Williams’ editorial
By JohnL on Mar. 28, 2006.
As carried in “Education Gadfly” over on the Fordham Foundation’s site, Jim Williams has an editorial entitled “Why can’t learning disabled students read?” In his view, the answer to his question is that they are crippled by education and, more specifically, by special education.
But too often, special education inflicts harm by keeping children from reaching their potential. Instead of giving these students an extra hand, the special education bureaucracy unnecessarily segregates them while passing them from one grade level to the next, irrespective of how well they’ve mastered material. The result is a system that creates in these students a crippling sense of helplessness and entitlement. This is certainly the case for the least well-defined subgroup of special ed students, learning disabled (LD).
Mr. Williams challenges the idea that LD is a disability, rejects the concept of “basic psychological processes,” dismisses discrepancy methods of identifying LD, and contends that inadequate instruction is the root cause of reading disabilities. Although there are germs of truth in many of Mr. Williams’ indictments, there are problems with it, too.
Aside from some ticky-tack quibbles (e.g., omission of math LD), notable among the problems with Mr. Williams’ analysis is that he has aimed quite high, attributing to the entire field the inadequacies that many who are affiliated with special education seek to correct. It has been people with a background in LD—many with funding from federal research projects focused on LD—who have closely examined the issues of discrepancy, effective instruction, and etc. and identified these problems.
In addition, Mr. Williams has overlooked some important evidence, evidence that contributed to the changes in educational policy for assessment of children with disabilities announced a little over a year ago by the U.S. Department of Education (see coverage in Teach Effectively). Important work by J. Torgesen and colleagues and R. O’Connor and colleagues (to name just two groups) has shown that even under optimal conditions, a small percentage of children still fail to learn to read. Those are some of the students about whom LD and special education is concerned.
I’m not sure what Mr. Williams recommends as the means for addressing the legitimate education needs of those students, but I’m sticking with special education for them. I wonder to what extent other readers consider his arguments accurate or inaccurate.
Link to Mr. Williams’ editorial.
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One Response to “Williams’ editorial”
As a former School Psychologist, I hardly know where to begin to address Mr. Williams’ commentary. Perhaps the best place is to express my concern that a Special Education teacher seems to have so limited an understanding of the diagnostic and educationally prescriptive process involved in identifying and then teaching students with Learning Disabilities. The general public, including many teachers and parents, has seemed for decades to ascribe to the view that any student who is functioning below grade level for whatever reason should receive Special Education services. Mr. Williams seems to feel that is the modus operandi of schools and Special Education programs as a whole. Yet, those of us who work in this field know (or should know) that our standards of eligibility are rather more specific and stringent than the general public’s perception. Special Education, then, is NOT responsible for ameliorating every academic difficulty, only very specific ones. Thus, Mr. Williams asks the fundamental question we have been answering in our Special Education identification process for decades: “What is the root cause of these student’s difficulties?
It is fairly certain that there are teachers, schools, school systems, and Special Education programs which do not adhere to the strict definitions set forth for eligibility. This may be due to a myriad of reasons, including lack of understanding and training. No doubt there are many children receiving Special Education services who do not meet those criteria. In that case, would it not make more sense to analyze and correct the problems specific to those schools, systems, and programs rather than indicting Special Education as a whole?
And are there not methods and programs other than Special Education which address academic difficulties? Of course there are! Mr. Williams says it here: “Interventions for struggling readers that produce significant and comparable performance improvement results for both ‘disabled’ students (classified as LD) and general education students are readily available.” Why then, does he not attack those interventions when he says, “…students must establish a record of ‘low achievement’ (i.e. failing) before anyone bothers to ask why they are not learning”?
Mr. Williams further suggests that low achievement (in reading at least) is due to “educational experiences, and not in something deficient in the child.” He says, “ In other words the child’s capacity to learn to read is not the problem.” These statements seem to reflect a rather archaic view! How long has it been since we replaced such negative terminology as “deficient” with the more accepting “different”? Then again, it seems that Mr. Williams favors a more homogenous view of students, how students learn, teaching practices, and programs: Below grade level achievement is due to social promotion and “educational experiences.” According to him interventions to correct academic delays simply need to address educational gaps due to inadequate or faulty instruction (those pesky “’progressive’ teaching methods” Mr. Williams eschews). All students, regardless of their strengths, weaknesses, and reasons for those, should be held to the same standards. (At least he allows that a “modified timetable” for applying those standards might be acceptable.)
Finally, though, there is one statement of Mr. Williams’ with which I agree: “A clear-eyed assessment of special education shows that it is bedeviled by the same cultural and institutional constraints that explain the inadequate performance of public education in general.” However, I disagree as to the nature of that bedevilment. In my mind, the constraints are in the narrow analysis of our educational system, a tendency to oversimplify complex systems, and a bent toward blame rather than correction.
By Deanna Cash on Mar 29, 2006