There isn't enough money, then why didn't you spend what you had?

 There is not enough money, then why didn’t you spend what you had?

 

We regularly hear from school districts that there is not enough money to provide the wide range of services that both state and federal law requires for children with special needs.   We have also heard repeatedly that during pandemic and required distance learning students with special needs might have been shortchanged in the delivery of a free and appropriate public education.

 

Now we are learning about a whole new result of the pandemic.   Schools have NOT spent the amount of money they were required to spend by those same federal and state laws. There is a requirement called “maintenance of effort”.  It means that a school district must spend at LEAST as much money this year as it spent last year providing for the education of children with disabilities.  As the school year comes to an end, it seems that many districts have not met this effort.  Some schools have asked if they could use the federal money from IDEA to charge against the state required expenses.  They can't.  Black letter law.

 

Here is how they have saved money.  One savings is pretty obvious.   Schools are able to charge the cost of transportation for kids with special needs against the expense requirement.  Since students weren’t being transported, that money wasn’t spent.   The same is true regarding the classroom aides.  In many districts these aides are hourly and schools just decided to furlough these people during virtual instruction.  Could these people have been kept on and provided individual follow-up to the students who were struggling with virtual education.  Absolutely, but they weren’t kept on and the kids didn’t get the help.  More money not spent.  Some districts are being advised to count money spent on personal protection equipment for students in special education towards meeting the spending requirement.   How spending money on PPE for special ed kids is different and unique from what is spent on plain kids is an interesting question.

 

Districts have approached the U.S. Office of Education asking for a waiver for the 20-21 school year for maintenance of effort.  So far the USOE has refused.

 

Here is a very interesting question.  When just about everyone agrees that children with special needs have suffered more loss during this pandemic, why is it so difficult to spend the money that has been allocated to meet those needs to be spent?  Districts always complain they can’t meet kids’ needs because there is not enough money- now they complain they can’t spend what they have!  As Lucy would have said, they have some “splainin’ “ to do.

Yes, it is your fault.

 Yes, it is your fault

 

We have entered the era of “don’t blame me I am not responsible”.  This attitude sometimes takes refuge in the First Amendment guaranteeing free speech.  Just because a person may be free to say something does not mean he/she should escape the consequences for the saying.  

In the golden olden days if a child misbehaved at school, the school consequences were only the half of it.  Things would get worse when the child got home.  Not now.  It seems every parent has become a public defender securing their children’s rights to do and say whatever without consequences but with lots of excuses for the bad behavior.  Some parents have literally made a federal case out of it as the recent Supreme Court case regarding a 14-year old who used profanity online to trash her school and team because she didn’t get picked for varsity cheerleading.  The consequences were minimal but the parents weren’t having any of it.

Adults have difficulty owning up to their mistakes.  They are talented in making up all manner of extenuating circumstances explaining why they were not responsible.  Now they are attempting to pass this gift onto their kids.  It is not a good idea.

Failure to be responsible for one’s behavior is plain and simple bad character.  Why do we want to raise our students up to have bad character?  Making a mistake is not the end of the world.  Owning up to what we do wrong is being a responsible adult.  By insisting that our children own up to what they have done wrong and take the consequences for that behavior is how we teach people to be responsible adults.  

Perhaps one of the reasons for our current political division is the absence of people being brave enough to say I was wrong or calling out bad behavior on the part of someone else without huge political consequences.  

No one gets through this world without making lots of mistakes, some big and some small.  What is it about some of us that makes it so hard to admit to those mistakes.   Being wrong is ok, and yes, sometimes it is your fault- admit it, make compensation, accept the consequences and move on.  You’ll be a better person for doing so especially when it is your fault.

What Exactly are we testing?

 What Exactly are we testing?

 

Once upon a time someone got the idea that testing would improve education.  In truth, testing has been used to punish teachers for not doing a good enough job.  In some school districts teachers whose students got high test scores got salary bonuses.  In other districts, when kids got low test scores, teachers were poorly rated.   It came as a HUGE surprise when there were testing scandals because staff were helping kids get higher scores.  Heads rolled.

Then came the pandemic and a chance for folks to take a breath (behind a mask of course) and consider if this idea of testing was all that terrific.   It would be easy to blame the testing pause on the fact that online learning was proving to be not as effective as in the classroom face -to-face and those low scores would punish teachers, schools and school districts.  There was another opportunity to reconsider testing.  The new President brought with him a new Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona.  There was hope among the folks who didn’t see testing as the holy grail.  But at his confirmation hearing, Cardona said that he supported the testing required by federal law.   “If we don’t assess where our students are and their level of performance, it’s going to be difficult for us to provide targeted support and resource allocation in the manner that can best support the closing of the gaps that have been exacerbated due to this pandemic” he said.

All of those fine words make the assumption that testing does indeed measure the students’ levels of performance, with or without a pandemic.  In fact, educators have repeatedly said that test scores are more a measure of a student’s demographics such as race, family income, parental educational attainment and the student’s ability to test well.  All of these factors are confounding variables in  measuring achievement. Each of them impacts the validity of the test, i.e. measuring what the test says it measures.

A total of 548 scholars and academic researchers have sent a letter to Cardona saying that there is no empirical research based evidence to support the value of testing as a measurement of either student learning or teaching ability.  Yet we continue to test because the testing yields a number.  It is a meaningless number but still it is a number.

Testing could be useful if we forgot about the number and its ability to reward or punish educators.  Instead, we could use the tests to describe where kids are having difficulty and may need to be retaught or taught differently.  Now there's a concept.

There are no other professions where the professional’s clients are tested to measure the quality of the professional.  It is not like teachers have these great lesson plans that they are holding in reserve and they will pull them out to rescue test scores.  Really can’t we get some benefit from the pandemic and just forget the tests

 

 

Do teachers have a right to be safe?

 Do teachers have a right to be safe?

 

Apparently not according to both  district and circuit courts. Two teachers acknowledged that they voluntarily accepted work in an alternative school for middle school students with social and/or emotional issues.  However, the teachers charged that the district failed to do what it needed to do to protect the security and safety of the staff.  The teachers asserted that students threatened teachers, damaged furniture and technology and name called and bullied other students and staff.  The teachers went to court and asserted what they believed to be their right to a safe workplace. Their case was first heard in the District Court which ruled that there was no Constitutional guarantee of a safe workplace.  They were sure that was wrong so they appealed to the Sixth Circuit.  Although the court empathized  with the teachers, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals  found no constitutional right claim.

The teachers claimed that their right to due process under the 14^th amendment to the Constitution had been breached.  However, the Supreme Court found in 1989 that while there are limits on state power it does not guarantee safety and security.  Other court cases have also found that states do not have a constitutional obligation to ensure a workplace free of unreasonable risks of harm.   More significantly, the court held “federal law does not support a cause of action for due process violations against a school district, even if its workplace is unreasonably dangerous, and the district fails to warn it its employees of the danger.”  (emphasis added).    Also interestingly, the Court noted that the school district had no constitutional duty to protect people not in its custody.  Which might mean there is a constitutional duty on the part of the state to protect prisoners in penal institutions but not to state employees. 

While this case was specific to teachers claiming harm from the potential of physical violence, it does not seem like a big leap to teachers claiming harm from the “potential” of illness from a virus if the school district has exercised reasonable precautions and therefore avoids “unreasonable risks of harm”.    Since the court asserted a state’s obligation to protect only those in it custody, one would imagine that the court expects teachers to make their own decisions regarding where they will and will not work.  It would appear that there is no constitutional right or expectation  for teachers to be in a safe workplace, but their freedom to work elsewhere is still intact.