like a credible human being. |
Anonymous
What's your damage? People have already posted about at least one MCPS school that has the program and a report on MCPS' disappointing findings about that program. It's clear that there is a program and that it isn't working. |
Anonymous
| No MCPS SLP is involved in this nonsense. Essentially, MCPS caved to small group of very wealthy parents who threatened legal action. The parents proposed a more recently developed flavor of FC called RPM or Rapid Prompting Method. ASHA ethical guideline prohibit SLPs to participate (rightly so). |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
It is the parents who demanded implementation and threatened legal action. So, MCPS piloted a program for a small group of students to gather their own data. Parents believe it is working and the students are mainstreamed. Any suggestion that it isn't working is shot down by parents who assert that their DCs are misunderstood and that the issue is with staff who are not implementing properly. |
Anonymous
+1 I can imagine that parents of non-verbal children are pushing MCPS for these therapies, not the other way around. |
Anonymous
If these therapies were dropped, there would be parents screaming that this is the only way that allowed their non-verbal child to communicate and that if MCPS wasn't going to offer it, MCPS should fund a private placement. Big picture OP. What is MCPS's incentive to offer a debunked practice? It's not like there's tons of $ to be made on vendor contracts here. |
Anonymous
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The quacks that promote FC/RPM sell it as a civil rights issue- that the kids have the “right” to communicate in the way they choose.
There are people in MCPS that are ashamed this program exists, but they don’t seem to be able to close it. BTW: $10,000 came from The Montgomery County office of “innovation” for this “pilot project.” From an autism parent perspective, I’m saddened that these kids are not participating in an evidence based program. The MCPS autism program is as good as any out there. The parents will have difficulty when their kids “age out” finding adult services willing to play along with that nonsense. |