High school special education teacher Wayne Grytting, writing in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, says state bureaucracy is needlessly denying students with disabilities the chance to graduate with a diploma. It’s not fair to withhold diplomas because teachers can’t figure out the rules for submitting portfolios for student work, he says.

Last year, half of all disabled students failed the portfolio, many because of unseen errors by their teachers. You would be hard pressed to find a special-ed teacher who is not aghast at what we are being mandated to do. State education “experts” act like astrologers pretending to do science.

At our high school, disabled students are learning to cook, swim, use PowerPoint, garden, bag groceries, climb rock walls, use Metro, paddle canoes, manage recycling, surf the Internet, do pottery and woodcrafts. We’d love to produce meaningful portfolios that respect the richness of what our students accomplish.

Anonymous comments on Grytting’s op-ed question whether students in special education should be receiving diplomas at all, and whether parents should be responsible for all life-long costs of their children. Many of the posts are hostile.

See related post here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 10:36 am and is filed under NOT2BEMISSED, No Child Left Behind, special education, standardized testing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post