“The Time has Come,” the Walrus Said, “to Speak of Many Things!”

Abstract

As a special educator, I find myself in an ever-increasing Mad Hatter-March Hare sort of existence. I wonder if you too are having trouble just trying to keep up? This is true on many special education fronts: in curriculum, in classroom settings, and in the shear complexity of our professional conversations. In particular, how did and curriculum standards become the desired goal for all students? Whatever happened to reasonable standards, goals and expectations that used to be acceptable back here in the trenches, where most of us reside? When I think of rigorous, I immediately envision Arctic explorer Anne Bancroft trekking through snow and ice, dragging a dogsled by a shoulder harness, or Lance Armstrong making that final uphill push in the French Alps. Must all of us strive to achieve universal levels? It would appear that few of us are either motivated enough or talented enough to be able to achieve high or rigorous standards. For my part, I think it may be enough to achieve reasonable goals. Frustrated parents, students, and teachers may agree. A Tweedle Dum, Tweedle Dee rigor issue in my current world is the widely accepted notion that special or general education interventions and curricula must be scientifically based, or variants thereof such as scientifically based, peer reviewed, peer juried and data driven (No Child Left Behind Act). Much of what we know from special education research, just like in other disciplines, is narrowly construed and focused on relative minutia; for example, time on task, reading fluency, or short-term memory. As a consequence, we find ourselves in a place similar to those embracing the new frontier in brain research: We are on the cusp of an explosion of information about practice, but right now we don't have many research-based practices on which to hang our hats. Those few practices we know for sure are effective can be named on the fingers of one hand: direct instruction works; strategy instruction works; children who are safe, alert and fed do better than those who are not; children who are instructed in small, intensive settings have a better chance of improving their skills; and students who achieve at levels one and one-half standard deviations below their peers can make progress but do not catch up (yes, there are a few more fingers). Still, mostly we know how to apply findings when it comes to teaching basic reading skills to young students. In more complex areas such as math application and reading comprehension, we do not yet have the body of scientific evidence needed to make research based practice more than a hope for the future. I must have been taking a Cheshire cat nap when confusion arose about the value of special education settings. The thought goes something like this: Children with disabilities are better off in general education classrooms because special education classrooms are somehow inferior or produce minimal results (the opposite of rigorous). …