Monday, June 22, 2009

Big Special Education Decision

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that schools must pay "for the cost of special education services when a school district fails to provide a FAPE and the private-school placement is appropriate, regardless of whether the child previously received special education or related services through the public school." Public must pay for private special education tells of the court's 6-3 decision in favor of a teenage Oregon boy diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder "whose parents sought to force their local public school district to pay the $5,200 a month it cost to send their son to a private school."

High Tech Cheating

Jill Tucker has an interesting article about a survey of students on cheating in More high-tech cheating - and rationalizing.

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Wednesday, June 24, 2009

More on Monday's Supreme Court SpEd Decision

A couple of more complete articles on Monday's Supreme Court decision appeared online yesterday. Tamar Lewin added some pertinent new information in her New York Times article, Court Affirms Reimbursement for Special Education:

The case before the court involved a struggling Oregon high school student, identified in court documents only as T. A., whose parents removed him from public school in the Forest Grove district in his junior year and enrolled him in a $5,200-a-month residential school.

Although Forest Grove officials had noticed T. A.’s difficulties and evaluated him for learning disabilities, he was found ineligible for special-education services. Only after he enrolled in the private school did doctors say T. A. had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and other disabilities.

David G. Savage also has a good article about the decision in the Los Angeles Times, Supreme Court victory for parents of disabled students. He writes:

School lawyers said the ruling did not focus on the more common situation in which parents and school officials disagree on the proper program for a child with a disability. In those situations, the law calls for a series of appeals so the two sides can resolve their differences, or a judge can decide which option is better.

In the Oregon case, by contrast, the parents did not go into the appeals process until after their child had been turned down for special education and he was enrolled in the private program.

Forest Grove School District vs. T.A. (228K PDF Document) may become one of those required cases to know in SpEd 101.

Those Two Days

The two days of staff inservice before Labor Day are becoming an issue in New York. The recent contract settlement between the New York schools and the UFT included rolling back the start of school for teachers to after Labor Day, eliminating two training days before the traditional end-of-summer-vacation holiday. Principals Denounce Plan to Cut Two Training Day tells of the New York City principals’ union's displeasure with the rollback.

For many of us in the midwest, starting school after Labor Day is a fond, but distant memory. Most schools around here have started in mid-August or earlier for years so they can wind up the school year by Memorial Day. School districts here commonly have the first day of school as teachers' first paid day. Often, teachers who want to set up their classrooms before the beginning of school do so beginning in late July and early August on their own time. They just consider it part of their professional duty to have the room ready for kids from the first day (as it should be).

Unions and Charters

Libby Quaid has a good piece in Unions seek bigger role in charter schools. She quotes Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, as saying, "Charters are not inherently anti-union." I think that may be a bit of a naive statement, but the unionization of charters is something I think will have to happen. Many charters push their staff terribly hard and sometimes are insensitive to the needs of the teachers. I can think of one bright charter that seems to burn out its teachers in about three to five years. Where this stuff happens in charters, I think we'll see unions arise.

Minnesota School Funding Woes

I sure hope Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty doesn't plan to run for President in 2012 as the education president. Pawlenty shifts mean schools need loans; charters especially worried tells of his plan to delay payments to Minnesota schools to help balance the state's budget. This gimmick was tried here in Indiana by Mitch Daniels a few years ago, but was quickly struck down by the legislature. It forces school districts to borrow to meet their budgets and/or cut services. Both Pawlenty and Daniels appear to have presidential aspirations and neither are terribly friendly to education.

Odds 'n' Ends

I know that I wrote last Wednesday that I'm "not updating this site nearly as regularly as I do over the winter months," but I'm also taking it a bit easier these days on the outdoor work. My lovely wife reminded me that I'm not a kid anymore and should exercise a little restraint on trying to get some storm damage cleaned up along with my usual gardening and yard chores.

So today I got out early and completed a few garden chores before things got too hot and sticky and now have time to do this update in air conditioned comfort. I also had time to look at our four barn swallow nests around the house. The nest under our back porch has five baby barn swallows in it. They're pretty well feathered out now, so the air should soon be filled with even more barn swallows than we have now.

Since barn swallows eat insects, we appreciate having them around despite all the swooping through our porches that goes on. They actually tolerate us pretty well, but are really tough on our outdoor cats!

I'm still using my old backup camera these days, as my main camera is back in the shop again at Nikon to get the same problem repaired that I previously had sent it in for. With the Nikon Coolpix P60 out-of-production, many vendors are offering the model at bargain rates to close out their stock. I can only guess that may be the reason my review, A Day Off & A New Camera: Part II, has become the most popular page on this site as folks do their homework before buying.

Camera Update, or The Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight (6/27/09)

The P60 arrived via UPS Next Day Air on Friday (June 26). One of the test shots from the first "roll" on automatic mode was too dark and way too contrasty. Wondering if I was inadvertently metering part of a bright daytime sky, I switched to spot metering. It produced the washed out image at right.

It appears that Nikon has fixed the problems with image vignetting and the lens not fully retracting, but introduced some metering issues that terribly limit the performance of the camera. They did do better on turn-around, only taking 14 days, 2 hours, and 32 minutes to get the camera back in my hands.

To be fair to Nikon, the camera can take acceptable photos in the automatic mode. Unfortunately, it's a crap shoot as to whether the image will be metered correctly or not with each image in auto mode.

The spot metering problems may just be a matter of settings messed up at the repair station, but they also could be symptomatic of a far more serious general metering failure. Images in auto often are too dark, have way too much contrast, or simply don't achieve a proper balance between the ground and sky.

As it now stands, my P60 certainly isn't useable for my purposes on Educators' News and especially for Senior Gardening.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Supreme Court Rules on Arizona Strip Search Case

In its second education related decision this week, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling today that said "the strip search of a 13-year-old Arizona girl by school officials who were looking for prescription-strength drugs [ibuprofen] violated her constitutional rights." Supreme Court Says Child’s Rights Violated by Strip Search relates that while the court ruled the strip search violated the girl's rights, it also "held that the individual officials in the case should not be held liable, because “clearly established law” at the time of the search did not show that it violated the Fourth Amendment."

Robert Barnes, in Supreme Court Rules School's Strip Search of Girl Was Illegal in the Washington Post, provides some interesting commentary on the justices and a good summary of the incident:

The strip-search case was one of the most dramatic of the term for the court, prompting an intense oral argument and leading to charges from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that her all-male colleagues had failed to appreciate the trauma that such a strip search would have on a developing teenaged-girl.

Safford Middle School vice-principal Kerry Wilson had pulled Savana Redding out of class after another student was found with prescription-strength ibuprofen, and said she had gotten them from Redding.

Wilson took Redding to his office, and a search of backpack and outer clothes turned up no contraband. He then had a school nurse take Redding to her office, where she was made to remove her clothes, shake out her bra and pull her underwear away from her body, "thus exposing her breasts and pelvic area to some degree," Souter wrote.

Nothing was found, and the former honors student said she was so humiliated by the incident that she never returned to the school. Her mother filed suit against the school district, as well as Wilson.

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