JULY 2006

Healing horses giving help to handicapped kids
Children able to gain confidence, physical strength through program

PEAPACK -- Shane Szott waved as he strode along the grass in a slightly-relaxed hunch atop a brown mare on Friday.

It had been about a year since the 11-year-old from Morristown had ridden a horse, but he looked as comfortable in the saddle as ever.

"Look at his balance," said Fay Mackay, director of development at the Matheny School, where Szott attends. "It's incredible."

His mother, Andrea, was far less concerned about getting him acclimated to the horse than she had been when she first let her son, who has cerebral palsy, mount up.

Shane was two years old then, and couldn't even sit up straight in a seat. But little by little, Shane reaped the benefits that experts say lie within therapeutic horseback riding, from improving balance and fitness of the disabled to the smile it puts on their faces.

Szott, the son of former New York Jets football player David Szott, was one of 10 patients and students at the Matheny School who were selected to participate in the school's first therapeutic riding program. Friday marked the first day of the 10-week program that allows the students to ride for about 45 minutes each.

"Therapeutic horseback riding is the closest thing to a human gait, human walking,"said Linda Silvia, director of therapies at Matheny.

The riding allows them to develop a better sense of how to walk.

Sitting on the horse also forces riders to use and strengthen their abdominal muscles and improves balance, Silvia said.

The practice also has psychological benefits, Andrea Szott said. "It allows them to do what typical children do, and I think it makes him feel confident,"she said.

The horses are being provided by Spirit Filled Riders, a nonprofit academy in the Long Valley section of Washington Township that provides therapeutic horseback riding.

Millie Pott, president of Spirit Filled Riders, said that she started the academy after volunteering at a center for disabled children that provided the same service, but strictly for a fee.

"I can't turn a kid away,"Pott said.

Not all of the students did as well as Szott. But Pott said that would change in time. Pott said there are no averages to measure the improvement of therapeutic riding because it depends on individual students' level of disability and age.

"By the time they're done, they'll take a great deal from it," Silvia said.

Varied benefits

Some students have stayed with the program and gone on to take up recreational equestrian riding, while others have simply done enough to improve their abilities, Pott said.

"I've found this has improved greatly their skills, their stability, their strength,"Pott said.

The academy uses five horses, three of which it owns outright, including Nitro, a brown ex-racehorse with a black mane, and Sam, a 17 year-old brown mare, both of which were brought to Matheny.

Silvia said she approached Pott about bringing the horses up to the school because it is difficult transporting the students to stables where therapeutic riding is offered.

Spirit-Filled Riders is one of more than 670 providers of therapeutic riding programs affiliated with the North American Riding for the Handicapped Association.

According to the NARHA web site, therapeutic riding has been used to help people with disabilities since the early 1950s in Europe. NARHA was founded in 1969 to promote the practice in the U.S. and Canada, and serves about 30,000 people with disabilities.

In recent years there have been numerous studies performed to gauge the effectiveness of therapeutic riding.

One study, performed by doctors at the Center for Sports Therapy Research, in East Aurora, N.Y. and the Robert Warner Rehabilitation Center in the Children's Hospital of Buffalo, N.Y., on 17 children, showed that after 12-18 weeks of riding therapy, the children's gross motor functions, such as walking, running and jumping, increased. The children also retained those skills after the riding stopped.

That study, published by the Cambridge University Press in 2002, however, concluded that larger studies were needed to investigate the practice further.

Therapeutic riding also garnered some celebrity support recently.

On Monday, actor William Shatner, star of the original "Star Trek" series and currently "Boston Legal," visited Jerusalem to promote therapeutic riding and attempted to raise $10 million for about 30 riding programs in Israel, according to the Associated Press.

Shatner has long been involved with "Ahead for Horses," a Los Angeles charity that works with physically and mentally disabled children through horseback riding.

ROB SEMAN, DAILY RECORD
Rob Seman can be reached at (973) 267-9038 or rseman@gannett.com.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
May 31, 2006
http://www.dailyrecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060531/
COMMUNITIES32/605310352/1203/NEWS01


Online science and math courses in Spanish may aid immigrants

AUSTIN - Some South Texas students soon will be taking online courses from Mexican high schools and could even receive Mexican diplomas under a groundbreaking program designed to help immigrant students succeed.

The program beginning this fall in two Hidalgo County school districts is the result of collaboration between the University of Texas and Mexican federal education agencies.

It is designed to reduce dropouts by allowing Spanish-speaking students to use computers to study math and science courses in Spanish, while they learn English and social studies in their Texas schools.

"Generally they drop out because they can't pass courses and get frustrated not knowing the language and sitting in classrooms. This is an incentive for them to at least see something they're passing," said Felipe Alanis, a former Texas education commissioner who helped UT design the program.

Proponents say the program will help not only immigrants, but students whose families are migrant workers or who move back and forth across the border as well, as American students from Spanish-speaking homes.

The students will be able to use the Spanish-language curriculum to supplement courses they are taking in English or even to complete a course, although they must take the final exam in English to receive Texas credit.

Some students could even receive their diplomas from Mexico, which would allow them to attend a community college in Texas.

Alanis said this option likely will only be used by students who are 17 or 18 when they enter a Texas school and have substantial credits in Mexico.

Signed compact

Ofelia Gaona, bilingual director for Donna Independent School District, said the language barrier is particularly difficult for older students entering Texas schools for the first time.

"So what happens is they end up dropping out of school and end up with jobs that pay minimum wage or below," she said. "A lot are very, very intelligent, they are very hardworking and they want to go to college."

William Powers Jr., president of UT-Austin, signed the educational compact earlier this month with Jorge Gonzalez Teyssier, director general of the Colegio de Bachilleres, a high school program offering online courses; and C.P. Ciro Adolfo Suarez Martinez, director general of the National Institute for Adult Education.

Witnessing the ceremony was Tony Garza, the United States ambassador to Mexico.
"This is the culmination of about nine months of intensive talks," said Alanis, associate dean of UT's Division of Continuing Education.

The talks included painstaking work to align Texas and Mexican curriculum in math and science. The alignment was necessary so students will be able to work with online resources from Mexico, as well as Mexican teachers who will help the students in computer labs.

Another key feature of the agreement will help Texas educators place older students in the proper grade by considering their transcripts from Mexico. Alanis said high school-age immigrant students are routinely placed in the ninth grade even though they may have enough academic credits to enter a higher grade.

The districts piloting the program this fall are Donna, where one-third of the 13,000 students are migrants, and neighboring Edcouch-Elsa, with 5,600 students. Each received a $500,000 federal grant to buy computers, pay for the online programs and train teachers.

The Donna district purchased laptop computers so students can study at home or while they are traveling with their families doing farm work. Edcouch-Elsa concentrated its funds on 40 desktop computers that will be placed in labs at several schools and hiring four Mexican teachers to help students with the online course work.

Different learning styles

Minerva Guerra-Gonzalez, special populations director for Edcouch-Elsa, said she believes students will be drawn by the technology.

"We have a lot of children that have very different learning styles," she said. "This program will give them access to the translation of the language. The barrier of the language is what keeps them behind sometimes."

Officials at UT's Center for Hispanic Achievement Program hope that the program will eventually expand to larger districts, such as Houston ISD, with its large population of English-language learners.

Alanis said it is coincidental that the program is launching at a time of great national debate about immigrants. Helping students who are in Texas schools complete their educations will boost the state's economy, he said.

"This is not to encourage immigration," Alanis said. "These kids are in our schools now and schools are needing help with this population."

JANET ELLIOTT
janet.elliott@chron.com
May 29, 2006
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/3913768.html


Love Complicates Life Even for the Autistic
Autistic Man Practices Art of Dating

It was supposed to have been a spectacular Sunday in New York City for Paul DeSavino.

He and his mother, Marlene, were on their way to Carnegie Hall, where he was one of a group of piano students in a recital. The others were already there, taking turns warming up. But Marlene DeSavino sensed that there was something wrong with her son, the only autistic performer in recital that day.

"When we got to the rehearsal, and he played, I knew immediately as soon as he played the first couple of notes that he wasn't focused," she said.

Watch "Nightline" tonight.

Chopin's Prelude #4 is one of the sweetest and gentlest melodies ever composed. And Paul was just chopping at it.

"I gave him clues and cues while he was playing it -- you know, 'Softer, good, good, that's right,'" Marlene said.

But the problem with Paul was entirely in his heart as he had told previously told his mother.

"He said that he thought that he was in love," Marlene said.

Paul told her later he was in love with an older woman. But problem was the woman didn't love him back. Unrequited love weighed devastatingly on Paul.

Who knew that a man with autism could suffer the pain of a broken heart? Does it even make sense that an autistic man is in love?

"Am I to say that what he thinks is love isn't love?" said Peter Gerhardt, executive director of Nassau Suffolk Services for Autism. "For him, it's love. And that's okay."

Human Nature

Gerhardt does not know Paul personally. But as one of the first psychologists in the nation to work primarily with autistic adults he concluded long ago that autistic people are as likely as the rest of us to stumble into human attraction.

"First of all, it's part of human nature," Gerhardt said.

"He just wants to be with her," Marlene said. "He wants her to be around."

The object of Paul's infatuation is the director of a job-training program he was enrolled in for several years. It's a relationship that could never be, some of his closet confidantes say.

"Feelings of love are so complex he doesn't understand the nuances," Marlene said.

And how do you explain that to a man who is otherwise always being encouraged to go for it, to experience the pleasures and challenges the rest of us enjoy to the extent he can. Paul is told to enjoy things like sports and music.

He has a job as a volunteer errand-runner at a New Jersey hospital and lives with several adults in a home of their own under supervision.

We filmed scenes of Paul in his home and at work for a "Nightline" special on autistic adults. This was a good time in Paul's life, before the heartache. But on that earlier visit -- when Paul showed me his room -- I learned that he'd had an earlier infatuation with another teacher.

Paul is heartbreakingly naive in so many ways but especially about relationships.

To express his feelings for that earlier teacher he started wearing the same eyeglasses she wore, even though he has 20/20 vision.

"I can't believe how much I loved her," Paul said. "Well, she's a mother now."

New Idea for Experts

The idea that autistic people love the same everyone else is new to experts.

"The kids love their moms, they love their dads," Gerhardt said. "They will snuggle up. Yes, there is that classic distance, or they are not looking at them. But they'll sit next to mom and tuck themselves underneath their arms. That's love in his terms."

And yet a man like Paul who loves in his own way can seem so thoroughly at sea when trying to understand feeling like the feeling in a piece of music.

Jeff and Jessica, residents of a group home in New York, are mentally retarded and are dating. They are not the only disabled members of the household to be in boyfriend-girlfriend relationships.

Christine lives here while Greg lives in an apartment nearby. He saw her at a group meeting, and they have been dating since.

There was a time when romantic and sexual involvements among the developmentally disabled were aggressively discouraged. Sexuality was taboo. The sexes were kept apart, and some individuals were sterilized.

"I worked for two other social service agencies, and rather than dealing with it, it was very ignored," said Lisa Stenrantino, who counsels residents at the New York group home on sexuality.

Practice Dates

In addition to a general squeamishness, there were specific concerns about accidental pregnancy, disease and sexual abuse. The program at the New York group home, however, helps couples navigate the dangers with sex education and one-on-one counseling on when no means no.

Jeff and Jessica get coached in dating on topics such as where to go, how to dress and how to respect one another in a restaurant and in the bedroom.

All this intimacy is within reach of the mentally retarded, but is a world away from what Paul. Autism doesn't impair intelligence but the ability to communicate and make social connections.

So Paul is now practicing the art of dating with developmentally disabled women like Bev, who is mentally retarded and therefore better at it than he is.

The big problem for a man who seems to want to connect is how often he simply disconnects.

"He goes off into his own little world and that's the difficult part in having a relationship," Marlene said. "It's because he leaves them. He could leave them cold and he can't open himself up. He doesn't know how to do that yet."

'He's Growing'

Paul's mother has arranged these practice dates but hasn't forced them. She has no particular dreams of marriage for Paul. And she's nowhere near contemplating a sex life for her son because he may never be ready for that.

But that's not the point.

"He's growing and that's the important thing," Marlene said. "And growth is very hard and he'll tell me sometimes, 'This is too hard.' But God love him, he tries. He tries very hard."

Finally, at the recital, when it was Paul's turn to play for real in front of the full audience, he nailed his part thanks to his mother's support and encouragement.

That's what moms are for, isn't it? But it can also be what friends are for, too. Female friends. And maybe someday he'll find one of those.

John Donvan
ABC News
May 30, 2006
http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Health/story?id=2019736&page=1


Lifting The Curtain On How Ritalin Packs Its 1-2 Punch

Methylphenidate (Ritalin) elevates norepinephrine levels in the brains of rats to help focus attention while suppressing nerve signal transmissions in the sensory pathways to make it easier to block out extraneous stimuli, a Philadelphia research team has found.

Their report in the Journal of Neurophysiology helps explain how a stimulant aids people with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders to improve their focus without increasing their motor activity. Methylphenidate, prescribed under the brand name Ritalin, has been used for more than 20 years, mostly in children, to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and attention deficit disorder (ADD). The drug can also help people who don't suffer either disorder to attend better to a cognitive task.

Despite its wide use, little is known about how the drug, a chemical cousin of amphetamines, produces its therapeutic effects. Researchers want to unlock the mystery of why the drug has the paradoxical effect of decreasing hyperactive behavior and increasing the ability to focus, even though it is a stimulant, said Barry Waterhouse, the study's senior author.

"We're developing a series of behavioral and electrophysiological assays for examining the actions of drugs like methylphenidate," Waterhouse said. "If we can show exactly how methylphenidate works, we may be able to produce even more effective drugs and provide a better understanding of the physiology underlying ADHD."

The study, using rats, is the first to document the increase in norepinephrine and suppression of the neuronal response in this sensory pathway of the brain.

"Methylphenidate enhances noradrenergic transmission and suppresses mid- and long-latency sensory responses in the primary somatosensory cortex of awake rats," by Philadelphia-based researchers Candice Drouin, University of Pennsylvania; Michelle Page, Thomas Jefferson University; and Barry Waterhouse, Drexel University College of Medicine appears online in the Journal of Neurophysiology, published by The American Physiological Society.

From whiskers to brain

The researchers stimulated rats' whiskers while recording the activity of the neurons in the sensory pathways that convey this sensation from the whiskers to the cerebral cortex. They compared the rat's sensory pathway response to the whisker stimulation when receiving two different doses of methylphenidate. They found that both the low and moderate doses of methylphenidate:

Elevated norepinephrine in the area of the brain that processes information related to whisker movement. Norepinephrine helps transmit sensory information from the periphery to the brain.

Suppressed the long latency phase of the brain's neuronal response to whisker-related sensory stimuli. Suppression of the sensory neuronal response in this way is believed to help filter extraneous stimuli, Waterhouse explained. With the extraneous stimuli out of the way, the individual is better able to attend to the important stimuli.

In addition, the researchers found that the higher dose caused the rats to increase motor activity, while the lower dose did not.

Scientists still have much to learn about methylphenidate, which has an impact on neural circuits throughout the entire brain, not just the sensory pathway studied in this paper, Waterhouse noted. The changes that occur in this sensory pathway may affect other areas of the brain and changes in other areas of the brain may affect this pathway. In addition to sensory pathways, other scientists are studying how the drug affects cognitive and emotional areas of brain.

Next steps

"This experiment adds to our knowledge of what the drug is doing at the cellular level and gives us a springboard to other studies," Waterhouse said. "One question now is, how does the individual's perception of what is an important stimulus factor into the equation?"

Researchers in this area keep in touch and share their results, Waterhouse said. One group, for example, is looking at the drug's effects on dopamine and norepinephrine in the prefrontal cortex, he noted. These results will eventually have to be combined, as changes in one area of the brain are likely to affect other areas.

"We've been thinking about this for a long time," Waterhouse said of his research. "We hope to have a good idea of the drug's action when we put it all together."

One broad question that intrigues researchers is whether ADHD traces back to the same area of the brain as attention deficit disorder, a similar condition but one in which hyperactivity isn't a symptom.

They also want to know whether Ritalin has any toxic or long-lasting effects, not only for ADHD patients, but also for individuals taking the drug who do not suffer from ADHD or ADD. Methylphenidate use is on the rise among college students who solicit prescriptions from friends or siblings diagnosed with ADHD and use the drug to postpone fatigue and stay alert and focused while studying for exams or completing projects, Waterhouse said.

Source and funding

"Methylphenidate enhances noradrenergic transmission and suppresses mid- and long-latency sensory responses in the primary somatosensory cortex of awake rats," by Candice Drouin, Laboratory of Neuromodulation and Behavior, Dept. of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania; Michelle Page, Depart. of Neurosurgery, Thomas Jefferson University; and Barry Waterhouse, Dept. of Neurobiology and Anatomy, Drexel University College of Medicine. The study appears in the May issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology published by The American Physiological Society.

Research was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (Waterhouse).

Source: American Physiological Society
May 30, 2006
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060530202639.htm



Children's trouble processing information can disrupt lives

Margo Wells and her husband had always regarded their son, Jacob, as an intense child.

"As a baby, he squirmed a lot when you held him," Wells says. "You could tell he didn't like to be held."

He also didn't sleep much and resisted when it was time to change clothes or take a bath. "He was pretty happy, he just seemed to always be alert," his mother says.

His behavior became more of an issue when he started preschool.

"He would scream at the other kids and hit them, and you could tell he was overwhelmed," his mother says.

At age 3, Jacob was diagnosed with sensory-processing disorder, which affects a person's ability to interpret and respond to the information he or she receives through the senses.

The disorder, first called sensory integration dysfunction, covers a broad range of problems. Some children are hypersensitive, unable to cope with the noise of a crowded room or driven to a tantrum by the feel of a tag in a shirt. Others are under-responsive and seek out stimuli, such as the noise from a washing machine, or have motorskill delays because of problems processing sensory information.

A link between sensory issues and behavior was pioneered by Jean Ayres, a psychologist and occupational therapist who brought the disorder to light in "Sensory Integration and Learning Disorders" in 1972. A quarter-century later, sensory-processing disorder is not recognized by the DSM, or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a tool commonly used to diagnose mental disorders. And some insurance companies don't cover sensory-integration therapy, calling it experimental.

"Sensory-processing problems are very real, and they can be extremely debilitating," says Michael Kisley, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs who researches sensory issues. But sensory-processing disorder remains a controversial diagnosis, he says. More research is needed to show whether it is separate from other disorders with sensory-processing components, such as autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.

"In my own research, we often see individuals with no clear history of disorders defined by the DSM, and yet with very prominent sensory-related issues," he says.

Rebecca Hendricks, an occupational therapist in pediatric rehabilitation, says she sees more referrals from doctors citing sensory-processing disorder or sensory issues as the problem.

"It's probably one of the most frustrating diagnoses you can have because it's not static," she says. Problems may overlap, or children may swing from one type of sensory-processing disorder to another, she says.

"I think the hypersensitive kids get recognized more often because it gets in the way of their daily life more," she says.

Adults can have sensory-processing issues, too, but they're less likely to be recognized because adults learn to cope, partly by avoiding certain situations, Kisley says.

That's one thing her son, now 5, is learning, Margo Wells says. They recently went to a local family fun center. She could tell Jacob was having difficulty coping at the center, but he avoided a meltdown.

"When we were walking to the car, he said, `I don't think it's a good idea for me to come back here.'"

Adults have greater control over their environment. Kids with sensory-processing disorder who seek to control their environment may be criticized as manipulative, says Tami Lamphere, an occupational therapist at the Child Development Center of Colorado Springs, Colo. But those kids - from the infant who can't stand anyone's touch except mom's to the child who can't seem to handle a change in routine - are simply trying to control a sensory bombardment that may be unbearable to them.

Those children often are in a hypervigilant state known as sensory defensiveness.

"If you put anything else on their system, they're over the top," Lamphere says.

Therapy aimed at helping a child cope with sensory issues may rewire the brain and change the way that child receives sensory input, though that has yet to be proved. One method is to combine a "noxious" stimulus with a more pleasant one.

Hendricks gives the example of a child who doesn't like vestibular input, which refers to structures in the inner ear that detect movement and changes in the position of the head. For a child with vestibular issues, swinging can be frightening, not fun. Therapy might involve having the child swing on her stomach while putting a weighted blanket on her back to provide a comforting pressure.

In addition, Hendricks might have the child pretend to catch fish under the swing, "so their brain is not on this alert because they are distracted."

Over time, the act of swinging becomes less threatening.

Insurance may dictate the duration and frequency of treatment. Hendricks says therapy can last for years, with the resolution of one issue uncovering another. But Lucy Jane Miller, an occupational therapist who has studied sensory-processing disorder for 30 years, stresses short, intensive bursts of therapy. With three to five visits a week for 20 sessions, "we can make major changes in a reasonably short time," she says.

Miller, author of the just-released "Sensational Kids: Hope and Help for Children With Sensory Processing Disorder," is founder of the KID Foundation, a research and advocacy group, and directs the STAR Center, a treatment center in Denver for sensory-processing disorder.

She thinks sensory-processing disorder is widespread, affecting as many as one child in 20. But not every sensory issue is cause for alarm, she says.

"If they can cope on their own and they compensate, they don't really have a disorder, they just have a sensitivity."

Some research suggests that sensory-processing disorder is inherited. Jacob Wells struggles mostly with auditory and tactile issues. Margo Wells notes she is particularly sensitive to sounds, while her husband is "really funny about the way clothes feel on his body."

Jacob used to run away or fight with his mom when getting dressed.

"Even brushing teeth or combing his hair, anything involving touch, he was tactilely defensive," Margo Wells says.

He tends to be easily startled by loud sounds. When he enters a public bathroom, he'll cover his ears to protect himself from the roar of a flushing toilet.

Jacob goes to rehab weekly for therapy and also is in gymnastics to help with his motor development. He has made great strides, says his mother, who leads a local support group for parents of children with sensory-processing disorder.

"He seems like a typical kid. Our family life is much better."

BILL RADFORD
The Gazette
May. 30, 2006
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/living/14697948.htm

RED FLAGS
There are several forms of sensory processing disorder. Here are the signs of some:
Sensory over-responsiveness:
Child bothered by noise in a restaurant, mall or gymnasium; any loud, unexpected sounds; feeling crumbs on his mouth; food textures; fuzzy or furry textures; playing on swings and slides. Typically irritable, fussy and moody. Aggressive or impulsive when overwhelmed by sensory stimulation.

Sensory under-responsiveness:
Child doesn't seem to notice when someone touches him or her, doesn't cry when seriously hurt, prefers sedentary activities. Typically passive and withdrawn.

Sensory seeking:
On the move constantly, loves to play music and television at extremely high volume, seeks opportunities to feel vibrations such as leaning against stereo speakers or the washer and dryer. May be angry or even explosive when required to sit still. Typically intense and demanding.

Sensory-discrimination disorder:
Child has difficulty judging how much force is required for a task or telling what is in his hands without looking. Trouble identifying sounds or following directions. Aversion to playing with puzzles or other visual games.

SOURCE: "Sensational Kids, Hope and Help for Children With Sensory Processing Disorder,"
by Lucy Jane Miller

ON THE WEB :
The KID Foundation, http://www.kidfoundation.org/, 1-303-794-1182


Older Students Who Need Basics Pose Challenge
Systems Use Special Programs to Help Immigrants With Little Education in Their Native Countries

When Jose Velasquez, a soft-spoken teenager from Nicaragua whose basketball jersey and baggy jeans drape his lean frame, enrolled in a Montgomery County high school, his teachers soon discovered that he was far from ready for the classroom.

Although he was 17, he couldn't do division, write a paragraph or read a simple sentence in English.

Although many immigrant students excel in school, a few, such as Velasquez, have so little education in their native language that they pose a special challenge when they enter local schools. They lack the basic skills necessary to benefit from traditional programs -- known as English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) -- that are designed to acclimate immigrants to the U.S. educational system.

At a time when No Child Left Behind requires that educators ensure that all students are literate, the plight of this group illustrates the hurdles faced by even wealthy school systems such as those in Montgomery and Fairfax counties as they attempt to meet the law's mandates. Somehow, educators must help students with little formal schooling read, write and do math at the same level as the kids who arrive at school as kindergartners fluent in English.

"The challenge with high-schoolers is the lack of time," said Keith Buchanan, coordinator of the ESOL office for Fairfax County Public Schools. "The clock is ticking the minute they walk into that school."

The process of teaching this group can be difficult and frustrating for students and teachers, experts say. Older teenagers such as Velasquez are so far behind that educators are trying to cram nine to 10 years' worth of learning into just a few years.

And students unaccustomed to the rigors of U.S. schools sometimes find themselves struggling with a new set of expectations.

"I like school," Velasquez said through a translator. "There's much more opportunity here, so I want to work hard."

But the schoolwork is difficult, and math is particularly tricky for him, he said. Even with the help of a Spanish-speaking aide, trying to understand linear equations sometimes makes his head hurt.

In many cases, such students must be taught more than academics. Neither they, nor often their parents, understand why they have to do homework or even why they have to come to school every day.

"They're lacking in so many social and educational skills," said Maria Garcia, an ESOL counselor at Gaithersburg High School. "Things that other kids learned in kindergarten -- how to sit still, how to learn -- they don't know, because they haven't been in school. And it's difficult because they see the difference [in ability] between themselves and their peers."

Although they might use similar teaching methods, area school systems have different strategies for working with this group of students. In addition to their regular ESOL offerings, Fairfax public schools offer evening programs at four transitional high schools targeted at immigrants 18 and older. Schools in the District offer "newcomer" courses that focus on teaching students life skills and interpersonal communication .

"We don't want to have an uneducated underclass here," said Karen Adkins-Hastings, a guidance counselor at South Lakes Transitional High School in Fairfax. "That's part of what [these programs] are all about."

In Montgomery, students such as Velasquez enroll in METS -- the Multidisciplinary, Education, Training and Support program -- for students 9 and older. Students are taught in smaller classes -- usually about 15 students -- by teachers who specialize in working with non-English, mostly Spanish, speakers. Teachers use a variety of strategies to reach students, including lots of visual aids and hand motions, in 50-minute sessions. Fairfax takes a similar approach, but students take 90-minute classes.

During a recent class at Gaithersburg High, where Velasquez is a freshman, Margaret VanBuskirk began the lesson by assigning students to write brief sentences on what they did over spring break. She asked the question slowly in English. When the students looked puzzled, she pantomimed eating, sleeping and other activities as suggestions. When students recognized an activity, she had them repeat it in English, first using present tense, then past tense, before writing it on a sheet of paper tacked to the white board.

Velasquez takes three 50-minute courses especially designed for METS students -- social studies, reading and math -- along with non-METS classes in science and math. Ideally, as he and his classmates gain more fluency in English, they will be moved into more advanced ESOL courses and then into regular high school classes.

But Velasquez's progress, like that of many newcomers, is slow. He is among VanBuskirk's better students -- he does his homework and comes to class every day. But after a year and four months in school, he has moved ahead only one grade level in math -- from second to third. His reading is improving, but he is still at primary grade level.

Alex Mendez was born in the United States, but he spent several years in El Salvador before returning to Gaithersburg seven months ago to live with his father. Like Velasquez, he is trying to learn English as well as an entirely different culture.

He said he will try to graduate from high school, but beyond learning English he doesn't have any specific goals.

"I like [Ms. VanBuskirk's class] because it feels like family," he said through a translator. "But the work is difficult because I don't understand English."

How well these programs work for older students such as Velasquez and Mendez is difficult to assess by standard measures, educators say. Montgomery doesn't track the number of METS students who move into mainstream English classes or graduate from high school. And in Fairfax, officials don't distinguish these students from regular ESOL kids.

However, an independent analysis of Montgomery's METS program released this year by the Latino Education Coalition, a collaborative of local groups concerned about the achievement of Latino students, painted a troubling picture. It found "numerous, serious shortfalls" and that older METS students "receive insufficient support within the school system and that not enough resources are channeled to support the success of these students."

At one high school, the study's authors found, seven of the 18 students enrolled in the METS program in the 2004-05 school year dropped out. Another school lost more than half of its METS kids.

"These are students that we believe [the school system] is missing," said Candace Kattar, executive director of Identity Inc., one of the agencies that did the study. Too often, she said, these kids are slipping through the cracks because their numbers are small and their parents don't know how to be advocates for them. With the number of Latino students in Montgomery growing -- from 12 percent of the student population a decade ago to 20 percent today -- the system can no longer afford to ignore their needs, she added.

Fairfax educators say about one-third of the 325 students who enroll in the Transitional High School program graduate and move to an alternative high school, where they can continue studying English and working toward a diploma. But administrators say that number can be misleading because it fails to account for students who move out of the area or who take the skills they've gained to get jobs.

Montgomery officials concede that more can be done for older METS students and have formed a task force to study new strategies to reach this population. One possibility: offering students vocational training in addition to academic instruction.

"I can't say we're always successful, but we're hopeful we can provide them with understanding of what their goals could be," said Lois Wions, program supervisor for ESOL Instruction for the Montgomery school system. "But we also have to be realistic with ourselves and our students. There's very little chance that in four years a student who is not literate is going to graduate from high school."

But Kattar and others say they are optimistic that something can be done for students such as Velasquez before they get discouraged and disappear from the system. Even if they don't earn a diploma, they may be able to pick up enough skills to survive, she said.

Velasquez said he has a simple goal: to do well in school, both for himself and his family's sake. And someday, he said, he hopes to master enough English to get a job helping other Latinos, just as his teachers at Gaithersburg have helped him.

Lori Aratani, Washington Post Staff Writer
May 29, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/28/AR2006052801012.html


Educating gifted students

Criteria for gifted students are not set in stone. Not in Florida or anywhere else.
Proponents of gifted programs grapple with this and likely will do so for a long time.

I once opposed gifted education, as did Pierre Tristam in a recent column. That is, until I did my homework.

My initial aversion to such programs began more than 20 years ago when my daughter's IQ score got her in the door, but "insufficient support in the home" slammed it in her face.

It seems that the Pennsylvania school's psychologist felt that a mother who worked as a waitress and a father who worked as a stock clerk lacked the wherewithal to support a gifted child in her academic endeavors. My daughter remained in the regular classroom and stayed there until she followed in her mother's footsteps and dropped out of high school.

At age 35, I entered college to pursue my dream of becoming a classroom teacher. The first "research" paper I wrote vehemently opposed gifted education, dismissing it as elitist and unnecessary. To her credit, instructor Teri Delos Santos (who was, unbeknownst to me, the parent of a gifted child) did not take my attack personally. Thus began my true understanding of the word "research."

As I continued to rant against gifted education in subsequent classes, I continued to research the topic in order to bolster my argument. To my surprise, I began to learn a thing or two about gifted education, and the new knowledge made me squirm. It can be hard to admit being wrong, but no one ever said enlightenment would be easy. There are several points worth consideration.

First, let's look at the criterion of IQ. An IQ of at least 130 is typically required for gifted identification. (About 2 percent of the population would be included.) For those who believe that students with an IQ of 130 (or higher) do not require special educational considerations, please bear in mind that this is two standard deviations above the average IQ of 100. Few would argue that students scoring two standard deviations below the average, or those with an IQ of 70 (or lower), require special educational considerations. Why does it seem politically incorrect when special consideration is given at the high end?

Secondly, Tristam's question, "What message are we sending our children, and society at large, when segregation is held up not only as a defining factor of an educational program, but as a desirable, even admirable one as well?" merits a thorough response.

Yes, what message are we sending? Let's begin with the world's most famous (and powerful) C student. President Bush, as he has every year since taking office, recently requested no funding for the Javits Program. Congress passed the Jacob Javits Gifted and Talented Student Education Act in 1988 to ensure America's brightest would be provided with curriculum commensurate with their ability.

President Bush's message to gifted students: No support from me! Find yourself a rich daddy like I did! His message to the rest of the country: Don't look to me to waste taxpayer dollars on those snotty smart kids. I've got better places to waste taxpayer dollars.

And what about Tristam's charge of segregation? In junior high school I auditioned for chorus. I was named an "alternate" and could sing only if a real chorus member got sick. Others didn't even make that cut. In band, I met with even more elitism. (My clarinet squeaked.) And football? Well, now I'm just being facetious. Segregation is a serious charge, but one that I, too, once accepted.

I changed my attitude when I heard renowned researcher Nicholas Colangelo explain it.

"First of all," Colangelo asked, "do you believe that there is considerable variation among students of the same grade and age?" Yes, I did.

"And do you believe," he continued, "that students learn best when there is a good match between the learning readiness and curriculum?" Who could disagree?

"Lastly," Colangelo asked, "do you believe it is educationally sound to assess readiness and then match it with an appropriate curriculum?" Again, I agreed.

This, Colangelo pointed out, is the essence of gifted education -- meeting students where they stand.

America has had a long and notorious love-hate relationship with gifted education. Labeling contributes to the negative connotation. When we call one child "gifted," we imply the next child is "not gifted." Tough to hear in a setting as democratic as the classroom is supposed to be.

But why not clarify the label? We have no problem with athletically gifted and musically gifted. Indeed, most Americans can handily name the winners of Oscars, Emmys, Superbowls and Stanley Cups. But, quickly, who among us can name the academically gifted winners of the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prizes? It is simply un-American. There is an aversion to the stereotype of the pencil-neck geek.

Love them or hate them, we rely on the academically gifted to seek cures for cancer and paralysis, develop alternative energy sources and resolve global warming, write plays and poetry that uplift the spirit, and pursue honest, investigative reporting to inform a beleaguered public.

Bright children have different needs. Ask any classroom teacher. They languish and underachieve when asked to review and revisit and relearn material they have long ago mastered. And this is what we ask of them in a regular classroom setting.

Asking a child to be on page 50 because "that's where we are today" is a real problem to the child who has not yet made it to page 17. It is equally frustrating to the child who has finished reading the book. Speed limits belong on the highways, not in the classroom.

Knowledge is power, and as the American public educates itself about the facts regarding gifted children they will quit demeaning them and dismissing their needs as being no more than the wants of a willful and spoiled child. They will acknowledge that denying them an appropriate education is as inherently evil as refusing access to a child in a wheelchair.

Lovell Oliver specializes in gifted education and English as a second language at Stetson University in the Department of Teacher Education. She holds a doctorate from the University of Iowa She recommends ."A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students" (available online at http://www.nationdeceived.org/).

CINDY LOVELL OLIVER, COMMUNITY VOICE
May 27, 2006
http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/Opinion/
Editorials/opnOPN60052706.htm



School districts turn to paid readers for grading student essays

In the Northshore School District, some English teachers don't spend much time reading student papers.

In the Bellevue School District, some don't even grade the papers.

Both districts now rely on paid readers to evaluate and in some cases grade student essays in English classes; Seattle's Garfield High School is piloting such a program this year. The use of readers greatly reduces teacher workload and gives students more writing practice, but the trend raises questions about teachers' roles in inspiring and guiding students' work.

Many English teachers in the region teach five classes a day with 30 students each. If they assign a two-page essay in every class, that adds up to 300 pages to read, edit, comment on and grade.

Teachers and administrators agree that most high schools don't give students enough writing practice, largely because of the limits on teacher time. By using readers, Bellevue officials estimate their students can write seven three- to five-page essays a semester, compared with two essays in a traditional literature class.

"External readers encourage teachers to assign more writing. That's the heart of it," said David Conley, director of the Center for Educational Policy Research at the University of Oregon. "The amount of writing in high school is dramatically less than what's expected in college."

Conley was the consultant for the Bellevue School District as it reworked its curriculum two years ago to increase its rigor and prepare more students for college. He recommended Bellevue students do more discursive and argumentative writing, the type they are most likely to do in college, and less literary analysis, the type most frequently assigned in high-school English classes.

Bellevue this year launched a required senior English class that relies almost entirely on paid readers to analyze and grade all but a fraction of papers. Teachers don't see most of their students' written work, and they don't give most of the grades.

The use of paid readers isn't new. In the 1980s, before tightened school budgets, many districts hired professional readers to assist their English teachers, said Carol Jago, co-director of the California Reading and Literature Project. The Theme Reader program in Northshore, in which teachers weigh readers' comments and assign grades, has been in place for at least 15 years, officials there say.

But Jago said the practice raises questions, even when teachers work closely with the readers.

"What's lost is how teachers get to know their students through their writing. And students no longer know the audience they're writing for," she said. But others point out that anonymous readers evaluate students on a range of tests including the WASL and the SAT.

Readers for local school districts are typically college students majoring in literature, professional writers, editors and retired teachers.

Northshore spent $80,000 last year — $13 an hour, per reader — on the Theme Readers program, though not all teachers use it. Bellevue pays its readers $20 an hour and expects to quadruple the reading ranks next year when the writing initiative expands to include the sixth through 11th grades. The Bellevue Schools Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports education, donated $29,000 to pay for readers this year; the district has requested $235,000 for next year.

In the Seattle school district, the Garfield High School PTA has spent $6,000 on the school's new reader program. Gretchen Wilkinson, who chairs Garfield's English department, said parents had criticized the department for not giving students more writing practice and more detailed feedback to improve skills.

During fall semester, Wilkinson said, readers commented on 725 papers and critiqued 435 practice WASL essays written by ninth-graders. Teachers will use the comments to identify students who need more help.

"We wouldn't have been able to give that kind of attention to the essays unless all our ninth-grade teachers were willing to give up three to four weekends and not get anything done in our regular classes," Wilkinson said.

Lance Balla, a curriculum and technology coach for Bellevue schools, said the district built into the program several checks to keep teachers informed about their students' work. The teachers develop a scoring guide for each assignment and read three out of every 30 essays. Readers and teachers consult after each set of papers is graded, and teachers are expected to use the readers' comments to look for common problems and if necessary, adjust their teaching.

"It's not just a way to give a kid a score, it's a way to improve instruction across the district," Balla said.

That's debatable, said Stephen Miller, president of the Bellevue Education Association.

"All English teachers would agree that students become better writers by writing more. But is writing many essays more important than personal feedback from your teacher? We don't know the answer," he said.

One of Bellevue's paid readers, University of Washington doctoral candidate Megan Miller, said using readers also eliminates the "suck-up" factor in teacher-student relations.

"The fact that they have outside readers commenting [on their papers] may make them step it up a bit and not rely on their rapport with the teacher."

Naomi Vaughan, a 2003 Woodinville High School graduate who is now a student at the University of Washington and a reader for her former school, said that prompt and frequent feedback is more effective at helping students improve their skills.

"Students want feedback. If they have to wait two to three weeks, it's meaningless," she said.

But some teachers want to remain connected to their students, and their progress, through their written work.

"If I have an ace writer, I can demand more. If he or she's a B-level, I want to know that, too," said Angela Rossana, an English teacher at Mariner High School in the Mukilteo School District.

David Ehrich, chair of the Roosevelt High School English department in Seattle, talks about paid readers the way a remote villager might talk about electricity.

"I never thought they were in the realm of the possible," he said.

Lynn ThompsonTimes Snohomish County bureau
Lynn Thompson: 425-745-7807 or lthompson@seattletimes.com
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/education/2003025593_
themereaders29m.html


Music therapy helps develop communication and motor skills

BEVERLY, Mass. --Seventeen-year-old Tony Bacon sat at the parlor window seat, his eyes glued to the driveway. He settles into the same spot every Wednesday afternoon.

"What are you waiting for?" his mother, Susan Williams, asked.

"Music therapy," he said, his words coming out fast and slurred.

Over the next 45 minutes, Tony, who has autism, and Krystal Demaine sit face-to-face in the sunroom. She'll play guitar while he'll beat on a drum.

Demaine, a 2000 graduate of the Berklee College of Music's music therapy program, has been making the trek to Tony's house for the past four years, using the oohs and aahs in "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" as exercises in enunciation, volume and breath control. Beating along to "Blackbird" on the drum wasn't just fun, it was an exercise in coordination and motor control.

It's all part of a session known as music therapy that is used in hospices, hospitals and schools to help people with different medical conditions develop everything from language skills to motor coordination. Music therapy can provide a drug-free way to regulate moods in people with depression or foster socialization in people with limited means of communication.

At the Berklee College of Music, which has had a music therapy program for the past decade, there are about 100 students enrolled in what is the only undergraduate music therapy program in the state and one of 70 in the country.

Music therapists are professionals that use music "to address nonmusical goals," said Al Bumanis, spokesman at the American Music Therapy Association.

Therapists are not trying to create an orchestra, but take advantage of the ways mind and body are stimulated when people listen to and make music so they can hone motor and brain functions, he said.

Suzanne Hanser, founder and chairwoman of the Berklee program, tends to talk about "spirits" and "creative potential" when she describes the benefits of music therapy.

"One doesn't need to intellectualize, one doesn't need to understand very much, music impacts a person viscerally, physically, immediately, and directly," said Hanser, who did postdoctoral training in clinical gerontology at Stanford University School of Medicine and is currently a research associate at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and president of the World Federation of Music Therapy.

Demaine, who also has a certificate in neurologic music therapy and a master's degree in education, said a patient in therapy is working on a lot of things at once.

"I'm using my hands, I'm using my eyes, I'm using my ears -- I'm using all these different senses and I'm receiving something that makes me feel good," she said.

Tony's mother said she enrolled him in music therapy because she thought it could help his communication skills.

The therapy "forces language when they sing," she said and now it's easier for Tony to communicate with others. "He's able to express his needs," she said, making life easier for them both.

"I think there's something so basic, but so complicated about rhythm. I think really helps organize the brain," she said.

Berklee students pursuing the field of music therapy spend most of their time off-campus, in hospitals and at schools where they work with patients under the supervision of professional music therapists, many of whom are Berklee graduates themselves. Upon graduation, they must pass a national certification test to be recognized as music therapists.

"Our students are invested in the community," Hanser said. The school, with the help of corporate partners, endowed a part-time music therapist job at the McLean Hospital in Belmont.
Adam Sankowski, a 2003 graduate of the program, had his first out-of-classroom experience as a student at the Kennedy Day School, run at the Franciscan Hospital for Children in Boston.

He said the first few classes he took were "kind of heady. ... It wasn't until I went into the field and started observing that it kind of clicked into place."

Sankowski has come full circle; he now works part-time at the Kennedy Day School where he uses therapy to foster socialization. Many of his patients are nonverbal and use machines with recorded phrases -- such as "good morning" -- to communicate.

The idea, he said, is to make the setting similar to any other group of friends hanging out. "People are talking, everybody takes turns," he explained, "we try to create that same thing but in a musical context."

So the first song the group sings every day is a greeting, used both to help the children interact and help them learn to use the technology that they depend on. Several of the students have such limited use of their bodies that all they can do is hit a switch with their heads. But during music therapy, hitting that switch lets them sing along with their classmates.

Getting Berklee students into the community is not just good experience for them, Hanser said, but it exposes doctors and other caretakers to what she does, "so that they can understand that it is an art and it is also a medical science and it is based on current theories as well as research."

For instance, in a 1986 paper published in the Journal of Music Therapy, Hanser described the effects of music therapy on women in labor. For 10 contractions, women listened to music designed especially for them -- songs they had used before as part of relaxation techniques. That was alternated with five music-less minutes for the duration of labor.

The women had fewer physical pain responses -- tense muscles, clenched teeth raised shoulders and, requests for pain killers -- while music played.

And recent research at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation suggests listening to music can reduce chronic pains and depression by up to a quarter.

But it wasn't the hard evidence of research that brought Sankowski to the program at Berklee.

"I had always liked playing guitar, but I didn't think I was going to be a rock star. I wasn't sure what I was going to do, but I made the decision that music was going to be a big part of my life," he said. "It's more about connecting with people."

Brandie M. Jefferson, Associated Press Writer
July 4, 2006
http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2006/07/04/ music_therapy_helps_develop_communication_and_motor_skills/


'Academic Redshirting' Is Getting a Mixed Report Card
The popular practice of delaying schooling is not necessarily helpful, researchers say.

Many parents and educators swear by the practice of "academic redshirting" — waiting an extra year before enrolling a child in kindergarten in hopes of giving the kid more confidence, greater size or perhaps an academic edge.

But does it really work?

New research — including a federal study of 21,000 youngsters released in May — suggests that the benefits are a mixed bag, both academically and socially. As often happens with education techniques, redshirting appears to help some, harm others or have no effect at all.

For Suzanne Weerts of Burbank, the value was clear enough. As her son Jack neared his fifth birthday last September, his parents sought out teachers and other parents to help them decide whether their boy was ready for kindergarten.

Eligibility wasn't an issue: The Burbank Unified School District's cutoff birth date is Dec. 2 and Jack was born on Sept. 15. But Weerts worried that her shy son would be intimidated by children who had turned 5 months earlier and would have a tough time keeping up academically.

This September, Jack will start kindergarten at William McKinley Elementary School and is likely to be one of the older kids in his class.

"In preschool he was a follower," said Weerts. "This year he was a leader in the classroom. He's more confident. You can't go wrong with the extra year."

Weerts said that, among her friends, about half opted to give their children an extra year. It's a decision lots of parents have to make as fall approaches. And a lot are deciding to redshirt, a term borrowed from sports lingo, where freshmen athletes are held back a year to give them more time to build strength.

The concept isn't new, but it's impossible to say how common it was, say, a generation ago. Recent national studies estimate that 6% to 9% of children eligible for kindergarten are redshirted each year. Research and anecdotal reports have found that, in some school districts, as many as 50% of kids are held back an extra year before starting kindergarten.

Some kids benefit, but others don't.

That was the conclusion of the report on 21,000 children released in May by the U.S. Department of Education. The study of boys and girls entering kindergarten in 1998 looked at their abilities when they were in first grade. It found that the children who had been redshirted had lower math knowledge and skills than first-graders who started kindergarten on time.

"It's always done with huge amounts of love and passion," said Elizabeth Graue, professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, of the practice.

"The problem is that it doesn't always necessarily pay off the way you think it's going to," said Graue, who has done extensive research on redshirting.

Repeating kindergarten, the federal study also found, was an even more harmful practice.

By the time they reached first grade, kids who had repeated kindergarten appeared less likely to possess specific math skills than the typical first-grader. In addition, they were less likely to have developed reading skills, such as understanding words in context.

One possible explanation: If a child had trouble mastering a subject the first time around, teaching the child with the same technique won't help much a year later.

"Typically, just repeating the same treatment doesn't work," Graue said.

Other studies have looked at the possible long-term influence of redshirting.

In 2003, a literature review of studies on redshirting by Hermine H. Marshall, an emerita professor at San Francisco State University, found that, on average, the effects of delaying kindergarten dissipated later on in grade school.

Although redshirting might help — or harm — a child soon after kindergarten, things start to even out by about third grade.

So, according to some research, redshirting isn't necessary because younger kids can benefit from being around older ones. Children learn from one another, and the stimulating environment of school sometimes helps younger kids catch up with their peers.

Socially, the effects of redshirting are mixed. Some studies show that older children could feel awkward about reaching puberty before their classmates. Conversely, other studies say that being older could raise a child's confidence and popularity.

For some parents, the social pressures of middle school and even college were on their minds when they redshirted their kids before kindergarten.

"Just think if you want your child to be the youngest ninth-grader, trying to keep up with the older kids and being more susceptible to peer pressure," said Calissa Ricker of Burbank, whose daughter Isabel, 8, was redshirted. "Do you want them to be the confident ninth-grader or the timid one?"

In some cases, parents may be pressured into giving their kids an extra year by teachers or school officials hoping to ensure classrooms that are easier to control.

The pressure to redshirt is particularly high at private elementary schools in Los Angeles, where September cutoffs help to quietly encourage the practice, said Fiona Whitney, author of "The Whitney Guide," private-school guidebooks. By comparison, many other districts — including Los Angeles Unified — have December cutoffs.

Most top-notch schools are "very interested in having kids that will fit in," said Whitney, who also counsels parents on education matters and is a proponent of redshirting.

While children of both genders are held back, boys are more likely to start kindergarten a year late than girls, studies show.

"They tend to be impulsive or cry when things don't work; that can be really wearing," Graue said of boys. "Also there's this phobia that you don't have a teary-eyed boy. You want that kid who is confident and strong, who can lead the whole world."

As a result of interviewing many parents over the years, Graue has also come to suspect that there is another factor affecting what they want for their children: the parents' own childhood experiences.

"You might have the dad who was always the smallest and didn't get picked first in kickball," Graue said. When it's time for those people to have their own kids, you'll see "the parents who want their kid to be on varsity. It has more to do with what you want the child to accomplish. Especially with sports."

Michelle Keller, Times Staff Writer
July 5, 2006
http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-me-redshirt5
jul05,1,5742143.story?coll=la-news-learning

JUNE 2006

Mainstream schools can't manage special needs pupils, say teachers
Union calls for an end to the policy of inclusion after a study suggests that it harms all children

THE policy of educating children with special needs in mainstream schools has failed and must be changed immediately, the country’s biggest teaching union said yesterday.

The National Union of Teachers dramatically reversed decades of support for “inclusion” and demanded a halt to the closure of special schools. It called on the Government to carry out “an urgent review of inclusion in policy and practice”.

The union issued a report by academics at Cambridge University, which suggested that inclusion was harming children with special needs, undermining the education of others and leaving teachers exhausted as they struggled to cope with severe behavioural and medical conditions.

John MacBeath, one of the authors, described inclusion “as a form of abuse” for some children, who were placed in “totally inappropriate” schools where they inevitably failed.

Pupils with special needs were nine times more likely to be expelled and teachers were leaving the profession because they could not cope with the pressure of working with them. Teachers were being given responsibility for tasks such as clearing out tracheotomy tubes, changing nappies and managing children prone to harming themselves in outbursts of extreme violence.

Other pupils lost out as staff devoted excessive time to special needs children. Many students witnessed highly disturbing behaviour as special needs pupils reacted in frustration and anger to their surroundings. Teachers often delegated responsibility for special needs pupils to classroom assistants.

Parents felt betrayed as their children’s educational needs went unmet and the children sunk into a spiral of misbehaviour that often ended in expulsion. Parents of other children were unhappy at the repeated disruptions to their education.

Steve Sinnott, the union’s general secretary, said that “inclusion has failed many children”. Teachers supported the idea in principle, but felt let down by the practice. He said: “It demonstrates very clearly the failures in policy and practice in our education system and in our schools.”

The Cambridge researchers interviewed teachers, children and parents at 20 schools in seven local authorites. They concluded that the reality of inclusion was very far from the “world of fine intentions” inhabited by policymakers. “While there are many examples of social benefits both for children with special needs and their peers, there is much less positive evidence that learning needs are being met across the whole spectrum of ability,” the report said.

But Lord Adonis, the Schools Minister, said: “Children should be taught in mainstream schools where this is what their parents want and it is not incompatible with the efficient education of other children.”

David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, said: “This report should lead the Government to a radical rethink on its inclusion policy.”

Tony Halpin, The Times
May 17, 2006
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2184133,00.html


As Babies Are Born Earlier, They Risk Problems Later

More and more babies each year are being born just shy of spending a full pregnancy in their mothers' wombs, putting more infants at risk of health and possibly developmental problems because they enter the world before they are ready.

The percentage of babies born slightly early has been increasing steadily for more than a decade and is now at an all-time high. So many babies are being born a few weeks early -- more than 350,000 annually -- that the average U.S. pregnancy has shortened from 40 weeks to 39.

The increase is driven by a combination of social and medical trends, including the older age of many mothers, the rising use of fertility treatments and the decision by more women to choose when they will deliver. At the same time, medical advances are enabling doctors to detect problem pregnancies earlier and to improve care for premature babies, prompting them to deliver more babies early when something threatens their lives or those of their mothers.

Many obstetricians argue that the trend is positive overall because they are preventing thousands of stillbirths and avoiding potentially serious risks for mothers. But other experts worry because these babies are prone to a long list of serious, potentially life-threatening complications, which often require intensive, costly treatment. Moreover, growing evidence suggests that their long-term development may be more problematic.

"We should be concerned about these babies," said Tonse N.K. Raju of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. "They have more short-term problems, and there is evolving evidence that they have long-term risks as well."

Although most of these babies fare well and face far less risk than very premature infants, researchers have begun to realize that they are nevertheless more prone to short-term complications, such as problems breathing and feeding, and jaundice. And because so many are being born each year, even a small increased risk translates into thousands of sick babies. Studies are also starting to suggest that these children may tend to not develop as well as full-term babies, leading to behavioral, learning and other difficulties.

"There's no question these babies tend to have more [immediate] problems compared to full-term babies," said Richard E. Behrman of the Federation of Pediatric Organizations, who chairs a panel assembled by the National Academy of Sciences that will issue recommendations on the rising late-preterm birth rate next month. "The concern is about whether there is some adverse impact on their long-term development."

For years, most of the attention focused on the earliest, smallest "preemies" -- those born before 32 weeks -- because they face the greatest risks of dying or having permanent disabilities, such as cerebral palsy, deafness and blindness. But the proportion of babies born that early has leveled off, while the rate of "near-term" or "late-preterm" births -- between 34 and 36 weeks -- continues to rise. They now account for about two-thirds of all preterm births.

"These kids have been below the radar screen," said Marie C. McCormick of the Harvard School of Public Health. "They're just starting to get our attention."

Nearly 9 percent of all babies delivered in the United States were born late-preterm in 2003, according to the most recent federal data. That is up from 7.6 percent a decade earlier and the highest since the government started tracking such births -- and translates into about 50,000 more of these babies each year.

"It's a huge increase," said Mary E. D'Alton of Columbia University. "The question is: Are we doing too many of these deliveries?"

While the precise cause of the increase is unclear, one reason is that more women are delaying childbearing until their thirties, when they are prone to complications, including premature labor. Older women are also more likely to need fertility treatments, which increase the chances of having twins and triplets -- which tend to be born early. The obesity epidemic may also play a role -- obese women have more complications, such as high blood pressure and diabetes, that can make it necessary to end a pregnancy early.

Medical advances are making it easier to spot babies who are in distress or developing poorly, prompting doctors to deliver them early -- either by Caesarean section or by inducing labor with drugs -- to prevent stillbirths. Techniques for caring for premature babies have also improved, giving physicians more confidence that a baby will survive if delivered early. That makes them more likely to suggest an early delivery at any hint of a problem that might endanger the mother or baby -- or risk a lawsuit.

"In the past they wouldn't have dared -- they would have tried to wait it out," McCormick said. "Now they know what the neonatal intensive-care unit can do. That's been a very powerful, powerful change."

So powerful, obstetricians say, that the rate of stillbirths has dropped and the chances that a premature baby will survive have risen sharply.

"We shouldn't be worried," said Charles J. Lockwood of the Yale University School of Medicine. "We're doing a good job of avoiding stillbirths and subsequent infant mortality. When you have a fetus with no growth or insufficient food, the better place for that fetus is outside the womb."

But some specialists question whether the increase in Caesareans and inductions is the reason for the drop in stillbirths. And they worry that too much of the increase may be due to women hastening delivery for nonmedical reasons -- they want to make sure their mother will be in town, their husband has a business trip pending, or they are just fed up with being pregnant.

"It's a common request," said Mark Lollar, an obstetrician in San Ramon, Calif., who routinely honors such requests for the wives of professional athletes so their husbands can be present. "I have no problem arranging that for them."

Lollar and other obstetricians insist that they make sure that the fetus is at least 38 weeks old. "We never compromise the mother or the baby's safety," Lollar said.

Other experts, however, say it can be difficult to calculate the precise gestational age of a fetus.

"If a woman comes in late in the pregnancy and only has one ultrasound, you can have an error of up to two weeks, which can be significant," Tonse said.

After losing her first baby three days before her due date, Becky Veduccio and her doctor decided to induce labor in March just before her 37th week. Her daughter, Sophie, spent several days in intensive care getting breathing help, antibiotics and intravenous fluids. Less than a week later she was readmitted to the hospital for jaundice, and she has had digestive problems ever since.

"I thought 36 1/2 weeks would be okay," said Veduccio of Bloomfield, N.J. "But it's been just torturous. Every time we thought we could relax, something else would happen."

The lungs, brains and other organs of babies born even a week or two early are often underdeveloped, making the infants much more likely to have problems breathing, maintaining their body temperature and feeding. They are also vulnerable to infections and jaundice, which can be life-threatening or cause brain damage.

Such complications often require them to be sustained in the hospital for a week or two until they are fit to go home, adding thousands of dollars to the cost of their care. Often, they end up being readmitted once doctors realize they are not quite fully formed.

"These babies often masquerade as term babies," said Elizabeth A. Catlin of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. "They look like full-term babies -- they are chubby, they have a head of hair. But they just don't have the maturity and development of full-term babies."

In addition to the added cost and anxiety the complications cause, late-preterm babies are about five times as likely to die in the first week of life and about three times as likely to die in the first year than full-term babies, studies show.

"Doctors ought to be aware that there's no free lunch," said Michael Kramer of McGill University in Montreal. "There are a lot more babies out there who are getting sick and dying."

Although very little research has been done on these babies' long-term well-being, researchers suspect they may also be at increased risk for behavioral problems such as hyperactivity and possibly cerebral palsy and mental retardation.

"Could this group of babies be contributing significantly to the total burden of mental retardation in the United States and the world?" asked Gabriel J. Escobar of Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program in Oakland, Calif. "I would say yes. We don't know how much, but it's not trivial."

Some studies have found evidence that these babies are more likely to have subtle problems with speech development and coordination and behavioral and learning difficulties.

"The thinking had been that these babies were basically the same as term babies," said Steven B. Morse of the University of Florida. "Now it looks like they really are different."

Morse presented a study at a conference in San Francisco this month that found late-preterm babies were significantly more likely to fall behind in reaching language, coordination and developmental benchmarks at age 3, were less likely to be ready to start preschool at age 4, and were more likely to need special-education classes, have behavioral problems and be held back in kindergarten.

"A lot of brain maturation occurs in those last few weeks," he said. "How the brain develops when the baby is still inside the mother may be different than how it develops when it is outside. If these kinds of development problems persist for these children, that is a concern from a societal standpoint."

Rob Stein, Washington Post Staff Writer
May 20, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/
2006/05/19/ AR2006051901702.html


ADHD in girls overlooked

Many parents and paediatricians assume girls don't suffer as much from attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder as boys.

However, researchers in Northern California observed girls with the disorder at summer camps, and found they are much more impaired than their counterparts who don't have the condition.

Girls show ADHD differently

The findings suggest the medical community doesn't appreciate the frequency and severity of ADHD in girls, says Stephen Hinshaw, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley and co-author of the new study.

"Boys and girls are similarly afflicted and impaired by the symptoms of the disorder," Hinshaw says. "Girls appear to be as affected as boys, if not more so in some instances."

Several researchers have argued that many affected girls have been left behind, largely because they are less likely to be hyperactive and more likely to have trouble paying attention.

"The hyperactivity tends to come to the attention of teachers and parents, and gets kids in trouble with their peers," while a lack of attention is less noticeable, says Nadine Kaslow, chief psychologist at Emory University School of Medicine.

Establishing a test scenario

In the UC-Berkeley study, researchers enrolled 228 girls aged six to 12 in day camps held from 1997 to 1999.

Of the girls, 140 had ADHD and were specially recruited; the others, who weren't diagnosed with ADHD, were told the camps were for "enrichment."

The girls with ADHD went off their medications for the six-week day camp periods so researchers could observe their "natural" behaviour.

The findings appear in the October issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.

More subtle aggression and attention deficits

Researchers watched the girls closely, and found those with ADHD were often socially isolated and uninterested in following directions.

The girls with ADHD weren't as physically aggressive as boys with the disorder, but Hinshaw says they were more likely to engage in what is called "relational aggression" - "getting back at someone by excluding them from an activity or social group, or spreading rumours rather than directly aggressing against them."

The girls scored as poorly as boys on tests of their abilities to set goals, alter strategies in response to changing situations, and make plans.

Helping the children live an easier life

Kaslow praises the study, and says more attention to the ADHD problems of girls will help them later in life.

"This really underscores the importance of teacher, parents and paediatricians paying attention when girls aren't doing as well as one thinks they should be," she says.

"The longer these problems go untreated, the worse kids feel about themselves, the more social difficulties they have, and the harder life becomes for them."

Some adult women appear in her office with cases of ADHD that have been undiagnosed since childhood, Kaslow says. "They didn't know they had it, but they knew they struggled more to organise their work and their thinking. Sometimes teachers would say these kids weren't that smart, but it's not an intelligence issue. It's about an ability to organise it, and get it all together."

The good news is that ADHD drugs appear to work as well in girls as in boys, Hinshaw says. "ADHD is a serious, but treatable, problem in girls."

HealthScout News
http://www.health24.com/mind/ADHD/1284-3441,19832.asp


Is tech injuring children?

Mitali Perkins worries about her sons' hands.

Her 13-year-old twins, James and Timothy, are avid gamers who own three computers, two Sony PlayStations, a Nintendo GameCube and a Microsoft Xbox. Physically, they're fit, with one oddity: The boys can bend their thumbs all the way back to their forearms, and they constantly stretch and crack their knuckles with ease. For tasks like ringing a doorbell, dialing a phone number and changing the remote, they use their thumbs.

"The word 'arthritis' comes to mind," Perkins wrote in an e-mail to CNET News.com.

The Perkins boys' flexi-thumbs could be genetic--or they could be the physical adaptation of two game fanatics, just like big thighs are to bicyclists and strong shoulders are to swimmers. Whatever the case, the prolonged exposure to technology by a generation of kids has doctors, researchers and physical therapists expecting a rash of new repetitive stress injuries in the coming years.

A study from 2000 in Australia on the effects of laptop computers in schools showed that 60 percent of students aged 10 to 17 complained of neck and back discomfort while using the PC.

"Not since the development of a written language has the task performed by children and adults changed so dramatically," according to the report from the International Ergonomics Association.

Unfortunately, conclusive research on the subject of computer ergonomics for kids has been lacking. But researchers are concerned nonetheless.

"The exposure to ergonomic risk hazards for children is expected to be higher than it would be for adults because of the sheer amount of time that they're on computers at home and at school," said Ken Harwood, director of the practice department at the American Physical Therapy Association.

"So we expect to be seeing more diagnoses of repetitive stress injuries (RSI) in kids in the upcoming years as these kids start to develop, but we lack the evidence that supports it," said Harwood, who's also a physical therapist and certified industrial ergonomic specialist.

Repetitive stress as young as 8

Some physical therapists and pediatricians are already citing cases of RSI in children as young as 8 years old. Kids complain of headaches, neck problems and backaches. And when pediatricians can't identify the source, they'll send the child to a physical therapist.

"We see so many more middle school children with neck (pain) and backaches," said Doreen Frank, a physical therapist based near Albany, N.Y. "When we evaluate them and find there's been no trauma or no new activity, it narrows down to the fact that they sit for way too long and then they're on the computer way too long," Frank said.

Many adults who have witnessed kids trading hobbies like soccer or dance for instant messaging and computer games aren't surprised by these concerns. But even athletic children can suffer as a result of prolonged states of sedentary computer slump without break that strain developing muscles and joints. In the last five years, Frank said, at least 5 percent of her patients have been middle school children with neck and back pain, some in just the sixth grade.

Alan Hedge, a professor of ergonomics at Cornell University, said it takes an average of five to 10 years for people with poor computer habits to develop RSI problems. At that rate, kids in high school or college today might be primed for stress injuries while in the workplace--and it would likely be recorded as a work-related injury. Because there's no national database tracking child ergonomics issues in schools, there would be no way for researchers to understand the scope of the effects, he said.

Still, there's hope that digital kids could adapt to their heavy computer use.

A theory called the "Healthy Worker Effect" supposes that when someone performs a repetitive task for a long time, like lifting heavy boxes or surfing the Web, the person can develop a resistance to problems associated with the activity. The effect may be developmental, according to Harwood, in that children could develop a body structure to handle more ergonomic stress than they would have if they started the task as an adult.

Harwood said that it's not easy to measure RSI symptoms and then link them to a particular activity. Most research is conducted through surveys, he said, and kids don't fair well filling out such questionnaires. However, he said, there have been many studies in adults that show a relationship between computer use and RSI, and that could correlate to children. There's a need to track children's use of technology over time so as to measure future effect, he said.

"There's a lot of work that still needs to be done in this area," he said.

Hours and hours each day

The potential dangers are associated with several trends. One, of course, is the ubiquity of computers, cell phones, text messaging, instant messaging, social networking, and whatever the next technological fad might be. More than 80 percent of American kids age 12 to 17 use the Internet, and more than half of those kids log on daily, according to a Pew Internet and American Life study.

Kids nowadays can spend hours cradling a cell phone with a crooked neck, slumping over a computer game, slouching in front of a PC while text messaging friends and listening to music. And that's on top of time they might spend in school on a PC surfing the Web to research topics and do homework.

Experts are particularly concerned about the ergonomics of PC setups in schools because many computer labs are designed with a one-size-fits-all approach. Children might not have chairs suited to them or computer screens at eye-level that help avoid common repetitive strain.

College and high-school kids could once be found on a bed or couch reading a book for school. Now, studies are happening more on the computer, adding hours to sitting at the PC.

The state of Maine, for example, has mandated that all school kids be equipped with a computer. Microsoft, too, has donated computers to schools. Yet many such initiatives don't include programs to teach children how to use those computers properly to avoid injury, experts say.

"We'll have trouble; then we'll accommodate to it," said Dr. Stephen Nicholas, director of the Nicholas Institute of Sports Medicine and Athletic Trauma.

Karen Lunda, a physical therapist in Tuscon, Ariz., said when it comes to children, people consider the developmental vulnerabilities they're prone to in many activities. For example, the pitcher in Little League baseball is restricted in how many innings he or she can pitch to avoid arm injury. The same might be warranted for computer use, she said. Perhaps, she added, kids should be forced to take a break every 1,000 keystrokes.

"It's something to examine because if we don't, boy, we're going to have a huge problem as they get older," she said.

Except for a few initiatives, very little has been done in the United States to protect children from computer injury and teach them good habits like regular breaks, posture and stretches, experts say. The state of New Jersey has passed legislation to set standards for school furniture that would support computer use, but the measure has yet to be enacted. At least one company, Magnitude, has developed software for schools called Ergo Fun. Cornell has also developed downloadable software that teaches kids the principles of PC ergonomics.

"If you teach children the principles of good ergonomics for using computers when they're young, then those will become habits to protect them throughout their life," said Cornell's Hedge.

For now, the Perkins boys show no signs of repetitive stress from mouse or joystick use, according to their mother, who said that's likely because she and her husband do their best to limit game play.

"I'm not sure about the long-term effects," Perkins said.

Send insights or tips on this topic to stefanie.olsen@cnet.com.

Stefanie Olsen, Staff Writer, CNET News.com
May 19, 2006
http://news.com.com/Is+tech+injuring+children/
2009-1041-6073730.html?part=dht&tag=nl.e703

TalkBack
backache from computers
msngurl05 May 23, 2006

A little break never hurt anyone!
TechMom236 May 22, 2006

"fair well"?
George Liddy May 19, 2006

Bad Science
noybypos May 19, 2006

Of Course they won't
Bruce Jenner May 19, 2006

It actually affects the parents
Christopher Hall May 19, 2006


Immigrant children lag behind in European schools

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Immigrant children in various European countries are lagging behind in school performance when compared to their native counterparts, a study published by the OECD on Monday (15 May) shows.

The research by the economic think tank reveals that more than a third of second-generation immigrant children in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Norway and also the US perform below a basic level of mathematical competence.

About 40 percent of second-generation immigrant students leave school without basic skills in mathematics.

Concerned by the statistics, the OECD warned against being passive on the issue.

"Doing nothing isn't an option, the data suggest: with unemployment rates in many countries two to three times higher among immigrants than among nationals, the cost of inaction may be far greater than the cost of action," an OECD statement said.

In certain countries immigrants do substantially less well.

Germany obtained some of the worst results, with statistics showing that the performance of immigrant students in German schools is worsening drastically.

At the other end of the scale, Sweden emerged as the best performer among West European states in succeeding to reduce educational inequality between second-generational immigrant children and the native population

The research also says that immigrant students whose families are from Turkey tend to perform poorly in many countries, Germany remains the country where they do significantly worse.

From all the countries analysed, Australia and Canada got the best results.

In these countries, the performance of second-generation immigrant children is much closer to that of native children and close to the national average.

The OECD study suggests that public policy can make a big difference.

Australia and Canada have common well-established language support programmes in early childhood education and primary school which have clearly defined goals, standards and evaluation systems, the OECD reports says.

For the study, OECD experts tested 15-year-old students in 41 countries in mathematics, reading comprehension, science and problem-solving skills.

Then the study focused on 17 territories with large immigrant populations.

Aleander Balzan

EUOBSERVER

http://euobserver.com/9/21608

Gifted and Tormented
Academic Stars Often Bullied -- and More Likely to Suffer Emotionally as a Result

More than two-thirds of academically talented eighth-graders say they have been bullied at school and nearly one-third harbored violent thoughts as a result, according to a study believed to be the first to examine the prevalence and impact of bullying in a group some experts regard as particularly vulnerable.

The study -- published in the current issue of Gifted Child Quarterly, a peer-reviewed journal -- involved 432 students in 11 states, including Maryland, who had been identified by their school systems as gifted. Lead author Jean Sunde Peterson, an associate professor of educational studies at Purdue University, said she sought to explore whether harassing behavior affected such children differently.

"All children are affected adversely by bullying, but gifted children differ from other children in significant ways, and what they experience may be qualitatively different," said Peterson, whose study was conducted with doctoral candidate Karen Ray. "It is important to remember that although cognitively these children are advanced, physically, socially and emotionally they may not be."

In the view of Peterson and some other experts, the personality traits and interests of many gifted children may make them targets of bullying by their classmates. At the same time, she added, gifted children may be more susceptible to the emotional damage that bullying can inflict.

Some studies have found that gifted children, especially those with high verbal aptitude, may be more sensitive than their less-gifted peers and to worry more about their social standing.

Because the Purdue study did not contain a control group and was not designed as a comparative study, it is impossible to determine whether the bullying that gifted children described differs in quality or quantity from that experienced by their peers. Other studies have found that 60 to 90 percent of schoolchildren say they were bullied and 20 percent say they bullied someone else.

"This study is a great start and the tip of the iceberg," said developmental psychologist Susan Limber, an associate professor of psychology at Clemson University in South Carolina and an expert on bullying prevention.

Sylvia Rimm, a clinical professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Case School of Medicine in Cleveland, said Peterson's findings echo what she hears in her practice.

"Regular kids get bullied, too, but gifted kids are bullied based on their school performance, which makes the child's strength into a weakness" and a potential source of shame, said Rimm.

Peterson said that one of her most alarming findings involved the frequency of violent thoughts. By eighth grade approximately 37 percent of boys and 23 percent of girls reported having unspecified violent thoughts in response to being bullied; 11 percent said they had resorted to violence to cope with the problem, often by striking a classmate.

Goad to Violence

The link between bullying and school violence has attracted increasing attention since the 1999 rampage at Colorado's Columbine High School. That year, two shotgun-wielding students, both of whom Peterson said had been identified as gifted and who had been bullied for years, killed 13 people, wounded 24 and then committed suicide. A year later an analysis by officials at the U.S. Secret Service of 37 premeditated school shootings found that bullying, which some of the shooters described "in terms that approached torment," played a major role in more than two-thirds of the attacks.

In the last two months, Columbine-style plots involving students as young as 12 have been disrupted in more than half a dozen American communities, from North Pole, Alaska, to Atco, N.J. Bullying was cited as a motive in some of these incidents, but it is unclear how many of the suspected conspirators would be considered academically precocious.

Jaysen Kettl, who was convicted of conspiracy after his plan to murder 20 classmates, teachers and administrators at Vidor High School in Vidor, Tex., was foiled in 2003, told the Houston Chronicle in an interview last March that classmates began bullying him when he left a gifted program in eighth grade. Kettl, who was 17 at the time of his arrest, was charged as an adult and is serving a four-year prison term.

Often, psychologists say, gifted children who are bullied turn their rage and despair inward. Among them was J. Daniel Scruggs of Meriden, Conn., a slightly built 12-year-old with an IQ of 139.

Scruggs was tormented for more than a year by middle school classmates who shoved him off the bleachers, affixed "Kick Me" signs to his back and made him eat his lunch off the cafeteria floor. Many school officials knew about the abuse and failed to intervene, state investigators found. On Jan. 2, 2002, the boy walked into his bedroom closet and hanged himself.

One of Rimm's clients, a middle school student, told Rimm she worried that if her grades were too good, she would be ostracized.

"Some kids get away with it if they're really good at sports or very pretty," Rimm said. "If kids are teased in the one area they have that's strong, there is this feeling of isolation and anger. Adults need to take it seriously because otherwise these kids go underground."

Peterson conducted detailed interviews with 57 students as part of her study. Some told her their intelligence was used against them; school officials, including teachers, were low on the list of people to whom they turned for help.

"Many students said they assumed responsibility for fixing the problem" Peterson said. "Some felt they had essentially been told by school officials, 'If you're so smart, figure it out yourself.' "

Out of the Loop

Many studies of bullying have found that the problem escalates in the later years of elementary school, is most severe in middle school and tends to dissipate by high school. Peterson's subjects reported that sixth grade was the peak year for bullying.

Rimm said she suspected that bullying might be less a problem for gifted children who are grouped together, as in many Washington area school systems that have magnet academic programs.

Mary Shaw, a spokeswoman for the Fairfax County Public Schools, which offer gifted education programs beginning in kindergarten, said officials there declined to comment other than to say that bullying of gifted students "is not an issue for us."

That is not true elsewhere. Developmental psychologist Richard Olenchak, director of the University of Houston's Urban Talent Research Institute, which works with gifted minority students, said some cultures label gifted children as "overly intellectual"; standing out for being "a brain" at an age when children most want to fit in, he said, may make a gifted student a target of unwanted attention.

Peterson found that being teased about appearance, reported by 24 percent of study participants, bothered students "a lot" in sixth and seventh grade, the same age that being teased about intelligence and grades peaked.

One finding that merits further study, according to Peterson: 16 percent of students in her study said they had bullied someone else. Although fewer students reported being bullied by eighth grade, the number who said they bullied others increased.

To Clemson's Limber, who consults with school systems around the country about bullying prevention, the key questions have to do with the tone set by teachers and administrators.

"Do they mark [gifted] kids as being special or different?" she asked. "Are they looking out for those who may be socially isolated?".

Comments: boodmans@washpost.com.

Sandra G. Boodman, Washington Post Staff Writer
May 16, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/
2006/05/15/AR2006051501103.html

Dropout Data Raise Questions on 2 Fronts

One Side Says Problem Isn't as Dire as Thought, but Others Doubt Research

Economist Larry Mishel was troubled by high school graduation statistics that contradicted what he thought was good research. That was particularly true of data used by many politicians and pundits to bemoan a 30 percent dropout rate in American high schools.

"This picture was radically different from what I knew from labor market data I regularly examined in my studies of wage and job trends," said Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank. His research indicated that only about 12 percent of the workforce lacked a high school diploma or its equivalent, so how could the dropout rate be so large?

Political scientist Jay P. Greene also had trouble with the data, but for a different reason. He found many school systems were claiming low dropout rates, even though their ninth grades were bulging with restless students eager to be elsewhere and many had disappeared by graduation time. Working as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and as head of the education reform department at the University of Arkansas, Greene reported that graduation rates seemed to be worse than many people thought, as low as 50 percent in low-income urban neighborhoods.

A collision of those two views by prominent scholars was inevitable, and in the past several weeks it has hit the education policy world in an explosion of articles, e-mails and public debates, some quite heated. Experts disagree over who is right, and some say the truth may be somewhere in between. But the argument has aggravated a widespread feeling that information on how many children are disappearing from public schools is not nearly as accurate as it should be.

"Jay Greene and Larry Mishel have performed the valuable service of exposing the huge inadequacies in the way we measure the percent of students who achieve a regular high school diploma -- inadequacies not attended to in over two decades of education reform," said Paul E. Barton, senior associate in the Educational Testing Service's Policy Information Center.

Such congratulatory words have not ended the scholarly strife. Mishel and Greene continue their sometimes testy exchanges, and the argument has broken into disputes over lost diplomas, growth computation mistakes, uncounted immigrants and other issues loved only by people whose livelihoods depend on population data.

The major event has been the publication of a book by Mishel and Economic Policy Institute economist Joydeep Roy, "Rethinking High School Graduation Rates and Trends." It is only 100 pages, many of them full of charts, but it takes a big swing at powerful forces, particularly the National Governors Association and its recent report that said high schools are in crisis.

"About a third of our students are not graduating from high school," the association declared in a 2005 report by a task force that used Greene's data. "About three-fourths of white students graduate from high school, but only half of African American and Hispanic students do."

Mishel and Roy say that is wrong. Using U.S. Education Department data that follow student experiences and results of Census Bureau household surveys, they get very different numbers: an overall high school graduation rate with a regular diploma of 80 to 83 percent, a black student graduation rate of 69 to 75 percent and a Hispanic graduation rate of 61 to 74 percent.

They say that in the past 40 years, the high school completion rate, including graduates and those passing General Educational Development diploma tests, has gone up substantially and that the black-white gap has shrunk, except in the past 10 years, when there has been little improvement. Only graduation among Hispanics increased during the past 10 years.

Greene and Manhattan Institute research associate Marcus A. Winters have quickly counterattacked. They say the Mishel-Roy book is too dependent on Education Department longitudinal studies that follow a representative sample of students over several years and on census surveys that depend on people telling the truth about their success in school. If, for example, there were as many high school graduates in 2003 as Mishel and Roy said, they would number 476,442 more than the number of students school systems reported that year, Greene and Winters said.

Russell Rumberger, a University of California at Santa Barbara education professor, said he carefully checked the longitudinal survey used by Mishel and Roy and found that it appeared to "generate very accurate population estimates confirmed by published data." Greene struck back with a political analogy. He said the "assertion that we should believe the results of a survey over population counts is a little bit like the people who asserted that Kerry really won the 2004 election because the exit polls showed him winning even though the vote count gave the victory to Bush."

Daniel J. Losen, senior education law and policy associate at the Harvard University Civil Rights Project, said he agreed with Greene that the dropout problem is severe. "There is a consensus that this crisis is real and particularly severe for Latinos, African Americans and Native Americans," he said.

Researchers say this is not just an academic question; there are consequences for many children. "If Larry Mishel is right that the graduation rates have been improving, then some of the radical reforms for high schools being proposed may be misguided or dangerous," said Richard Rothstein, a former New York Times columnist and a research associate at Mishel's think tank.

"It may seem that we are talking about just a few percentage points here and there," said John Robert Warren, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota who agrees with Greene, but "five percentage points would be 175,000 young people annually."

No matter who is right, Barton said, it is embarrassing for educational research to have scholars as reputable as Mishel and Greene be so dubious about the value of major sources of dropout data.

Barton said census officials told him that there had been no field or validity studies of the census question on high school completion rates -- so experts cannot be as confident about that data. By contrast, he said, "tens of millions of dollars have gone into getting the questions right in that survey that gives the monthly unemployment rate."

Jay Mathews, Washington Post Staff Writer

May 23, 2006

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/
2006/05/22/ AR2006052201187.html

Dropout Data Raise Questions on 2 Fronts
One Side Says Problem Isn't as Dire as Thought, but Others Doubt Research

Economist Larry Mishel was troubled by high school graduation statistics that contradicted what he thought was good research. That was particularly true of data used by many politicians and pundits to bemoan a 30 percent dropout rate in American high schools.

"This picture was radically different from what I knew from labor market data I regularly examined in my studies of wage and job trends," said Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank. His research indicated that only about 12 percent of the workforce lacked a high school diploma or its equivalent, so how could the dropout rate be so large?

Political scientist Jay P. Greene also had trouble with the data, but for a different reason. He found many school systems were claiming low dropout rates, even though their ninth grades were bulging with restless students eager to be elsewhere and many had disappeared by graduation time. Working as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and as head of the education reform department at the University of Arkansas, Greene reported that graduation rates seemed to be worse than many people thought, as low as 50 percent in low-income urban neighborhoods.

A collision of those two views by prominent scholars was inevitable, and in the past several weeks it has hit the education policy world in an explosion of articles, e-mails and public debates, some quite heated. Experts disagree over who is right, and some say the truth may be somewhere in between. But the argument has aggravated a widespread feeling that information on how many children are disappearing from public schools is not nearly as accurate as it should be.

"Jay Greene and Larry Mishel have performed the valuable service of exposing the huge inadequacies in the way we measure the percent of students who achieve a regular high school diploma -- inadequacies not attended to in over two decades of education reform," said Paul E. Barton, senior associate in the Educational Testing Service's Policy Information Center.

Such congratulatory words have not ended the scholarly strife. Mishel and Greene continue their sometimes testy exchanges, and the argument has broken into disputes over lost diplomas, growth computation mistakes, uncounted immigrants and other issues loved only by people whose livelihoods depend on population data.

The major event has been the publication of a book by Mishel and Economic Policy Institute economist Joydeep Roy, "Rethinking High School Graduation Rates and Trends." It is only 100 pages, many of them full of charts, but it takes a big swing at powerful forces, particularly the National Governors Association and its recent report that said high schools are in crisis.

"About a third of our students are not graduating from high school," the association declared in a 2005 report by a task force that used Greene's data. "About three-fourths of white students graduate from high school, but only half of African American and Hispanic students do."

Mishel and Roy say that is wrong. Using U.S. Education Department data that follow student experiences and results of Census Bureau household surveys, they get very different numbers: an overall high school graduation rate with a regular diploma of 80 to 83 percent, a black student graduation rate of 69 to 75 percent and a Hispanic graduation rate of 61 to 74 percent.

They say that in the past 40 years, the high school completion rate, including graduates and those passing General Educational Development diploma tests, has gone up substantially and that the black-white gap has shrunk, except in the past 10 years, when there has been little improvement. Only graduation among Hispanics increased during the past 10 years.

Greene and Manhattan Institute research associate Marcus A. Winters have quickly counterattacked. They say the Mishel-Roy book is too dependent on Education Department longitudinal studies that follow a representative sample of students over several years and on census surveys that depend on people telling the truth about their success in school. If, for example, there were as many high school graduates in 2003 as Mishel and Roy said, they would number 476,442 more than the number of students school systems reported that year, Greene and Winters said.

Russell Rumberger, a University of California at Santa Barbara education professor, said he carefully checked the longitudinal survey used by Mishel and Roy and found that it appeared to "generate very accurate population estimates confirmed by published data." Greene struck back with a political analogy. He said the "assertion that we should believe the results of a survey over population counts is a little bit like the people who asserted that Kerry really won the 2004 election because the exit polls showed him winning even though the vote count gave the victory to Bush."

Daniel J. Losen, senior education law and policy associate at the Harvard University Civil Rights Project, said he agreed with Greene that the dropout problem is severe. "There is a consensus that this crisis is real and particularly severe for Latinos, African Americans and Native Americans," he said.

Researchers say this is not just an academic question; there are consequences for many children. "If Larry Mishel is right that the graduation rates have been improving, then some of the radical reforms for high schools being proposed may be misguided or dangerous," said Richard Rothstein, a former New York Times columnist and a research associate at Mishel's think tank.

"It may seem that we are talking about just a few percentage points here and there," said John Robert Warren, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota who agrees with Greene, but "five percentage points would be 175,000 young people annually."

No matter who is right, Barton said, it is embarrassing for educational research to have scholars as reputable as Mishel and Greene be so dubious about the value of major sources of dropout data.

Barton said census officials told him that there had been no field or validity studies of the census question on high school completion rates -- so experts cannot be as confident about that data. By contrast, he said, "tens of millions of dollars have gone into getting the questions right in that survey that gives the monthly unemployment rate."

Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
May 23, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/
2006/05/22/AR2006052201187.html

From a Poet's Failing Sight, a Novel 'Seeing Machine' Emerges

A poet and artist has enlisted the help of scientists and engineering students to create a "seeing machine" that may eventually help people like her, with severely impaired vision, to read, look at pictures and explore landscapes and buildings.

Elizabeth Goldring's eyesight has come and gone over the years. Mostly, it has gone. Now 61, she has had juvenile diabetes since college, and the disease has pecked away at her vision, causing hemorrhages in her retinas, the fragile layer of light-sensitive cells at the back of the eye.

About 10 years ago, when she was nearly blind in both eyes, her doctor recommended a test to find out whether she had any healthy retina left at all. The test involved a large $100,000 machine called a scanning laser ophthalmoscope, which would let the doctor examine her retinas and project images directly onto them. If there were any live spots, the device might let her see.

It worked. She saw a stick-figure turtle. Ms. Goldring, a poet who has had three books published, asked to see a word. She was able to read "sun." It was the first word she had seen in many months.

"For a poet, that's an incredible feeling," she said. "I said almost immediately, 'I need to get in touch with the man who invented this machine.' "

She wanted a scaled-down version to use on her own, and she thought other people with impaired vision would want one, too. About 14 million people in the United States have low vision — deficits that cannot be corrected with glasses or contact lenses, according to the National Eye Institute. Diabetes, glaucoma and the retinal disease macular degeneration are among the most common causes.

Ms. Goldring had tried just about every device made to help people with low vision, but the doctor's machine was far better than any of them. She imagined using a home or library version of it.

The idea of creating a new device did not intimidate her: though she is not a scientist or engineer, she works at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"I was convinced it would work," she said, though she added, "at first people were really, really suspicious."

She and a team of M.I.T. students collaborated with the machine's inventor, Robert W. Webb, a researcher at Harvard and the Massachusetts General Hospital. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration paid for part of the project.

The result is what Ms. Goldring calls a seeing machine, a smaller, simpler desktop device that cost less than $4,000 to build. It consists of a projector, computer, monitor, eyepiece and a joystick for zooming in and out. It uses light-emitting diodes instead of a laser.

Ten people with severely impaired vision tried out the prototype as part of a pilot study, Ms. Goldring said.

Most had diabetes or macular degeneration, which is becoming more common as the population ages. The patients used the seeing machine to look at words and navigate through virtual architectural models.

"I can't think of a one of them that didn't respond very vividly and excitedly to the experience," Ms. Goldring said. She and her colleagues described the pilot study in a recent article in a medical journal, Optometry. But no seeing machines are available for sale yet. "Ten patients is great, but we need to do a large-scale test of the machine," Ms. Goldring said.

Dr. Webb agreed that more testing was needed but said he thought that the machine would ultimately be useful to only a small minority of people with low vision.

Even with the seeing machine, people with badly damaged retinas will not be able to read normally.

Most can see only three or four letters at a time or tiny bits of a picture, and even that can be hard and slow. For people with vision like hers, she said, words like book and door can be almost indecipherable because the letters b or d followed by o create a weird visual effect.

For that reason, Ms. Goldring created a "visual language" that combines letters and simple pictures to represent hundreds of nouns and verbs. For example, the word book is a b, the outline of an open book and then a k. Door is a d, the outline of a doorway and then an r.

Patients in the study liked the visual language and it made reading easier and faster; one woman liked it so much she wished her recipes could be written in it, Ms. Goldring said.

She said she thought the machine might eventually be used to help people look at material from Internet libraries for people with impaired vision, so that the images were not too complicated for them to process.

The machine might allow people to study the layout of places they are about to visit, to make it easier to get around. Ms. Goldring said she tried this, asking students to videotape the interior of a building at M.I.T. that she had never entered. "It was too complicated, but I looked and looked," she said. "Then I went by myself. My sense of confidence was something entirely different."

Just knowing the location of staircases or the arrangement of buttons in an elevator can be enormously helpful, she said.

She has also been using the machine to help her create artwork that she calls "retina prints," impressionistic, digital portraits of the world as she sees it, superimposed on faint images of structures of the retina, her own and other people's.

Ms. Goldring hopes that eventually the seeing machines will be mass produced and available for even less than $4,000. "My dream is that these seeing machines will make it out of my laboratory and into the hands of people who could use them," she said.

DENISE GRADY
May 23, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/23/health/23visi.html

Hang It Up

YOU'RE a teacher in the New York City public school system. It's September, and you're lecturing the class on the structure of an essay. Your students need to know this information to pass your class and the Regents exam, and you, of course, hope that one day your talented students will dazzle and amaze English professors all over the country.

You turn your back to write the definition of "thesis" on the chalk board. It takes about 15 seconds. You turn around to the class expecting to see 25 students scribbling the concept in their notebook. Instead, you see a group of students who have sprung appendages of technology.

Jose has grown an earphone. Maria's thumbs have sprouted a two-way. Man Keung, recently arrived from China, is texting away on a cellphone connected to his wrist. And Christina appears to be playing Mine Sweeper on a Pocket PC on her lap.

Come the end of the term, a handful will fail the class. A number will never pass the Regents. As we all know, far too many will drop out of school. And I can tell you with no hint of pride that it isn't the teacher's fault. As much as any other problem plaguing our schools, the onus for failure should be placed on distractions in the classroom, specifically the cellphone.

Though electronic devices have been banned in public schools for years, the issue came to the forefront last month when Chancellor Joel Klein announced the random placement of metal detectors in schools. The result: more than 800 cellphones have been confiscated.

Students and their parents, who say they rely on cellphones for safety reasons, are outraged. There's even talk of a lawsuit arguing that the rule should be struck down.

But as a former New York City public school teacher, I can tell you that cellphones don't belong in the classroom. A student with a cellphone is an uninterested student, one with a short attention span who cares more about his social life than education.

Parents think of cellphones as a connection to their children in an emergency. I have a few questions for those parents: First, when was the last situation that genuinely called for immediate interaction with your child? In most cases, the hospital or the police would seem more urgent. Second, is phoning the main office and having it patch you through to your child not quick enough? And third, do you know why your children really want to take cellphones to school?

Because just like the new Jordans and Rocawear they desire, cellphones are status symbols. Because when their cellphone rings while the teacher is talking, everyone laughs. Because playing video games on their cell makes them look cool. Because text messaging their friend in the next room is more fun than learning about the topic sentence. So is listening to the new Three 6 Mafia song they just downloaded onto their cell.

And saying students can store their phones in the locker is a joke. If they have cellphones, they're going to bring them into class.

There are legitimate causes that parents should be taking on. Rally against crowding in the classroom. Fight against the oppressive and culturally biased Regents tests. But you're wrong on this cellphone issue. In this case, you are part of the problem, not the solution.

Jesse Scaccia, a film producer, taught at Franklin D. Roosevelt High School in Brooklyn.

JESSE SCACCIA, Op-Ed Contributor
May 23, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/23/opinion/23scaccia.html

Schools, students match wits over Web access

Thousands of websites are blocked on school computers in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, including pornography, video games, gambling and MySpace, the wildly popular social-networking service.

Sergio Molina, a senior at Felix Varela Senior High School in West Kendall, explains how frustrating those virtual roadblocks can be -- they interfere with researching papers on drugs or sexual abuse, make it hard for him to find background for the video-game reviews he writes for the school newspaper and block him from checking his e-mail during the school day.

But while he explains it, he makes a few clicks on a classroom computer and shows off his own MySpace page. He could easily slide to others, including pages of classmates with suggestive pictures or far racier material elsewhere on the Internet.

His trick -- which is far too widely known among students and teachers to qualify as a secret -- is a proxy server, which allows students to skirt the Miami-Dade school district's watchdog software.

''We use proxies, like, every week,'' Molina said.

Think of school computers as a telephone that can dial only a few numbers -- but one of those belongs to a friend who can start a conference call with anyone else in the world. That friend is the proxy.

District administrators -- and the contractors they hire to run the blocking software -- scramble to cut access to proxies, but new ones open at least as quickly.

''We have had a problem with it,'' said Chuck Stanley, the Broward County school district's director of technical support, echoing similar concerns in Miami-Dade. ``The Internet is such that someone is going to create another site, but the filtering companies are working on ways that can more quickly detect the usage of those things.''

Proxies are almost impossible to block manually because students can set up new ones every morning. They have become far more common over the last few months, according to Eric Lundbohm, vice president of 8e6 Technologies, the company that produces the software used in Miami-Dade.

8e6 is releasing an update today that may be able to zap proxies more quickly, using the same techniques that block instant messaging and file-sharing programs, but it may not be completely effective.

''The kids are way ahead of everybody in figuring out ways around filters,'' Lundbohm said. ``It's an ongoing cat-and-mouse game.''

Schools can suspend students for circumventing the blocks, but proxy servers are a gaping hole in an Internet security program that serves a number of purposes.

From a technical standpoint, it insulates the district's massive computer networks against viruses by banning access to popular e-mail servers such as America Online, Hotmail and EarthLink. If a student or teacher were to download a particularly nasty bug, it could spread across more than 125,000 computers in the Miami-Dade district.

SOFTWARE'S PURPOSES

Educationally, the blocking software prevents students from frittering away time when they should be studying. Teachers cannot monitor every computer at every moment, especially when students are spread out in the school's media center. X-Stop, the software used in Miami-Dade, blocks some of the most tempting distractions.

Perhaps most importantly, though, district officials use blocking software to protect students from inappropriate content and from predators.

''Kids do tend to make stupid decisions sometimes,'' said Elizabeth Cárdenas, Varela's journalism teacher, who gives her students wide latitude to work online and sometimes catches them on the wrong side of the Internet tracks.

Miami-Dade spends more than $100,000 a year on staff and software for its filtering program. Broward uses a state program that is currently free, but will begin to cost $2 a computer next year.

No website has been a bigger target than MySpace, which is wildly popular among teenagers and twenty-somethings.

Varela has a little more than 4,000 students, and more than 840 MySpace pages belong to users who claim to be current students.

''Everyone's on it because everyone's on it,'' said Varela senior Mayling Gomez, 17.

Molina said his mother watched his MySpace page, and the service's own help page for parents urges them to monitor their children's usage, but many are either unfamiliar with the service or intimidated by the technology.

Some pages are strongly sexual or violent, and some students said they routinely receive provocative and uninvited contact from strangers. ''I don't accept any friend I don't know,'' said sophomore Stephanie Henao, 15.

Some of her friends restrict their pages to an approved list of buddies. But many are quick to welcome anyone who approaches them online -- in some circles, more online friends equals more popularity.

But it also equals more danger, according to some parents and policymakers. ''They are posting very personal information: the names of their school, the names of their friends, the stores they like to shop at, along with photos of themselves -- it's become a virtual catalog of children for child predators lurking on the Internet,'' said Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican who has sponsored a bill in Congress that would ban MySpace and similar sites in schools and libraries.

The district could easily make its system far more restrictive by reversing its strategy. Instead of blocking sites on its blacklist, it could give access only to prescreened sites on a ``white list.''

''We could say these are the educational sites and this is it, but then you really shut down search capabilities,'' said Deborah Karcher, Miami-Dade's information technology chief.

LEGITIMATE CONTENT

The problem, according to Cárdenas and her students, is that each new filter blocks legitimate content as well as dangerous or illicit sites. They must do research at home if their student newspaper prints video-game reviews or stories on breast cancer because practically any site with the word ''Nintendo'' or ''breast'' is blocked.

''They probably have to go home for that one,'' Karcher said. ``That's just one of the things where we have to say no.''

MATTHEW I. PINZUR
mpinzur@MiamiHerald.com
May 22, 2006
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/education/14637230.htm

Seeing college in the future
At fair, focus is on special ed

It looked like any other college fair. Representatives from schools stood behind colorfully decorated tables, handing out brochures and talking to students and parents.

But the event on May 11 in the Arlington High School cafeteria was meant to spread the word about postsecondary education options available to an often overlooked population -- special-education students.

The fair filled a need. At its height, nearly 200 teenagers and their parents crowded around the tables of 36 colleges and trade schools.

School officials say that by showcasing academic and vocational programs that provide support to young people with cognitive or other disabilities, fairs like the one on Arlington help special-education students prepare for a future of achievement and independence. The consistent message from behind the tables was, ''Yes, there is life after high school, and you can succeed in it."

Arlington is not the only high school that has held a special-education college fair this year. Woburn, Westford, Concord, Carlisle, Newton, and many other communities have had their own versions of the event. Frank Tassone, Arlington High School's coordinator of special-education programs, got the idea for the fair several years ago after hearing about a special-education question-and-answer night at Belmont High School.

Believing that other college fairs are ''too big and intimidating" for special-education students, Tassone worked with a committee that included parents as well as members of the Arlington High School guidance and special-education departments to create an alternative.

It started six years ago with only 15 to 20 schools and about 25 students and parents in attendance, but it soon became a much larger event.

''The regular college fair is mostly for juniors and seniors, but we invite all students in grades 9 through 12 from Arlington and surrounding communities to attend," said Tassone. ''It's important for special-education students to start thinking about their future early on."

Arlington High School has 191 special-education students out of a student body of 1,200. If last year is any indication, approximately 85 percent of them will go to college or enter a vocational training program after they graduate.

''More students who need academic support are applying to college," Tassone observed, ''and more colleges now realize they need to accommodate them."

Principal Charles Skidmore agreed with Tassone, noting that ''the special-education fair makes it clear that there is a college for every student who wants to go on to postsecondary education, and it demonstrates how much support colleges are willing to give all students as they make the transition to higher education."

The college fair opened with a panel presentation that included four participants: Tish Pieper, admissions counselor for the Program for the Advancement of Learning, or PAL, at Curry College in Milton; Susan Woods, director of disability services and the transition program at Middlesex Community College; Sean Garballey, a 2003 Arlington High special-education graduate; and Sharryn Gedeon, a 2005 special-education graduate of the high school.

Pieper led off by describing PAL, which was founded in 1970 and serves students with learning disabilities at Curry. PAL is a competitive program, with about 900 applicants vying for 180 slots. Students meet with PAL instructors for two hours per week and receive credit for their first year of participation.

''With the proper supports," said Pieper, ''PAL students can achieve anything."

Woods said the two most important things students need when making the transition from high school to college are self-advocacy and current test results.

''You have to be your own advocate" and ask for services, said Woods. She also observed that because accommodations are based on documented disabilities, the results of cognitive, neuropsychological, and achievement tests submitted to the college must be no more than three years old.

Woods added that since all community colleges have open enrollment and are nonresidential, they are well suited to students whose high school records are less than stellar and those who are not ready to live away from home.

Sean Garballey attends the University of Massachusetts at Lowell as a political science major and is a member of the Arlington School Committee. He told the audience that to receive disability services, it's important to form a close relationship with your college adviser.

''I want to make sure students know they can succeed. The key is to stay motivated," said Garballey.

Sharryn Gedeon, who is a freshman studying prelaw at Becker College in Worcester, said in an interview that special-education fairs are helpful because the college representatives know why students are there and don't ask embarrassing questions.

''I feel more confident at a special-education fair," Gedeon said. ''I don't have to hide anything."

Gedeon encouraged students to find and apply for scholarships, saying, ''They're everywhere."

''If you have a disability, don't be afraid to talk about it," Gedeon said. ''Keep your head up. Don't give up. Smile."

Carla DeFord, Globe Correspondent
May 21,2006
http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/
2006/05/21/seeing_college_in_the_future/

Teacher putting down her pen after 69 years

After spending the equivalent of two careers in the classroom, Florida's longest-serving public school teacher is retiring at last.

LAKELAND - Six-forty-five in the morning, the classroom is dark and locked, and, dear heaven, Miss Haley is missing!

''She's always here by this time,'' says a student slumped at the foot of a nearby staircase, prompting an ominous twinge that perhaps the excitement of yesterday's boisterous retirement party over at First United Methodist, plus the prospect of teaching the creepy witches scene from Macbeth today for the gazillionth time, might have precipitated an unfortunate . . . well, never mind. And then a tiny, stooped figure rounds the corner and begins her sedate shuffle down the hall.

''I don't ever remember being late,'' Miss Haley says, eyes gleaming. ``I get up at 10 minutes to five, and I sign in between six-oh-five and six-oh-seven. This is what I'm locked into. This morning I did not open my baby blues until almost 6:30, so anybody who comes in tardy today has my sympathy.''

The end of the year always is a time of celebration and parting, but these days at Lakeland Senior High school, a deep velvet finality accompanies the rituals of transition and farewell. Hazel Haley, at 89 the longest-serving public-school teacher in Florida -- and, as far as anyone knows, in the country -- is retiring after 69 years, 67 of them in this school, 54 in this book-crammed, pink classroom. A few years ago, the Florida Legislature ruled school districts could hang on to veteran teachers, but now time has run out, and Miss Haley must go. Network camera crews have dropped by to record the milestone. Miss Haley's beloved LHS Dreadnaughts may have snared the national football title this year, but there is no question as to who the school's real champ is.

''She's the teacher I'll remember all my life,'' says senior Travis Britton. From now on, everything about this place will occur within a new, peculiar context: missing Miss Haley.

''I've always said that . . . we're such a big place, there's not anything that actually stops the world,'' says Mark Thomas, the first LHS principal in decades who will have to make decisions by himself. `` . . . The nice thing is, the kids next year won't know what they missed. I think they'll get a great education. I think they'll learn a lot about British literature, . . . but Hazel is Hazel.''

13,500 STUDENTS

Through the years, Miss Haley has taught an estimated 13,500 students, including Lawton Chiles, Florida's late governor and former U.S. senator. But he was no more adorable or beloved than anyone in this semester's three senior honors English classes.

''My inspiration every day comes from the satisfaction of being with these young people,'' Miss Haley says. ``You know, they give you so much back that is stimulating, exciting and fun, and that every day I will miss. That's been an integral part of my life for most of my life. I depend on it. It's not approval, . . . although sometimes I get that, and sometimes I don't. But it's a life force. It's an energy that comes from the children that nothing else can replace.''

Today's text is Macbeth's woeful Act IV, so murky with eye of newt, fearsome apparitions and murder, but the lesson, as always, quickly ricochets from the literary to the personal. ''Dears, we've all agreed that the second or third time that you do something you know is wrong, it's easier,'' Miss Haley says. ``When you sneak out on your parents, and you don't get caught, it becomes easier to sneak out a second and a third time.''

TEACHING ABOUT LIFE

''She doesn't just teach you about English, but she teaches you about life,'' says senior Tori Harvey, whose mother once sat in this classroom, too.

''She just lets you know that you are special,'' says Robin Harris, class of 1987, who named her 11-year-old daughter Haley, because, ``when you're in high school, you don't really know which way you're going. She just made me interested in school again. She made it exciting to learn.''

Harris and her daughter were among more than 500 fans -- community leaders, co-workers, friends, students and alums, even Miss Haley's mailman -- sipping punch and nibbling on cake and homemade cookies at the frothy Queen for a Day retirement party at the church. ''She said she remembered me,'' says Jo Kelly of Brandon, class of 1940, who turns 80 in July.

``Of course, she says that to everybody, but she might. I never forgot her.''

Here are a few things to remember about Miss Haley: She was a student here herself, graduating in 1933. She has never married and lives alone, but every student she has ever taught is dearly regarded as ''my child.'' She drives to school in Earl, her 1988 Grand Marquis. She is a lifelong Anglophile and will happily show off letters from Margaret Thatcher and the Queen.

An accomplished motivational speaker, she believes that life is a series of little joys.

She believes it is a long string of choices, that each choice exacts a consequence, and if you choose to say something naughty on the video being shot for your retirement party, you must be genteel when the editor calls your bluff and lets you spill these spicy beans: ``I love being with the children. . . . That's my whole life every single day, but when I come home, then I'm ready to close the door, take off my clothes and run naked through the house.''

Senior Krista Hulvebos says her sister had Miss Haley three years ago, ``and she'd always come home with these stories. Kids say that they relate closest to younger teachers, but Miss Haley beats them all, because she knows us. . . . I wish I could take her to college with me.''

LAST DAY OF TEACHING

Well, Krista cannot, but when Miss Haley leaves this classroom for the last time, she is not taking everything she might need, either, just that pink plush bear over in the corner, the lady-writers umbrella that hangs over her speaker's stand and her British flag. And that will be that. Or maybe not.

''I'm a great compensator, and I will find something else to do,'' Miss Haley says. ``I laughingly say I have had three job offers, so I may go to work.''

In the meantime, though, ``All right, sweethearts. Anybody have a question? Put the books up for me, boys. That's very kind. You're very thoughtful. OK, dears. Bye, sweetheart. Bye, little one. Bye, darling. Aren't they adorable?

``Bye.''

MARGARIA FICHTNER
mfichtner@MiamiHerald.com
May. 16, 2006
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/education/14587725.htm

Can Computers Help Schools?

I'm not really a technophobe. Call me a technoskeptic, which doesn't sound so wimpy.

Either tendency is a problem for an education reporter. School districts have embraced the computer age with the fervor of a mother welcoming a new baby. I don't want to seem like a wet blanket by pointing out there isn't much data yet showing these new machines and software are helping more kids learn.

But I can't help it. My focus has always been on what is going on in the classroom, rather than the principal's office or the school board meeting room or the exhibition floors of all those education conferences that look like software fairs. In the classes I visit, plenty of students are working on computers. I am happy they are mastering the essential tools of modern life. But I wish there were more evidence that those hours tapping keyboards are making them better at reading, writing and math.

I used to get considerable pleasure from debunking school computer miracle stories. One of my proudest moments in the 1990s was a story about a New Jersey middle school hailed by President Clinton for its sharp increase in achievement scores after computers were installed. I visited the school, talked to the teachers, checked the arrival date of the new technology and discovered that the test scores had gone up before the computers got there. The real heroes were a very energetic principal, a great faculty and an innovative curriculum.

Yet so many smart educators are putting so much time and effort into making these devices do for schools what they have done for business (including mine -- notice this is an online column) that I have decided to grow up and try to accentuate the positive. My timing is good, because Education Week has just produced another one of its annual Technology Counts progress reports, and it is full of hopeful information.

I am on the board of Editorial Projects in Education, the non-profit that owns Education Week. My fellow board members, not to mention the Edweek staff, are probably astonished that I actually read the new report: "The Information Edge: Using Data to Accelerate Achievement." I am glad I did.

First, the good news: I think the greatest potential for raising achievement through computers can be found in two new approaches to school information -- quick, consistent and regular reports to teachers on how their students are doing on tests they don't control, and student identifier systems that allow educators to follow closely the progress of each child no matter how many times he or she switches teachers or schools. Edweek says schools are making progress on both counts.

Edweek Senior Writer David J. Hoff describes a system in Gainesville, Ga., in which students are tested based on state standards at the start of every quarter in every subject and the results made available the same day. Students take tests on the same content at the end of the quarter so teachers can determine if they will need to review material that may not have come across in their teaching. Reporter Vaishali Honawar reports on a similar system at the John Welsh middle school in Philadelphia that has helped teachers focus their efforts and helped raise the percentage of fifth graders scoring at the highest level in mathematics from 1 percent in 2001 to 73.5 percent in 2005.

(Okay, that is a big jump, and may reflect factors unrelated to the new machines and software, but it is a hopeful sign.)

As for student identifiers, Hoff says in 1999 just eight states had an identification number for every student. Now, according to a survey by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, 43 states and the District have student identifiers.

Now we move to the bad news, with which we skeptics are more comfortable. The same survey found that three states don't match the identifiers with performance on state tests, six states plus the District don't use them to track whether students complete high school and 27 states plus the District don't link the identifiers to high school transcripts.

Last year, Hoff notes, all 50 governors agreed to standardize the way they calculate high school graduation rates and to measure the percentage of students who earned a diploma based on the number of students who entered ninth grade four years earlier. Hoff says this won't be possible if states don't improve their data systems, most of which are not set up at the moment to determine which ninth graders stay at their schools, which transfer and graduate elsewhere and which stop going to school.

A national comparative survey of all the states showed much room for progress. Edweek graded states based on their success at providing students access to computers and the Internet, training teachers and administrators, and creating policies that promote innovative use of computers. The top two states were West Virginia, which got the only A, and Virginia, which got an A-minus. Grades of B went to North Dakota, Wyoming, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Kansas, Texas and Nebraska.

At the bottom of the class were Hawaii and Massachusetts, D-plus; Oregon, Rhode Island and Minnesota, D, and Nevada, D-minus.

I remain much more interested in what the new technology is doing in the classroom than I am in state-level assessments, such as this one. And I am not going to place any large wagers on the new computers being able to make up for the low expectations, short school days and apathy that plague our worst schools.

But there is something interesting going on with all these new devices and assessment techniques, and the inventors who seem to be about the same ages as my children. I wish them well, and will try not to let healthy skepticism degenerate into ignorance.

Jay Mathews, Washington Post Staff Writer
Washington Post
May 16, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/
2006/05/16/AR2006051600586.html?nav=rss_technology