Posted by Christopher Melba | Posted on 13-09-2010
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Friend-of-the-blog Candace Cortiella of The Advocacy Institute has collected a great set of resources for those who’d like to follow the current state of national policy related to restraints and seclusion of children with disabilities.
In addition to the work that Candace has sponsored directly, like an August podcast with experts in the field, she has also linked to several important documents on the topic, like the May 2009 report from U.S. Government Accountability Office noting that there have been hundreds of cases of restraint and seclusion with no federal oversight, and other reports that note the wide disparity in state laws relating to this issue.
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Posted by Christopher Melba | Posted on 08-09-2010
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I hope that you’ve had a chance to check out my article exploring the decline in students identified as having specific learning disabilities. It’s particularly important to examine trends with the students in this category, because they made up about 40 percent of all the students served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act as of the 2007-08 school year, the most recent year for which data is available. (Information on the 2008-09 school year is coming in the next few weeks.)
(Interestingly enough, for all the attention that the disability has received, autism is still a tiny percentage of the students served under the IDEA, at 4.5 percent as of the 2007-08 school year.
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Posted by Christopher Melba | Posted on 08-09-2010
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Education Week has compiled a selection of articles that I and my colleagues have written on giftedness. For just $4.95, you can read some of the latest reseach and commentary on gifted education. Be sure to check it out, and also let me know here: what are some stories you would like to see tackled related to education of the gifted?
Posted by Ali Gaby | Posted on 05-09-2010
Not so long ago, teenagers in trouble got grounded. They lost their evenings out, maybe the keys to the family car. But lately the art of family discipline has begun to reflect our digital age.
Now parents seize cellphones, shut down Facebook pages, pull the plug on PlayStation.
That’s how it went in Silver Spring last school year, when Iantha Carley’s high-schooler got a midterm grade report that contained letters of the alphabet that were not A, B or C.
Carley decreed there would be no more Facebook until he delivered a report card with better grades. The result: six weeks offline.
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Posted by Christopher Melba | Posted on 31-08-2010
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For years, the only funding at the federal level for gifted education has come through the Jacob Javits Gifted and Talented Education Act, funded at $7.5 milion for the past few fiscal years (compared to the approximately $11.5 billion spent in fiscal 2010 on school-aged children with disabilities under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.)
Now, that money, once again, is on the verge of being cut, as happened repeatedly during the Bush administration. Advocates for gifted education are scrambling to preserve a program they say is focused on developing gifted programs for underserved students.
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