The McCollumn - 9/21: "Students with special needs deserve exceptions to high-stakes testing"

During last week’s Opelika City School board meeting, I was privy to assistant superintendent Brenda Rickett’s explanation of the system’s recent Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) results, those ultra-important percentages from the state that are allegedly meant to tell us whether our system’s schools are up to snuff.

It seemed that this year’s reading scores were not up to their proper levels across the system; though the percentage of children passing these high-stakes tests had risen over the last few years, it had not risen enough to please the educational gods in Montgomery.

In two cases, Opelika missed a passing grade on these tests because children who fell into the “special education” subgroup failed to score high enough of some of their tests.

This gave me pause.

“We’re making special education students take these tests?” I said to myself. “Seriously?”

Having known several special education teachers over the years (and having worked with students with special needs myself over the years), I found it downright mindboggling the state of Alabama would want to give high-stakes tests to those students.

We call these kids “students with special needs” because each of them is special and each of them has needs different from every other student.

The nature of high-stakes testing is meant to homogenize and blend together students into that almighty percentage, that simple pass or fail number, and seems to go against the style of individualized education and attention that is the spirit of the special education movement.

In your average special education class, you find students who run the gamut of disabilities, from developmental impairments to intellectual issues, from autism to Down’s syndrome and from specific learning barriers to kids with severe speech and language concerns.

Special education teachers have to spend their time catering to each of these wildly differing students’ needs, making sure they can understand the state standard mandated instructional materials in front of them using the methods that these teachers know works best for those individual students.

Sometimes, it’s beyond difficult for these teachers and aides to fulfill this task.

When you’ve got a pupil who, for all intents and purposes, thinks on the level of a six-year-old, it can be a Herculanean task to get that student to sit still long enough to try to get him/her to learn a ninth grade science standard like the names and locations of the planets, much less getting him/her to retain the material.

If daily lessons are a struggle, I shudder to think of the burden those students face when it comes time for these high-stakes standardized tests.

While it seems all well and good to want to hold every child to high standards, to want them to succeed at the best level they can, unfortunately not every student can meet those challenges, and what’s left is sadness and frustration on the part of teachers, parents and our friends with special needs.

Often, these educational policies are designed and mandated by politicians and bureaucrats who seldom see the inside of a regular classroom (outside of the occasional election year photo-ops), and seldom visit our special education classrooms at all.

Instead of forcing these students to have state-mandated standards and plans of study hammered into their brains, why can’t we take a more common sense approach and give these kids the sort of hands-on vocational and life training they’ll actually need once they leave school and enter the real world.

Instead of teaching them the planets, why not show them how to read and interpret restaurant menus, so they can order for themselves when they get hungry.

Instead of talking about valence electrons and balancing chemical equations, let’s teach them chemistry they’ll use in their everyday lives, showing them what household cleaning products not to mix together so they won’t cause accidents that may hurt themselves or others.

Instead of complex algebraic equations, let’s show them how to count out correct change from a cash register, useful basic math skills we could all benefit from learning.

Our students with special needs are great kids with the potential to lead normal, fulfilling lives that they themselves can manage and control.

But, they can only succeed in this task if those who control our schools’ curriculums can recognize a simple fact: those high-stakes test scores they revere so much only tell them one thing about our schools - how good kids are at taking those tests.

Until they take off their testing blinders, all of this is just a moot point.

We all want our kids to grow and thrive as best they can, but shoving testing at these kids isn’t the right way to produce excellent results, and, quite frankly, it never will be.

Opelika Observer Staff Editorial - 9/14: "‘Yea’ or ‘Nay’ on Sept. 18’s Special Election? We’re not sure either."

We set out to write an objective editorial about the upcoming special election on whether or not to transfer funds from our state’s oil and gas “savings account” to the beleaguered General Fund Budget,  but the ballot language devised by our estimable legislature makes it hard to seem objective.

When the ballot language talks of preventing “the mass release of prisoners from Alabama’s prisons” and protecting “critical health services to Alabama children, elderly and mothers,” how could anyone dare to oppose the measure and still consider themselves a decent, moral person?

Once we cut through the treacle of hyperbolic language, we find our state at a crossroads.

It is true that if the amendment fails, those aforementioned groups will see drastic budget cuts, including the state’s Medicaid recipients - who include 50 percent of births in the state and more than 70 percent of the residents of Alabama’s nursing homes.

Such cuts would be catastrophic, and it seems overly cruel to punish these groups for the failures of the turkeys and whackadoos we elected to our legislature, whose failure to pass a balanced budget (as they are required by state law to do) caused this conundrum in the first place.

Proponents say voting the amendment down will require the governor to call a special session of the legislature in order to create a budget.

Where will the money for that special session come from, and will the cost of said session be worth it?

Once again, we return to the argument that if our legislators had done the job we elected them to do, we would not have this mess to deal with.

For a group of people who were elected, primarily, on a platform of “trimming the fat” and restoring “balance” to the budget, raiding the state’s savings account does not seem to be the model of fiscal responsibility they claimed to embody and hold dear.

While it is worth mentioning that the amendment currently has no language or means of paying back the funds to be borrowed, it does no good to vote “No” due to this lack of payback.

The General Fund would have to generate funds for the payback, and it can’t generate the funds it needs now, much less the additional costs of a multi-million dollar payback scheme.

We’re all faced with a dilemma regardless of which way we choose.

We either slash the General Fund budget severely or we produce the revenues to fund these vital programs at the levels they need.

And, of course, by raising revenues, we mean that our legislators would have to vote to raise taxes, more than likely.

Can we elect a legislature with the courage to face up to the challenge and do what needs to be done?

Not likely with these jokers.

The scariest part of this amendment proposal is that, past the preamble and its shocking statements, there is no specific provision to allocate these monies anywhere specifically.

Does this mean we have to trust these same legislators who got us into this to spend these new funds more wisely than they did the last time?

Trusting the Alabama legislature - can we really afford to do it?

The McCollumn - 9/7: "An apology, of sorts"

For a few weeks now, a die-hard contingency of readers has called on me to make recompense for a Aug. 10 column I had written about how I felt our city schools’ employees should send their kids to our city’s public schools.

Some of you called me or e-mailed.

Mrs. Ione Mayfield wrote a wham-bam-boozle of a Letter to the Editor about it (which I found delightful; I’m one of those weirdos who enjoys “hate mail.”)

One of you even went so far as to accost me at my parents’ restaurant as I was working, making orders back on the sandwich table.

All of you let me know you thought I had crossed a line with my statements and that some sort of apology was due.

Well... here goes:

“I apologize for any who were offended by my comments in the Aug. 10 McCollumn, ‘Why Isn’t ‘Dear OHS’ Good Enough for You?’. My comments were not meant to demean other school alternatives, and I am sorry they were interpreted as such.”

Sound like a good enough apology for y’all?

Good.

It’s not one, but I hope it sounded enough like one to mollify you.

What I wrote on Aug. 10 was not a condemnation of private or home schools, but an earnest opinion about my feelings on public school teachers and administrators not supporting the system that employs them.

That was my intent as an author - to point out an issue and encourage a healthy discussion.

However, I should have remembered we live in an era where reader interpretation, not authorial intent, reigns supreme.

That is to say, what you imply from my writing means more than what I meant to infer.

Some of you did some good close textual analysis, unearthing hidden inferences I never intended to make.

You took it upon yourselves to reckon that I was vehemently anti-private schooling.

I am not and never have been against private schools, even if I would personally choose to send my hypothetical children to our local public schools.

For you to say otherwise would mean that you obviously don’t know me or my beliefs, and, quite frankly, you don’t, so please stop spreading this vile calumny.

What you implied was not what I actually wrote, and while I’m somewhat angered that my words have been twisted more than a pretzel, I’m at least gratified by the facts that a) you read the piece and b) it caused you to have an emotional reaction.

For a writer, there is no greater compliment than to have something you’ve written invoke emotions from your readers - happy, sad, blistering angry ... all are valid and welcomed.

The true aim of the Aug. 10 column was not to shame those teachers and administrators, nor was it a “holy war” on private and Christian education.

It was meant to start a discussion, a dialogue in this community, about an issue that myself and others in the community were aware of but had henceforth not been talked about in the public sphere.

I’ve always been of the perhaps naive belief that there is no problem so great that we cannot solve it through rational, well-thought discussion.

While some of you may have thought the remarks needed an apology, there were an equal number who have given me the old “Atta boy” and the occasional “Give ‘em hell” - proving, I suppose, some readers got what I was writing toward.

How we read a text depends largely on our own specific world views.

We all have different life experiences and beliefs that allows each and every reader to approach a text differently.

I would never be so bull-headed as to believe that my reading of a piece was the final word on the matter, and nor should you, dear readers.

It is only when we come together and make a “stone soup” of all of our beliefs and opinions that we can truly view a piece of writing.

In closing, for those of you who wanted a true apology out of me for that column, I am truly sorry ... that you won’t be getting what you asked for.

The best I can give you is the italicized part from earlier in this column, because I’m afraid I’m not sorry - and I probably won’t ever be.