In Press: Learning Disabilities: A Multidisciplinary Journal

The New Era (2002) document issued by the President’s commission goes a long way to remove individual rights, devalue individual differences and place children with learning disabilities and other “high-incidence disabilities” in the most restrictive environment, i.e., the General Curriculum (Cherkes-Julkowski, 2002; http://educational-advisor.com/articlegencurric.html). It attacks individual differences and individual rights systematically, from a number of directions. First it makes the general curriculum the reference point for all identification under IDEA, rather than the current self-reference inherent in the discrepancy model. This gives great weight to the general curriculum and assumes that not only is it a right and good curriculum but it is right and good for every child. It is from the general curriculum that no child should be left behind. It is into the specifications (restrictions) of the general curriculum that every child should be squeezed. The original idea of an IEP carried with it the very important realization that the curriculum itself was often the problem for children with individual differences.

Solutions before Problems/Performance without Understanding
Since the sole reference point is the general curriculum, there is no need for assessments that define the idiosyncrasies of the individual, i.e., “services first, assessment later” (Commissioner Steve Bartlett, p.20). On its face, this would makes absolutely no sense as a formulation, suggesting that a solution can be found without an awareness of the problem. However, as a semantic slight of hand, Bartlett’s formulation forces out the very existence of the problem, i.e., there are no noteworthy individual differences, learning disability among them. Not coincidentally, it is exactly this formulation that underlies a good deal of the general curriculum: assume individual experience and abilities don’t influence learning; have the child execute the response ( “focus on results not process”, p. 10) and worry about what it means later if at all (more about this below). In this formulation, the only problem of concern at all is conformity to the general curriculum. This position removes individuality from the picture altogether and unleashes the dominance of the general curriculum, with no need of safe guards for the now irrelevant individual.

Double Speak
Along with the dismissal of assessment, out goes the IQ and ability-achievement discrepancy as a reference point for learning disability. There is no need to reference the individual against him or herself since the individual has been rendered irrelevant except to the degree that s/he has found a way to conform to the general curriculum.
New Era then goes on to attack individual interests at the level of due process. It threatens to “focus on results instead of process” (p.10), i.e. due process. Schools would be relieved of the burden of procedural safeguards and the contractual obligations of the IEP. IEP’s would be a “guide”. The delivery of specific services would not be obligatory, but on an as-needed basis (decided by whom?) to meet desired outcomes (desired by whom?). Without due process rights and without a clear IEP to which to refer, who would decide what the outcomes would be, if they should be changed and if there were a need for those unsecured services? The answer is clear.
All of this is set out, like the emperor’s new clothes, as a promise of something better. There will be better instruction for everyone, making the false assumption that there is one form of instruction that is better for everyone. We will be rid of the ills of IQ. There will be a “focus on substantive educational and developmental outcomes and results”. Of course, what is precisely eliminated is the substance from the IEP, including a sound assessment upon which to base informed and individually tailored instruction in the skill and content areas, as promised under the law. Unlike the emperor’s new clothes, this pretense is not a mere embarassment. It has the potential to do great harm to the individual and to the culture at large (see below).

Baby:Bath Water::Intelligence:IQ
The offer to eliminate IQ is tempting. tests IQ tests are an abomination for many reasons, primarily because they have very little to do with thinking (what is the capital of Greece, what is a thief, what is missing, memorize the numbers). They are an especial abomination when applied to learning disabilities since the specificity of any learning disability will inevitably distort aggregate IQ scores by washing away at one and the same time high and low points. For example, if a child has a visuospatial processing problem and does very poorly on the block design but very well with the more sequential demands of picture arrangement, this might be disguised by a performance IQ that lies somewhere between the midpoint of the two, washing out the extremes which are the very essence of the learning disability. This would be like saying that a person with only one leg that had twice the average strength of a single leg could be validly described as having average strength in her legs.
Although it is tempting to snatch any opportunity to rid the field of IQ testing, the offer made to do just that by the President’s Commission in their New Era document ought to be resisted at all costs. Despite its inadequacies as a reflection of intelligence, IQ measurement does maintain the centrality of the individual in the identification process. discrepancR Rax
Just because IQ has become a corruption of the idea of intelligence does not mean that the idea of intelligence itself has lost its value. When taken to mean the ability to think, to figure things out without specific instruction, intelligence becomes a meaningful standard against which to judge the progress of learning. I would offer the Raven Standard Progressive Matrices as a reasonable instrument to measure actual intelligence and as a replacement for IQ as the standard to use in ability-achievement comparisons.
Presumably there are individual differences in intelligence and those differences ought to say something about an individual’s rate, quality and limits to learning. Singular, so-called good instruction would not be able to level effects due to variance in intelligence.
This fact seems lost to the President’s commission who effectively have thrown out the idea of intelligence along with IQ. Having thrown them both out, the only reference point is the general curriculum. The child is to be measured against only it, in the form of her “response to instruction” or “adaptation to the general education classroom.” Discrepancies or deficits are now defined solely in the light of an unassailable entity called “instruction” or “general education”. Is there any reason to believe that there is any more objectivity or worth to these idealizations than there is to IQ? Why must a child learn the algorithm for long division or for division by a fraction? Why learn the names of cloud formations?
The President’s Commission objects vehemently to IQ-achievement discrepancy but offers no clear reason why. What we are told is:
“IQ achievement discrepancies are not necessary for the identification of children as having a learning disability.” (p.24)
“There is no compelling reason to continue to use IQ tests in the identification of learning disabilities. And that if we eliminated IQ tests from the identification of individuals with learning disabilities we could shift our focus to making sure that individuals are getting the services they need and away from the energy that’s going into eligibility determination - Sharon Vaughn” (p.24)
there’s little justification for IQ tests
children don’t need them.
For a document that touts “scientifically based instruction”, the lack of science to say nothing of reason in these pseudo-arguments raises more than one eyebrow.
In fact, the worst of the IQ test is that part which is most closely aligned with the general curriculum. There are formal, dictionary definitions, encyclopedic facts (How far is it from New York to Los Angeles), speed delivery of memorized arithmetic facts, memorization of completely disconnected bits of information (digit span), manipulation of symbols with no semantic base (coding, symbol search) and opinion surreptitiously presented as fact (comprehension test items such as, tell me some advantages of getting the news from a newspaper rather than from a television news program).

A Learning Disability IS an “instructional casualty”
The New Era commission would have it that “instructional casualties” are categorically different than learning disabilities. A learning disability is in fact defined by a mismatch between instruction and the child’s preferred way of thinking/processing. The federal definition (Federal Register, Vol.64, No. 48/ Friday March 12, 1999, section 300.7) tells us that a learning disability is a “disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes...that may manifest itself in an imperfect ability” to function in the context of typical classroom demands to “listen, think, speak, read, write, spell or to do mathematical calculations”. By definition, all students with LD have at least normal intelligence who, by reason of their neurological/psychological condition, are not able to access instruction. Different students with different kinds of learning disabilities will fail to access different parts and kinds of instruction due to the differences in how their basic psychological processes are affected.
A learning disability is both an instructional and curriculum casualty that requires personalized adjustments to both instruction and curriculum in order for the individual to learn.

The Myth of Good Instruction
The idea put forth by the New Era commission that there is “scientifically based instruction” is a representation that defies both fact and reason. The debate rages on about back to basics vs constructivism. Back to basics claims practice as the scientific basis for instruction. Constructivism claims discovery and self-made interpretations. Of particular importance to learning disabilities, scientifically based effective instruction would vary based in the processing difficulty at issue. Would you teach reading the same way to a child who is severely phonologically impaired as to a child who is phonologically competent but cannot intuit orthographic patterns?
The hard sell of semantically loaded, “hot” but empty phrases like good teaching, research-based instruction, scientifically based instruction is more than a little disconcerting. It sets up a tyranny of a falsely validated general curriculum from which people with individual differences will be hard put to escape.

“Good” Instruction can be Bad for Everyone
The current curriculum is highly fragmented, valuing memorization of dictionary definitions, encyclopedic facts, formal rules and empty symbol manipulation over meaning itself. It is painfully evident in math where students with better than average intelligence can earn perfectly adequate grades without knowing anything. Take the example of R, a sixth grade middle school student with no disability, who has tried to memorize the algorithm for multiplying with decimals without having any idea of what it means or yields (Woodcock & Johnson, 2001):
1.05 1.05
x.2_ x.20
000
2100
21.00
Follow up questions indicated that he could not round off 1.05, could not estimate about how much 1.05 x .2 would be, and given the problem of 1 x 1/2 thought the answer would be 1 1/2. R was receiving an A in math.
There is the example of the student, L, with a learning disability in reading and language who has progressed into high school with strong grades in math, needing no support. Or so it is said. She is happy to tell you that 22 x 2 = 44 is the answer to the problem that tells her a woman’s car gets 22 miles to a gallon, she drives 2 weeks without getting gas, how far can she drive on 4 gallons of gas (Woodcock & Johnson, 1989). She consistently applied strategies that don’t work without ever noticing the impossibility of her answers: to solve 8-5m = 3, by what number can you multiply each side, L’s answer 8; or a+b+a+b = a2 x b2. At a meeting to develop her IEP, L’s math teacher said that despite continuation of this kind of error, she was receiving C’s and B’s in algebra I and therefore was functioning, in his judgment, well. The advice offered to her by the special education director at the meeting was a shameless promotion of good instruction that would have her memorize strategies for her algebra course and give her access to good grades while bypassing learning.
Math does not have the monopoly on good instruction that fragments, formalizes and disconnects from meaning. The standard (scientifically based??) instruction in writing provides students with the following “formula you’re going to follow” (words of a third grade teacher):
Introduction
a sentence that grabs with a lead
a thesis statement
Body
3 paragraphs, each with a topic sentence and at least 4 supporting
sentences
Conclusion - restatement of thesis and 3 main ideas
This good instruction leaves out all the important and difficult issues of writing, i.e., what is the substance of what you want to say, what is the structure of information field itself and therefore how should it be unraveled so that it can be presented in an accessible way to the reader.
Good instruction’s fragmentation and disconnection from substance truly promotes encyclopedic knowledge, i.e., strings of information bytes devoid of the connections among them, making it possible for a perfectly nondisabled student to think he has provided a causal explanation in the following:
We even saw President Clinton make a speech about Memorial Day. That’s why it is important that we honor the people that died in a war. (grade 5)

It also makes it possible for a high school student with a learning disability to create the following tautology Because publicly he was held in high esteem, people started to like him.
It also makes it possible for a high school student with learning disability to come forward with the following tautology with the confidence that it means something:
Because publicly he was held in high esteem, people started to like him.

The idea that one, “scientifically based” curriculum suits all has already failed. As of the year 2000, the National Center for Education Statistics, Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) reported that, the general curriculum failed to bring its students to the top half of the 27 ranked countries in math, science or literacy (Lemke, Calsyn, Lippman, Jocelyn, Kastberg, Lui, Roey, Williams, Kruger & Bairu, 2001). Our general curriculum is 15th for reading literacy, below Iceland, Ireland and Korea. It is ranked 18th in math, adding this time the Czech Republic whose students perform better than ours. In science our ranking is 14th, still below the Czech Republic, Ireland and Korea.


When and How Much Phoneme Awareness
Perhaps the best candidate for actually effective, scientifically based instruction would be phoneme awareness as the basis for learning how to read and spell. However, science has very little to tell us about instruction. Research does tell us repeatedly and with impressive clarity that there is a strong correlation between phoneme awareness and reading ability (Adams, 1998; Blachman, 2000). This suggests that information about the phonological structure of speech should be available in the curriculum. However, it does not tell us how, how much or when to teach it or in what way to which children.
In my reading of the literature, there is no consistent scientific evidence for how best to teach phoneme awareness. There are a number of phoneme awareness instructional studies that yield few benefits to reading skill (Troia, 1999). It seems that phoneme awareness might help in the early stages of alphabet learning but depends upon later reading instruction for its own development (Blachman, 2000).
Further, children with phonologically based learning disabilities will need special instruction, i.e., special education, in order to access the phoneme awareness curriculum. This is the point at which assessment is of critical importance. Different methods will have to be used, for example, with:
a child who has been assesssed to have a structural speech impairment and cannot produce the sounds he is trying to learn
a child who is has been assessed to have ADHD
a child who has been assessed to have developed counterproductively to guess at words rather than analyze their phonological and orthographic structures.

Stagnation of a General Curriculum unresponsive to Individual Differences
Until now IDEA held out the promise to children with learning disabilities, that if they could not find a way to fit into the general curriculum, they would be entitled to an IEP that adjusted the curriculum to their needs. This has been, of course, a great benefit to individuals with learning disabilities. It has been an even greater benefit to the general curriculum since it ensures its openness to change, adaptation and advancement. This, in turn, benefits the culture at large, providing the diversity necessary for creative growth. Were the New Era to be set in motion, it would not be too long before the suppression of individual differences would be reflected in a stagnant culture with no potential for growth, innovation or adaptation (Swenson, 2000).































References



Adams, M.J. (1998). Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.

Blachman, BA. (2000) Phonological Awareness, (In Kamill, ed. et al) Handbook of Reading
Research, Volume III. London: Lawrence Erlbam Associates.

Cherkes-Julkowski, M. (2002). The General Education Curriculum: A Case of Calling the PROBLEM the SOLUTION. Available: http://educational-advisor.com/articlegencurric.html.
A Case of Calling the PROBLEM the SOLUTION


Lemke, M., Calsyn, C., Lippman, L., Jocelyn, D., Kastberg, Y., Lui, S., Roey, T., Williams, T., Kruger, T. & Bairu, G. (2001). Outcomes of Learning: Results from the 2000 Program for International Student Assessment of 15-Year-Olds in Reading, Mathematics, and Science Literacy. National Center for Education Statistics (2000). Office of Educational Research and Improvement, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education. Available: http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa.

New Era: Revitalizing Special Education for Children and their Families (2002). Available: http://www.ed.gov/inits/commissionsboards/whspecialeducation/reports/pcesefinalreport.pdf

Swenson, R. (2000). Spontaneous Order, Autocatakinetic Closure, and Development of Space-
Time, Annals of New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 901, pp 311-319.

Troia, G.A. (1999). Phonological Awareness Intervention Research: A critical review of the
experimental methodology. Reading Research Quarterly 34(1), 28-52.

Woodcock, R. & Johnson, M. B. (1989). Woodcock-Johnson - R, Itasca, Il: Riverside
Publishing.

Woodcock, R. & Johnson, M. B. (2001). Woodcock-Johnson - III, Itasca, Il: Riverside
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