The Education Pendulum Swings Again

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I have been in education, particularly special education, long enough to see that great pendulum swing...more than once. I grew up in rural South Carolina in the 60's. In my little community school, there was no special education. There was one girl my age in my church with Down's Syndrome . Mollie went to church with us, but she did not go to school. My mom just explained that she had the mind of a 5 year old and would always be like that. We didn't care. We liked Mollie. We just all played together.

I was taught to read phonetically. There was no other way. In college, I became fascinated with something called dyslexia and learning disabilities. At the time, I was working dually on my Masters in learning disabilities and obtaining my school psychologist certification. I was just in awe of the work done by Dr. Samuel T. Orton and the Orton Dyslexia Society, Dr. Albert Gallaburda at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, Dr. Margaret Greer and her work with preschoolers at MUSC. My life was also blessed with having the opportunity to work very closely with Dr. Alice D'Antoni Phillips for almost 20 years. I could not learn enough. My eyes had been opened. Being torn between working in the private or public setting, I decided that I could reach more children in the public sector. Special Education law and litigation intrigued me. I knew in my heart that this was right. I knew these were bright children.

It was then I noticed a problem. Public education was using a different way to teach kids how to read and write. It was called Whole Language. Spelling was not important. Phonetic rules were not important. Kids would learn. Yeah, right. How many did we lose? "Typical" kids will learn in spite of a bad program or teachers. The learning disabled child did not have a prayer. By then, I was an eager beaver school psychologist evaluating children left and right, trying to identify those children with learning differences to try to help them in a world of failure. Could we go to work every day and not be successful day after day after day? After a few years of Whole Language frustration and an entire loop of kids not being able to read, write or spell, I began to see a change. I saw reading moving back toward phonetics. Being trained in the Orton-Gillingham method, I could not fathom why public schools did not utilize what had been proven over and over since the 1940's. Then I saw phonetics being taught through SRA materials. This was good. It was very much like Orton-Gillingham. There seemed to be progress. Kids learned and felt better about themselves.

Time moved on. I began hearing, "too many children identified;" "higher than the national average;" and "money is being wasted." There seems to be a huge movement to "not identify" children with learning disabilities. In one respect, that is fine as long as these unidentified children with learning disabilities can receive the strategic or intensive programs they need in the public school in order to be successful and make the playing field level. On the other hand, the child whose needs are not being met will usually present themselves in one of two ways. One, they are the quiet child who believes that they are "stupid" and fades into the background and goes to the nurse every day at 1:00. Two, we have the Tazmanian Devil who can totally tear a classroom of 25+ apart with a nationally certified teacher at the helm who feels totally inadequate because she/he cannot control ONE twelve year old.

Are we moving forward to help ALL children or are we cutting our nose off to spite our face in order to appear to be politically correct?