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Special Education and Exceptionality in Urban schools In this paper I want to give brief and precise information about special education in urban schools. I hope that my information will shade some light on this topic. Lets start with the history of the special education. I think that such approach helps to understand the whole topic better. Priscilla Parking states In 1975, Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, better known at the time as Public Law 94 - 142, to change what was clearly an untenable situation. Despite compulsory education laws that had been in place nationwide since 1918, many children with disabilities were routinely excluded from public schools.
Their options: remain at home or be institutionalized. Even those with mild or moderate disabilities who did enroll were likely to drop out well before graduating from high school. The Civil Rights Movement and the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision which extended equal protection under the law to minorities, paved the way for similar gains for those with disabilities.
Parents, who had begun forming special education advocacy groups as early as 1933, became the prime movers in the struggle to improve educational opportunities for their children. (The History of Special Education, 2002) Public Law 94 - 142 became a result of long struggle between parents and their supporters and the Government. It was an important milestone legislative act because it allowed public schools to provide education to students with wide range of disabilities including physical handicaps, mental retardation, speech, vision and language problems, emotional and behavioral problems, and other learning disorders. Even more than that, it was necessary for such schools to provide schooling in the "least restrictive environment" possible and they did so. Reauthorized in 1990 and 1997, the law was renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and spawned the delivery of services to millions of students previously denied access to an appropriate education. Thanks to IDEA, these students were not only in school, but also, at least in the best case scenarios, assigned to small classes where specially trained teachers tailored their lessons to each student's individual needs. Schools also were required to provide any additional services - such as interpreters for the deaf or computer-assisted technology for the physically impaired - that students needed in order to reach their full potential.
And, in more and more cases, special education students began spending time every day in regular classroom settings with their non-special education peers. (The History of Special Education, 2002) I want to give some brief information about the situation before IDEA. Once in a time, there was a charming six-year-old child named Hector who attended his neighborhood school in Arizona. He had some problems with his behavior and teachers helped him specific social skills to improve his competence in such areas as answering questions, controlling his anger, and getting along with others. For some time everything was perfect but at the end of 1 st grade Hectors mood changed dramatically. Hector was appropriately engaged and worked hard to complete his academic assignments each day. He played with other children and learned to control his temper.
After some time Hector was no longer viewed as disruptive child and now he and his parents have rather optimistic plans for the future. Before IDEA, many children like Hector were denied access to education and opportunities to learn. For example, in 1970, U. S. schools educated only one in five children with disabilities, and many states had laws excluding certain students, including children who were deaf, blind, emotionally disturbed, or mentally retarded. (HISTORY Twenty-Five Years of Progress in Educating Children with Disabilities Through IDEA) Im proud that today early intervention programs and services offer appropriate education to more than eligible infants and toddlers and their families, while nearly 6 million children and youth receive special education and related services to meet their individual needs (HISTORY Twenty-Five Years of Progress in Educating Children with Disabilities Through IDEA) Nowadays disabilities who have benefited from IDEA have many opportunities thanks to their education. According to the Department of Education, approximately 6 million children (roughly 10 percent of all school-aged children) receive special education services.
Educating those children was expected to cost nearly $ 51 billion last year, according to the Department of Education's Center for Special Education Finance, with the yeoman's share - more than $ 44 billion - coming from states and local school districts. That, despite the promise made by the federal government in 1975 to cover 40 percent of the additional costs incurred by districts to educate students with disabilities. Even though federal spending for special education continues to rise (from $ 3. 1 billion in 1997 to $ 6. 3 billion in 2001), the federal government has never paid more than 15 percent of the total costs. (The History of Special Education, 2002) Urban schools education has much longer history than special education. It understandable because urban schools appeared somewhere in Middle Ages. In the cities, on the contrary, the schools offered to all the clergy who so desired the means of satisfying their intellectual appetite.
More and more of them attended these schools, for the studies were a good means of social advancement or material profit. The development of royal and municipal administrations offered the clergy new occupations. (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2005) Urban schools developed as well as cities developed and their number constantly increased. In US urban education was rather popular among the immigrants. According to Richard Rothstein for immigrant and minority workers, they have also been an important source of better jobs, a first step to the middle class. (The other role for the urban school, The New York Times, June 12, 2002) Nowadays urban schools do what they do the best educate youth in urban communities. Of course the level of education and the environment in such schools is incomparable with private schools. But still they are very popular and there are many organizations (LSS one of them), which try to better conditions of studying in urban schools.
LSS has developed a program of cross-disciplinary applied research, development, and dissemination to significantly improve this nation's capacity to foster development and learning success of children and youth in urban communities. The overarching mission of LSS's Urban Education Enhancement Program is to: (a) put into practice what is known from research and practical know-how in coherent and practical ways to significantly improve the education of children and youth in urban communities; and (b) assist urban communities in scaling up systemic urban reform to ensure a high standard of achievement of every child in the mid-Atlantic region and the nation. Program projects are designed to demonstrate the successful implementation of systemic urban education reform, and to identify strategies for sustaining scaling-up efforts to improve our capacity for achieving learning success of children and youth in disadvantaged urban communities. The program aims to serve as a resource at local, state, and national levels through exchanging information on urban education reform; establishing collaborative activities to enhance and extend the work of the Urban Education Enhancement Program; and developing networking and collaborative relationships to improve the capacity for education in urban communities. (History of LSS and Urban Education, 2005) Martin Haberman, Distinguished Professor, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee states The dictionary meaning of urban is simply a term pertaining to a city or town. In everyday parlance the term is used frequently to distinguish it from the terms rural, small town, suburban or ex-urban. (Urban Education: Definitions and Perceptions, Monday, November 1, 2004) Education in America, in contrast to other countries where education is a federal or national function, is a decentralized one.
More than 53 million of children attend schools. Martin Haberman outlined, Since 1962 the achievement gap between disadvantaged populations and more affluent ones has widened. At one extreme urban school districts graduate half or fewer of their students. At the other extreme 11 % of American students are now among the top 10 percent of world achievers. If youre in the top economic quarter of the population, your children have a 76 % chance of getting through college and graduating by age 24 if youre in the bottom quarter, however, the figure is 4 %.
White students achievement in reading, math and science ranks 2 nd, 7 th and 4 th when compared with students worldwide. Black and Hispanic students however rank 26, 27 th and 27 th on these basic skills. Such data describe but do not explain the causes of such wide disparities among educational outcomes. (Urban Education: Definitions and Perceptions, Monday, November 1, 2004) Everybody understands the importance of good teacher staff that is why the teacher shortage, which we face today, is rather disturbing. Especially this situation concerns special education in urban schools. Teacher must be well qualified and demonstrate practical skills in teaching of disable pupils.
The public clearly understand the importance of well-prepared teachers: 82 % believe that the recruitment and retention of better teachers is the most important measure for improving public schools, more effective than investing in computers or smaller class size. In the next decade there may be as many as 1 million new teachers hired because of turnover, retirement and the fact that the typical teaching career has shortened to approximately 11 years. If the school age population continues to increase, another million teachers may be needed. While all districts face occasional selected shortages of special education teachers, bilingual teachers, math or science teachers, the major impact of the current and continuing teacher shortage...
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Research essay sample on Special Education And In Urban Part 1
