To:
Members, Michigan State Board of Education
Date:
March 11, 2013
My
name is Kathleen Kosobud. I am a “temporarily retired” special educator
working on my dissertation, and offering technical support and advocacy to
parents of students receiving special education all over the state. I am here
today to speak to you about the impact of “school reform” and the ever more
rigid standards that affect these children.
Almost
two years ago (May 26, 2011), I addressed members of the Board about the
effects of withholding a Personal Curriculum option from students with disabilities, until their senior years. Since then, I have had two more years
working with students who have experienced exclusion—in the name of “improving
education”. Some of these actions are
against Federal and Michigan law, some are merely immoral:
- I heard from a student’s parent in an EAA school who is trapped in the school where he is being bullied because his IEP is not current, and his new public school won’t accept him without a current IEP.
- I was contacted by a parent whose child was suspended from school for three months on a disciplinary issue, and is not being allowed back until the parent has him evaluated for emotional/behavioral problems.
- I have been called by parents who can’t keep their children in charter schools, because their children’s needs don’t fit the services at the charters.
- I represented a child in foster care who had been suspended for a year, placed in a virtual high school, and had been stripped of the other services that his IEP called for because the virtual school claimed that they didn’t offer those services.
- I have represented several children whose parents have requested evaluations, only to be told that they must wait for a “response to intervention” program before they could be evaluated…even though their children are failing academically, or have behaviors that are so severe and frequent that they are missing countless days of school.
- And finally, after leaving school, I was contacted by an adult who was told by the local adult literacy organization that his entry test scores made him unsuitable for literacy instruction—he was unlikely to make enough progress to support the literacy organization’s funding.
I am
worried, and I think that I have a right to be worried that school reform is
nothing more than code for “reform school” for these children and adults—who
are destined to leave school because they are not supported—by dropping out, or
being pushed out through a steady diet of “we don’t serve people like you”.
Having
recently read The
New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, I am left to wonder if our weak Michigan economy is being
bolstered by feeding the School-to-Prison Pipeline, a growing economy that
starts with the alienation of disempowered youth. And what more disempowered group than
students with learning and behavioral disabilities, left unattended by our
schools?
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About
N Kathleen Kosobud: Kathleen Kosobud is completing her
dissertation at Michigan State University focusing on family-school
relationships in special education. Kathleen
has blogged for LDA of Michigan at http://ldamiexchange.blogspot.com/, and for
her own amusement at http://backburner-nkk.blogspot.com/. She
was one of the contributors to restructuring of the teacher education program
at Michigan State University’s School of Education through a project to infuse
inclusive content into all teacher education courses for the preparation of new
teachers, under the guidance of Susan J. Peters, Ph.D. After achieving National
Board Certification as an Early Adolescence/Generalist as a teacher of middle
school mathematics in a special education resource classroom, she served as a
teacher-in-residence for Assessment Development at the National Board for
Professional Teaching Standards. She is the parent of two
adult children with learning disabilities, and identifies as a person with
learning disabilities, herself. You can reach her by e-mail.
