My friend’s brother refers to his educational experience as “the monkey house.”
In the ’70s, when he went to school, if you had a disability, you got your education in the “Sped” room. And so, even though his challenges involved only reading and writing, he spent much of his day confined to the same environment as children who couldn’t walk, or meaningfully speak.
I used to tell people he was an example of someone who’d succeeded despite his disability, because he left high school with a plumbing job. But he never became a journeyman; eventually, he lost the job, and commenced a drift through life, job to job, apartment to parents’ basement, marriage to divorce. He eyes bookish people like me with contempt and suspicion. I don’t like to imagine his denouement.
When I became a special education teacher, I told a friend I saw it as morally unimpeachable, needed after four years gleaning money in the oil field. But I love the field for the same reasons I love climbing mountains: I’m never quite sure that, on any given day, I’ll succeed, and that guarantees the absence of boredom.
But the definition of success for the kids keeps changing. When my friend was a kid, hardly anyone argued with the assumption that kids with special needs couldn’t learn, or couldn’t learn much. School was a respite for parents and a safe place for the kids, and if they got out knowing how to write their name and maybe fill out the first few lines of a job application, that was a bonus.
Even when I began teaching, nobody much cared what we special education teachers did, as long as we kept the toughest-to-teach kids out of everybody’s hair. It was fun. I once taught high school boys math by building a pedestrian-only gate into national forest land. We designed it, figured out the lumber and cement we’d need, filled out the forms to get the money and the order slips for the lumberyard, and finally mixed cement and hammered. It still stands.
I’d never get away with that today. After No Child Left Behind, we special education teachers have only one goal: Enough kids with special needs need to gain enough points so that our school maintains required Adequate Yearly Progress. Never mind that these children, by definition, have serious challenges dealing with precisely the skills annual achievement tests like CSAPs measure. The law mandates that kids must achieve a certain level, and we have to make that happen.
I was awful at basketball. I imagine that, for my kids, who often get nothing but academic and intervention classes all day, a school day must be like a whole day of basketball would be for me. Would you want to come to a place where you were required to do nothing but things at which you were terrible?
And for kids, just as for us, demonstrating competence at something is tremendously self-reinforcing. Good teachers know and love the wonderfully satisfied look on a kid’s face as he shows you something he can do.
So, you say, “Teach them what they need to learn for the CSAP, and you can see that satisfied look on their faces and make AYP, too.” But the gap between the skill level of the kids I teach and that required to reach proficiency on the test — especially given a learning rate slowed by learning disability — is more of a challenge than most of them can bridge. Every year I explicitly teach to the test; and every year, as I watch them try and fail, my heart gets broken.
But no, I don’t want to go back to my friend’s Monkey House model.
We Americans are famous for this: In an effort to do the right thing, we always swing the pendulum too far to one side. And the real solution, as is almost always true, lies somewhere in between: We need to make sure kids with special needs gain academic skills, but we also recognize that they need to learn the skills to be successful adults even if they don’t go to college. Endless practice for achievement tests will teach them none of these things.
Eva Syrovy (evasyrov@ msn.com) of Colorado Springs is a special education teacher. She blogs at .
