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Running Head: LEARNING DISABILITIES

Dealing With Learning Disabilities in the Modern Educational System Matt Severns 7 May 2010 North Dakota State University

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Education is an institution that is subject to persistent reform. Rarely does a year

pass during which a mention of some sort of change is entirely absent. Societal values shape the educational process by determining what should be taught. Unfortunately however, America"s capitalistic groundings push education to be aligned with the market"s expectations and that unfortunately fosters cold and denitive standards. In the process, somewhere between national standards and Social Darwinism, learning disabled children are managed as statistics rather than people. Inclusive Education? This Must Signify #New Times" in Educational Research, by Roger Slee (1998) focuses on the implications of the reductionism of learning disabled students in a progressive and industrial system. ! Slee makes two major statements in his article that lead to his ultimate

proposition. The rst point that he covers is that often, learning disability research belittles the subjects and reduces them to manageable statistics (Slee, 1998). He makes the case for the necessity to, distinguish between the essentializing decitbound psycho-medical and technical discourses, on the one hand, and those discourses which reconstitute disablement as a deeply structured social phenomenon and [address] disability as a question of identity and cultural politics (Slee, 1998, p. 450).Slee argues that researchers of learning disabilities often have predispositions that drive them to want to rationalize something as abstract as a person. He notes that the tragedy is that in the process, the learning disabled children lose identity. The problem with them losing an identity, is then they become just a number. With numbers instead of faces, it is easier to tell them that they have no particular place in society and to determine that they should simply be given up on (Gerwirtz, Ball, & Bowe, 1995, p. 23).

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He suggests that in the place of a scientic and quantitative approach which is typically quick to assign a denite of failure, there should be a system in which approaches to teaching and learning, together with the physical conditions of schooling, [have] the capacity to disable or enable (Slee, 1998, p. 445). In this setup, students are never given up on or labeled as defunct. To achieve this, Research should be multidimensional to both capture experiential specicity and observe social structure (Qtd. in Slee, 1998, p. 449). Instead of the reliance on quantitative research, preferred would be a standard qualitative approach in which students can be both properly addressed and still maintain an identity. ! A contributing factor in the declining importance of maintaining identity amongst

learning disabled students is the push toward national standards. On a large scale, problems can only be dealt with if they are put in concrete terms. Unfortunately, to do this, students get reduced to statistics. For example, adequate yearly progress (AYP) is a measure of whether or not a school has improved enough to maintain its current funding. The AYP is measured as a percent, and because of varying state standards and loopholes, oddities are uncovered but not addressed. In the article Are NCLB"s Measures, Incentives, and Improvement Strategies the Right Ones for the Nation"s LowPerforming High Schools? the authors note that, low-performing high schools that made AYP are concentrated in states in which it appears easier to reach the required prociency levels (Balfanz, Legters, West, & Weber, 2007, p. 572). Part of the reason that this is possible is because: ! ! Contrary to the intentions of the law, the lack of standards and subgroup accountability requirements around graduation rates has created loopholes and

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! ! !

perverse incentives for schools to make AYP by pushing out or holding back students likely to score low on academic prociency tests. (Darling-Hammond, 2006; Losen, 2005; Oreld, Losen, Wald, & Swanson, 2004, p.642)

Two primary components of these perverse incentives include establishing low goals or targets to meet AYP and pushing ill-performing students out in the ninth or tenth grade so as to exempt them from the school"s overall score. In effect, the schools get to look better, while the students that need the most help are brushed under the rug, so to speak. ! Robert Slee of the Faculty of Education at the University of Western Australia

knows that this method of dealing with low performance students, particularly the learning disabled exists, but would be the last to advocate for the permanence of the status quo. In studying an integrated approach to education he notes, What is signicant is that the push for the desegregated education of disabled students in Australia, and elsewhere, did not shake the epistemological tree. He mentions that just as integration was common in the past, so can it be today. He believes that to make this happen, what is necessary is to calculate the degree of disability of a student according to elaborate ascertainment schedules [so that] we can then calculate the corresponding resources requirement to include effectively the disabled child in the activity of the regular classroom (Slee, 1998, p. 448). With this concept--which he calls resource redistribution--it is possible to run an integrated classroom between learning disabled and regular students by distributing resources according to student need. Ultimately the same amount of effort would be put forth into a classroom, but it would be used and applied more efciently. In this sense, Roger Slee has the ideal solution: he wants

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reform, suggests using the resources already available, just more effectively, requires that truly no child gets left behind, and decries bureaucracy. He criticizes the way things are now when he writes, Collectively they [educational psychologists] argued that SEC [special education needs] was a euphemism for the failure of schools to provide an education for all (Slee, 1998, p. 444), while maintaining that to research educational inclusiveness without addressing exclusion is #self defeating" (qtd. in Slee, 1998, p. 446). Because he approaches the issue so reasonably, his ideas may actually be helpful in a classroom setting. ! The idea that the study of learning disabilities being belittling by nature raises

many new questions. There is no doubt that protocol for dealing with learning disabilities would benet from further research, but the question is how to go about it. Slee argues that part of the reason such research is reductionistic by nature is because it is often subjective scientists doing the research. Whether they have a medical or psychological background will determine how they go about guring out exactly what is wrong. On top of this is, scientists by nature like to think quantitatively. The problem is that people are so dynamic that counting them as statistics or concrete but simple statistics would do the eld an injustice. The best way to go about this is to set general standards for measuring and dealing with learning disabilities, but allowing for adjustment to nely tune into each individual student. This will ensure that they get a quality education and maintain individuality. Learning disabled children deserve the same clean slate going into a classroom that is provided to the regular ones. ! The new challenges that are getting faced with regard to the changing

educational environment however, are persistent. Smooth running society demands that

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everything be rationalized, quantized, and protocoled. America"s schools are designed to train future workers, which means that if a student with a learning disability who is not always societally acceptable in behavior wants to get an education, because of the way the system is tuned, they will likely be turned away covertly. This factory style education may work for most people, but an educational system that is all-encompassing is necessary. Standardized tests can be all right so long as they are truly standardized and do not carry with them immoral loopholes. The ultimate goal of education should be to teach, not just to show what appears to have been taught on paper. Under no circumstances should a student ever be given up on because of low performance. Mike Oliver, Colin Barnes, Paul Abberly, and Will Swann critique the orthodoxy of the special needs determination system and invited education researchers to interrogate their understandings of disability and disablement through a social theory of disablement and opression (qtd. in Slee, 1998, p. 444). With a more universal understanding of learning disabilities and the social forces that reinforce them, it can be realized that every student has potential. If this is seen, there will be no reason for students to get pushed out of the system, but rather there will be reason for them to receive redistributed resources. ! The ideal classroom setting would be a fusion of what has been done in the past

and what is being learned everyday. Standards could be in place so as to assure that every student at every school is given the same opportunity. In the same breath though, those standards would be better thought out to ensure that learning is taking place instead of simply the appearance of learning. In that same classroom, learning disabled children would be placed in the same environment as regular children. Although in the

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same class, they would receive special attention so that they can succeed while still being a part of normality. In this classroom, students from every level of development, including the gifted and disabled would be tended to through efcient resource redistribution. Also in this classroom, standardized test scores would not be of any concern, because students, having been properly emerged into a learning environment that caters to their needs, will learn with condence. ! Roger Slee, just like most people, envisions education reform. He focuses on

what works and what does not work in the existing system, and approaches issues rationally to come to a conclusion that is both appealing to all audiences and practical. Surely there is no such thing as a miracle solution that cures all issues, but reform is multifaceted and requires thought that adapts as quickly as education does. It is known that no student can be given up on, but what is not known is that unfortunately many faceless students are. Loopholes and relentless expectations, along with rational and subjective research make dealing with learning disabilities an issue that most people want to simply go away. Learning disabilities will never be gone, but by dealing with them more effectively and appropriately, the process and management associated with them will become easier and more effective. ! !

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References Abberley, P. (1987). The concept of opression and the development of a social theory of ! disability. Disability, Handicap & Society, 2(1), 5-19.

Balfanz, R.. Legters, N., West, T. C., & Lisa M. Weber (2010). Are NCLB"s measures, ! ! ! incentives, and improvement strategies the right ones for the nation"s lowperforming high schools? American Educational Research Journal, 44(3), 559-593.

Commission on No Child Left Behind. (2007). Beyond NCLB: Fullling the promise to ! our nation"s children. Washington D.C.: Aspen Institute.

Gerwirtz, S., Ball, S. & Bowe, R. (1995). Markets, choice, and equity in education. ! Buckingham: Open University Press.

Oliver, M. (1990). The politics of disablement. London: Macmillian. Slee, R. (1998). Inclusive education? This must signify #new times" in educational ! research. Society for Educational Studies. 46(4), 440-454.