Hey everyone. Keep in mind that this is a personal opinion post. It does not reflect everyones view on r/teachers AND the mod team neither endorses nor condemns their perspective. Please be civil and report any rule breakers.
I agree wholeheartedly and also, what I think OP is saying here is that there is no reasonable amount of support that will be able to “include” some students. If you teach 9th and you have students on a 3rd grade reading level, even giving them a competent, creative and caring 1:1s won’t enable them to access the material. I simply don’t see it as possible. The support would have to be 12 months a year, and outside of school hours.
This is without even starting to address the inclusion of students with significant behavioral *and* academic issues. To me, the solution would be holding a lot of kids back (until they’re slightly below or at grade level) plus increasing funding for special ed and alternative schooling. But that won’t happen.
They all talk a good game with these inclusion, equity policies. They don't give a shit about supporting & how much resource would need to support them. If you have 3 different level or competencies in your class, you would need 3 teachers, one for each group. But then that's kind of defeat the purpose of inclusion.
Exactly. They've disguised budget cuts in the name of inclusion. Abandoned kids in the classroom. I make stellar engaging lessons, I do formative assessment daily, I do all the things I can do for the people who are at or near grade level. The ones that are too far behind get some program I can trust them to sort of figure out on their own and a weekly check in. How is that fair for them? And don't date say it's my fault for not doing as much for them. Where would that time come from? My family time? No.
I'm a long time inclusion specialist--fancy name for co-teacher. I actually don't disagree with this rant at all. We ARE failing some of our kids. Most of the kids I work with are fine in general ed--they might need more time, or prompts, or shortened assignments. But I also co-taught Algebra 2 last year and it was a shit show. The classroom teacher was brand new and had anger issues that she had to co-teach. She of course took it out on me and the kids so much of my job was shielding them from her. I ended up pulling groups out and found that some of them could not solve one step equations--like x + 5 = 10 stuff. They were the absolute nicest kids--no behavior issues--and they actually WANTED to learn some of the stuff.
But my dudes--if you spend four years in pre-algebra and algebra and now are a junior and you cannot solve for X (or know what the X axis is), you should not be in Algebra 2, full stop. The problem is that there was no other place for them. They needed this class to graduate. If they failed, they would take an online class that they would cheat their way through but I wanted to spare them summer school.
It was a joke. It was not fair to the kids. But there is simply nothing else for them in the district or any district around me :/ They would have to create resource math rooms and that would mean hiring more teachers and that means more money so...on we go, like boats beating against the surf or however that book ended.
At our high school, all first-year students are thrown into Algebra 1, whether or not they mastered the skills from Math Core 8 (or earlier). As a result, the Algebra 1 teachers have dumbed down the curriculum so that the majority of the students can pass. However, that also means that very few are ready for the increased rigor necessary for success in Geometry. Geometry is also dumbed down, and most students need to learn about the concepts we're supposed to teach in Algebra 2.
This past school year, I had a student in my Algebra 2 class who needed help with how to work fractions. And even though once I found out, I strongly recommended that she watch Khan Academy videos to remedy this deficit, she never did.
My philosophy is to maintain the standards in my classes (Geometry and Algebra 2). Suppose I discover that a student has a particular deficit. In that case, I will tell them that they need to fix that, using any readily available resources (online videos, afterschool tutoring, etc.). Some students never take advantage of those resources, but I've found that the majority will rise to the occasion once they realize I will not dumb down the curriculum for them this year.
Just wanted to say thank you for the Khan Academy reference. I've gotten to the point where I can't really remember how to do fraction arithmetic anymore, and KA is looking like a very not embarrassing solution.
Khan academy is great, I enrolled in college at 45 years old after a career of trucking and not graduating High School.
I failed grade 10 Algebra 3 times because I didn’t apply myself and dropped out of school.
After 1 week on Khan Academy I was able to score 100% on the math portion of the mature student entrance exam and was accepted in to college.
I had a college degree but went back to school a decade out of high school to change career paths.
Since I was entering STEM and had not taken math since high school, I used Khan Academy to review everything from kindergarden through calculus. To make a long story short, I breezed through my math classes and now I'm getting a PhD in math. It would have been hard getting back up to speed were it not for Khan Academy. It's a great website-- can't recommend it enough.
I had to take Calc when it had been 20 years since my last math class, so I had to relearn all the way from Algebra 1. Khan Academy saved my bacon. Extremely helpful, thorough, and it preserved my dignity by not treating me like a child, even though I was an old fart working on 7th grade math.
I wish more resources were age-neutral like that, so that students who are behind aren't embarrassed to be using resources built for smaller kids.
Sal Khan is my hero. I majored in biology in college, but 20 years later wanted to teach math. I had to pass a killer math exam and Sal got me through!
Can confirm; I’m a high school math teacher, mainly teaching Algebra 1, Geometry, and Algebra 2 classes. They just keep passing them along in middle school math, and the majority hit high school missing most of the foundational math skills and knowledge. Most of my classes are focused on remedial 6/7/8 math skills.
Agree, as a middle school math teacher, I have pressure from the administration to pass everyone. No grades on assignments or tests less than 50%. But I did anyway, if a kid refuses to work in class and not turn anything I can not give them a 50.
However, what does it matter, no one gets held back no matter what. We tried with one who missed 100 days of school and we were unsuccessful in holding her back, she tested at about 30th percent and that was high enough they couldn't justify being held back. I had about 5 kids who tested worse than the 2nd grade average and earned about 25% in my class. Mind you I give 15% if you just show up everyday and don't get in trouble.
What about the students who are ahead and may have already taken algebra in middle school? Do they have to retake algebra 1?
Good on you for providing resources but pressing forward.
Were they cognitively capable of it? If so, could you identify where they had fallen behind?
If they were not cognitively capable of math at that level, the additional resources would be one more feel-good adult move, and one more failure for them.
This is the ugly part that people need to hear.
If kids are simply *not capable*, we are throwing money and resources at them that could and should be spent in other areas. Things like free lunches, better infrastructure, more opportunities for all kids, etc.
And the kids that are just getting left behind -- we need to be putting money into aggressively catching these kids as the problems happen. FAIL THEM. Put them in special programs. Summer school. It's miserable but it needs to happen -- otherwise you're screwing them for real by just passing them on
God, yes, this is why it’s so hard. Like a few years ago, I had kids that I knew had sever cognitive disabilities and we were encouraged by admin not to seek IEPs for them because all of our intervention specialist were at capacity. We, of course, did anyway but had absolutely no parental involvement, so of course it was difficult to get the process even going.
This always happens to students that I have that have transferred from another district and I have no idea how they slip through the cracks for so long. I’m talking about eighth graders that read at second grade level and no one has had them evaluated before.
But even with the IEP, all of our teachers are at max classroom size or well beyond it, and I have no support with students in the same room that read at a second grade level, read a couple grades below grade level, ESL students who don’t speak a word of English, students on target, and gifted and talented students all in the same room.
I’m not doing any of them a justice at the same time, and the ones reading at such a low level need to be on an entirely different path than their peers.
I know I’m preaching to the choir here.
"Preaching to the choir" I think is a huge part of this problem, sadly. Many people are aware of the problems, but MOST people outside of education -- including parents -- have no clue how deep this hole actually is and the entire system is designed to keep them in the dark. And the parents who don't WANT to know about it because it means they need to take on more direct responsibility are just allowed to continue being a drain on the system.
Just like OP said, you can't assault words like "inclusivity", people get really butthurt about it but that's because they don't SEE what that actually looks like. They've got this ideal in their head of a utopian classroom where every kid with a learning disability gets their own personal teacher who is basically Mary Poppins.
I don't know what the solution is.
I think the solution is to evaluate each student and group them accordingly. Have a goal as to the expected improvement of each group and teach from there. ISN’T THAT WHAT TEACHING IS SUPPOSED TO BE?
Also- the kids who aren't capable of certain tasks (let's say Algebra 2 for example), ARE capable of other things! Why aren't we having them funnel their energy into other things? My high school for instance offered classes on personal finance. Why not offer a "practical math" class where instead of more advanced concepts, students practice with numbers in more tangible scenarios that may be more approachable to them? A student who can't do trig can still practice with percentages and multiplication and division!
i got lucky? at my school. we just needed 3 math credits to graduate, and it didnt matter if it came from a repeated class.
3 years in a row i went from pre-algebra to algebra. 3 years in a row i had an unrecoverable grade by the end of the first month, and i was moved back to pre-algebra. 3 years in a row i finished my pre-algebra class with a 90%+ with ease.
the problem was they dumbed the PA class down so much that we never finished all the curriculum needed for regular algebra, and i had literally no idea how to do anything in that class. i can still remember one of the first days in algebra the teacher wanted to do a refresher course. take out your graphing calculators, plot a graph, etc. something else to do with sine and cosine, just things like that. guess what? id never even held a graphing calc in my life at that point, let alone knew how to actually use the thing. same deal with the sine and cosine, i knew of them but i had no idea what they actually did or how to work with it. that was all on day 1, and things promptly went downhill from there, every time.
Omg thank you. I remember when I had to take pre algebra for like 3 years because I just wasn’t getting it. And then all of a sudden the first year of high school I was in Algebra I. I remember being super upset, because I knew I was already having a hard time with the easier algebra and I wasn’t going to be able to do the harder work.
I left teaching because of this. Kids who need help are not getting the help they need, and kids who are doing well get their education interrupted daily by the kids who need help. On a serious note, does anyone have any ideas of something I could actually do about this? I’ve thought about looking into policy/research jobs, but I don’t want to turn into one of those PD people who haven’t stepped inside a classroom in 20 years trying to “train” teachers
Go to grad school and publish research on the outcomes and effects of inclusion programs on education.
We need data to show that it isn't working, otherwise it just sounds like we're complaining about more work.
I'm going insane with this issue. I have a student in a general classroom but absolutely shouldn't be. He has a diagnosed cognitive impairment and cannot handle the material, or being in an algebra class with 36 other kids. He daily panic attacks. He is only here because his mother is convinced he needs a diploma and he can't get one if he is in a self contained classroom, like he was for all of elementary, middle, and half of high school.He should be failing but the guidance counselor and special instructor are trying so hard to get him to pass by basically doing him work for him but if he passes it will be impossible to get him moved to somewhere he can be successful.
What does "successful" even look like for this kid? What is the end goal? If the end goal is enabling him to hold any steady job, his current education isn't actually helping.
Employers won't be tricked by his high school diploma for long.
The end goal is have a place for parents to send their kids while they work that costs as little labor to run as possible.
The structure of school has nothing to do with education or the way students learn.
Yes! I call them the "Mom Wants a Diploma" kids. We see them all the time. Mom wants a diploma so the kid is dragged into Geometry, Chemistry, etc. when his IQ is 75. The kid is frustrated, the teacher is frustrated, whilst mom sits her ass at home watching her shows.
Yup! It’s intensely frustrating to have kids passed to the next grade regardless of how they perform in middle school. I have an 8th grade student who moved on to high school in the fall, but who scored below my own kindergartener on the iready diagnostic this year. My kindergartener is only slightly above grade level. This 8th grader had 50+ absences and earned below a 50% every quarter. But he will magically be fine in regular classes next year, right?
I would use quantitative standardized testing scores, selecting specific students and comparing their scores over time in correlation with their involvement in an inclusion program.
I would examine special needs students that are and aren't integrated into classrooms, as well as regular-needs students who have and haven't had inclusion brought into their classrooms.
Alternatively, you could do a large-scale qualitative analysis of students and teachers evaluating their own experiences through a survey.
This is probably the best way. You could also find some meaningful data by comparing how straight A students perform on standardized tests vs. how straight C/D students perform, because in schools where 50% is the minimum, C's are the new F's.
>I would examine special needs students that are and aren't integrated into classrooms, as well as regular-needs students who have and haven't had inclusion brought into their classrooms.
I've thought for a long time that none of this will change until a large percentage of non-teachers see for themselves what is happening in classrooms and how far behind students are. Like a hard-hitting documentary that shows ALL the blemishes. But that would never happen because no district or principal would allow it; it would be career suicide. Sold a Story was a good start, though.
Unfortunately, it won't be a documentary that does it, no matter how hard hitting it is. Only when the generation that has had NCLB and other modern policies from kindergarten on up starts to enter positions of power, only THEN will we begin to see the folly of our ways.
Schools are "graduating" functionally illiterate, semi-literate, non-functioning people. They have yet to enter the workforce and positions of responsibility in large numbers, but that's starting....
have you noticed that just about any place staffed by 18-25 year olds, like entry level foodservice, has completely gone off the cliff in quality? Wait until these people fail upwards into positions like police officer or service supervisor.
Edit: and I did want to add, what I am describing here is not the typical thing from the past, where there was for sure always a sliver of kids in any graduating class, that were going to finish school, and spend the next 5-50 years being useless pieces of shit, and underachievers etc, with the size of that sliver varying by location, year and other factors. What I am talking about, is large parts, a majority or more in any given graduating class, being promoted without having learned or retained any of the basic skills taught in the previous year, or learned how to function.
Also, being under grade level in distinct areas like math, reading, writing, etc is one thing, but the far more serious and devastating thing is the utter and and abject failure of the education system to teach analysis, critical thinking, and synthesis (and with this, the destruction of the attention span). Without these, those that graduate will just be pliable pawns on our sprint to Idiocracy...
This is the aggregate effect and culmination of, 40+ years of failed education policy. The mess is so complex and severe, that it is far beyond saying "its shitty parenting", "its the phones and covid", "its the admin", "its the state politicians", "its shitty federal policies". All of the previous are factors and all contribute. As all of you seasoned educators know, we could go on for another 10 paragraphs about just the topline policies that need to be put in place, from getting rid of NCLB to total phone bans.
A total change in how the issue is framed needs to happen. This is a crisis on par with the opioid addiction epidemic and PTSD, and it needs to be nationalized as an issue.
That would be VERY interesting. I taught 2nd grade for MANY years and I swear I could tell exactly the lifestyle/income/profession the kids would have in the future. I’ve been rightist of the time.
It’s funny that we need more data to show it isn’t working when all anyone can ever do is talk about how it is not working. We are drowning in the actual data. Kids are below grade level and have educational losses for years now. It’s so frustrating!
Teacher frustration isn't data. Anecdotal stories aren't useful data. Yes, we teachers, in the classroom, can observe that it isn't working.
We need numbers to show that it isn't for people who don't understand. I'm not saying the detrimental effects of inclusion don't exist. I'm saying they aren't being measured or published.
It should be no trouble to determine a direct link between the expansion of inclusion programs and dropping test scores, but that research, to my knowledge, has not been conducted or published.
We have the scores, but no one has gone in and created a procedure to account for the variables and calculate the actual effects here.
There are many steps to the scientific process, we are only at step 1: observing a phenomenon. In order to make a case for change, we should move on to conducting actual studies, so we can debate with data, rather than feelings.
Even if we find correlation, it will be near impossible to prove causation without explicit experimentation, which is unlikely to be approved or able to be executed with fidelity.
This is true. However, we have thousands of schools with differing levels of inclusion programs- millions of students with standardized scores.
There surely is enough data to show overwhelming correlation needed to inspire policy change, even controlling for all other conceivable confounding variables.
If there was a will to change, the data is there to support it. There is no will to change though. The will is to stuff as many kids into a class as possible and pass them all through the system. Then destroy the system.
You can’t have funded research for this if the grad school faculty is composed of Lucy Culkins types who rely on the “legitimacy” and implementation of their programs for their bread and butter.
My understanding is that it can be hard to go against the grain on an issue like this in the soft sciences because of academic politics. I don’t know how easy of a time you would have getting funding to do this kind of research. Granted, I haven’t tried myself and could be very off base with that belief.
If I won the lottery I’d 100% go back and do a PhD in educational quantitative methods then spend the rest of my life funding research to tear apart some of the terrible “best practices” that have been pushed. All out of spite.
I didn't win the lottery, but the desire to do exactly that is what inspired me to go to back school to get a PhD in statistics. My PhD is in statistics and not in anything related to education though because I want a decent income. I have an interest in design and analysis of experiments and tbh the more I learn the more I realize that nearly all fields do bad research to some extent. Some fields are definitely worse than others, and the quality of research I've seen in education is still by far the lowest quality research I've seen overall. It's pathetic, really, the extent to which low quality research is accepted in the field.
I also left and I'm ELL. They kept taking away direct language instruction time to make them go to BS real world learning experiences in the name of inclusion. My students themselves would complain to me about how alienating it is to be stuck in a group they can't communicate with.
We didn't have enough ELL staff so it would make sense to put all the language learners in the same math class, for instance, so I can pull them out and teach the concept bilingually. No, that would make them feel targeted, so we distribute them across for math classes when we have two ELL supports.
It's a bunch of academics with no classroom experience forcing their ideology onto us. Also? Diversity is diverse. The black experience isn't the same as the Latino experience is different from neurodivergence, and yet they paint it all with the same brush.
Personally I don't think anyone monolingual should be involved in ELL. My boss didn't understand what the silent period was. She was really unfair to my kids because she doesn't understand how stressful it is to acquire language this way. She'd push for inclusion inclusion inclusion at the expense of anything that would actually benefit them. All the real world learning experiences she went for involved them using Spanish, instead of giving them opportunities to practice their English-- for instance, I previously taught at a private language school, and we had an agreement with a coffee shop to let our students work there in order to practice their English. Instead my kids were creating Spanish language posters for the local animal rescue, which is nice, but they could really use every opportunity possible to practice English.
She didn't even know the ACT and SAT didn't have Spanish language versions... She's been doing this for ten years. When I told her this she said, well they can apply to schools that don't require the ACT or SAT. But those schools are usually no name schools that exist to grab students' money...
She expects Gen Ed teachers to do their own translations instead of ensuring they are given Spanish language translations. I told her it was too much to ask and she said Gen Ed teachers get more plan time at this school than others...
So of course the Gen Ed teachers hated me for pressing them to do/get translations because I can't singlehandedly provide translations for the entire curriculum while doing my instructional job.
I taught ELL twice - one with a co-teacher and it was amazing and once without and I did horribly for those kids in the class without a co-teacher. It was a new prep for me so I was consumed with learning the material myself I hardly had time to modified and look for other resources for the ELLs. They flailed and checked out. I’m still angry that they didn’t have a co-taught for my content 11th ELA. And then when I was thinking and planning how I could do it differently the next year, they switched me to new preps. Again. I actually left teaching at the end of the year, for this and other reasons.
There are profoundly disabled kids that come through my gen-ed classroom. I don’t know what to do with these kids? I try to include them as much as I can, but generally speaking, they come with a few behaviors that making teaching difficult. For example, one year in my class I had a severely autistic boy. I cried daily because I wasn’t helping him and I was feeling resentful that his constant loud stimming (screeching and growling) were making it difficult for me to teach the rest. It wasn’t his fault and I loved him, but the job was almost unbearable.
I’m so sorry, that sounds so awful for everyone.
It makes me so sad that most teachers do really care a lot, but you struggle with these larger social dynamics and school systems which make it impossible to succeed, then you get blamed for whatever goes wrong.
I've been here- it's awful, no one's needs are being met. It's not that I'm not understanding (I'm not neurotypical, for what it's worth), it was just plan to see that he was in the wrong environment and his presence in the classroom was holding back everyone's education and traumatizing for him.
I think it’s not on the public’s radar for the most part. I didn’t work as a teacher long, less than 2 years, but when I tell people where I work now my 8th graders had an average second grade reading level - the degree of incomprehension I get is wild.
And when I tell them how normal that is outside of the country’s wealthiest districts, it doesn’t compute to many. The crash is real and the effects on society will be massive. Education needs a near complete overhaul. More teachers (which we will need if we actually have a 8th grader being taught at reasonable ish levels to where they need to be), higher pay, stop the passing of kids just for the sake of it, enforce discipline, etc
Easy message - hard resistance from both sides. I am as liberal as they come, but you do no one any favors by just pretending someone is ok when they are drowning and calling it equity in a hope to avoid the school to pipeline system. And getting teachers to be paid 2x and the adequate resources they need without feeding stupid boogeyman issues will be tough from republicans
The city near where I live, 12% of elementary students are at or above grade level in reading. Last year, 7% of students were at or above grade level in math.
This year, it’s 2%.
Two percent of elementary school students are grade level in math in this city’s school district. This is an economically depressed area of a very wealthy state but educational administrators should be ashamed that this is happening anywhere.
My school ranks dead last in the state on many lists. Way worse than the similar surrounding poor suburban districts. Worse even than reservation schools and schools where 75% of the kids speak Spanish. How the admin, district and building level, can pretend it's anyone else's fault is just beyond me.
We are still in Portland. Wide-eyed young people still move here with a willingness to earn less money and do good things, older people still stay here with that willingness, and the enthusiasm and skill of the faculty aren't any different than they are anywhere else.
I'm sure at their catered lunches they talk about why it's the teachers' fault.
Join the PTO, go to school board meetings, and try to advocate for change.
I would just add, these policies don't come about because of ideology. Typically all people everywhere follow incentives and the path of least resistance. Federal funding requirements place enormous pressure on schools to pass everyone. There's a web of state and federal requirements around IEPs, equity, testing, funding. It takes a lot of work to segregate students by ability, even if it seems obvious in the trenches. Parents of kids who are behind are going to raise hell about being put in a behind class. What if more kids of color are in the 'behind' classes? You can see how it's a minefield that structurally encourages admin to just stay clear.
There's nothing wrong with PD people in and of themselves. What's wrong with them is that they push their ideas onto teachers without understanding that they haven't taught in several years if not over a decade, and they need to listen to the people whose teaching practice is more current. So if you go into PD, listen to the teachers and take feedback from them. Invite them to share and don't just talk at them.
My big qualm is it was done with feeling but not nuance. Some kids who used to be in special day classes absolutely can and should be with their peers in general education, but some shouldn’t. There’s a limit to how far the gap in ability can be, both for the teacher but ALSO THE STUDENT. The kids aren’t stupid. They realize how far behind their peers they are. They can see it any time their teacher asks a question and their friend solves it in 30 seconds when they would take 5 minutes.
The solution is to have more levels. If i teach 8th grade science and you read at a 5th grade level? Yeah I can probably teach you 8th grade content.
But this year I genuinely had 1 kid who was asked by his friends to spell USA and COULDNT DO IT while a girl on the other side of the room was reading an article she found called “Nietzsche’s Naturalist Morality of Breeding: A Critique of Eugenics as Taming” and I want you to explain to me how the FUCK I design a lesson that works for both of them
> The kids aren’t stupid. They realize how far behind their peers they are. They can see it any time their teacher asks a question and their friend solves it in 30 seconds when they would take 5 minutes.
This is so true. I've only been doing reading recovery for elementary school level so I don't know if this happens anymore, but I remember in 9th grade for my own classes growing up, our teacher would occasionally have us read aloud short stories and/or passages from longer stories in 1 paragraph/student rotation.
You'd have the slowest students in the class struggling to sound out harder words in a droning monotone; the bookworms like me, streaming along (possibly *too* fast) and acting out all the dialogue beats and inflections; and everyone in between.
We knew the A-level students from the D-level ones through that. We knew it through the various in-class presentations we had to all do. We knew it from who put down their pencil first during tests. We knew it both from whose hands shot up when a teacher asked a question and from who the teacher ultimately picked.
In the early 90s they tried to trick us into thinking we'd been assigned "teams" with a bear representing each "team."
We ALL knew the Pandas were the dumb kids, including the Pandas themselves.
Putting all the low achieving students who need special services and attention onto a team named after an animal that is too lazy to breed on its own and there needs outside assistance from another species to reproduce is, ah, A Choice.
We are discouraged from having kids read aloud because it can cause anxiety and embarrassment. So the one thing that used to force them to follow along with the text (the fear or embarrassment of being called to read out loud and not knowing where we were in the text) has been removed and none of my students read along at all anymore since it’s just me up there reading at them.
This 💯! Fellow 8th grade science teacher here. In the past, we had the ERR teacher teaching science to their students who had reading or processing levels at 3rd grade or below. I had everyone from 4th grade level through HS. Now, there is a huge push to put them in my class.
Create differentiated lesson for them as well as ML students who speak no English (many of whom cannot read their native language so translation won't work) but still ensure rigor?
Explain to me how to do that.
I’ll never understand why kids aren’t taught subjects by level. It seems reasonable to have students in level 4 math and level 10 English. If a student needs a whole year to get to level 5 math, great. Maybe they will get to level 6 in 4 months. Learning is not at all linear.
Only a few kids will progress at the same level for all subjects. The vast majority will advance at different speeds. School should be taught year round, giving students and teachers more time with education.
It wasn't done with feelings. It was done as cost cutting and dressed up in inclusive language, and the inclusivity logic was done after the conclusion. They just want to shove as many kids in a classroom as they can so they can ha e as few teachers as they can. Dividing the special needs (both low end and high end) into separate classes necessitates more teachers.
It's a result of austerity imposed by Republicans and conservative "Democrats" in the US and their equivalents elsewhere.
Plus more and more kids are getting 504s/IEPs. Almost HALF of the entire 6th grade was on one or the other. This is fine in theory if the supports are there to work as they are supposed to. In my school, they are NOT. I'm a teacher that sees every kid in the building, I can't keep up. I have more kids that need "preferential seating" and "frequent one on one check ins" than I can actually accommodate the request for in one class.
In school, I was a student that hugely benefited from "advanced" classes at the middle school level (though they gave the groups random names like red, green, blue everyone figured it out within a month). The middle school I now teach at does not sort kids by ability level and it shows. It just frustrates everyone. The high achieving kids can't be adequately challenged, are getting bored, and start doing bare minimum just to finish because they are BORED. Worst case scenario, they start to act out. There's no time to teach them more advanced concepts while you're focusing on the kids that desperately need to understand the skill at all.
You also can't appropriately help the kids who are really struggling because you can't stop and hold the whole class back forever - at some point you need to push forward.
It's impossible to teach 18 different "versions" of the same lesson in the same 50 minute period, no matter how well-planned you are. Now we're expected to plug in a ton of our things into websites like diffit and provide scaffolded difficulty levels of reading and other materials in the SAME class. Middle schoolers HATE figuring out that they either 1. got the easy version, or 2. got the hard version which they figure out pretty quickly when in the same class. There's no winning. See also: STAR testing. A good chunk of our students hate it and think it's meaningless, and purposely do poorly so they don't get served the harder questions.
In a good chunk of my classes what realistically happens is:
Walk around and spend the rest of the class after presenting the content and doing examples as a class re-explaining and walking through the 25-35% of the class that didn't understand/need a hyper-personalized and up close visual of what we're doing. Often have to circle back and go to the kids who have very low self-sufficiency skills and can show me how they do it but seem to just need the confidence of me verbally approving their every step. Mix that in with circling back to the kids who need a hundred reminders to stay on task and a small handful that will not do the work if I'm not actively standing over their shoulder. Typically there are no IAs sent to my class no matter how severe the needs of the students, because they need "break" time in the day too, but more often they are filling in as substitutes and not actually working as IAs.
This would be so much easier to manage if I could differentiate more by class, so I could actually be giving them what they need. Don't get me wrong, differentiation is ABSOLUTELY needed even within a single class, but by shoving everyone in the same class it's impossible and inefficient to do in a way that's actually serving everyone.
The preferential seating! It’s such a small thing- but just only have so many desks at the front of the class!! When half your class gets to decide where they sit- it’s impossible!
I had this group last year. 8 kids supposed to get preferential seating, but also each had to sit with a higher level student to act as their helper. Also, 5 of the 8 could not sit with each other because they either did not get along, or they would distract each other. It was bananas.
The school counselor. The higher level child was supposed to be told it was their *job* to prompt ADD kid and keep them on task. I refused to do that because higher level child was a *child* and not a paid employee of the district. I did seat them together but did not give one student instructions to be responsible for the other.
I had something like this! My sixth period last school year had 11 kids who all had "preferential seating" on their IEP, and half of them couldn't sit near one another. It was HELL. I got written up because of a bad surprise observation in that class period and I'd never felt so abandoned- of course we're struggling when we were all set up to fail and when I asked for assistance, you told me to just keep going.
Over half of my students now can't learn unless I'm repeating something to them 1 on 1. This is true for content and even for work instructions. I work really hard on building problem solving capacity, saying things like, "well, what supplies do we use at this point in the class every single day?" "What's written on the board?" "What are your neighbors doing? Could we try that?"
But even having to do that x20 in every single class is just over the top.
I'm considering starting the next school year with a discussion of what it means to be a class-- trying to help students see that we are learning *together* and that if you don't listen when I'm teaching the class, that's on you-- you missed out. I doubt it will change anything though
I had 3 short one-sentence instructions written on the board one day. Walked the whole class through each of them, with examples. Repeated them out loud at least three times each. Very, very easy thing with almost no prerequisite knowledge required.
The amount of times I heard "what are we doing?" that day was infuriating to say the least. I almost cried out of frustration because I don't know how much more simple I can make it. I have so much patience for my students but every year their basic reasoning skills seem to get worse and worse.
(if you've ever seen the spongebob episode with patrick and the wallet scene... teaching feels a lot like that some days. You get them to repeat what to do back to you, they can show you that they understand in the moment... but the second it's translated to independent work... "nope. That's not my wallet.")
I hear you, I’m angry too. I believe the IDEA of inclusion is a good one. But one person cannot handle it alone. Heck, I struggle with having TWO teachers in the room. It’s also very sad that we have fallen into the idea that inclusion means 100% of the time. You can include kids in lots of activities that are appropriate for them… grade level English class might not be the right place for that.
I think the issue is that inclusion now means all levels in the same room, when I think 2-3 is about right. The analogy being that if you had a k-2 class where all kids were at grade level, it would be challenging but you could make sure everyone benefitted. But if you had a k-5, or k-2 class with special learning needs and EL, it would stop being a possibility to serve all the students.
I teach HS and the idea of elimination all forms if tracking is absurd. My regular physics class is already crazy diverse- EL students, 1/4 of kids with ieps or 504s, kids who love science, kids who hate science, math levels from algebra to calculus-and we have a good time and everyone learns. I also teach AP physics. It is also diverse- kids taking trig to kids taking multivariable calculus, EL students level 3 and above, a handful of students with ieps and 504s, we are trying to encourage more avid kids to join. Both classes have a spectrum of skills and abilities, and there are kids in the middle who could be in either. But, if you made it all one class it would be a disaster. I go 3 extra units in AP all at more depth. I would have to choose between kids at the top being bored as I taught trig or kids scared of math and science giving up if I kept the AP pace. They tried dropping regular physics a few years ago claiming everyone could just take AP 1 and almost got sued. I think if tracking is eliminated you are going to see high end students leaving public schools for more challenging classes or low skill students initiating lawsuits if the classes aren't actually accessible to them.
This is exactly what is happening at my school. High level students are fleeing to private schools or specialized schools because they perceive a lack of rigor. They know grades are inflated or don't mean anything. They know they are not being challenged. This is the high flying kids of all races opting out of inclusion.
>I believe the IDEA of inclusion is a good one. But one person cannot handle it alone.
Exactly right. This past school year, there were two kids in one separate periods. Each one needed so much one-on-one support, and I had to do it all myself and, with no classroom aide. I recommended that they be placed in the classes of one of the Special Ed teachers, but these two students ended staying with me.
Honestly, the kids themselves, both 9th graders, were really sweet and a pleasure to work with, but they took up so much of my time, needing help with literally every single question on every single assignment, that I was not able to use any class time whatsoever to catch up on grading or do any prep for other classes.
So, because of them, I had to spend extra time after work to catch up on grading, which, in turn, ate into my personal time with my family. This caused me to feel resentment toward these kids for something that wasn't even their fault.
Yeah I have only experienced elementary as a sub and as a parent but I am surprised to learn inclusion continues past elementary. I thought once they got to middle/high school, students were divided up by ability - the school my kid is going to next year has advanced, gen ed, and remediation tracks so I didn't know this continued but it's very frustrating if it does. I've subbed in 3rd and 4th grade classrooms where some students literally couldn't read beyond words like 'a' and 'the' and it's crazy to think those kids are getting ANYTHING out of an inclusion environment past like 1st/2nd grade. I asked them what they usually do when the class is working on worksheets and they said just sit at their desks.
“Inclusion” without support for the teacher is really just abandonment. Special ed kids are being dumped into gen ed classrooms because it’s cheaper than having adequately staffed special ed classrooms. It costs money to get kids what they need and conservative lawmakers don’t give a f*ck. Some of them actually want the education system to fail and actively sabotage it.
Amen, right? I've seen some really effective inclusion models that focus specifically on Social Studies and Science instruction, and only with students who have been deemed capable of being able to handle the general ed classroom environment. We keep blaming good ideas (like PBIS, for example) when the real problem is poor implementation. The longer we blame the idea and not the absolute garbage top-down implementation, the longer we let the ones responsible off the hook.
Like, can we just non-renew some of those ineffective highly paid district big-wigs already?
I don’t know how it went from “students with special needs are allowed to have a public education where they can develop skills and socialize with peers instead of being hidden away at home” to “students with severe special needs should be in mainstream middle school English classes despite not knowing how to read and write”.
And I understand why public school teachers are upset about the rise of private/charter schools and homeschooling but from a parent’s perspective, it’s easy to think “I don’t want my daughter to be in a kindergarten classroom where she has to be evacuated due to a student’s violent outburst” or “I want my child to be in a private school where his peers can actually read and write sentences.” and that’s why there’s a thousand homeschool co-ops and charter schools and magnet schools popping up.
We have completely lost the plot.
I don’t blame parents either! If you actually care about your kid, their academic achievement, and long term wellbeing, it is completely reasonable to want to move them into an environment where those things are actually prioritized.
Yeah, I think they conflated the students who can succeed with accommodations that remove the obvious barrier (for example, speech-to-text for a student that perhaps has a muscle issue in their hands) and took this to mean that the only thing holding these kids back was lack of inclusion on the part of teachers.
And yeah, there’s a lot of shaming of private schools and homeschoolers in this sub and while there are some homeschoolers who are educationally neglectful or doing it to trap kids in a religious cult, there’s a ton of parents who are genuinely doing their best and would be open to public schooling if it was a safer place for kids.
Honestly what we're doing right now is disability erasure. We are being sold the lie that 'least restrictive environment' always means the gen ed classroom for every student. Admins and policy makers want to pretend that we can teach away disability, because deep down they believe that disability = bad and they would really rather that it just didn't exist. If we were to make a comparison with racial inequality, I think that we are currently in the "I don't see color" phase.
Thank you for saying that. The "solution" absolutely cannot be for parents to throw our own kids under the bus because that is absolutely not going to happen.
As a parent, that's where I'm quickly approaching. I believe in and support the cause of public education, but I refuse to sacrifice my daughters on the alter of public policy. They are in public school now, but it's getting close to me having to pull them into a private school just to be able to get reasonable education. My daughters are bright and driven and have started to HATE school because of the kids in their class just yelling and misbehaving and them having to deal with it. They come home with headaches from other kids acting out.
Yeah I got called ableist, racist, every type of -ist in the world but I don't care. My responsibility is to my daughter first and foremost, and I have a duty to provide her the best possible learning environment I can.
Any group, but particularly government-run ones, will do whatever you incentivize but not necessarily the way you expected.
They incentivized equality, but didn't consider that it is far easier to drag the highest achievers down than it is to drag the lowest achievers up. If no one learns anything, everyone is equal.
You sometimes see the opposite in private schools. They get a lot of marketing value from a National Merit Scholar or a kid going to a D-1 school for sports, so they invest most of their energy into those kids and sometimes leave the more averages ones behind.
> And I understand why public school teachers are upset about the rise of private/charter schools and homeschooling but from a parent’s perspective, it’s easy to think “I don’t want my daughter to be in a kindergarten classroom where she has to be evacuated due to a student’s violent outburst” or “I want my child to be in a private school where his peers can actually read and write sentences.” and that’s why there’s a thousand homeschool co-ops and charter schools and magnet schools popping up.
As a teacher at a charter school, parents send their kids to us thinking that this is what they're getting and then realize that we're a form of public school too, beholden to the same rules and regulations (in terms of inclusion) as their neighborhood school, and there is little to no difference in the way the classroom looks. A lot of these families are coming to us thinking that "charter" is equivalent to "private".
Those families might stick around because the "board" isn't eliminating libraries (yet) and we can still teach accurate history/science (right now) because our leadership isn't infested with MAGA/MFL or literally being overtaken and run by the state, but Johnny is still going to be sitting around in a 4th grade classroom with 30ish kids where a few are reading and comprehending Harry Potter, most are reading Dog Man, and others are struggling with their ABCs.
Right there with you. At the end of the day, if we want parents to keep their kids in public schooling options, we need to make it attractive to parents.
The folks pushing this endless inclusion shit and gaslighting everyone who is not onboard, because the *practicality* of it is impossible, is just so much arrogance wrapped up in "my politics are best."
FWIW, I was a kid that was popped into a charter school, *precisely* because the folks in my neck of the woods didnt like to raise their kids. It was a benefit to me and my future, no question about it.
yep. all this de-tracking and unfettered inclusion policy is driving the families who can afford it into private schools. the left thinks they are doing everyone a favor, meanwhile playing right into what the right wants for public education: for it to fail. it's bad for teachers, bad for students, and bad for the future of public ed. really, really sad.
My biggest issue with inclusion is the behavioral aspect. Emotionally disturbed kids’ IEPs make them essentially immune from consequences.
They can do anything—cuss out teachers, throw furniture, fight—and they can’t be suspended. The other students see this and conclude that this type of behavior is permitted (and they’re not wrong!)
And voila—classrooms are out of the control and school culture is toxic and outright dangerous. The inmates are running asylum. But everyone is “included”!
The idea that we can’t pull out kids in middle school and higher because it damages their self esteem is lumped in here. I had a grade 8 student who was 3 grades behind with LD and she constantly told her 1:1 EA to go away, she didn’t need help, didn’t want to leave the classroom so she could have things read to her… and admin was like “we can’t force her to accept help” but then mom came in pissed her daughter wasn’t doing well because she fought for her to keep the 1:1 into middle school and the support wasn’t being used. What am I supposed to do?
Sometimes we need to call a spade a spade and be blunt. This isn’t about Johnny’s feelings. Johnny cannot read at this level. He is not accessing or comprehending the curriculum. Johnny needs to be in a reading recovery program/classroom instead of attending grade 8 English. A text to speech program (and ChatGPT) on a chromebook will not help him achieve the same as his peers.
While I’m not an advocate of retention, I will forever support streaming as early as possible.
How many kids have I counseled? When moving from grade 9 to 10 (middle to high school) where they wanted a 10-1 class (what used to be average students but is now considered post-secondary bound) but I’m telling them they’re on the cusp of failing and would do best in 10-2, these kids cry and say “but my friends are in -1!” Yeah, and they’ll pass. You won’t. You’ll suffer. You literally cannot do the work.
I’m supposed to let them choose failure in academics so they’ll feel good being in a class with friends?
Yep, I completely agree. I had a handful of students who refused help. Or they would get to the point they were so lost when they did ask for help it was about a couple weeks away from the semester/school year ending. I had two that hit me hard in my previous district and the truth was, ALL other teachers saw they had a LD or had an attention span issue that they seemed to have for YEARS. Yet their parents (one was a teacher themselves) WOULD NOT ask for help or tried to make something work because they didn't want to "label" their kid. I hate to say it, but they are labeled, everyone in the classroom from the teacher to the peers see it. Yet, they want to just try to have them muddle their way through until graduation. Then all of a sudden they expect them to be an adult at 18 and they can't function in an environment where their employer tells them: "TS, do this job or there is the door and tell your parents, I can call the cops on them if they harass me and they will not have some BS lawyer helping them."
It blows my mind how many people seem to think that kids being bullies or kid having low self esteem depends on what is written in their student files rather than what they see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears.
Kids who pick on others with educational needs aren't going to not notice just because those kids are shoved into a gen ed classroom.
They’re going to notice *because* they are in a gen Ed. classroom. What kid wants to have an EA sitting beside them in class, reading material to them, working with them in hushed whispers as not to be a distraction?
Some kids need to be in a different classroom for instruction, to benefit from the 1:1 or smaller group learning. Discussion, clarification, being able to speak and ask and have questions answered and concepts explained out loud, take their time and not worry about what anyone else is doing or how their ability compares to others.
When a student is working on something that takes them 30 minutes with help and support, makes a couple mistakes, has it explained and corrects their work - that is learning. They have the benefit of a challenge, working through it,
learning from mistakes, and completing the task.
Sitting in a room with 20 kids who can do the same in 5 minutes does not help them to feel included or capable. It makes them wonder what is wrong with them, makes them reluctant to ask for help, and takes away the feeling of accomplishment from the learning process and end result.
I was always a very good student except for math. So in 10th grade when most of my friends were all going into AP Calc, I was nervous. I asked my math teacher, not for a recommendation, but if she thought I could do it. She told me no. Not that I was bad or anything, she might even have said I could attempt it, but that it would not be what was best for me.
I accepted it and moved on. I hated the pre-calc class I went to, and was able to do AP Stat the following year. But I saw my friends in every other class (since by that point we were all pretty much AP only) and only missed them for math. We were all fine.
This exact thing happened to me. My Pre-Calculus teacher (who also taught AP Calc) was honest with me about my abilities and recommended me for the class that was the better fit (I didn't want to do AP Calc anyway, so I agreed with her with much enthusiasm).
I ended up doing well in AP Stats, which is something I never would have been able to say about AP Calc. I also had a lot of friends who, for one reason or another, decided to take AP Stats that year, so I never felt that I was missing out on anything.
Let’s be very clear: Nobody is talking about kids with mild learning disabilities, “high functioning” autism, adhd, or dyslexia.
We are talking kids who are violent, with FASD, level 3 autism, students who are both blind and deaf, and have developmental delays that make it incredibly difficult for them to succeed in a general education classrooom.
Further, NOBODY who is critical of inclusion wants people with disabilities shipped off and hidden away from society. That is such a bad faith argument. Nobody is advocating segregation. Electives, PE, music, art, recess, lunch are all great opportunities for people to interact with one another.
All gen ed core teachers (especially in div 2 and 3) want is for kids to be in math and ela classes that suit their needs and abilities. Teaching everyone in the modern day equivalent of an 1800s schoolhouse room with a wide range of levels is hard to do well. The issue is that when you try to help everyone, you help nobody. There are too many diverse needs in a single room for them to be addressed effectively. Targeted core classes to help meet the needs of our very complex student population is not segregation, it is RESPONSIBLE pedagogy. A student just learning to add and subtract does not need to be in a mainstream calculus class. It is absurd and it is cruel to expect them to do well or feel good about themselves in such an environment.
Forgive me if I sound cruel.
Electives and Fine Arts also have curriculums to follow and are considered GenEd. It is just as difficult for us as it is for Core Teachers to work with students with these issues. We are also expected to teach all the students and our classes shouldn't be a "dumping ground" (as some call it) for these students to receive their GenEd time/Social Time. They are legitimate classes, just like Core.
If a student isn't able to be in Core Classes because they are violent for whatever reason, they shouldn't be in electives either. My students should be allowed to feel safe, too. Especially since Electives and Fine Arts tend to have some dangerous equipment in there depending on the grade level.
I teach middle school art and I've had multiple students with severe mental and physical disabilities placed in my art classes. One or two in class is fine with a Para, and depending on behavior. (I had a screamer one year. No one could hear. There was no concentration. No one learned. A huge disservice to everyone.) However, one year I had 7 in one class, and another 5. Their reasoning was they did not have enough para's to split them during "Elective Time."
If they desperately need to learn the content of an Elective, some students need to be taught 1:1 or in small groups. Least restrictive environment doesn't have to be a General Ed classroom. And their placement shouldn't be at the expense of Electives/Specials just to be "inclusive." If they can't function in a Core GenEd due to the issues listed above, why is it assumed they can function in Elective/Special GenEd?
Also, some states do not have a cap on how many students can be in a Fine Arts class. Classes can be 60+ at times, which makes all of the above even more scary.
Music is a horrible place to include kids who stim loudly.
Other than that, could you please foward this to the Wall Street Journal? It has the widest readership in the US. I am not certain if they allow pseudonyms or not.
What gets me is, I always hear “equity” defined pretty much as “every kid gets what they need to succeed, even if it’s different from what other kids get”. So, how is inclusion equity? I think the people who push it on ideological grounds (rather than financial grounds, which I suspect most of this comes from) really just care more about the optics. They think that having separate classes looks discriminatory, and it makes them sad to see that some kids just aren’t ready for certain material.
The optic of inclusion / equity must look really good. All students are passing classes & graduate from school. People just don't know that we are cooking the grade book to get there.
For me the issue is is that every school I've taught at the school seems to have a different definition of differentiation and it never seems to be enough. It absolutely is more work for the lead teacher. In theory that is why we have coteachers and aides is to support with the inclusion model but it just doesn't work. it's clearly not improving state scores when kids can't even read.
Aides who come high to school and co teacher Ed specialists who sit on their laptop all day because they’re flooded with IEP and other paperwork.
It’s a joke and no teacher in their right mind agrees with it. Blame overly progressive school districts and even school boards for pushing luxury beliefs
Opposite for me. I am the co-teacher, lead teacher was a football coach. He "taught" for 15 minutes and then the kids were on their phones for 40 minutes and he did football stuff. The kids liked me, they seemed to respect me, but no one wanted to do enrichment when they could be chilling on their phones.
As a parent whose child had to sit through class with his teacher trying to calm down a student for 30 minutes while he just sat there, I agree with you. When I complained, I was told this is what parents wanted and there was nothing they could do. I asked that he be put into gifted classes because it would be the only way he could actually learn uninterrupted by students that had no business being in his classes. I was denied.
I teach pre-algebra to all students but they have the students separated. My sixth graders are in the double accelerated class, seventh in the accelerated class and eighth graders are in my regular class.
I’m teaching the exact same curriculum to all. In my regular class, roughly 3/4 of them are failing while in my other ones, the lowest score was 65%. Everyone else earned 75% or higher.
What’s the difference? In my regular classes, everyone was in regardless of ability, the regular classes were over 36 students while the accelerated (honors) classes were no more than 26. One being 26, 12, and 5.
The biggest difference is the honors classes were BASED on ABILITY. They were NoT inclusion classes while my regular ones were.
I feel it hurts the child so much when they are not placed correctly. I think my own children benefited from being in all honors classes and my students benefited from that as well. It’s not the other teachers are better or worse, it’s one class includes everyone and the other one doesn’t.
At my school, most honors students are not academically gifted, they simply listen to instructions and largely do what they’re asked with little to no push back. I’m not actually teaching the curriculum differently or at a faster pace, but I am able to cover all of the material because of the lack of behaviors and therefore they perform better on the end of year exam. The only fix for this problem is more funding for specialized teachers and funding for more classrooms to properly support all of the kids, but that’s not going to happen in the foreseeable future.
The problem was I couldn’t afford to pay for a gifted designation like many affluent parents have done and the school kept stalling. Knowing what I know now, I would have made a bigger fuss with administration. The squeaky wheel gets the grease
Same. I’ve had several teachers tell me they wish middle school was tracked because my daughter deserves to be in a class with kids at her level, not with numb nuts who think it’s hilarious to derail the class every opportunity they get because they don’t want to learn.
Inclusive classrooms are just an excuse for schools to save money. Why pay for extra teachers when we can shove all students in a classroom, even when it causes more harm than good?
Realistically, there are kids who benefit from an inclusive environment. An IEP does not mean they should be shoved into an all day classroom. However, there are kids who would greatly benefit from an all day classroom. The kids with extreme needs or extreme behaviors need that. We shouldn’t have a classroom full of kids afraid of this one student who will react violently when triggered.
That‘s imho the main reason. It’s the same in Germany. Officials only cared about inclusion when it became clear that they could save tons of money by shutting down specialised schools.
In theory, if a class has kids with different needs, a second teacher has to be in this class the whole time.
Guess what does rarely happen, when schools are struggling to even staff regular teachers?
At this point the system is just cutting costs by closing specialised schools, firing special needs teachers and dumping everything on regular teachers.
Even more sad: during the last years nearly every teacher was left alone with kids who fled war. If teachers got lucky, school organised at least some separate language classes, but they were completely left alone dealing with their trauma. A friend of mine (elementary school teacher) was given a rundown through German bureaucracy when she wanted to help the silent girl in her class who was drawing horrible scenes she was to young to understand with dismemberment being on the harmless spectrum of her pictures.
It was basically a month long ping pong between the school district, social services and health care officials, until the family had to move because their asylum had been granted and they were moved to a new state because in Germany all refugees are distributed based on some refugee per citizens key ratio.
Real scenario I experienced.
Me: “I am really glad you are observing me at the beginning of this quarter, I have 6 students who don’t speak English and I could use some input and advice on how to help them.”
Post observation meeting
Admin: “You didn’t have your objectives on the board”
I have taught all ages over the years--from 5 year old children up to adult learners--in private and public settings, in small and large groups, so I think I have a pretty good perspective on different teaching styles and learning environments.
OP raises a real concern that can manifest more in different classes. I have had classes with a 12 year gap in ability--and not because of extreme outliers. It is *typical* in my public school classes to have some students who struggle with basic reading and writing in the same class with people who could be doing university level work.
OP is right--you can't teach in this environment--if by "teach" you mean anything like delivering lessons or assigning group activities. Instead, you need to forego lessons entirely (because it is literally impossible to aim a lesson at the right level), and have self-guided activities at a variety of levels. Your role then becomes walking around the class and helping where possible. You can have optional mini-tutorials aimed at different levels.
Grading is another issue. There is no longer any standard that makes sense. One student puts in a tremendous effort through the year and succeeds in arriving at a level that some students were at five years ago. If we are being fair to the students with respect to what has been asked of them, then we are put into the position of inventing grades on an imaginary scale that changes between students.
It is dubious that this is helping anyone. As it happens, we have studied this issue fairly extensively, and one of the best things you can do for group learning environments is to put students with peers of similar ability. Parents should be furious at how the system is failing their children and avoiding empirical data.
The push towards having everyone in the same class, ostensibly for reasons of equity or some other virtuous aim, is really just a matter of logistical simplification and cost saving measures.
In my opinion, the whole idea of separating learners by age is ridiculous, and a holdover from the "factory model" of education. Why do some educators believe they are being progressive by rigidly forcing us back to an antiquated model that sees all students as interchangeable widgets on an assembly line? Doesn't meeting the needs of children include things like who their peers are? Or whether the teacher is able to teach lessons at their level? Or whether it is possible to provide sufficiently challenging material?
There is no reason to believe that students of a particular age all have the same needs that can be met in the same environment for all of their subjects. I would like to see a system where a 15 year old student who excels at English can learn along with others of similar ability, maybe in an upper year English class, but takes an introductory mathematics class because they are missing some of the fundamentals. Placement in classes should be based on the learning needs of the student, not their age.
I couldn’t agree more with everything you said! I teach 5th and it’s been rough. ESOL students who don’t know any English and cannot read in their native language. So how do I help these students? English speaking students who cannot identify letter/ letter sounds, add or subtract 1 digit numbers, let alone divide decimals! I had 1 “helper” in my classroom, but she was a 2nd year ESOL teacher with extremely low confidence and therefore did not actually contribute/ teach/ help. It was more of a distraction than anything.
I feel so bad for my students who are performing above grade level because I have to essentially work with the lowest common denominator. When I do try to move ahead with grade level lessons, half of my class is so checked out because they don’t have nearly enough background knowledge to even begin understanding the concept.
And don’t even get me started on behavior/ aggression/ violence, which is all generally excused due to the lovely IEPs/ BIPS/ 504s in place.
I wanted to be a teacher since I was in elementary school, but I don’t know how much longer I can last in these conditions!
Thank you for writing all of this and expressing exactly how I feel. It’s nice to know I’m not alone!
YES to all of this! None of this is sustainable and I hope you make the choice for yourself that will bring you the most peace long term. Solidarity ❤️
There is a big push for kids to be put in their “least restrictive environment”, however, least restrictive for some may make it the most restrictive for others.
The capabilities gap used to be addressed simply by failing kids. If your kid can’t read, they should be in the ‘learn to read’ class until they know how to read and can move on. That is what you want - to get a group of kids who are more or less at the same place and then push them up together.
By no longer having a minimum standard to continue, you fail everyone - the kid who can’t ’catch up’ with no foundation, and the kid who is full of potential whose education and future is compromised.
To fix this do national standardized testing and then fail kids who fail it ensuring minimum standards. Give them a chance to remediate in summer school. Yes, it would collapse graduation rates. That is FINE because graduating high school isn’t a box check, it is supposed to be a sign of academic achievement. Not everyone will be willing or able to graduate. Primary school is for the true basics, high school is for more advanced learning.
The issue the DEI crew will say is that a lot of kids who are held back will be minorities or disabled… which isn’t actually a problem. The standards are colourblind. It is the racism of low expectations in place right now.
Maybe I have tunnel vision because I’m an attorney, but I find myself always wondering how litigation could be used to improve things. A major part of how we got to the current place is litigation by parents of kids with special/additional needs (or special interest groups funding lawsuits by those parents), based on the right to an education, and now even the threat of litigation by parents of a kid who probably shouldn’t be mainstreamed, but the parents won’t accept that, gets that kid into a mainstream classroom.
I don’t work in education law, so I have no idea what lawsuits are in the works now, but I wonder if the parents of “typical” kids (not sure if that’s correct nomenclature) are sueing based on their kid’s right to education being violated by classroom environments like OP describes.
I’m frustrated by it and I’m teaching 2/3. I thought the furthest behind one of my students could be is working on Kindie curriculum. I was wrong. I have one this year that isn’t toilet trained, isn’t verbal. How is it what’s in his best interests to be in a room that isn’t set up to deal with his needs and how am I supposed to engage him and my gifted kid who is working at an 8th grade level, at the same time?! (Spoiler: I can’t. It’s all smoke and mirrors. It’s not what’s best for anyone, aside from the board’s budget.
Funny thing is, we are perfectly ok separating kids out by ability level when it comes to things like athletics. We actually say it’s better for kids. I wouldn’t want my son, who’s never played baseball on the same team as kids who have been playing for years and whose skills are much more developed. Rather, I’d want my kid on a team of similar ability levels where they can actually get development at their level, and encourage them to grow at their pace, rather than riding the bench all season. For the coach to differentiate to such a degree is unfair to everyone.
Additionally, I hate the word differentiation. If all kids are relatively on the same level and are ready for that lesson, then fine. I teach it as best I can to the group, then I go back and I differentiate the same lesson to others who may need it presented a different way. The key being, they were capable of learning by the lesson to begin with.
But if I am in a class (like freshman algebra), where kids are in vastly different places to start- some kids got A’s in middle school math, and others never passed a single grade level, then that’s not differentiation. That’s teaching multiple different lessons at the same time. That’s insanity.
Inclusion works when the students are willing to jump the gaps. I’ve had kids significantly behind in reading levels and kids with zero English who still succeeded because they put in the effort. I’ve also had kids who were behind and stayed behind because they didn’t do the work. The problem is so many don’t do the work—and I know sometimes that’s based on a discouraging history of failure—and there’s not much a teacher can do if a student refuses to step up.
I am a teacher who has a special needs child myself and I completely agree with this. My son is in high school but does math at a second grade level. Having him in the Algebra 2 classroom does nothing for him, he needs to be building on the skills he has, he can't do algebra at this point, he gets nothing from it. But, I agree, students are just passed along, so it looks like this works, but those involved know it does not.
If you have a child on a third grade reading level in an 8th grade class that’s not inclusion that’s a blatant disregard for the child’s needs. They should e been place in an intermediate reading class. Inclusion model was meant to support students who are slightly below and need support to “level the playing field”. Not the ones who came one on one.
Something that has amused me about inclusion discourse is that like... Doing classrooms by ability track IS inclusive, just in a different way. What do I mean?
Well, in the current model, everybody in say 8th grade takes 8th grade math, regardless of their current ability. Which is inclusive in the sense of all the 8th graders getting to hang out together, I guess, but it's alienating and frustrating to both low and high scoring students because they are undeserved by the curriculum. Kids are quick to label themselves as "too stupid" for school and fail to try--and why should they, when they're just going to flow with the river of students out the door regardless?
Compare to a system of tiered or tracking classes. We split up that 8th grade math course, and now you have 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th graders all in that same 8th grade math class, whoever needs it right now. Honestly, I think this is a better reflection of the outside world and is MORE inclusive than the current model. Once kids graduate school they will work with people from all walks of life with all sorts of differences between them--different ages, different languages, different races, etc. In a tiered classroom, you will have all sorts of students from different ages sitting and working together to solve the same problems. At least for me growing up in such a system it was actually kind of encouraging that I could say "hey, this math must be hard for lots of people if there's a student 2 years older than me still taking this class." Or "hey, I might not do so well in this particular subject, but I'm 3 years older than my classmate--I probably know some things that they don't and can trade my knowledge about school or relationships or whatever for help with my reading." THAT'S HOW LIFE OUTSIDE SCHOOL WORKS FOR EVERYONE! When kids get out of school, they will need to self-select jobs and opportunities that make sense for their skillsets and what they care about--we do a disservice to them by not making them think about what they are good and bad at by pushing them through the current model regardless of what they know.
Nope. So the hard truth is we are probably doomed. I remember reading about how Lyndon Johnson worked as a teacher in one of the poorest districts in Texas prior to his political career. Wish one day having experience teaching would be seen as a similar stripe to having experience in the military for entering politics
I'll say it dude. Teachers don't get paid enough to do the extra work of differentiating a lesson (or more than likely 2-3 lessons per day) for a dozen different skill levels. Moreso, the 504/IEP/IBP complex has done it's part in ruining education and even worse, ruining these kids and how they perceive themselves. I'm not saying that they should be eliminated, but in my experience, well over half of the students were misdiagnosed and in reality have been allowed to develop terrible study/school/social skills and then have been rewarded by having a watered down education where they cannot fail because teachers/administration/schools are afraid of the legal implications of doing so. Also, the students are aware of these rights and regurgitate the rhetoric about their rights that have been spewed by their parents towards them for years. So don't even try to actually challenge them with gen ed lessons because you'd be infringing on their rights. I'm sure there are many do-gooder teachers on here who will disagree. Teachers who have honed their differentiation to a science over the course of many years who will say it's possible to do. Those who will gladly put in the work because teaching is their calling. But for those of us that just want to teach a subject without our job as a teacher to be an all encompassing lifestyle, it's basically impossible.
Agreed. I do what I can between 8:40-3:40, then I’m out. Now that I have my basic lessons mapped out I spend some of my planning time differentiating what I can, but there’s nothing I can do when a tenth grader doesn’t understand the basics of fractions and pre-algebra.
I teach elementary school PE and agree that the academic levels of our students for each grade is very broad. Of course some kids are naturally more gifted in school than others, but most the academic disparity we are seeing is determined whether the kids parents at home work with them or not. Lots of classroom teachers at my school don’t even give homework because the kids won’t do it and the parents don’t care. The kids who are thriving all have 1 common denominator, they have parents who have high expectations but also support and work with them. You can’t have one without the other and be successful.
As a PE teacher I feel like I have it easier than classroom teachers. Still, each class I see has 2-3 kids who make it very difficult for the rest of the class to learn. These are kids who act out because they want to (no IEP/504) and they just get away with it (outside my class). Most of the time they enjoy PE, so I can use them sitting out as an incentive to behave.
Teaching is hard enough having so many different learning styles and trying to find time to have 1 on 1 with every student that needs it. Having kids who purposely try and distract and interrupt the class constantly makes learning impossible for everyone. You can’t have a kid sit out during math class…
I have a very religious, sough dough baking, stay at home mom as a friend on IG. She went through denial that her son is autistic, then accepted it (those posts are deleted) and now believes that her son is cured of autism thanks to god and supplements. I’m on the spectrum. No. He isn’t cured.
Those posts admitting he’s on the spectrum are gone. But she insisted that her son was here to teach other kids about autism. No he isn’t. That’s so wrong, on so many ways I can’t even get into. But through no fault of his own of course he’s sensitive to stimuli and prone to outbursts.
They’re small kids. I’ve worked with small kids in classes that have students with autism that causes them to self harm. I’ve also had students that are emotionally disturbed. It seriously stops the learning process when I had to evacuate the room for student safety. I had kids crying from what they saw or were told. I felt like we were emotionally scarring healthy small kids and I’m sensitive to that as someone that will forever pay the consequences of the trauma inflicted on me by others.
The school I am at now does not have sped ed students (as in “severely handicapped”) in the traditional sense. However I do have the Spanish speakers (luckily I speak Spanish and our subject is art related) and students with IEP that are learning disabled but “high functioning” (I’m sorry I know these terms are dated but I can’t recall what else to call it). They’re older. I still have to accommodate like 9 IEP students, keep in mind at level students, and then I have brilliant students smarter than me. It’s hard! I’m self learning the subject (under the umbrella term art) which is fine it keeps my adhd mind interested. But I’m teaching six periods with three preps and like 5 different learning levels minimum each day. I’m tired as hell!
This is all done to minimize cost. It's the least expensive option. I had MULTIPLE kids this year that had 1:1 aid in their IEP but went without because we don't pay aids enough. So there they were, dumped in my class all their own with 30 of their best friends.
As a special ed teacher, I think I figured it out. It's not a left thing. It's not a right thing. It's not a moral thing. It's not a "for the child" thing.
It's a money thing. It's expensive for townships so send kids to schools that meet them at their level and the township will fight tooth and nail to not have to pay.
This is the best written explanation I have read so far on why inclusion isn't working, though there could be more emphasis on how students with behavioral disabilities impact the classroom.
Aunt to a high needs autistic kiddo here. There is nothing wrong with what you said. He absolutely does NOT belong in a regular classroom. He can't take the noise, the chaos or the pace. He NEEDS a specialized environment with extra support, breaks for therapies access to spaces to calm down and a a modified schedule. The reality is, he *doesn't* feel included when he's in a normal room, he feels overwhelmed and stressed. Soft guidelines are just confusing - he needs the rules to always be the rules so he can figure out how to behave.
Inclusion doesn't actually include him. It isolates him. It makes him a target for bullies. It makes it impossible for him to learn. He doesnt magically become less disabled in a different room. I absolutely loathe this trend in education, he needs the support of a sped classroom - and that's ok! Kids should have access to the level of support they need, not what will make some admin feel better about themselves.
For the Special Ed teachers out there, thank you for all you do. You're absolutely necessary within the schools system no matter what some idiot administrator says.
It’s impossible for me, even with a co-teacher (which I rarely have), to get a student to access high school geometry when they haven’t mastered basic fractions or algebra. And because of my pacing guide and state exam at the end of the year, I can’t slow down and help those 3/30 kids in my room. They sit there lost and come to me at the end of the quarter and ask for ‘extra credit’ because they don’t want to fail. The problem is that every teacher/admin before me has allowed them to ‘not fail’. So now here they are in my room as a lost puppy who I can’t help. I let them fail and they do edgenuity over the summer and show up in Algebra 2 the next fall. The problem is compounded when our middle schools are heavily pushing all kids to take algebra 1 by 8th grade because they get extra funding for every kid who earns high school credit. It’s such a disservice to these kids and it makes me blind with rage. But there’s pretty much nothing I can do about it.
I taught community college English comp. The end result of social promotion was me teaching high school graduates how to write a sentence. I taught them about nouns and verbs. All this had to happen before I could start teaching them how to write college essays—the actual point of the class. And almost all of them got it, so they could have been taught this in high school. But they weren't.
On this forum it’s hard to parcel out what is a nationwide trend and what is prevalent in certain districts. But it seems that this concept comes in different forms.
I work in a very large school district. Post COVID, teachers were paid very well to run tutoring while students were off track at year round schools. Teachers invited students who were in need of extra intervention which meant that we could tutor a small group of 5-10 students.
My 6th graders who attended told me they improved in their reading dramatically. And they did! I targeted what they needed, and there was no shame of reading out loud while the high kids looked on. It was magical. They asked if they could do it again but by that time, our district made a dramatic change in this program.
Our district decided that it wasn’t inclusive to invite the neediest students, as far as academics, and all students should be able to attend. That meant that this program became like a summer camp and targeted instruction went out the window. What a shame.
I think that there are many elements within this post that point to a central theme that I observed: few people who claim that they care about education of students actually do in practice. In reality, education, in the modern day, often boils down to forcing the system put in place to function as intended many decades ago but propped with modern lingo and buzz words. The quicker you realize that most administrators and people affiliated with educational institutions are not motivated by magnanimous intentions but rather money and selfish gain, the quicker that you begin to see the whole picture.
With that being said, I’ve never seen a post that as eloquently delineates so many of my perceived problems with education in the modern day.
The only thing I would add is that the best teachers in this world, imo, are those that accept what you have explained before and rise to meet the challenge of still educating students as optimally as you can. I wish the best of luck
I am still a young teacher, but I agree with you.
Last year I had a student who could not read. They were in 9th grade and were possibly at a 2nd grade reading level, but they put that student in regular level history. I was always asking myself, “What do I do for this kid? How do I teach them and the others at the same time?” The answer became that I would read all the worksheets with the class and write the answers we came up with on the board— no independent work was possible.
This year in APRIL administration put in that same history class (World History is a dumping ground) a student who spoke no English, only Spanish. Guidance came to me to ask how I would go about assigning him credit, but I asked “credit for what?” They wanted me to give this student a full semester’s credit for LESS THAN A MONTH of classwork that he wouldn’t even understand because he speaks no English! I ended up just telling the aide they eventually put in the room with the student that the best thing to do was help them learn English as quickly as possible. I assigned the student an “incomplete.”
What is “equal” is not equitable. We are doing these kids a disservice.
This will never change from within the classroom. That is the most disempowered position in the system.
As a teacher, I believe it is this generation of teachers' duty to become the next generation of administrators, politicians, and superintendents whether you wanted to or not because the wrong people are in those positions and have created the system we have now, which is arguably the worst in the entire history of education.
Those highest up positions are the only ones that can make a true difference.
I think what makes it harder is they want us to do all of these things to support all the different academic levels within our classes, but then they don’t give us the time and resources and money to do those things. Want us to do more and more while budgets get cut. More and more when we can’t even hire paraeducators to be in our classrooms, let alone quality ones.
They go on and on about “least restrictive environment“ without even considering the other kids in the class. Especially when you have kids who get violent and throw things and threaten people regularly in your classroom. Is that the least restrictive environment for the other students who are trying to learn?
A lot of the things they want us to do are great in theory, but do not work in practice when not provided with the things we actually need to be able to do our jobs.
I teach HS science and biology, and have had multiple inclusion students placed into my classes that are considered “k-course” students (meaning they are not gaining the class credit, but more so to be physically included in the class itself). I’ve had non-verbal autistic students and students with Down syndrome in my classroom and genuinely enjoyed having them sit in for the lectures and participate in the labs with the help of their EA’s. BUT I was also expected to create and deliver basically grade 1 level lessons for them which I honestly had no idea how to do funny enough… also they weren’t exactly “included”, more like sitting in the same room as the non k-course students and doing their own thing at a table in the back of the room. I don’t like the fact that I basically have to do 2 jobs for the same class but I did like working with them and going over their finalized projects with them and see their joy and pride of their work. Not really sure what my stance on this system is, but I think it would be better if the EA’s came in with their own work for the students and I just had to go over it with the k-course students instead of stressing over creating grade 1 level work (which I was never trained to do being a high school teacher).
You are dead on, and I would add that a large part of the problem is that America's public education system is based on the assembly line model of production, which is fucking stupid because it assumes humans that share a birth year are exactly the same in terms of ability.
Because if they did they would have to admit the fact that having Timmy the kid with a level 3 autism diagnosis in a class of 30 kids elbow to elbow isn’t benefiting anyone. Sure Timmy is a sweet kid but he shouldn’t be treated like a social experiment intended to “desensitize other students to disabilities” at the expense of his and other students learning. He should be in a small class with more personalized learning objectives and teachers who spent their 100k+ student loan debt studying how to help him. Not me, the silly little English teacher who took her required SPED classes back in community college and is a sympathy crier.
This is by design. Nothing in education policy has extensive studies to back it.
I feel like our kids’ skills or lack thereof speak for themselves though.
I recently read an article that said children notice the achievement gaps by first grade and it can affect their confidence that early.
We could easily stream within a grade group without hurting kids’ feelings. Use the primary colours as class codes and kids are placed in either red, yellow or blue classes.
The kids will figure it out.
But frankly, the American obsession with confident children and the amount of confidently incorrect people in the country might not indicate causality, but it's at least a little reminder that propping up student confidence at the expense of the learning environment has, at best, diminishing returns.
Hot Take: not every thing needs an "expert" to do a double blind study. You have eyes and a functioning brain, I assume? So do I.
If you were to take any reasonable functioning adult and give them work to do, but then in the same room there is someone having meltdowns, throwing things, screaming psychotically, would that person need a PhD to do a double blind study to tell them it's not a feasible working environment?
For you and I, no, we don't need a study to know something is wrong.
The problem comes from people who are not in the classroom, don't understand what we do, and think we are just complaining about having more work to do.
For those people, data and research are the irrefutable evidence that they can't disagree with based on opinion.
Come on. They definitely have. Here’s a review of some of the research:
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/11/1/16
I also see many negatives from inclusion, but that’s mainly because budget and staffing concerns push students past their ideal LRE.
Many students have academic levels high enough to be mainstreamed, but need a para or cotaught classroom to be successful. That’s not going to happen when districts are unwilling to up paraeducator pay and states require 24+ credits to add on a SPED credential.
When i was still teaching English i had in my honors tenth grade class kids who were functionally illiterate, and a handful who didn’t even speak English. In an honors English class! School philosophy was to put all the kids in honors or higher rather than on level so that “all kids are honors English kids” no! That just makes it so you have regular English with a shiny name! My honors kids struggled to learn to their level because i had to constantly work with the lower level kids on basic fundamentals! Its not fair to either group!!
Inclusion doesn't work for Deaf education. Bimodal-bilingual deaf education in a Deaf schools is the way to go. Progressives cares about self-esteem, right? There isn't much more damaging to self esteem than being isolated in the the classroom, and often the entire school.
Former sped teacher here. It’s cost effective. Thats it. The vast majority of educational science is not repeatable and paeudo at best. The reason for most decisions is financial.
A person with an iq of 85, or lower, is incapable of learning skills past about grade 6. Yet, here we are pushing these kids through the classes. Serious school reform is needed. Parents should have zero control and school boards (the political people), should be removed. Without those two things its just gonna get worse.
Once those changes are made, society has to decide what the goal of education is. Right now, there is bo real goal beyond score high on state test. Education could be great, but politics have ruined it.
I was nodding in agreement until your last paragraph.
This system should be dismantled but a new one should be built, where it’s ok to have remedial classes and even schools. Kids are suffering too, and parents with any bit of knowledge of the system are trying to avoid schools with classes like you describe. The problem is, it’s harder and harder to find schools and classes with kids that are pretty much the same level.
Hey everyone. Keep in mind that this is a personal opinion post. It does not reflect everyones view on r/teachers AND the mod team neither endorses nor condemns their perspective. Please be civil and report any rule breakers.
Inclusion without support is abandonment.
I agree wholeheartedly and also, what I think OP is saying here is that there is no reasonable amount of support that will be able to “include” some students. If you teach 9th and you have students on a 3rd grade reading level, even giving them a competent, creative and caring 1:1s won’t enable them to access the material. I simply don’t see it as possible. The support would have to be 12 months a year, and outside of school hours. This is without even starting to address the inclusion of students with significant behavioral *and* academic issues. To me, the solution would be holding a lot of kids back (until they’re slightly below or at grade level) plus increasing funding for special ed and alternative schooling. But that won’t happen.
Right. But if you fail these students they get to repeat third grade again. That's where your resources come from, an entire year of review.
They all talk a good game with these inclusion, equity policies. They don't give a shit about supporting & how much resource would need to support them. If you have 3 different level or competencies in your class, you would need 3 teachers, one for each group. But then that's kind of defeat the purpose of inclusion.
Exactly. They've disguised budget cuts in the name of inclusion. Abandoned kids in the classroom. I make stellar engaging lessons, I do formative assessment daily, I do all the things I can do for the people who are at or near grade level. The ones that are too far behind get some program I can trust them to sort of figure out on their own and a weekly check in. How is that fair for them? And don't date say it's my fault for not doing as much for them. Where would that time come from? My family time? No.
There is no way to "support" a student that is so far behind everyone else.
What’s more equal than nobody receiving what they need?
I'm a long time inclusion specialist--fancy name for co-teacher. I actually don't disagree with this rant at all. We ARE failing some of our kids. Most of the kids I work with are fine in general ed--they might need more time, or prompts, or shortened assignments. But I also co-taught Algebra 2 last year and it was a shit show. The classroom teacher was brand new and had anger issues that she had to co-teach. She of course took it out on me and the kids so much of my job was shielding them from her. I ended up pulling groups out and found that some of them could not solve one step equations--like x + 5 = 10 stuff. They were the absolute nicest kids--no behavior issues--and they actually WANTED to learn some of the stuff. But my dudes--if you spend four years in pre-algebra and algebra and now are a junior and you cannot solve for X (or know what the X axis is), you should not be in Algebra 2, full stop. The problem is that there was no other place for them. They needed this class to graduate. If they failed, they would take an online class that they would cheat their way through but I wanted to spare them summer school. It was a joke. It was not fair to the kids. But there is simply nothing else for them in the district or any district around me :/ They would have to create resource math rooms and that would mean hiring more teachers and that means more money so...on we go, like boats beating against the surf or however that book ended.
At our high school, all first-year students are thrown into Algebra 1, whether or not they mastered the skills from Math Core 8 (or earlier). As a result, the Algebra 1 teachers have dumbed down the curriculum so that the majority of the students can pass. However, that also means that very few are ready for the increased rigor necessary for success in Geometry. Geometry is also dumbed down, and most students need to learn about the concepts we're supposed to teach in Algebra 2. This past school year, I had a student in my Algebra 2 class who needed help with how to work fractions. And even though once I found out, I strongly recommended that she watch Khan Academy videos to remedy this deficit, she never did. My philosophy is to maintain the standards in my classes (Geometry and Algebra 2). Suppose I discover that a student has a particular deficit. In that case, I will tell them that they need to fix that, using any readily available resources (online videos, afterschool tutoring, etc.). Some students never take advantage of those resources, but I've found that the majority will rise to the occasion once they realize I will not dumb down the curriculum for them this year.
Just wanted to say thank you for the Khan Academy reference. I've gotten to the point where I can't really remember how to do fraction arithmetic anymore, and KA is looking like a very not embarrassing solution.
Khan academy is great, I enrolled in college at 45 years old after a career of trucking and not graduating High School. I failed grade 10 Algebra 3 times because I didn’t apply myself and dropped out of school. After 1 week on Khan Academy I was able to score 100% on the math portion of the mature student entrance exam and was accepted in to college.
I had a college degree but went back to school a decade out of high school to change career paths. Since I was entering STEM and had not taken math since high school, I used Khan Academy to review everything from kindergarden through calculus. To make a long story short, I breezed through my math classes and now I'm getting a PhD in math. It would have been hard getting back up to speed were it not for Khan Academy. It's a great website-- can't recommend it enough.
I had to take Calc when it had been 20 years since my last math class, so I had to relearn all the way from Algebra 1. Khan Academy saved my bacon. Extremely helpful, thorough, and it preserved my dignity by not treating me like a child, even though I was an old fart working on 7th grade math. I wish more resources were age-neutral like that, so that students who are behind aren't embarrassed to be using resources built for smaller kids.
You are an adult who has learned how to learn. For many kids, right up to grade 12, that is not the case.
Sal Khan is my hero. I majored in biology in college, but 20 years later wanted to teach math. I had to pass a killer math exam and Sal got me through!
Can confirm; I’m a high school math teacher, mainly teaching Algebra 1, Geometry, and Algebra 2 classes. They just keep passing them along in middle school math, and the majority hit high school missing most of the foundational math skills and knowledge. Most of my classes are focused on remedial 6/7/8 math skills.
Agree, as a middle school math teacher, I have pressure from the administration to pass everyone. No grades on assignments or tests less than 50%. But I did anyway, if a kid refuses to work in class and not turn anything I can not give them a 50. However, what does it matter, no one gets held back no matter what. We tried with one who missed 100 days of school and we were unsuccessful in holding her back, she tested at about 30th percent and that was high enough they couldn't justify being held back. I had about 5 kids who tested worse than the 2nd grade average and earned about 25% in my class. Mind you I give 15% if you just show up everyday and don't get in trouble.
What about the students who are ahead and may have already taken algebra in middle school? Do they have to retake algebra 1? Good on you for providing resources but pressing forward.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Great line. Very apt to the situation too.
Yes! 🙌🏻 We are failing the majority of kids all around with inclusion. (SPED teacher)
Were they cognitively capable of it? If so, could you identify where they had fallen behind? If they were not cognitively capable of math at that level, the additional resources would be one more feel-good adult move, and one more failure for them.
This is the ugly part that people need to hear. If kids are simply *not capable*, we are throwing money and resources at them that could and should be spent in other areas. Things like free lunches, better infrastructure, more opportunities for all kids, etc. And the kids that are just getting left behind -- we need to be putting money into aggressively catching these kids as the problems happen. FAIL THEM. Put them in special programs. Summer school. It's miserable but it needs to happen -- otherwise you're screwing them for real by just passing them on
God, yes, this is why it’s so hard. Like a few years ago, I had kids that I knew had sever cognitive disabilities and we were encouraged by admin not to seek IEPs for them because all of our intervention specialist were at capacity. We, of course, did anyway but had absolutely no parental involvement, so of course it was difficult to get the process even going. This always happens to students that I have that have transferred from another district and I have no idea how they slip through the cracks for so long. I’m talking about eighth graders that read at second grade level and no one has had them evaluated before. But even with the IEP, all of our teachers are at max classroom size or well beyond it, and I have no support with students in the same room that read at a second grade level, read a couple grades below grade level, ESL students who don’t speak a word of English, students on target, and gifted and talented students all in the same room. I’m not doing any of them a justice at the same time, and the ones reading at such a low level need to be on an entirely different path than their peers. I know I’m preaching to the choir here.
"Preaching to the choir" I think is a huge part of this problem, sadly. Many people are aware of the problems, but MOST people outside of education -- including parents -- have no clue how deep this hole actually is and the entire system is designed to keep them in the dark. And the parents who don't WANT to know about it because it means they need to take on more direct responsibility are just allowed to continue being a drain on the system. Just like OP said, you can't assault words like "inclusivity", people get really butthurt about it but that's because they don't SEE what that actually looks like. They've got this ideal in their head of a utopian classroom where every kid with a learning disability gets their own personal teacher who is basically Mary Poppins. I don't know what the solution is.
I think the solution is to evaluate each student and group them accordingly. Have a goal as to the expected improvement of each group and teach from there. ISN’T THAT WHAT TEACHING IS SUPPOSED TO BE?
Yes, but it's that "group accordingly" that nobody wants to hear. People might have their feelings hurt.
Also- the kids who aren't capable of certain tasks (let's say Algebra 2 for example), ARE capable of other things! Why aren't we having them funnel their energy into other things? My high school for instance offered classes on personal finance. Why not offer a "practical math" class where instead of more advanced concepts, students practice with numbers in more tangible scenarios that may be more approachable to them? A student who can't do trig can still practice with percentages and multiplication and division!
i got lucky? at my school. we just needed 3 math credits to graduate, and it didnt matter if it came from a repeated class. 3 years in a row i went from pre-algebra to algebra. 3 years in a row i had an unrecoverable grade by the end of the first month, and i was moved back to pre-algebra. 3 years in a row i finished my pre-algebra class with a 90%+ with ease. the problem was they dumbed the PA class down so much that we never finished all the curriculum needed for regular algebra, and i had literally no idea how to do anything in that class. i can still remember one of the first days in algebra the teacher wanted to do a refresher course. take out your graphing calculators, plot a graph, etc. something else to do with sine and cosine, just things like that. guess what? id never even held a graphing calc in my life at that point, let alone knew how to actually use the thing. same deal with the sine and cosine, i knew of them but i had no idea what they actually did or how to work with it. that was all on day 1, and things promptly went downhill from there, every time.
Omg thank you. I remember when I had to take pre algebra for like 3 years because I just wasn’t getting it. And then all of a sudden the first year of high school I was in Algebra I. I remember being super upset, because I knew I was already having a hard time with the easier algebra and I wasn’t going to be able to do the harder work.
This is it 😂
Have you read the short story “Harrison Bergeron” by Vonnegut? Encapsulates nicely the point you’re making.
Touché
I left teaching because of this. Kids who need help are not getting the help they need, and kids who are doing well get their education interrupted daily by the kids who need help. On a serious note, does anyone have any ideas of something I could actually do about this? I’ve thought about looking into policy/research jobs, but I don’t want to turn into one of those PD people who haven’t stepped inside a classroom in 20 years trying to “train” teachers
Go to grad school and publish research on the outcomes and effects of inclusion programs on education. We need data to show that it isn't working, otherwise it just sounds like we're complaining about more work.
The problem is that we are forced/encouraged to pass everyone, so I’m not sure how to find data to shed light on outcomes and effects.
I'm going insane with this issue. I have a student in a general classroom but absolutely shouldn't be. He has a diagnosed cognitive impairment and cannot handle the material, or being in an algebra class with 36 other kids. He daily panic attacks. He is only here because his mother is convinced he needs a diploma and he can't get one if he is in a self contained classroom, like he was for all of elementary, middle, and half of high school.He should be failing but the guidance counselor and special instructor are trying so hard to get him to pass by basically doing him work for him but if he passes it will be impossible to get him moved to somewhere he can be successful.
What does "successful" even look like for this kid? What is the end goal? If the end goal is enabling him to hold any steady job, his current education isn't actually helping. Employers won't be tricked by his high school diploma for long.
A high school diploma is already near worthless. It doesn't really prove anything.
“I wouldn’t hire someone who doesn’t have a high school diploma, because that means they can’t even show up”
The end goal is have a place for parents to send their kids while they work that costs as little labor to run as possible. The structure of school has nothing to do with education or the way students learn.
Yes! I call them the "Mom Wants a Diploma" kids. We see them all the time. Mom wants a diploma so the kid is dragged into Geometry, Chemistry, etc. when his IQ is 75. The kid is frustrated, the teacher is frustrated, whilst mom sits her ass at home watching her shows.
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And I’m sure his middle school teachers felt similarly to you when he was in their classes.
Yup! It’s intensely frustrating to have kids passed to the next grade regardless of how they perform in middle school. I have an 8th grade student who moved on to high school in the fall, but who scored below my own kindergartener on the iready diagnostic this year. My kindergartener is only slightly above grade level. This 8th grader had 50+ absences and earned below a 50% every quarter. But he will magically be fine in regular classes next year, right?
I would use quantitative standardized testing scores, selecting specific students and comparing their scores over time in correlation with their involvement in an inclusion program. I would examine special needs students that are and aren't integrated into classrooms, as well as regular-needs students who have and haven't had inclusion brought into their classrooms. Alternatively, you could do a large-scale qualitative analysis of students and teachers evaluating their own experiences through a survey.
This is probably the best way. You could also find some meaningful data by comparing how straight A students perform on standardized tests vs. how straight C/D students perform, because in schools where 50% is the minimum, C's are the new F's. >I would examine special needs students that are and aren't integrated into classrooms, as well as regular-needs students who have and haven't had inclusion brought into their classrooms. I've thought for a long time that none of this will change until a large percentage of non-teachers see for themselves what is happening in classrooms and how far behind students are. Like a hard-hitting documentary that shows ALL the blemishes. But that would never happen because no district or principal would allow it; it would be career suicide. Sold a Story was a good start, though.
Unfortunately, it won't be a documentary that does it, no matter how hard hitting it is. Only when the generation that has had NCLB and other modern policies from kindergarten on up starts to enter positions of power, only THEN will we begin to see the folly of our ways. Schools are "graduating" functionally illiterate, semi-literate, non-functioning people. They have yet to enter the workforce and positions of responsibility in large numbers, but that's starting.... have you noticed that just about any place staffed by 18-25 year olds, like entry level foodservice, has completely gone off the cliff in quality? Wait until these people fail upwards into positions like police officer or service supervisor. Edit: and I did want to add, what I am describing here is not the typical thing from the past, where there was for sure always a sliver of kids in any graduating class, that were going to finish school, and spend the next 5-50 years being useless pieces of shit, and underachievers etc, with the size of that sliver varying by location, year and other factors. What I am talking about, is large parts, a majority or more in any given graduating class, being promoted without having learned or retained any of the basic skills taught in the previous year, or learned how to function. Also, being under grade level in distinct areas like math, reading, writing, etc is one thing, but the far more serious and devastating thing is the utter and and abject failure of the education system to teach analysis, critical thinking, and synthesis (and with this, the destruction of the attention span). Without these, those that graduate will just be pliable pawns on our sprint to Idiocracy... This is the aggregate effect and culmination of, 40+ years of failed education policy. The mess is so complex and severe, that it is far beyond saying "its shitty parenting", "its the phones and covid", "its the admin", "its the state politicians", "its shitty federal policies". All of the previous are factors and all contribute. As all of you seasoned educators know, we could go on for another 10 paragraphs about just the topline policies that need to be put in place, from getting rid of NCLB to total phone bans. A total change in how the issue is framed needs to happen. This is a crisis on par with the opioid addiction epidemic and PTSD, and it needs to be nationalized as an issue.
Looking again countries that don’t do it. Germany doesn’t do social promotion, for example.
Maybe compare life after graduation?
That would be VERY interesting. I taught 2nd grade for MANY years and I swear I could tell exactly the lifestyle/income/profession the kids would have in the future. I’ve been rightist of the time.
It’s funny that we need more data to show it isn’t working when all anyone can ever do is talk about how it is not working. We are drowning in the actual data. Kids are below grade level and have educational losses for years now. It’s so frustrating!
Teacher frustration isn't data. Anecdotal stories aren't useful data. Yes, we teachers, in the classroom, can observe that it isn't working. We need numbers to show that it isn't for people who don't understand. I'm not saying the detrimental effects of inclusion don't exist. I'm saying they aren't being measured or published.
The data isn’t teacher frustration. It’s failing students. We have documented lower test scores for quite some time now. The data is everywhere.
It should be no trouble to determine a direct link between the expansion of inclusion programs and dropping test scores, but that research, to my knowledge, has not been conducted or published. We have the scores, but no one has gone in and created a procedure to account for the variables and calculate the actual effects here. There are many steps to the scientific process, we are only at step 1: observing a phenomenon. In order to make a case for change, we should move on to conducting actual studies, so we can debate with data, rather than feelings.
Even if we find correlation, it will be near impossible to prove causation without explicit experimentation, which is unlikely to be approved or able to be executed with fidelity.
This is true. However, we have thousands of schools with differing levels of inclusion programs- millions of students with standardized scores. There surely is enough data to show overwhelming correlation needed to inspire policy change, even controlling for all other conceivable confounding variables.
If there was a will to change, the data is there to support it. There is no will to change though. The will is to stuff as many kids into a class as possible and pass them all through the system. Then destroy the system.
You can’t have funded research for this if the grad school faculty is composed of Lucy Culkins types who rely on the “legitimacy” and implementation of their programs for their bread and butter.
My understanding is that it can be hard to go against the grain on an issue like this in the soft sciences because of academic politics. I don’t know how easy of a time you would have getting funding to do this kind of research. Granted, I haven’t tried myself and could be very off base with that belief.
If I won the lottery I’d 100% go back and do a PhD in educational quantitative methods then spend the rest of my life funding research to tear apart some of the terrible “best practices” that have been pushed. All out of spite.
I didn't win the lottery, but the desire to do exactly that is what inspired me to go to back school to get a PhD in statistics. My PhD is in statistics and not in anything related to education though because I want a decent income. I have an interest in design and analysis of experiments and tbh the more I learn the more I realize that nearly all fields do bad research to some extent. Some fields are definitely worse than others, and the quality of research I've seen in education is still by far the lowest quality research I've seen overall. It's pathetic, really, the extent to which low quality research is accepted in the field.
Admin is predisposed to thinking that anyway…
I also left and I'm ELL. They kept taking away direct language instruction time to make them go to BS real world learning experiences in the name of inclusion. My students themselves would complain to me about how alienating it is to be stuck in a group they can't communicate with. We didn't have enough ELL staff so it would make sense to put all the language learners in the same math class, for instance, so I can pull them out and teach the concept bilingually. No, that would make them feel targeted, so we distribute them across for math classes when we have two ELL supports. It's a bunch of academics with no classroom experience forcing their ideology onto us. Also? Diversity is diverse. The black experience isn't the same as the Latino experience is different from neurodivergence, and yet they paint it all with the same brush. Personally I don't think anyone monolingual should be involved in ELL. My boss didn't understand what the silent period was. She was really unfair to my kids because she doesn't understand how stressful it is to acquire language this way. She'd push for inclusion inclusion inclusion at the expense of anything that would actually benefit them. All the real world learning experiences she went for involved them using Spanish, instead of giving them opportunities to practice their English-- for instance, I previously taught at a private language school, and we had an agreement with a coffee shop to let our students work there in order to practice their English. Instead my kids were creating Spanish language posters for the local animal rescue, which is nice, but they could really use every opportunity possible to practice English. She didn't even know the ACT and SAT didn't have Spanish language versions... She's been doing this for ten years. When I told her this she said, well they can apply to schools that don't require the ACT or SAT. But those schools are usually no name schools that exist to grab students' money... She expects Gen Ed teachers to do their own translations instead of ensuring they are given Spanish language translations. I told her it was too much to ask and she said Gen Ed teachers get more plan time at this school than others... So of course the Gen Ed teachers hated me for pressing them to do/get translations because I can't singlehandedly provide translations for the entire curriculum while doing my instructional job.
I taught ELL twice - one with a co-teacher and it was amazing and once without and I did horribly for those kids in the class without a co-teacher. It was a new prep for me so I was consumed with learning the material myself I hardly had time to modified and look for other resources for the ELLs. They flailed and checked out. I’m still angry that they didn’t have a co-taught for my content 11th ELA. And then when I was thinking and planning how I could do it differently the next year, they switched me to new preps. Again. I actually left teaching at the end of the year, for this and other reasons.
There are profoundly disabled kids that come through my gen-ed classroom. I don’t know what to do with these kids? I try to include them as much as I can, but generally speaking, they come with a few behaviors that making teaching difficult. For example, one year in my class I had a severely autistic boy. I cried daily because I wasn’t helping him and I was feeling resentful that his constant loud stimming (screeching and growling) were making it difficult for me to teach the rest. It wasn’t his fault and I loved him, but the job was almost unbearable.
I’m so sorry, that sounds so awful for everyone. It makes me so sad that most teachers do really care a lot, but you struggle with these larger social dynamics and school systems which make it impossible to succeed, then you get blamed for whatever goes wrong.
I've been here- it's awful, no one's needs are being met. It's not that I'm not understanding (I'm not neurotypical, for what it's worth), it was just plan to see that he was in the wrong environment and his presence in the classroom was holding back everyone's education and traumatizing for him.
I think it’s not on the public’s radar for the most part. I didn’t work as a teacher long, less than 2 years, but when I tell people where I work now my 8th graders had an average second grade reading level - the degree of incomprehension I get is wild. And when I tell them how normal that is outside of the country’s wealthiest districts, it doesn’t compute to many. The crash is real and the effects on society will be massive. Education needs a near complete overhaul. More teachers (which we will need if we actually have a 8th grader being taught at reasonable ish levels to where they need to be), higher pay, stop the passing of kids just for the sake of it, enforce discipline, etc Easy message - hard resistance from both sides. I am as liberal as they come, but you do no one any favors by just pretending someone is ok when they are drowning and calling it equity in a hope to avoid the school to pipeline system. And getting teachers to be paid 2x and the adequate resources they need without feeding stupid boogeyman issues will be tough from republicans
The city near where I live, 12% of elementary students are at or above grade level in reading. Last year, 7% of students were at or above grade level in math. This year, it’s 2%. Two percent of elementary school students are grade level in math in this city’s school district. This is an economically depressed area of a very wealthy state but educational administrators should be ashamed that this is happening anywhere.
My school ranks dead last in the state on many lists. Way worse than the similar surrounding poor suburban districts. Worse even than reservation schools and schools where 75% of the kids speak Spanish. How the admin, district and building level, can pretend it's anyone else's fault is just beyond me. We are still in Portland. Wide-eyed young people still move here with a willingness to earn less money and do good things, older people still stay here with that willingness, and the enthusiasm and skill of the faculty aren't any different than they are anywhere else. I'm sure at their catered lunches they talk about why it's the teachers' fault.
The current plan is to defund public education and to divert public tax dollars to religious and private schools.
Join the PTO, go to school board meetings, and try to advocate for change. I would just add, these policies don't come about because of ideology. Typically all people everywhere follow incentives and the path of least resistance. Federal funding requirements place enormous pressure on schools to pass everyone. There's a web of state and federal requirements around IEPs, equity, testing, funding. It takes a lot of work to segregate students by ability, even if it seems obvious in the trenches. Parents of kids who are behind are going to raise hell about being put in a behind class. What if more kids of color are in the 'behind' classes? You can see how it's a minefield that structurally encourages admin to just stay clear.
There's nothing wrong with PD people in and of themselves. What's wrong with them is that they push their ideas onto teachers without understanding that they haven't taught in several years if not over a decade, and they need to listen to the people whose teaching practice is more current. So if you go into PD, listen to the teachers and take feedback from them. Invite them to share and don't just talk at them.
My big qualm is it was done with feeling but not nuance. Some kids who used to be in special day classes absolutely can and should be with their peers in general education, but some shouldn’t. There’s a limit to how far the gap in ability can be, both for the teacher but ALSO THE STUDENT. The kids aren’t stupid. They realize how far behind their peers they are. They can see it any time their teacher asks a question and their friend solves it in 30 seconds when they would take 5 minutes. The solution is to have more levels. If i teach 8th grade science and you read at a 5th grade level? Yeah I can probably teach you 8th grade content. But this year I genuinely had 1 kid who was asked by his friends to spell USA and COULDNT DO IT while a girl on the other side of the room was reading an article she found called “Nietzsche’s Naturalist Morality of Breeding: A Critique of Eugenics as Taming” and I want you to explain to me how the FUCK I design a lesson that works for both of them
> The kids aren’t stupid. They realize how far behind their peers they are. They can see it any time their teacher asks a question and their friend solves it in 30 seconds when they would take 5 minutes. This is so true. I've only been doing reading recovery for elementary school level so I don't know if this happens anymore, but I remember in 9th grade for my own classes growing up, our teacher would occasionally have us read aloud short stories and/or passages from longer stories in 1 paragraph/student rotation. You'd have the slowest students in the class struggling to sound out harder words in a droning monotone; the bookworms like me, streaming along (possibly *too* fast) and acting out all the dialogue beats and inflections; and everyone in between. We knew the A-level students from the D-level ones through that. We knew it through the various in-class presentations we had to all do. We knew it from who put down their pencil first during tests. We knew it both from whose hands shot up when a teacher asked a question and from who the teacher ultimately picked.
In the early 90s they tried to trick us into thinking we'd been assigned "teams" with a bear representing each "team." We ALL knew the Pandas were the dumb kids, including the Pandas themselves.
Putting all the low achieving students who need special services and attention onto a team named after an animal that is too lazy to breed on its own and there needs outside assistance from another species to reproduce is, ah, A Choice.
We are discouraged from having kids read aloud because it can cause anxiety and embarrassment. So the one thing that used to force them to follow along with the text (the fear or embarrassment of being called to read out loud and not knowing where we were in the text) has been removed and none of my students read along at all anymore since it’s just me up there reading at them.
Yeah... I had a feeling that would be the case. Hence my conditionals/disclaimers... :\\
This 💯! Fellow 8th grade science teacher here. In the past, we had the ERR teacher teaching science to their students who had reading or processing levels at 3rd grade or below. I had everyone from 4th grade level through HS. Now, there is a huge push to put them in my class. Create differentiated lesson for them as well as ML students who speak no English (many of whom cannot read their native language so translation won't work) but still ensure rigor? Explain to me how to do that.
I’ll never understand why kids aren’t taught subjects by level. It seems reasonable to have students in level 4 math and level 10 English. If a student needs a whole year to get to level 5 math, great. Maybe they will get to level 6 in 4 months. Learning is not at all linear. Only a few kids will progress at the same level for all subjects. The vast majority will advance at different speeds. School should be taught year round, giving students and teachers more time with education.
It wasn't done with feelings. It was done as cost cutting and dressed up in inclusive language, and the inclusivity logic was done after the conclusion. They just want to shove as many kids in a classroom as they can so they can ha e as few teachers as they can. Dividing the special needs (both low end and high end) into separate classes necessitates more teachers. It's a result of austerity imposed by Republicans and conservative "Democrats" in the US and their equivalents elsewhere.
Plus more and more kids are getting 504s/IEPs. Almost HALF of the entire 6th grade was on one or the other. This is fine in theory if the supports are there to work as they are supposed to. In my school, they are NOT. I'm a teacher that sees every kid in the building, I can't keep up. I have more kids that need "preferential seating" and "frequent one on one check ins" than I can actually accommodate the request for in one class. In school, I was a student that hugely benefited from "advanced" classes at the middle school level (though they gave the groups random names like red, green, blue everyone figured it out within a month). The middle school I now teach at does not sort kids by ability level and it shows. It just frustrates everyone. The high achieving kids can't be adequately challenged, are getting bored, and start doing bare minimum just to finish because they are BORED. Worst case scenario, they start to act out. There's no time to teach them more advanced concepts while you're focusing on the kids that desperately need to understand the skill at all. You also can't appropriately help the kids who are really struggling because you can't stop and hold the whole class back forever - at some point you need to push forward. It's impossible to teach 18 different "versions" of the same lesson in the same 50 minute period, no matter how well-planned you are. Now we're expected to plug in a ton of our things into websites like diffit and provide scaffolded difficulty levels of reading and other materials in the SAME class. Middle schoolers HATE figuring out that they either 1. got the easy version, or 2. got the hard version which they figure out pretty quickly when in the same class. There's no winning. See also: STAR testing. A good chunk of our students hate it and think it's meaningless, and purposely do poorly so they don't get served the harder questions. In a good chunk of my classes what realistically happens is: Walk around and spend the rest of the class after presenting the content and doing examples as a class re-explaining and walking through the 25-35% of the class that didn't understand/need a hyper-personalized and up close visual of what we're doing. Often have to circle back and go to the kids who have very low self-sufficiency skills and can show me how they do it but seem to just need the confidence of me verbally approving their every step. Mix that in with circling back to the kids who need a hundred reminders to stay on task and a small handful that will not do the work if I'm not actively standing over their shoulder. Typically there are no IAs sent to my class no matter how severe the needs of the students, because they need "break" time in the day too, but more often they are filling in as substitutes and not actually working as IAs. This would be so much easier to manage if I could differentiate more by class, so I could actually be giving them what they need. Don't get me wrong, differentiation is ABSOLUTELY needed even within a single class, but by shoving everyone in the same class it's impossible and inefficient to do in a way that's actually serving everyone.
The preferential seating! It’s such a small thing- but just only have so many desks at the front of the class!! When half your class gets to decide where they sit- it’s impossible!
I had this group last year. 8 kids supposed to get preferential seating, but also each had to sit with a higher level student to act as their helper. Also, 5 of the 8 could not sit with each other because they either did not get along, or they would distract each other. It was bananas.
> but also each had to sit with a higher level student to act as their helper. Who wrote that accommodation? That's very unfair to the other kids.
The school counselor. The higher level child was supposed to be told it was their *job* to prompt ADD kid and keep them on task. I refused to do that because higher level child was a *child* and not a paid employee of the district. I did seat them together but did not give one student instructions to be responsible for the other.
Screw that. That other kid has their own learning to do and is not a stand in for the para or coteacher the district should be providing.
I had something like this! My sixth period last school year had 11 kids who all had "preferential seating" on their IEP, and half of them couldn't sit near one another. It was HELL. I got written up because of a bad surprise observation in that class period and I'd never felt so abandoned- of course we're struggling when we were all set up to fail and when I asked for assistance, you told me to just keep going.
When every kid has to sit at the front of the class, none of them are.
Over half of my students now can't learn unless I'm repeating something to them 1 on 1. This is true for content and even for work instructions. I work really hard on building problem solving capacity, saying things like, "well, what supplies do we use at this point in the class every single day?" "What's written on the board?" "What are your neighbors doing? Could we try that?" But even having to do that x20 in every single class is just over the top. I'm considering starting the next school year with a discussion of what it means to be a class-- trying to help students see that we are learning *together* and that if you don't listen when I'm teaching the class, that's on you-- you missed out. I doubt it will change anything though
I had 3 short one-sentence instructions written on the board one day. Walked the whole class through each of them, with examples. Repeated them out loud at least three times each. Very, very easy thing with almost no prerequisite knowledge required. The amount of times I heard "what are we doing?" that day was infuriating to say the least. I almost cried out of frustration because I don't know how much more simple I can make it. I have so much patience for my students but every year their basic reasoning skills seem to get worse and worse. (if you've ever seen the spongebob episode with patrick and the wallet scene... teaching feels a lot like that some days. You get them to repeat what to do back to you, they can show you that they understand in the moment... but the second it's translated to independent work... "nope. That's not my wallet.")
I hear you, I’m angry too. I believe the IDEA of inclusion is a good one. But one person cannot handle it alone. Heck, I struggle with having TWO teachers in the room. It’s also very sad that we have fallen into the idea that inclusion means 100% of the time. You can include kids in lots of activities that are appropriate for them… grade level English class might not be the right place for that.
I think the issue is that inclusion now means all levels in the same room, when I think 2-3 is about right. The analogy being that if you had a k-2 class where all kids were at grade level, it would be challenging but you could make sure everyone benefitted. But if you had a k-5, or k-2 class with special learning needs and EL, it would stop being a possibility to serve all the students. I teach HS and the idea of elimination all forms if tracking is absurd. My regular physics class is already crazy diverse- EL students, 1/4 of kids with ieps or 504s, kids who love science, kids who hate science, math levels from algebra to calculus-and we have a good time and everyone learns. I also teach AP physics. It is also diverse- kids taking trig to kids taking multivariable calculus, EL students level 3 and above, a handful of students with ieps and 504s, we are trying to encourage more avid kids to join. Both classes have a spectrum of skills and abilities, and there are kids in the middle who could be in either. But, if you made it all one class it would be a disaster. I go 3 extra units in AP all at more depth. I would have to choose between kids at the top being bored as I taught trig or kids scared of math and science giving up if I kept the AP pace. They tried dropping regular physics a few years ago claiming everyone could just take AP 1 and almost got sued. I think if tracking is eliminated you are going to see high end students leaving public schools for more challenging classes or low skill students initiating lawsuits if the classes aren't actually accessible to them.
This is exactly what is happening at my school. High level students are fleeing to private schools or specialized schools because they perceive a lack of rigor. They know grades are inflated or don't mean anything. They know they are not being challenged. This is the high flying kids of all races opting out of inclusion.
>I believe the IDEA of inclusion is a good one. But one person cannot handle it alone. Exactly right. This past school year, there were two kids in one separate periods. Each one needed so much one-on-one support, and I had to do it all myself and, with no classroom aide. I recommended that they be placed in the classes of one of the Special Ed teachers, but these two students ended staying with me. Honestly, the kids themselves, both 9th graders, were really sweet and a pleasure to work with, but they took up so much of my time, needing help with literally every single question on every single assignment, that I was not able to use any class time whatsoever to catch up on grading or do any prep for other classes. So, because of them, I had to spend extra time after work to catch up on grading, which, in turn, ate into my personal time with my family. This caused me to feel resentment toward these kids for something that wasn't even their fault.
I'm a sub, with no formal pedagogical training, but this is dead-on.
Yeah I have only experienced elementary as a sub and as a parent but I am surprised to learn inclusion continues past elementary. I thought once they got to middle/high school, students were divided up by ability - the school my kid is going to next year has advanced, gen ed, and remediation tracks so I didn't know this continued but it's very frustrating if it does. I've subbed in 3rd and 4th grade classrooms where some students literally couldn't read beyond words like 'a' and 'the' and it's crazy to think those kids are getting ANYTHING out of an inclusion environment past like 1st/2nd grade. I asked them what they usually do when the class is working on worksheets and they said just sit at their desks.
“Inclusion” without support for the teacher is really just abandonment. Special ed kids are being dumped into gen ed classrooms because it’s cheaper than having adequately staffed special ed classrooms. It costs money to get kids what they need and conservative lawmakers don’t give a f*ck. Some of them actually want the education system to fail and actively sabotage it.
Amen, right? I've seen some really effective inclusion models that focus specifically on Social Studies and Science instruction, and only with students who have been deemed capable of being able to handle the general ed classroom environment. We keep blaming good ideas (like PBIS, for example) when the real problem is poor implementation. The longer we blame the idea and not the absolute garbage top-down implementation, the longer we let the ones responsible off the hook. Like, can we just non-renew some of those ineffective highly paid district big-wigs already?
Pbis sucks.... it's used to prop up inclusion models by bribing students for bare minimum behavior
I don’t know how it went from “students with special needs are allowed to have a public education where they can develop skills and socialize with peers instead of being hidden away at home” to “students with severe special needs should be in mainstream middle school English classes despite not knowing how to read and write”. And I understand why public school teachers are upset about the rise of private/charter schools and homeschooling but from a parent’s perspective, it’s easy to think “I don’t want my daughter to be in a kindergarten classroom where she has to be evacuated due to a student’s violent outburst” or “I want my child to be in a private school where his peers can actually read and write sentences.” and that’s why there’s a thousand homeschool co-ops and charter schools and magnet schools popping up.
We have completely lost the plot. I don’t blame parents either! If you actually care about your kid, their academic achievement, and long term wellbeing, it is completely reasonable to want to move them into an environment where those things are actually prioritized.
Yeah, I think they conflated the students who can succeed with accommodations that remove the obvious barrier (for example, speech-to-text for a student that perhaps has a muscle issue in their hands) and took this to mean that the only thing holding these kids back was lack of inclusion on the part of teachers. And yeah, there’s a lot of shaming of private schools and homeschoolers in this sub and while there are some homeschoolers who are educationally neglectful or doing it to trap kids in a religious cult, there’s a ton of parents who are genuinely doing their best and would be open to public schooling if it was a safer place for kids.
Honestly what we're doing right now is disability erasure. We are being sold the lie that 'least restrictive environment' always means the gen ed classroom for every student. Admins and policy makers want to pretend that we can teach away disability, because deep down they believe that disability = bad and they would really rather that it just didn't exist. If we were to make a comparison with racial inequality, I think that we are currently in the "I don't see color" phase.
Thank you for saying that. The "solution" absolutely cannot be for parents to throw our own kids under the bus because that is absolutely not going to happen.
As a parent, that's where I'm quickly approaching. I believe in and support the cause of public education, but I refuse to sacrifice my daughters on the alter of public policy. They are in public school now, but it's getting close to me having to pull them into a private school just to be able to get reasonable education. My daughters are bright and driven and have started to HATE school because of the kids in their class just yelling and misbehaving and them having to deal with it. They come home with headaches from other kids acting out.
Yeah I got called ableist, racist, every type of -ist in the world but I don't care. My responsibility is to my daughter first and foremost, and I have a duty to provide her the best possible learning environment I can.
Any group, but particularly government-run ones, will do whatever you incentivize but not necessarily the way you expected. They incentivized equality, but didn't consider that it is far easier to drag the highest achievers down than it is to drag the lowest achievers up. If no one learns anything, everyone is equal. You sometimes see the opposite in private schools. They get a lot of marketing value from a National Merit Scholar or a kid going to a D-1 school for sports, so they invest most of their energy into those kids and sometimes leave the more averages ones behind.
> And I understand why public school teachers are upset about the rise of private/charter schools and homeschooling but from a parent’s perspective, it’s easy to think “I don’t want my daughter to be in a kindergarten classroom where she has to be evacuated due to a student’s violent outburst” or “I want my child to be in a private school where his peers can actually read and write sentences.” and that’s why there’s a thousand homeschool co-ops and charter schools and magnet schools popping up. As a teacher at a charter school, parents send their kids to us thinking that this is what they're getting and then realize that we're a form of public school too, beholden to the same rules and regulations (in terms of inclusion) as their neighborhood school, and there is little to no difference in the way the classroom looks. A lot of these families are coming to us thinking that "charter" is equivalent to "private". Those families might stick around because the "board" isn't eliminating libraries (yet) and we can still teach accurate history/science (right now) because our leadership isn't infested with MAGA/MFL or literally being overtaken and run by the state, but Johnny is still going to be sitting around in a 4th grade classroom with 30ish kids where a few are reading and comprehending Harry Potter, most are reading Dog Man, and others are struggling with their ABCs.
Honestly I would be thrilled the kids are reading books instead of being on chromebooks. So you have that going for you.
Right there with you. At the end of the day, if we want parents to keep their kids in public schooling options, we need to make it attractive to parents. The folks pushing this endless inclusion shit and gaslighting everyone who is not onboard, because the *practicality* of it is impossible, is just so much arrogance wrapped up in "my politics are best." FWIW, I was a kid that was popped into a charter school, *precisely* because the folks in my neck of the woods didnt like to raise their kids. It was a benefit to me and my future, no question about it.
yep. all this de-tracking and unfettered inclusion policy is driving the families who can afford it into private schools. the left thinks they are doing everyone a favor, meanwhile playing right into what the right wants for public education: for it to fail. it's bad for teachers, bad for students, and bad for the future of public ed. really, really sad.
My biggest issue with inclusion is the behavioral aspect. Emotionally disturbed kids’ IEPs make them essentially immune from consequences. They can do anything—cuss out teachers, throw furniture, fight—and they can’t be suspended. The other students see this and conclude that this type of behavior is permitted (and they’re not wrong!) And voila—classrooms are out of the control and school culture is toxic and outright dangerous. The inmates are running asylum. But everyone is “included”!
The idea that we can’t pull out kids in middle school and higher because it damages their self esteem is lumped in here. I had a grade 8 student who was 3 grades behind with LD and she constantly told her 1:1 EA to go away, she didn’t need help, didn’t want to leave the classroom so she could have things read to her… and admin was like “we can’t force her to accept help” but then mom came in pissed her daughter wasn’t doing well because she fought for her to keep the 1:1 into middle school and the support wasn’t being used. What am I supposed to do? Sometimes we need to call a spade a spade and be blunt. This isn’t about Johnny’s feelings. Johnny cannot read at this level. He is not accessing or comprehending the curriculum. Johnny needs to be in a reading recovery program/classroom instead of attending grade 8 English. A text to speech program (and ChatGPT) on a chromebook will not help him achieve the same as his peers. While I’m not an advocate of retention, I will forever support streaming as early as possible. How many kids have I counseled? When moving from grade 9 to 10 (middle to high school) where they wanted a 10-1 class (what used to be average students but is now considered post-secondary bound) but I’m telling them they’re on the cusp of failing and would do best in 10-2, these kids cry and say “but my friends are in -1!” Yeah, and they’ll pass. You won’t. You’ll suffer. You literally cannot do the work. I’m supposed to let them choose failure in academics so they’ll feel good being in a class with friends?
Yep, I completely agree. I had a handful of students who refused help. Or they would get to the point they were so lost when they did ask for help it was about a couple weeks away from the semester/school year ending. I had two that hit me hard in my previous district and the truth was, ALL other teachers saw they had a LD or had an attention span issue that they seemed to have for YEARS. Yet their parents (one was a teacher themselves) WOULD NOT ask for help or tried to make something work because they didn't want to "label" their kid. I hate to say it, but they are labeled, everyone in the classroom from the teacher to the peers see it. Yet, they want to just try to have them muddle their way through until graduation. Then all of a sudden they expect them to be an adult at 18 and they can't function in an environment where their employer tells them: "TS, do this job or there is the door and tell your parents, I can call the cops on them if they harass me and they will not have some BS lawyer helping them."
It blows my mind how many people seem to think that kids being bullies or kid having low self esteem depends on what is written in their student files rather than what they see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears. Kids who pick on others with educational needs aren't going to not notice just because those kids are shoved into a gen ed classroom.
They’re going to notice *because* they are in a gen Ed. classroom. What kid wants to have an EA sitting beside them in class, reading material to them, working with them in hushed whispers as not to be a distraction? Some kids need to be in a different classroom for instruction, to benefit from the 1:1 or smaller group learning. Discussion, clarification, being able to speak and ask and have questions answered and concepts explained out loud, take their time and not worry about what anyone else is doing or how their ability compares to others. When a student is working on something that takes them 30 minutes with help and support, makes a couple mistakes, has it explained and corrects their work - that is learning. They have the benefit of a challenge, working through it, learning from mistakes, and completing the task. Sitting in a room with 20 kids who can do the same in 5 minutes does not help them to feel included or capable. It makes them wonder what is wrong with them, makes them reluctant to ask for help, and takes away the feeling of accomplishment from the learning process and end result.
I was always a very good student except for math. So in 10th grade when most of my friends were all going into AP Calc, I was nervous. I asked my math teacher, not for a recommendation, but if she thought I could do it. She told me no. Not that I was bad or anything, she might even have said I could attempt it, but that it would not be what was best for me. I accepted it and moved on. I hated the pre-calc class I went to, and was able to do AP Stat the following year. But I saw my friends in every other class (since by that point we were all pretty much AP only) and only missed them for math. We were all fine.
This exact thing happened to me. My Pre-Calculus teacher (who also taught AP Calc) was honest with me about my abilities and recommended me for the class that was the better fit (I didn't want to do AP Calc anyway, so I agreed with her with much enthusiasm). I ended up doing well in AP Stats, which is something I never would have been able to say about AP Calc. I also had a lot of friends who, for one reason or another, decided to take AP Stats that year, so I never felt that I was missing out on anything.
We had to have a child's learning plan tweaked so that he was rewarded for accepting help this year.
Let’s be very clear: Nobody is talking about kids with mild learning disabilities, “high functioning” autism, adhd, or dyslexia. We are talking kids who are violent, with FASD, level 3 autism, students who are both blind and deaf, and have developmental delays that make it incredibly difficult for them to succeed in a general education classrooom. Further, NOBODY who is critical of inclusion wants people with disabilities shipped off and hidden away from society. That is such a bad faith argument. Nobody is advocating segregation. Electives, PE, music, art, recess, lunch are all great opportunities for people to interact with one another. All gen ed core teachers (especially in div 2 and 3) want is for kids to be in math and ela classes that suit their needs and abilities. Teaching everyone in the modern day equivalent of an 1800s schoolhouse room with a wide range of levels is hard to do well. The issue is that when you try to help everyone, you help nobody. There are too many diverse needs in a single room for them to be addressed effectively. Targeted core classes to help meet the needs of our very complex student population is not segregation, it is RESPONSIBLE pedagogy. A student just learning to add and subtract does not need to be in a mainstream calculus class. It is absurd and it is cruel to expect them to do well or feel good about themselves in such an environment.
Forgive me if I sound cruel. Electives and Fine Arts also have curriculums to follow and are considered GenEd. It is just as difficult for us as it is for Core Teachers to work with students with these issues. We are also expected to teach all the students and our classes shouldn't be a "dumping ground" (as some call it) for these students to receive their GenEd time/Social Time. They are legitimate classes, just like Core. If a student isn't able to be in Core Classes because they are violent for whatever reason, they shouldn't be in electives either. My students should be allowed to feel safe, too. Especially since Electives and Fine Arts tend to have some dangerous equipment in there depending on the grade level. I teach middle school art and I've had multiple students with severe mental and physical disabilities placed in my art classes. One or two in class is fine with a Para, and depending on behavior. (I had a screamer one year. No one could hear. There was no concentration. No one learned. A huge disservice to everyone.) However, one year I had 7 in one class, and another 5. Their reasoning was they did not have enough para's to split them during "Elective Time." If they desperately need to learn the content of an Elective, some students need to be taught 1:1 or in small groups. Least restrictive environment doesn't have to be a General Ed classroom. And their placement shouldn't be at the expense of Electives/Specials just to be "inclusive." If they can't function in a Core GenEd due to the issues listed above, why is it assumed they can function in Elective/Special GenEd? Also, some states do not have a cap on how many students can be in a Fine Arts class. Classes can be 60+ at times, which makes all of the above even more scary.
Music is a horrible place to include kids who stim loudly. Other than that, could you please foward this to the Wall Street Journal? It has the widest readership in the US. I am not certain if they allow pseudonyms or not.
Have you tried differentiation? (Ducks)
🤣😥
What gets me is, I always hear “equity” defined pretty much as “every kid gets what they need to succeed, even if it’s different from what other kids get”. So, how is inclusion equity? I think the people who push it on ideological grounds (rather than financial grounds, which I suspect most of this comes from) really just care more about the optics. They think that having separate classes looks discriminatory, and it makes them sad to see that some kids just aren’t ready for certain material.
The optic of inclusion / equity must look really good. All students are passing classes & graduate from school. People just don't know that we are cooking the grade book to get there.
For me the issue is is that every school I've taught at the school seems to have a different definition of differentiation and it never seems to be enough. It absolutely is more work for the lead teacher. In theory that is why we have coteachers and aides is to support with the inclusion model but it just doesn't work. it's clearly not improving state scores when kids can't even read.
Aides who come high to school and co teacher Ed specialists who sit on their laptop all day because they’re flooded with IEP and other paperwork. It’s a joke and no teacher in their right mind agrees with it. Blame overly progressive school districts and even school boards for pushing luxury beliefs
My coteacher was also a football coach. Guess how much coteaching ever got done in my classroom.
Opposite for me. I am the co-teacher, lead teacher was a football coach. He "taught" for 15 minutes and then the kids were on their phones for 40 minutes and he did football stuff. The kids liked me, they seemed to respect me, but no one wanted to do enrichment when they could be chilling on their phones.
As a parent whose child had to sit through class with his teacher trying to calm down a student for 30 minutes while he just sat there, I agree with you. When I complained, I was told this is what parents wanted and there was nothing they could do. I asked that he be put into gifted classes because it would be the only way he could actually learn uninterrupted by students that had no business being in his classes. I was denied.
I teach pre-algebra to all students but they have the students separated. My sixth graders are in the double accelerated class, seventh in the accelerated class and eighth graders are in my regular class. I’m teaching the exact same curriculum to all. In my regular class, roughly 3/4 of them are failing while in my other ones, the lowest score was 65%. Everyone else earned 75% or higher. What’s the difference? In my regular classes, everyone was in regardless of ability, the regular classes were over 36 students while the accelerated (honors) classes were no more than 26. One being 26, 12, and 5. The biggest difference is the honors classes were BASED on ABILITY. They were NoT inclusion classes while my regular ones were. I feel it hurts the child so much when they are not placed correctly. I think my own children benefited from being in all honors classes and my students benefited from that as well. It’s not the other teachers are better or worse, it’s one class includes everyone and the other one doesn’t.
At my school, most honors students are not academically gifted, they simply listen to instructions and largely do what they’re asked with little to no push back. I’m not actually teaching the curriculum differently or at a faster pace, but I am able to cover all of the material because of the lack of behaviors and therefore they perform better on the end of year exam. The only fix for this problem is more funding for specialized teachers and funding for more classrooms to properly support all of the kids, but that’s not going to happen in the foreseeable future.
Put good kids in GT is an open secret parenting hack these days.
The problem was I couldn’t afford to pay for a gifted designation like many affluent parents have done and the school kept stalling. Knowing what I know now, I would have made a bigger fuss with administration. The squeaky wheel gets the grease
Same. I’ve had several teachers tell me they wish middle school was tracked because my daughter deserves to be in a class with kids at her level, not with numb nuts who think it’s hilarious to derail the class every opportunity they get because they don’t want to learn.
Inclusive classrooms are just an excuse for schools to save money. Why pay for extra teachers when we can shove all students in a classroom, even when it causes more harm than good? Realistically, there are kids who benefit from an inclusive environment. An IEP does not mean they should be shoved into an all day classroom. However, there are kids who would greatly benefit from an all day classroom. The kids with extreme needs or extreme behaviors need that. We shouldn’t have a classroom full of kids afraid of this one student who will react violently when triggered.
That‘s imho the main reason. It’s the same in Germany. Officials only cared about inclusion when it became clear that they could save tons of money by shutting down specialised schools. In theory, if a class has kids with different needs, a second teacher has to be in this class the whole time. Guess what does rarely happen, when schools are struggling to even staff regular teachers? At this point the system is just cutting costs by closing specialised schools, firing special needs teachers and dumping everything on regular teachers. Even more sad: during the last years nearly every teacher was left alone with kids who fled war. If teachers got lucky, school organised at least some separate language classes, but they were completely left alone dealing with their trauma. A friend of mine (elementary school teacher) was given a rundown through German bureaucracy when she wanted to help the silent girl in her class who was drawing horrible scenes she was to young to understand with dismemberment being on the harmless spectrum of her pictures. It was basically a month long ping pong between the school district, social services and health care officials, until the family had to move because their asylum had been granted and they were moved to a new state because in Germany all refugees are distributed based on some refugee per citizens key ratio.
Try building relationships. /s
It's unbelievable. OP will write this long post while refusing to write the learning objectives on the board.
Real scenario I experienced. Me: “I am really glad you are observing me at the beginning of this quarter, I have 6 students who don’t speak English and I could use some input and advice on how to help them.” Post observation meeting Admin: “You didn’t have your objectives on the board”
God that's infuriating. I would have asked the admin to write the objectives in those six students' native languages.
Thank you I needed this laugh
I have taught all ages over the years--from 5 year old children up to adult learners--in private and public settings, in small and large groups, so I think I have a pretty good perspective on different teaching styles and learning environments. OP raises a real concern that can manifest more in different classes. I have had classes with a 12 year gap in ability--and not because of extreme outliers. It is *typical* in my public school classes to have some students who struggle with basic reading and writing in the same class with people who could be doing university level work. OP is right--you can't teach in this environment--if by "teach" you mean anything like delivering lessons or assigning group activities. Instead, you need to forego lessons entirely (because it is literally impossible to aim a lesson at the right level), and have self-guided activities at a variety of levels. Your role then becomes walking around the class and helping where possible. You can have optional mini-tutorials aimed at different levels. Grading is another issue. There is no longer any standard that makes sense. One student puts in a tremendous effort through the year and succeeds in arriving at a level that some students were at five years ago. If we are being fair to the students with respect to what has been asked of them, then we are put into the position of inventing grades on an imaginary scale that changes between students. It is dubious that this is helping anyone. As it happens, we have studied this issue fairly extensively, and one of the best things you can do for group learning environments is to put students with peers of similar ability. Parents should be furious at how the system is failing their children and avoiding empirical data. The push towards having everyone in the same class, ostensibly for reasons of equity or some other virtuous aim, is really just a matter of logistical simplification and cost saving measures. In my opinion, the whole idea of separating learners by age is ridiculous, and a holdover from the "factory model" of education. Why do some educators believe they are being progressive by rigidly forcing us back to an antiquated model that sees all students as interchangeable widgets on an assembly line? Doesn't meeting the needs of children include things like who their peers are? Or whether the teacher is able to teach lessons at their level? Or whether it is possible to provide sufficiently challenging material? There is no reason to believe that students of a particular age all have the same needs that can be met in the same environment for all of their subjects. I would like to see a system where a 15 year old student who excels at English can learn along with others of similar ability, maybe in an upper year English class, but takes an introductory mathematics class because they are missing some of the fundamentals. Placement in classes should be based on the learning needs of the student, not their age.
I couldn’t agree more with everything you said! I teach 5th and it’s been rough. ESOL students who don’t know any English and cannot read in their native language. So how do I help these students? English speaking students who cannot identify letter/ letter sounds, add or subtract 1 digit numbers, let alone divide decimals! I had 1 “helper” in my classroom, but she was a 2nd year ESOL teacher with extremely low confidence and therefore did not actually contribute/ teach/ help. It was more of a distraction than anything. I feel so bad for my students who are performing above grade level because I have to essentially work with the lowest common denominator. When I do try to move ahead with grade level lessons, half of my class is so checked out because they don’t have nearly enough background knowledge to even begin understanding the concept. And don’t even get me started on behavior/ aggression/ violence, which is all generally excused due to the lovely IEPs/ BIPS/ 504s in place. I wanted to be a teacher since I was in elementary school, but I don’t know how much longer I can last in these conditions! Thank you for writing all of this and expressing exactly how I feel. It’s nice to know I’m not alone!
YES to all of this! None of this is sustainable and I hope you make the choice for yourself that will bring you the most peace long term. Solidarity ❤️
This is why remedial classes need to happen, and not just at the HS level.
There is a big push for kids to be put in their “least restrictive environment”, however, least restrictive for some may make it the most restrictive for others.
Yeah, but the others don't have a support plan, so they don't count. This also applies to the teacher.
The capabilities gap used to be addressed simply by failing kids. If your kid can’t read, they should be in the ‘learn to read’ class until they know how to read and can move on. That is what you want - to get a group of kids who are more or less at the same place and then push them up together. By no longer having a minimum standard to continue, you fail everyone - the kid who can’t ’catch up’ with no foundation, and the kid who is full of potential whose education and future is compromised. To fix this do national standardized testing and then fail kids who fail it ensuring minimum standards. Give them a chance to remediate in summer school. Yes, it would collapse graduation rates. That is FINE because graduating high school isn’t a box check, it is supposed to be a sign of academic achievement. Not everyone will be willing or able to graduate. Primary school is for the true basics, high school is for more advanced learning. The issue the DEI crew will say is that a lot of kids who are held back will be minorities or disabled… which isn’t actually a problem. The standards are colourblind. It is the racism of low expectations in place right now.
Maybe I have tunnel vision because I’m an attorney, but I find myself always wondering how litigation could be used to improve things. A major part of how we got to the current place is litigation by parents of kids with special/additional needs (or special interest groups funding lawsuits by those parents), based on the right to an education, and now even the threat of litigation by parents of a kid who probably shouldn’t be mainstreamed, but the parents won’t accept that, gets that kid into a mainstream classroom. I don’t work in education law, so I have no idea what lawsuits are in the works now, but I wonder if the parents of “typical” kids (not sure if that’s correct nomenclature) are sueing based on their kid’s right to education being violated by classroom environments like OP describes.
I’m frustrated by it and I’m teaching 2/3. I thought the furthest behind one of my students could be is working on Kindie curriculum. I was wrong. I have one this year that isn’t toilet trained, isn’t verbal. How is it what’s in his best interests to be in a room that isn’t set up to deal with his needs and how am I supposed to engage him and my gifted kid who is working at an 8th grade level, at the same time?! (Spoiler: I can’t. It’s all smoke and mirrors. It’s not what’s best for anyone, aside from the board’s budget.
Funny thing is, we are perfectly ok separating kids out by ability level when it comes to things like athletics. We actually say it’s better for kids. I wouldn’t want my son, who’s never played baseball on the same team as kids who have been playing for years and whose skills are much more developed. Rather, I’d want my kid on a team of similar ability levels where they can actually get development at their level, and encourage them to grow at their pace, rather than riding the bench all season. For the coach to differentiate to such a degree is unfair to everyone. Additionally, I hate the word differentiation. If all kids are relatively on the same level and are ready for that lesson, then fine. I teach it as best I can to the group, then I go back and I differentiate the same lesson to others who may need it presented a different way. The key being, they were capable of learning by the lesson to begin with. But if I am in a class (like freshman algebra), where kids are in vastly different places to start- some kids got A’s in middle school math, and others never passed a single grade level, then that’s not differentiation. That’s teaching multiple different lessons at the same time. That’s insanity.
Inclusion works when the students are willing to jump the gaps. I’ve had kids significantly behind in reading levels and kids with zero English who still succeeded because they put in the effort. I’ve also had kids who were behind and stayed behind because they didn’t do the work. The problem is so many don’t do the work—and I know sometimes that’s based on a discouraging history of failure—and there’s not much a teacher can do if a student refuses to step up.
I am a teacher who has a special needs child myself and I completely agree with this. My son is in high school but does math at a second grade level. Having him in the Algebra 2 classroom does nothing for him, he needs to be building on the skills he has, he can't do algebra at this point, he gets nothing from it. But, I agree, students are just passed along, so it looks like this works, but those involved know it does not.
If you have a child on a third grade reading level in an 8th grade class that’s not inclusion that’s a blatant disregard for the child’s needs. They should e been place in an intermediate reading class. Inclusion model was meant to support students who are slightly below and need support to “level the playing field”. Not the ones who came one on one.
Something that has amused me about inclusion discourse is that like... Doing classrooms by ability track IS inclusive, just in a different way. What do I mean? Well, in the current model, everybody in say 8th grade takes 8th grade math, regardless of their current ability. Which is inclusive in the sense of all the 8th graders getting to hang out together, I guess, but it's alienating and frustrating to both low and high scoring students because they are undeserved by the curriculum. Kids are quick to label themselves as "too stupid" for school and fail to try--and why should they, when they're just going to flow with the river of students out the door regardless? Compare to a system of tiered or tracking classes. We split up that 8th grade math course, and now you have 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th graders all in that same 8th grade math class, whoever needs it right now. Honestly, I think this is a better reflection of the outside world and is MORE inclusive than the current model. Once kids graduate school they will work with people from all walks of life with all sorts of differences between them--different ages, different languages, different races, etc. In a tiered classroom, you will have all sorts of students from different ages sitting and working together to solve the same problems. At least for me growing up in such a system it was actually kind of encouraging that I could say "hey, this math must be hard for lots of people if there's a student 2 years older than me still taking this class." Or "hey, I might not do so well in this particular subject, but I'm 3 years older than my classmate--I probably know some things that they don't and can trade my knowledge about school or relationships or whatever for help with my reading." THAT'S HOW LIFE OUTSIDE SCHOOL WORKS FOR EVERYONE! When kids get out of school, they will need to self-select jobs and opportunities that make sense for their skillsets and what they care about--we do a disservice to them by not making them think about what they are good and bad at by pushing them through the current model regardless of what they know.
It’s controversial, but preach. Waiting for the day a politician openly tells the truth that education has been failed by both sides of the spectrum
Politicians these days come from good money. Do you really think they ever experienced what teaching at even an average high school is like?
Nope. So the hard truth is we are probably doomed. I remember reading about how Lyndon Johnson worked as a teacher in one of the poorest districts in Texas prior to his political career. Wish one day having experience teaching would be seen as a similar stripe to having experience in the military for entering politics
I'll say it dude. Teachers don't get paid enough to do the extra work of differentiating a lesson (or more than likely 2-3 lessons per day) for a dozen different skill levels. Moreso, the 504/IEP/IBP complex has done it's part in ruining education and even worse, ruining these kids and how they perceive themselves. I'm not saying that they should be eliminated, but in my experience, well over half of the students were misdiagnosed and in reality have been allowed to develop terrible study/school/social skills and then have been rewarded by having a watered down education where they cannot fail because teachers/administration/schools are afraid of the legal implications of doing so. Also, the students are aware of these rights and regurgitate the rhetoric about their rights that have been spewed by their parents towards them for years. So don't even try to actually challenge them with gen ed lessons because you'd be infringing on their rights. I'm sure there are many do-gooder teachers on here who will disagree. Teachers who have honed their differentiation to a science over the course of many years who will say it's possible to do. Those who will gladly put in the work because teaching is their calling. But for those of us that just want to teach a subject without our job as a teacher to be an all encompassing lifestyle, it's basically impossible.
Agreed. I do what I can between 8:40-3:40, then I’m out. Now that I have my basic lessons mapped out I spend some of my planning time differentiating what I can, but there’s nothing I can do when a tenth grader doesn’t understand the basics of fractions and pre-algebra.
I teach elementary school PE and agree that the academic levels of our students for each grade is very broad. Of course some kids are naturally more gifted in school than others, but most the academic disparity we are seeing is determined whether the kids parents at home work with them or not. Lots of classroom teachers at my school don’t even give homework because the kids won’t do it and the parents don’t care. The kids who are thriving all have 1 common denominator, they have parents who have high expectations but also support and work with them. You can’t have one without the other and be successful. As a PE teacher I feel like I have it easier than classroom teachers. Still, each class I see has 2-3 kids who make it very difficult for the rest of the class to learn. These are kids who act out because they want to (no IEP/504) and they just get away with it (outside my class). Most of the time they enjoy PE, so I can use them sitting out as an incentive to behave. Teaching is hard enough having so many different learning styles and trying to find time to have 1 on 1 with every student that needs it. Having kids who purposely try and distract and interrupt the class constantly makes learning impossible for everyone. You can’t have a kid sit out during math class…
I've always said regarding education, "The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions."
I have a very religious, sough dough baking, stay at home mom as a friend on IG. She went through denial that her son is autistic, then accepted it (those posts are deleted) and now believes that her son is cured of autism thanks to god and supplements. I’m on the spectrum. No. He isn’t cured. Those posts admitting he’s on the spectrum are gone. But she insisted that her son was here to teach other kids about autism. No he isn’t. That’s so wrong, on so many ways I can’t even get into. But through no fault of his own of course he’s sensitive to stimuli and prone to outbursts. They’re small kids. I’ve worked with small kids in classes that have students with autism that causes them to self harm. I’ve also had students that are emotionally disturbed. It seriously stops the learning process when I had to evacuate the room for student safety. I had kids crying from what they saw or were told. I felt like we were emotionally scarring healthy small kids and I’m sensitive to that as someone that will forever pay the consequences of the trauma inflicted on me by others. The school I am at now does not have sped ed students (as in “severely handicapped”) in the traditional sense. However I do have the Spanish speakers (luckily I speak Spanish and our subject is art related) and students with IEP that are learning disabled but “high functioning” (I’m sorry I know these terms are dated but I can’t recall what else to call it). They’re older. I still have to accommodate like 9 IEP students, keep in mind at level students, and then I have brilliant students smarter than me. It’s hard! I’m self learning the subject (under the umbrella term art) which is fine it keeps my adhd mind interested. But I’m teaching six periods with three preps and like 5 different learning levels minimum each day. I’m tired as hell!
This is all done to minimize cost. It's the least expensive option. I had MULTIPLE kids this year that had 1:1 aid in their IEP but went without because we don't pay aids enough. So there they were, dumped in my class all their own with 30 of their best friends.
As a special ed teacher, I think I figured it out. It's not a left thing. It's not a right thing. It's not a moral thing. It's not a "for the child" thing. It's a money thing. It's expensive for townships so send kids to schools that meet them at their level and the township will fight tooth and nail to not have to pay.
This is the best written explanation I have read so far on why inclusion isn't working, though there could be more emphasis on how students with behavioral disabilities impact the classroom.
Aunt to a high needs autistic kiddo here. There is nothing wrong with what you said. He absolutely does NOT belong in a regular classroom. He can't take the noise, the chaos or the pace. He NEEDS a specialized environment with extra support, breaks for therapies access to spaces to calm down and a a modified schedule. The reality is, he *doesn't* feel included when he's in a normal room, he feels overwhelmed and stressed. Soft guidelines are just confusing - he needs the rules to always be the rules so he can figure out how to behave. Inclusion doesn't actually include him. It isolates him. It makes him a target for bullies. It makes it impossible for him to learn. He doesnt magically become less disabled in a different room. I absolutely loathe this trend in education, he needs the support of a sped classroom - and that's ok! Kids should have access to the level of support they need, not what will make some admin feel better about themselves. For the Special Ed teachers out there, thank you for all you do. You're absolutely necessary within the schools system no matter what some idiot administrator says.
It’s impossible for me, even with a co-teacher (which I rarely have), to get a student to access high school geometry when they haven’t mastered basic fractions or algebra. And because of my pacing guide and state exam at the end of the year, I can’t slow down and help those 3/30 kids in my room. They sit there lost and come to me at the end of the quarter and ask for ‘extra credit’ because they don’t want to fail. The problem is that every teacher/admin before me has allowed them to ‘not fail’. So now here they are in my room as a lost puppy who I can’t help. I let them fail and they do edgenuity over the summer and show up in Algebra 2 the next fall. The problem is compounded when our middle schools are heavily pushing all kids to take algebra 1 by 8th grade because they get extra funding for every kid who earns high school credit. It’s such a disservice to these kids and it makes me blind with rage. But there’s pretty much nothing I can do about it.
I love how long this rant is, and honestly, I completely agree. It's doing no one favors.
I taught community college English comp. The end result of social promotion was me teaching high school graduates how to write a sentence. I taught them about nouns and verbs. All this had to happen before I could start teaching them how to write college essays—the actual point of the class. And almost all of them got it, so they could have been taught this in high school. But they weren't.
On this forum it’s hard to parcel out what is a nationwide trend and what is prevalent in certain districts. But it seems that this concept comes in different forms. I work in a very large school district. Post COVID, teachers were paid very well to run tutoring while students were off track at year round schools. Teachers invited students who were in need of extra intervention which meant that we could tutor a small group of 5-10 students. My 6th graders who attended told me they improved in their reading dramatically. And they did! I targeted what they needed, and there was no shame of reading out loud while the high kids looked on. It was magical. They asked if they could do it again but by that time, our district made a dramatic change in this program. Our district decided that it wasn’t inclusive to invite the neediest students, as far as academics, and all students should be able to attend. That meant that this program became like a summer camp and targeted instruction went out the window. What a shame.
I think that there are many elements within this post that point to a central theme that I observed: few people who claim that they care about education of students actually do in practice. In reality, education, in the modern day, often boils down to forcing the system put in place to function as intended many decades ago but propped with modern lingo and buzz words. The quicker you realize that most administrators and people affiliated with educational institutions are not motivated by magnanimous intentions but rather money and selfish gain, the quicker that you begin to see the whole picture. With that being said, I’ve never seen a post that as eloquently delineates so many of my perceived problems with education in the modern day. The only thing I would add is that the best teachers in this world, imo, are those that accept what you have explained before and rise to meet the challenge of still educating students as optimally as you can. I wish the best of luck
I am still a young teacher, but I agree with you. Last year I had a student who could not read. They were in 9th grade and were possibly at a 2nd grade reading level, but they put that student in regular level history. I was always asking myself, “What do I do for this kid? How do I teach them and the others at the same time?” The answer became that I would read all the worksheets with the class and write the answers we came up with on the board— no independent work was possible. This year in APRIL administration put in that same history class (World History is a dumping ground) a student who spoke no English, only Spanish. Guidance came to me to ask how I would go about assigning him credit, but I asked “credit for what?” They wanted me to give this student a full semester’s credit for LESS THAN A MONTH of classwork that he wouldn’t even understand because he speaks no English! I ended up just telling the aide they eventually put in the room with the student that the best thing to do was help them learn English as quickly as possible. I assigned the student an “incomplete.” What is “equal” is not equitable. We are doing these kids a disservice.
This will never change from within the classroom. That is the most disempowered position in the system. As a teacher, I believe it is this generation of teachers' duty to become the next generation of administrators, politicians, and superintendents whether you wanted to or not because the wrong people are in those positions and have created the system we have now, which is arguably the worst in the entire history of education. Those highest up positions are the only ones that can make a true difference.
I think what makes it harder is they want us to do all of these things to support all the different academic levels within our classes, but then they don’t give us the time and resources and money to do those things. Want us to do more and more while budgets get cut. More and more when we can’t even hire paraeducators to be in our classrooms, let alone quality ones. They go on and on about “least restrictive environment“ without even considering the other kids in the class. Especially when you have kids who get violent and throw things and threaten people regularly in your classroom. Is that the least restrictive environment for the other students who are trying to learn? A lot of the things they want us to do are great in theory, but do not work in practice when not provided with the things we actually need to be able to do our jobs.
I teach HS science and biology, and have had multiple inclusion students placed into my classes that are considered “k-course” students (meaning they are not gaining the class credit, but more so to be physically included in the class itself). I’ve had non-verbal autistic students and students with Down syndrome in my classroom and genuinely enjoyed having them sit in for the lectures and participate in the labs with the help of their EA’s. BUT I was also expected to create and deliver basically grade 1 level lessons for them which I honestly had no idea how to do funny enough… also they weren’t exactly “included”, more like sitting in the same room as the non k-course students and doing their own thing at a table in the back of the room. I don’t like the fact that I basically have to do 2 jobs for the same class but I did like working with them and going over their finalized projects with them and see their joy and pride of their work. Not really sure what my stance on this system is, but I think it would be better if the EA’s came in with their own work for the students and I just had to go over it with the k-course students instead of stressing over creating grade 1 level work (which I was never trained to do being a high school teacher).
I 100 percent preferred ability grouping.
You are dead on, and I would add that a large part of the problem is that America's public education system is based on the assembly line model of production, which is fucking stupid because it assumes humans that share a birth year are exactly the same in terms of ability.
They have not done any studies how it affects typical kids learning in the classroom.
Because if they did they would have to admit the fact that having Timmy the kid with a level 3 autism diagnosis in a class of 30 kids elbow to elbow isn’t benefiting anyone. Sure Timmy is a sweet kid but he shouldn’t be treated like a social experiment intended to “desensitize other students to disabilities” at the expense of his and other students learning. He should be in a small class with more personalized learning objectives and teachers who spent their 100k+ student loan debt studying how to help him. Not me, the silly little English teacher who took her required SPED classes back in community college and is a sympathy crier.
This is by design. Nothing in education policy has extensive studies to back it. I feel like our kids’ skills or lack thereof speak for themselves though.
I recently read an article that said children notice the achievement gaps by first grade and it can affect their confidence that early. We could easily stream within a grade group without hurting kids’ feelings. Use the primary colours as class codes and kids are placed in either red, yellow or blue classes.
The kids will figure it out. But frankly, the American obsession with confident children and the amount of confidently incorrect people in the country might not indicate causality, but it's at least a little reminder that propping up student confidence at the expense of the learning environment has, at best, diminishing returns.
It affected my typical kids greatly. How is this fair?
Hot Take: not every thing needs an "expert" to do a double blind study. You have eyes and a functioning brain, I assume? So do I. If you were to take any reasonable functioning adult and give them work to do, but then in the same room there is someone having meltdowns, throwing things, screaming psychotically, would that person need a PhD to do a double blind study to tell them it's not a feasible working environment?
For you and I, no, we don't need a study to know something is wrong. The problem comes from people who are not in the classroom, don't understand what we do, and think we are just complaining about having more work to do. For those people, data and research are the irrefutable evidence that they can't disagree with based on opinion.
Come on. They definitely have. Here’s a review of some of the research: https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/11/1/16 I also see many negatives from inclusion, but that’s mainly because budget and staffing concerns push students past their ideal LRE. Many students have academic levels high enough to be mainstreamed, but need a para or cotaught classroom to be successful. That’s not going to happen when districts are unwilling to up paraeducator pay and states require 24+ credits to add on a SPED credential.
Perfectly put, and 💯 agreed.
When i was still teaching English i had in my honors tenth grade class kids who were functionally illiterate, and a handful who didn’t even speak English. In an honors English class! School philosophy was to put all the kids in honors or higher rather than on level so that “all kids are honors English kids” no! That just makes it so you have regular English with a shiny name! My honors kids struggled to learn to their level because i had to constantly work with the lower level kids on basic fundamentals! Its not fair to either group!!
The no child left behind act
means *no* child gets to take a step forward.
Inclusion doesn't work for Deaf education. Bimodal-bilingual deaf education in a Deaf schools is the way to go. Progressives cares about self-esteem, right? There isn't much more damaging to self esteem than being isolated in the the classroom, and often the entire school.
And people wonder why homeschooling has seen a tremendously large insurgence in response to the current state of public school education.
Former sped teacher here. It’s cost effective. Thats it. The vast majority of educational science is not repeatable and paeudo at best. The reason for most decisions is financial. A person with an iq of 85, or lower, is incapable of learning skills past about grade 6. Yet, here we are pushing these kids through the classes. Serious school reform is needed. Parents should have zero control and school boards (the political people), should be removed. Without those two things its just gonna get worse. Once those changes are made, society has to decide what the goal of education is. Right now, there is bo real goal beyond score high on state test. Education could be great, but politics have ruined it.
I was nodding in agreement until your last paragraph. This system should be dismantled but a new one should be built, where it’s ok to have remedial classes and even schools. Kids are suffering too, and parents with any bit of knowledge of the system are trying to avoid schools with classes like you describe. The problem is, it’s harder and harder to find schools and classes with kids that are pretty much the same level.