January 30, 2008

My Birthday

Today is my 69th birthday. I spent the morning in a magnificent preschool for a 3 year old that came to me as nonverbal and considered to be autistic. The first gift is that he now is talking, happy, and engaged. The second was the school staff. So bright, so proud of what they do and the results they achieve. They call themselves a transdisciplinary team. I’ve used that term for a decade and have heard it used by schools periodically. But for the first time I saw an entire school that actually understood what it meant and did it. The speech person recognized the occupational therapy components that are involved with producing speech. The special education teacher understood the physical therapy needs of certain children and skillfully acted on what she saw. The regular education teachers, for this was an inclusion program with nondisabled children, understood sensory integration and utilized those principles throughout the instructional day. Music and art was infused everywhere. The 1-1 assistants in the classroom knew the contents of each IEP and what it took to implement the goals and objectives. The IEP meeting was actually joyous. The group was intellectually curious and secure in what they did. Yes, this was a private preschool. Even so, what it achieved showed what could be done when there was the will and skill to do it. A public school representative attended the meeting and appeared to be the only one not relaxed and not enjoying herself.

So here is the age-old question. Why can’t public schools have the same kind of quality, intellectual rigor, and child-centeredness as some private schools? The answers include:

1. They must accept every student.
2. Staff shortages compel school districts to hire the person with the license, and not the person with the gifts and sass that makes teaching and learning fun.
3. Caseloads are gigantic and getting bigger every day.
4. Politics of local school districts often trumps good staff and genuinely creative thinking.
5. Burn out of staff constantly keeps personnel changing, the life-blood of excited new teachers sucked out of them in a way no different than Dracula leaving the carcass behind.
6. Administrators forget what it is like to actually work in a classroom.
7. All decisions are cleared by the school board attorney, lawsuits considered before anything else.
8. Child study teams are told not to comprehensively evaluate a child, not to classify and not to provide services because the budget won’t permit it.
9. Regular education teachers are overwhelmed with an immense range of students in their classes and get little help or advice on what to do or how to do it.
10. The science of learning, the analysis of learning in each public school building is determined by those largely without updated training whose basic job is to check the boxes on state and federal forms.

The amount of money that is wasted in public education each year and the amount of teaching talent lost is astonishing. I’ve come to believe this to be primarily a matter of attitude- if I don’t know it, you can’t do it. Supervisors often don’t want the work of a new idea because it doesn’t fit on the reporting form. But if those of us who are “senior” in our fields championed the young, took on the responsibility to learn to text message, to contemplate You Tube and My Space from the vantage point of today’s lonely children, we could become the role models of the merely middle aged. If we decided to integrate neuroscience into our methodologies, we could cross over the boundaries of the speech/language therapist, the occupational therapist, the educator and provide instruction that was exciting and also turned us into a new form of diagnostician. Oh, we are living in such new and uncharted times! And today I saw what the future can be. It was a fine birthday.