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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]As has been said on DCUM many times before, the overwhelming majority of teachers are not able to provide enough in-class differentiation for it to make a difference. This is why schools need more robust support to get kids up to grade level, i.e. tracking, and/or additional reading and math labs beyond the core curriculum.[/quote]

You can put in reading and math labs beyond the core curriculum, but that is at the sacrifice of electives like art, music, tech, cosmetology, child care, electronics, auto shop, etc.---because this is a zero sum game. The students who are behind are "punished" because they are not allowed to take these fun and interesting courses that might play to their more applied abilities.  And, many of these students have been in those kinds of remedial classes for years with no huge increases in reading and math levels.  The applied classes may actually be just as effective in getting the kids to improve in reading and math.  And, the kids actually may be happier (but who cares about that).

How do you think these students feel when they fail the standardized tests year after year and are forced to go to remediation?  Many give up.  They HATE the tests.  Teachers spend inordinate amounts of time trying to "pump them up" for the tests.  They bring food, promise pizza parties, promise higher grades, whatever.  Principals do crazy things like dance on the roof if they pass.

But, eventually The students start misbehaving.  School has not been a positive experience for them. They try to get themselves kicked out of school because they feel like failures and want an excuse to save face.  They stop showing up to school mostly and then there is no hope for any teacher (much  less a great one) to "save them".

It's all a big downer and teachers are feeling very tired of all of it.  [/quote]

Yes, so true.  Rick Lavoie, the special education expert, says that most of the prison population in this country actually have learning issues.

Here's a very interesting exchange:

Prison Cell Building Based on Literacy Rates

David Boulton: Now I'd like to invite you to go into this question that I asked earlier about the relationship between learning disabilities in the field and reading, and reading as a learning-disabling process for those that don't get it.

Rick Lavoie: Right.

David Boulton: To an extent that it's just mind-boggling to me, when we look at the various things children are at risk for, that they might develop that could do harm to their lives, that could diminish their potential in life, the risk of having some reading-related difficulty that can harm their life is greater than everything else we pay attention to combined.

[b]Rick Lavoie: Absolutely. Reid Lyon talks all the time about the number of states in the United States who use reading skill levels in third grade to project how many prisons they're going to need twenty years down the line. That’s horrifying to think of that, but they really do. Their prison-building programs are based on the literacy rates in the third grade and they're figuring in twenty years they're going to need this many prisons based on the number of kids who can't read in third grade. That's how close the correlation is. That's how real the correlation is.
[/b]
David Boulton: What we're basically saying is this comes back to the shame avoidance, the kind of things that you've been talking about. What we're saying is that children that struggle with learning to read become self-disabled in some ways. Their relationship with themselves becomes disabled. They become more prone to social pathology, and it radiates, at massive expense to our society as a whole and to our population as a whole, to such an extent that this is the nation's greatest learning disability.

Rick Lavoie: There are a number of schools within the field of education; in terms of the way we view the relationship between reading and learning. I come from the school where the inability to read is a symptom of a larger language problem. The overwhelming majority of kids who have difficulty, who have learning problems, have difficulty reading. And the overwhelming majority of kids with reading problems also have learning problems. So, I have a difficult time teasing the two of them away because they are so fundamental and so interlocked.

Rick Lavoie, L.D. and Special Education Professor, Source: http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/lavoie.htm#PrisonBuildingPrograms
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