Virtual learning fails children with disabilities

Schools across America have begun the 2020-2021 academic year, but approximately 67 percent of students in a snapshot of 19.6 million students in the 100 largest school districts in the U.S. are utilizing remote learning only to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Education Week.

Those children have not been to school in a physical setting since March in many cases, and the 7.1 million of children with disabilities who receive individualized, special education students may be the ones suffering the most.

If the Education Week snapshot is representative of the nation, that could mean as many as 4.8 million special education students have not been in a physical learning setting for about six months.

Now, Judith Sandalow, the executive director of Children’s Law Center in Washington, D.C. told American University Radio in an interview that these students are regressing: “Many children with special education needs are getting no education remotely.”

Sandalow explained, “One student we worked with had begun learning to speak, and since the pandemic has literally stopped speaking. And we’re seeing this over and over, where students are actually going backwards without the sustained support of teachers and therapists.”

Sandalow is absolutely right. And across the country, in school districts that are presently depending on distance learning, these kids are simply not getting what they need.

This matter strikes a personal note with my family, as my wife and I have a daughter who suffers from autism spectrum disorder. Last year, at just the age of two, she was enrolled in a northern Virginia public school for hands-on, special education for pre-K. It was just a few hours every day, but from September until March, the difference that was being made was incredible.

We would supplement her school curricula with visits to a local applied behavioral analysis (ABA) therapist who specializes in assisting children with autism with the social, communication and other learning skills she needs so that by the time she is ready for kindergarten, she can at least function. She was just learning to talk. Finally.

And then the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down. Now, she is most certainly regressing, and we fear it could take years to recover her development.

Quite simply, putting a three-year-old child with autism in front of a laptop to listen to her teacher who she desperately needs only talk to her on Zoom is completely inadequate. She needs more attention that only a physical setting can provide. As a stopgap, we’re using the ABA therapy and are looking for more hours now to fill in the gaps.

We know we’re not alone. We have spoken with our daughter’s teacher who says the school is ready to receive the students safely with precautions. Schools in northern Virginia and in states across the country are preparing the classrooms to protect staff with shields, distancing and personal protective equipment, and are weighing options to allow at least the special education students to return, even if the rest of the school remains closed for the time being in response to the pandemic.

In addition, the Trump administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education have all issued guidelines, resources and testimony for states to follow on how to safely reopen.

The sooner the better. Anecdotally, the schools at least in the northern Virginia region sound like they are ready to partially open, but the decision to reopen remains with the school systems at the county level and ultimately with the state, as in other states.

And I would say the same thing applies to all of the non-special education students. They’re not getting what they need either as the system suffers from connectivity issues, attendance problems and the burdens that homeschooling is placing on working families, with women disproportionately being knocked out of the workforce.

How long children are away from the classroom will have years-long impacts on their lives, development and future prosperity. Time is an essential factor here. A Brookings Institution study found that “the cost to the United States in future earnings of four months of lost education is $2.5 trillion—12.7 percent of annual GDP.” Now we are beyond four months of lost education.

Especially when one considers that there has never been an effective coronavirus vaccine produced, the schools may be closed in vain. Not for SARS. Not for MERS. Not for the common cold. And not for COVID-19 — yet.

While there are several candidate vaccines in development, it remains to be seen if any of them will be effective, calling into question what plan schools have in place to reopen should the vaccine fail. One hopes that millions of parents a few months from now when confronted with that potential reality are not left asking what we were waiting for.

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A professor at Suffolk County Community College, New York, has been reassigned after she allegedly urged her students to vote against President Donald Trump

The 45-second selfie-video was posted on Facebook by Anthony Salvatore, who identifies himself as the father of a student at Suffolk County Community College. By the time of this publication, the video has generated some 1,400 comments and 3,400 shares.

“…for four years, cause that’s what people say, ‘Give him a chance, give him a chance.’ Well he’s had four freaking years of a chance and he’s done a crap job,” the professor can be heard saying in the video, which was allegedly taken by Salvatore’s daughter during an online humanities class. “He’s really ruining our country.”

She moves on to say Trump is taking away people’s rights and turning the country into a “dictatorship.”

“Many of you this may be the first time that you’re voting. I’m sorry it’s such a contentious situation that you’re being thrusted into,” she continues. “If any of you do still think Trump is a good person, I beg you to not only go into your heart’s center and think about this a little more, pull up all the stuff that he’s been doing to our country, taking away so many of our rights, he’s trying to turn this into more a dictatorship type of situation.”

“This is complete [explicit] and not what we are paying to send our kids to school for,” Salvatore wrote, adding that the professor has “no business telling these kids who to vote for.”

The professor’s remarks also came into attention of Rep. Lee Zeldin, whose congressional district includes the eastern Suffolk County.

“College instructor trying her best DURING CLASS to indoctrinate students to turn against POTUS & remove him from office,” the Republican congressman wrote on Twitter. “This is wrong on many levels & gives our teachers a very bad name. Our classrooms should be a place for free thinking not indoctrination!”

“Suffolk County Community College is aware of a video posted to Facebook allegedly containing 45 seconds of audio from a 1 hour and 15 minute online class,” reads a statement from a college spokesperson. “Pending an investigation of the content and context of that video, we have reassigned the faculty member involved in the video. Suffolk County Community College encourages any open and diverse discussion and exchange of ideas. The College does not, however, condone electioneering by faculty in the classroom.”

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Another Public School Distributed BLM Handout Comparing Law Enforcement to Slave Owners, the KKK

The left's not very original. Anything they don't like is either Hitler or the KKK: ICE, Republicans, cops, the founding fathers -- you name it. So it's no surprise that a public school teacher in Westlake, New York kicked off the first day of class by distributing a handout on the Black Lives Matter movement that compares cops and sheriff's deputies to klansmen and slave owners.

The disgusting propaganda featured a five-frame cartoon panel that began with a depiction of a slave owner placing his knees on the back of a shackled slave, The New York Post reported. As the frames progress, the slave owner is replaced by a member of the KKK and then, finally, a sheriff's deputy and a police officer.

(Via The Post)

“My daughter showed me the paper. I said, `What is this?! You’ve got to be kidding me!’ ” said Westlake mom Ania Paternostro. “This cartoon compares the police to the KKK. It’s an attack on the police.”

The mother said she immediately fired off letters of protest to Mount Pleasant School District Superintendent Kurt Kotes and Westlake Principal Keith Schenker, whose school is in the district.

“Enough is enough,” Paternostro told The Post. “This cartoon is disturbing. We have to respect the men in blue who protect us,” added the mom of two, a native of Poland. “We don’t need a teacher brainwashing my kids. I’ll teach my kids about what’s right and what’s wrong.”

Her daughter Nicole said she was troubled by Moreno’s lesson plan because she considered it one-sided and anti-police, too.

“The cartoon was disgusting,’’ the teen said. “It compared the police with all the terrible people in history. It was not fair. It wasn’t right.’’

Nicole said she has been bullied on social media over the past few days and called a racist for blowing the whistle on the controversial lesson plan.

Mount Pleasant School District Superintendent Kurt Kotes has promised a "thorough investigation" of the incident.

Local law enforcement is understandably not very happy about the lesson plan, and Republican Rob Astorino, a candidate for state senate in the district, told The Post, "Our schools should be a place for the open exchange of ideas, not political indoctrination. The false narratives and brainwashing has to stop."

The same cartoon was reportedly distributed to eight graders in Texas weeks earlier.

The first step in condoning violence against one's enemies is to dehumanize and demonize your opponents, thus the constant comparisons to the KKK and Hitler.

Maybe closing the public schools over the coronavirus wasn't the worst idea.

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Australia: Students struggle as review finds writing skills neglected in NSW government high schools

A sweeping review of the teaching of writing in NSW schools found it has been widely neglected in the secondary years, leaving thousands of students struggling with crucial skills such as writing clear sentences or expressing complex ideas.

The review, commissioned by the NSW Education Standards Authority, found educators lacked knowledge, skills and confidence in teaching writing, as well as training and resources that could help them. Over recent decades, writing had been "forgotten" amid a strong public policy focus on reading, the report said.

Almost a decade's worth of NAPLAN data shows high school students struggle with writing more than with reading or numeracy. But without those skills, they "struggle to show what they know, and their learning remains untapped or unseen", the report said.

The report found year 9 students in NSW in 2019 were the equivalent of five months behind the level of year 9 students in 2011. On average, one in six of those students was below the minimum standard required to succeed in their final years of school. That compared with one in 20 below the standard in reading and in numeracy.

"The minimum standard isn't high to begin with," said education consultant Peter Goss.

NAPLAN writing assesses how students develop and structure a piece of writing, as well as how they structure a sentence and use punctuation, paragraphing and spelling.

The decline in writing has been more pronounced for advantaged students, whose parents are educated, than their disadvantaged peers, Dr Goss's analysis showed. Boys are twice as likely to be at or below minimum standard by year 9 than girls.

The Thematic Review of Writing, handed to NESA in mid-2018 and obtained by the Herald, found a focus on writing at primary level was followed by "a significant decrease in teaching writing in the early years of high school" across all three sectors.

In primary school, the class teacher teaches writing, but in high school it is shared across disciplines so no single teacher is responsible.

"It is core business in [kindergarten] to years three or four, but then you look at what the teachers self-report to us … the attention shifts away from the explicit teaching of writing," said lead author Claire Wyatt-Smith from the Australian Catholic University.

Research has shown that writing ability in year 9 is a strong indicator of success in year 12.

While there has been controversy over the quality of the NAPLAN writing test — including a recent high-level review that called for it to be redesigned — the report said it was a "reliable indicator for some key elements of student writing ability".

"Strident claims that NAPLAN assesses all the wrong things about writing have been unhelpful, and have likely done a disservice to teachers looking to improve their writing instruction," the report said.

Jenny Donovan, director of the newly established National Evidence Institute for education, said writing skills not only enabled students to demonstrate their knowledge but also involved a cognitive process that enhanced their learning.

"Like reading, writing is not a naturally acquired skill," she said. "It must be formally taught, not caught, and practised. As students progress through schooling, their writing needs to become more complex, so their instruction in how to write needs to be correspondingly more complex."

NESA chief executive Paul Martin said the review was commissioned in response to data showing NSW writing performance had been static since 2011, "with a marked decline consistently evident as students move through the junior secondary years".

NESA endorsed all six of the report's recommendations, including that it declare writing a priority area, improve the quality of teacher training in writing, develop requirements for teaching degrees, strengthen writing content in syllabuses and create resources that give teachers clear guidance.

Changes will be incorporated into the new curriculum. The first step is "a K-2 curriculum that makes explicit oral language development, early reading and writing skills and early mathematics skills, particularly for children who are less advanced in these areas," said Mr Martin.

Peter Knapp, an education consultant whose doctorate is in the teaching of writing, said it was a complex process that required extensive knowledge and experience, which teachers were not being given at university or during their years in the classroom.

Unclear policy and confusing standards also made it more difficult, he said. "Our national and state curriculum documents lack any real precision on how writing should be taught," he said.

"They constantly seem to be under review to change, re-orient and re-direct so that teachers, in all honesty, will have difficulty knowing what needs to be done, and there is a view that the changes will make no substantive difference."

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