BEFORE THE

PRESIDENT\'S COMMISSION

ON EXCELLENCE IN SPECIAL EDUCATION

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

TASK FORCE HEARING

Hyatt Regency

1750 Welton Street

Denver, Colorado 80203

Wednesday, March 6, 2002

REPORTER\'S TRANSCRIPT

COMMISSIONERS PRESENT:

CHAIRMAN PAULA C. BUTTERFIELD

COMMISSIONER STEVE BARTLETT

COMMISSIONER WILLIAM BERNDINE

COMMISSIONER ALAN COULTER

COMMISSIONER THOMAS FLEMING

COMMISSIONER C. TODD JONES

COMMISSIONER JACK FLETCHER

COMMISSIONER DOUGLAS HUNT

COMMISSIONER ROBERT PASTERNACK

PURSUANT TO NOTICE, the above‑entitled hearing

was held on Wednesday, March 6, 2002, commencing at 8:17

a.m. at the Hyatt Regency, 1750 Welton Street, Denver,

Colorado 80203, before Becki S. Anderson, Court Reporter

and Notary Public within and for the State of Colorado,

Court Reporting Offices of Mackereth‑Lombritto &

Associates, 2501 15th Street, Suite 1C, Denver, Colorado

80211‑3986.

INDEX PAGE

Opening remarks by Chairman Butterfield 3

Testimony by Ms. Rebecca Walk 9

Testimony by Dr. William L. Sanders 18

Testimony by Dr. Frederick M. Hess 24

Questions from the Commission 24

Testimony by

Drs. Thomas M. Skrtic & Mary T. Brownell 80

Questions from the Commission 101

Public Comments 115

P R O C E E D I N G S

(8:17 a.m.)

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: My name is Paula

Butterfield and I\'m a member of the President\'s

Commission on Excellence in Special Education. I welcome

you to today\'s hearing of the Professional Development

Task Force. I chair this task force which is examining

the topics we will look at today: teacher training,

teacher qualifications, certification, and related

issues.

Before we open our hearing and listen to our

witnesses, I want to briefly describe the Commission, its

mission, and its objectives. The Commission was

established last October by the executive order of

President Bush. His goal in establishing the Commission

was a simple one: \"No child left behind.\" This has

become a familiar and important message. \"No child left

behind\" was the guiding principle of the newly

reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Now, it comes into play with the work of this

Commission. Why? When President Bush says, \"no child

left behind,\" he means children with disabilities most of

all because they are the children who most often are left

behind.

I must reaffirm that the Commission\'s work is

not designed to replace the upcoming Congressional

reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities

Education Act. Rather, the report we produce and issue

this summer will provide vital input into not only the

reauthorization process, but also the national debate on

how best to educate all children.

The Commission\'s goal is a simple one: We want

to find out what works best for educating children with

disabilities. This won\'t be an easy task, but it\'s one

we must undertake. In my district alone, 15 percent, or

6,000, of our students are in special education. We

cannot leave them behind. In order to focus our task, we

will listen to the experts; look at the research; talk

with parents, teachers and children; and think broadly

and creatively.

The President has charged the Commission with

providing findings and recommendations in the following

nine areas: First, cost‑effectiveness. The Commission

will examine the appropriate role of the federal

government in special education programming and funding.

The Commission will look at those factors that have

contributed to growing costs of providing special

education services.

Second, improving results. The Commission will

examine how to best use federal resources to improve the

success of children and youth with disabilities.

Third, research. Understanding what works and

what doesn\'t work based on sound research data is

critical to making the best use of federal resources.

The Commission will recommend areas to target further

research funding, and to synthesize what we already know

works and doesn\'t work in educating children ‑‑

particularly those with learning and other cognitive

disabilities.

Fourth, early intervention. Early intervention

of first, second, and third grade children showing

problems in learning can mean the difference between

academic and developmental success or a lifetime of

failure.

Fifth, funding. Opening the money spigot

without building a better system focused on results and

accountability will not solve the problems facing special

education today. We must develop fresh ideas about how

we can better spend federal resources to improve special

education.

Sixth, teacher quality and student

accountability. There are manifold issues in this area.

We have a shortage of well‑trained special educators, we

have a high turnover rate of those that do enter the

field, and we need to close the gap between research and

teacher training to improve how well we serve children

with disabilities.

Seventh, regulations and red tape. The

Commission will study the impact of federal and state

laws and regulations and how these requirements support

or obstruct the ability of schools to better serve

children with disabilities. There is more that can be

done to reduce the amount of time special education

teachers spend on paperwork instead of teaching.

Eight, models. We will look beyond Washington

to find alternatives to the standard way of doing things.

Nine, federal versus local funding. The

Commission will review the experiences of state and local

governments in financing special education.

Our purpose today in Denver is to listen to the

experts and talk with educators and the public about

issues pertaining to the training and certification of

teachers of special education. We will explore the need

for quality teachers in special education to ensure that

no child is left behind.

A quality special education teacher is the

single most important factor in ensuring that children

with disabilities are not left behind. Over the past 20

years, a variety of curricular, fiscal, and

administrative innovations have emerged as school

reforms. Nevertheless, a caring, competent, qualified

teacher remains the most important factor in the

educational success of each child.

Our nation has a pressing need to train quality

teachers for special education classrooms. The reality

is this: During the 1999‑2000 school year, there were

69,000 job openings for special education teachers. More

than 33,000 special education teachers employed are not

fully certified for their primary teaching assignment.

Research has found that certification does not always

translate into quality.

We came to Denver to listen to the experts and

talk with educators and the public. We hope to learn

what teachers and administrators must possess to provide

an appropriate education to children with special needs.

In going so, we can ensure that no child is left behind.

This is an outcome‑oriented Commission that is

concerned about ensuring that no child is left behind.

Did you get the drift? In order to do that, we need your

help. We need your suggestions. Tell us about what

works. Show us the models.

Thank you for your interest in our work. We

appreciate everyone who has taken the time to attend our

hearing. We will now open today\'s hearing of the

Professional Development Task Force.

The first panel will be dealing with

qualifications versus certification. Where is the value

added and why? Why do many new teachers know so little

about teaching students with disabilities?

Panelist Rebecca Walk holds an Associate\'s

Degree in Mental Health, Bachelor of Science in

Elementary Education, and a Master\'s of Art in Early

Childhood Education. Walk directed early childhood

centers for 13 years, taught special education in regular

education in a public school system, is a special

education consultant with the Wyoming Department of

Education, and for the past two years has served as

Wyoming State Director for Special Education.

William Sanders is manager of Value‑Added

Assessment and Research for SAS in school in Carey, North

Carolina and has a research affiliation with the

University of North Carolina system. Over the past

decade, he has refined and applied value added assessment

using complex mixed model methodologies developed under

his leadership at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

In the process, he has revolutionized the use

of test data for educational assessments. School

districts across the nation are adopting his models to

explore the effects of schools, school districts, and

teachers on the academic progress of students. Sanders

has a Ph.D. in Biostatistics and Quantitative Genetics.

He recently retired from the University of Tennessee

after 34 years leaving his position as professor and

director of Value‑Added Research and Assessment Center.

He joined SAS in school in 2000.

Frederick Hess is assistant professor of

education and government at the University of Virginia.

Dr. Hess earned his Ph.D from Harvard University

Department of Government in 1997. His research interests

include public policy, urban politics, and bureaucracy.

His educational research focuses on school reform, urban

education, school choice, educational government and

politics.

We look forward to hearing your words of wisdom

for us. Rebecca, you\'re first.

TESTIMONY OF MS. REBECCA WALK

MS. WALK: Good morning. I would like to thank

the panel for giving me this opportunity to present my

comments on the issues related to professional

development. The issues as I see it are twofold.

Preservice education programs in institutions of higher

education for those candidates who are wanting to become

teachers, and in‑service training opportunities for those

teachers and administrators who are currently teaching in

our public schools.

I\'d like to preface my comments by the

following recommendations: To provide grant

opportunities for colleges and universities to develop

new preservice curricula for colleges and universities

which will prepare all teachers to teach a diverse group

of learners.

To discontinue teacher preparation programs

that continue to separate general education and special

education; to provide financial incentives to

institutions of higher learning; programs to attract and

train new personnel; to redefine the comprehensive system

of personnel development in the IDEA; to change

requirement for states to compete against each other for

state improvement grants; to provide funding for staff

development for family service providers and preschool

teachers; to reduce paperwork for teachers, allowing them

the time they need to provide services students need to

become successful learners; to provide incentives to

states for recruitment and retention of quality teachers

by allowing states to focus on improved outcomes with

students with disabilities and not on the compliance

aspect of the process; to ensure that all teachers

receive quality preservice instruction that enables them

to provide research‑based instructional activities to a

diverse group of learners. Children spend an enormous

amount of time being educated. To what end, one might

ask. To be a successful, productive, involved citizen.

This is what we want for all children.

The professionals responsible for educating our

children have a huge responsibility if, indeed, this is

what we want for all children. Therefore, it is

imperative that general education teachers, special

education teachers, related service providers, and

administrators be provided with quality, professional

development opportunities both in pre‑service and

in‑service levels.

When Public Law 94‑142 was enacted, we wanted

children with disabilities allowed in public schools.

With the reauthorization of the IDEA in 1997, we asked

for more access to and progress in the general

curriculum. This meant that the performance of students

with disabilities in the general curriculum became a part

of learning. It is no longer acceptable for students

with disabilities to be included for inclusion sake only.

Teaching students with disabilities in the

general classroom to the same standards as their

nondisabled peers and to include these children in

district and statewide assessments has really taken many

professionals out of their comfort zones.

For the first time, teaching professionals

looked at special education not as a curriculum, but as

an integral part of education as a whole. While all of

this is a wonderful opportunity for students with

disabilities to perform and succeed, they can\'t do it

until the teaching profession as a whole moves forward

and commits themselves to teaching all students.

While I believe that most teachers deem all

students can learn and have a right to an opportunity,

many feel inadequately trained to teach children with

disabilities in the general classroom. This is true for

both special education teachers and general education

teachers. The reason being is that these groups of

teachers have been taught to teach in a silo. Special

education teachers only learn how to teach students with

disabilities in a resource setting, and general education

teachers never set foot in a special education practicum.

We cannot continue this practice. Individuals

who want to teach must be taught how to teach to an

increasingly diverse range of learners rather than a

single or homogeneous grouping. We need to work

collaboratively with our institutions of higher education

to bring about the changes in present curriculum and the

practice this will require.

In order to promote the changes that need to

happen so teachers leave colleges and universities

prepared to teach in an environment with a variety of

diverse learning needs, the institutions of higher

education should be provided financial incentives through

grants to encourage the use of a variety of methods to

attract and train new personnel.

There should also be grant opportunities for

the development and implementation of new curricula to

support the trend of inclusion in collaboration between

general education and special education.

For the numerous teachers out in the field now,

we must strive to provide them with research‑based

effective instructional practices so that students with

disabilities can achieve to their potential. It is

critical that general education teachers are provided

with the support and strategies they need to be effective

teachers for diverse learners.

To emphasize the importance of this notion, the

National Academy of Science has released their report on

minority children in gifted and special education. There

is an overrepresentation of minority children in special

education and an underrepresentation of minority children

in gifted programs. The recommendations are: To more

tightly integrate general education and special education

services; to withhold judgment as to whether or not a

child has a cognitive disability or an emotional

disturbance until a child has received high quality

instructional and behavioral support in the general

education setting.

The notion for systemic professional

development was mandated in the IDEA through the

Comprehensive System of Personnel Development, which is

commonly known as CSPD. It is meant to ensure that

states have, in effect, a continuous statewide system

that provides quality staff development opportunities for

teachers, administrators, parents, and other

stakeholders. While states used to receive a separate

grant to carry this mandate out, this is no longer true.

States now must compete for state improvement grants.

I would like to make three points here. Number

one: It is critical for the states to receive the

support they need in order to carry out their CSPD

activities. It\'s quite a challenge to carry out an

unfunded mandate.

Number two: It is very difficult for small

states to compete with these grants. Let me explain.

I\'m involved in the Small States Consortium which

includes Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota,

Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode

Island, Delaware, and Wyoming. Each of our states is

comprised of a small staff. For several of us, that

number is between five and ten. We do not have grant

writers on our staff, nor can we afford to assign grant

writing as an extra duty. We have to contract outside of

our agency with a grant writer; sometimes these people

are from out of state. The administrative cost to us is

enormous. Both Delaware and Wyoming each have spent

close to \$100,000 in three attempts at the state

improvement grant.

We would very much like to see a change in the

competitive nature of these grants. Certainly, states

need to be held accountable for their CSPD activities,

but this could be done through negotiations between the

state education agent and OSEP.

Number three. Redefine the CSPD mandate in the

IDEA. The activities that comprise a state\'s CSPD should

all be linked to their State Improvement Plan. In some

cases, a state received their state improvement grant

before going through monitoring.

After implementing their state improvement

grant, a self‑assessment was completed and a state

improvement plan developed. Unfortunately, the state

improvement grants and the state improvement plans were

two different documents. The state improvement plan

should be the driving force, while the state improvement

grant is the vehicle to carry it out.

Certainly, we know that early identification

and interventions are the best methods for reducing the

numbers of children who are identified as learning

disabled. The IDEA supports these efforts through Part C

and 619 funding. Unfortunately, these programs have been

consistently flat funded. The shame in this is we know

emphatically how critical the first five years are,

especially for a child with a disability.

We can implement all kinds of wonderful staff

development opportunities for K‑12 teachers to learn

strategies for teaching already identified students, but

imagine how much more effective it would be if we

provided staff development opportunities for family

service providers and preschool teachers to provide

research‑based, quality interventions before children are

identified.

Family service providers, early childhood

special education teachers, as well as early childhood

education teachers, and other related service providers

must be afforded the same opportunities for high quality,

purposeful staff development as do their counterparts in

public school.

While you may have heard some of these

statistics, I think it\'s important to pay very close

attention to them because they paint a picture of how

serious this situation is. The majority of special

educators report they spend less than one hour per week

in actual collaboration with colleagues, and they spend a

day or more a week on paperwork. The United States

Department of Labor estimates that by 2008, the demand

for special educators will increase by one‑third. More

than 37,000 people without appropriate qualifications are

delivering special education to students with

disabilities.

College and university programs prepare

approximately 22,000 special education teachers annually,

which is about half the number needed to fill the

vacancies. Colleges and universities are experiencing

shortages of special education faculty. Every year, 30

percent of faculty vacancies go unfilled.

These issues must be addressed. We must work

towards the resolution of teacher shortages and

retention, both at the university level and at the

district level. We must work to develop and implement

research‑based instructional strategies so that all

students, including students with disabilities, can

achieve to their potential.

Again I want to thank you for this opportunity

to speak with you today.

25

TESTIMONY OF DR. WILLIAM L. SANDERS

DR. SANDERS: Honorable Chairman and

distinguished members of the Committee. My name is

William L. Sanders. I\'m a statistician. I\'m not an

educator spelled with a capital E. Often real educators

want to know how come you\'re messing in our business.

Well, 20 years ago this coming May is when I first got

involved in educational research.

What we have done is developed a different

statistical approach to measure the impact that school

districts, schools, and teachers have on the rate of

academic progress in populations of people. Simply, we

follow every child as an individual. We follow the

progress of these kids as an individual over time, and we

measure the impact that school districts, schools, and

teachers have on the length of that progress.

By doing it this way, you basically can filter

out and distinguish between educational influences and

exogenous influences, which is in the context of the

Commission\'s assignment.

What have we learned now with nearly 20 years

of doing research following this? We have found

consistently ‑‑ and let me quickly say that we have

developed the largest longitudinal diverse database of

student achievement data ever assembled in the country.

Using this database, we can now track the

progress of each child through third grade right through

the time they take the college entrance exam. We also

know who taught the child each year. We are now working

with school districts around the country from numerous

states, so consequently here are some consistent

findings. And from these findings is what I would make a

recommendation from to the Commission.

Consistently, the single biggest factor

affecting academic progress of populations of children is

the effectiveness of the individual classroom teacher,

period. It makes all of these other factors appear to be

trivial, such as poverty status. The sequence of

teachers that a child has will add more to their own

personal academic achievement than probably any other

single factor.

Now, from this, what we have learned is that

the top 25 or 30 percent of teachers are already

differentiating instruction within their classroom. So

we look at that data ‑‑ if you look at it very, very

carefully, you will find that highly effective teachers

are reaching up to kids or reaching down to kids and are

providing instruction for the kids and are making

wonderful progress.

On the other hand, if you look at average,

average, average teachers, they are not nearly as

effective at special education instruction. You can see

from the data they are focusing their energy, their

effort, and their target to the top two‑thirds of the

kids in the classroom or the bottom two‑thirds of the

kids in the classroom. Somewhere there will be regions

in the classroom where the kids are making less than a

year\'s worth of progress in a year of school.

We also have found that there is definitely a

relationship between a teacher\'s years of experience and

how effective they are in the classroom. Our date

indicates so clearly that teachers on average improve

their effectiveness quite steadily from about year one of

teaching through year 12 of experience, then a ten‑year

plateau spanning ten additional years. Around years 21

and 22, we see a very slow and steady decline. Those are

averages. The variability around those efforts is huge.

Clearly, beginning teachers on average are far

less effective. Beginning teachers are not nearly as

well‑prepared to differentiate instruction within the

classroom. So under the big agreement of the Commission

relative to this part, I want to offer four suggestions

that I feel could assist any teacher to be far more

effective than when they differentiate; they\'ve got to

differentiate instruction such that they can reach

individual children regardless of their previous

attainment level when they get there.

First of all, differentiating instruction is so

huge, and the beginning teachers are clearly not as well

prepared to do that. My second suggestion speaks to

that. And that is, most ‑‑ and I\'ve talked to a zillion

teachers within the last 15 years ‑‑ most teacher

preparation programs are giving teacher candidates very

little, if any, guidance and tools and skills on how to

monitor the progress of individual children within their

classrooms.

If I could be the czar for a moment, the first

thing I would do is spend every dollar, federal and

state, in staff development activities to assist teachers

to learn how to monitor the progress of individual

children in the classroom. I would put that number one

because, clearly, we\'re going to bring special needs

children in, and I certainly am hesitant of that, and I

certainly can show that classrooms that differentiate

instruction, those children can make wonderful individual

progress in that type of a classroom if people are

differentiating instruction in reaching the needs of

individual children.

Using both external data and internal data

within the classroom is absolutely critical because most

teachers are given very little preparation in how to do

that.

In states and districts around the country now,

and especially with the federal requirement to start

monitoring the progress of children as individuals which

I think is absolutely critical, then basically these

systems of people who want to use that data in an

appropriate way is don\'t be critical. And that goes back

to giving these teachers a head start on how to work with

these students and how to learn to do that in a very

creative way.

Now, the next thing that I would strongly

suggest is to somehow, some way, we\'ve got to get teacher

candidates more involved within schools through their

whole course of teacher preparation. Now, that\'s easy to

say, but when you start talking to people, in reality

that is harder to do. But ‑‑ and I must emphasize

that ‑‑ you\'re wanting these teacher candidates to work

with documented highly effective teachers. I cant\' think

of anything worse to do than to put a teacher in their

teacher preparation under the influence of woefully

ineffective teachers. Consequently, we would work within

the schools to get teachers and teacher candidates more

involved in that.

My fourth suggestion is that we\'ve got to do a

better job of counseling teacher candidates as they go

through. If someone aspires to be a high school math

teacher, then certainly, their academic preparation has

certainly got to be among the top prior to their entry

into the credentialing preparation. I\'ve got a new set

of research work that\'s not published yet that basically

documents that quite, quite nicely. You\'ve got to know

how to teach, but you\'ve got to have the course content,

particularly in middle and high schools.

I\'ve now got a fifth one I did not put in my

written comments that I want to mention. It\'s probably

not wise to do that, but I\'m going to do it anyway.

We\'ve go to somehow entice more of the undergraduate

majors to consider teaching. Quite candidly, on most

university campuses and undergraduate education, there is

a perceived stigma about being in education. I strongly

believe that one way to combat that would be to start

recruiting more kids from the math and the sciences and

any of those departments. If nothing else, start working

with local schools in after school tutoring programs

under the tutelage and guidance of better teachers.

I think when a lot of these students begin to

have an opportunity to see the joy of working with

students and watching them make progress, I think that

will go a long way to breaking down some of that

perception that, unfortunately, has been so pervasive but

also erroneous. Thank you for your time.

TESTIMONY OF DR. FREDERICK HESS

DR. HESS: I\'m Frederick Hess. I\'m delighted

to be here today under the Commission. I want to speak

specifically about the issues of teacher licensure at the

state level. At the close of remarks, I will have a

specific recommendation regarding federal activity, but I

think we\'ll all agree this is really a state issue.

Existing state systems of teacher licensure for

special educators, with their various provisions for

alternative, provisional, and emergency certification,

ought to be radically overhauled. It is appropriate to

move towards a system that permits adults to seek

employment as special education teachers if they meet

three criteria.

Aspirants should be required to possess a B.A.

or B.S. degree from a recognized college or university,

should be subjected to rigorous criminal background

checks, and should be required to pass a test that

demonstrates competency in knowledge or skills essential

to what they seek to teach.

In the realm of special education, this should

mean two things in particular: Aspirants ought to have

attained appropriate mastery of the content they will

teach, and should have exhibited mastery and knowledge

and skills essential to serving the special needs

population. Aspirants who will serve that population

ought to be required to demonstrate appropriate mastery.

Where there exists a body of research‑based

knowledge essential to educating children with particular

special needs, then licensure should ensure that all

certified teachers master that knowledge and not settle

for having passed a course of uncertain content merely

because it carries an appropriate label. Not all

individuals who meet these requirements will be

well‑suited to teach, but they should be permitted to

seek employment.

It is necessary to sound two notes of caution.

First, a system such as the one envisioned here requires

that a new emphasis on outcome accountability be

substituted for regulatory control. Second, for some

kinds of disabilities, there may exist research‑based

knowledge essential to serving an exogenous population.

Such knowledge ought to be demanded, again, demanded, of

all teachers serving that population.

Finally, in determining what constitutes

essential skills and knowledge, it is necessary to

consider whether the skills and knowledge to help

educators serve children with special needs are largely

transferable from one category of disability to another.

If not, it makes little sense to license special

educators and would make far more sense to certify

teachers as prepared to work with certain groups of

students.

Our nation\'s schools are desperate for

competent special education teachers. At the same time,

state licensure systems erect barriers in the paths of

potential applicants. On the one hand, we desire an

adequate supply of special education teachers. On the

other, we want to ensure teacher quality. The difficulty

is that efforts to increase the pool of teachers

typically imply a drop in standards, and efforts to

tighten standards a reduction in the teaching pool.

Resolving this dilemma requires recognizing

that the current system of licensure constricts teacher

supply without ensuring quality. The issue is not

teacher preparation, but whether we ought to, as best we

are able, bar from teaching those who have not completed

a teacher preparation program. Allowing someone to apply

for a job merely permits them to be hired if they are

deemed superior to the other candidates for that

position.

Licensure is most effective when it ensures

mastery of special skills and knowledge. Licensure does

not ensure that doctors, lawyers, or engineers are

talented practitioners in every sense; only that they

have demonstrated the minimum level of their professional

knowledge or skill.

In education today, despite the best efforts of

these groups, we have been unwilling or unable to

establish specific, agreed upon, measurable bodies of

skills that teachers must master. If standards are

unclear, we only hesitate to bring individuals from

practicing the profession. This is not because we think

incompetence is acceptable, but because outcome measures

and employer evaluation or federal regs fail to fully

assess and foster innovation.

Even in professions with clear standards,

licensure is not imagined to ensure competence in

ambiguous, subtle skills like comforting a patient or

swaying a jury. The skills that teacher educators deem

most important ‑‑ listening, caring, motivating ‑‑ are

not susceptible to standardized quality control.

To make teaching certification more akin to law

or medicine, it would be necessary to ensure the

applicant master a core of essential knowledge. The

obvious candidate has content knowledge even if we

recognize that such content knowledge is necessary, but

not sufficient, to be a good teacher just as knowledge of

case law is necessary, but not sufficient, to be a good

attorney. While content tests are commonly used in state

certification systems, the nature of the scoring content

means that they do little to ensure meaningful mastery.

Moreover, such exams rarely, if ever, demand aspiring

special educators to demand mastery of research and

knowledge relevant to the particular challenges they will

face in the classroom.

Our system of licensure rests on three

assumptions, each fundamentally flawed. Certification

does not ensure mastery of essential skills and

knowledge, does little to weed out unsuitable applicants,

and is an unconvincing and ineffective way to bolster

popular respect for teachers or teaching. Not only does

licensure not work as intended, it also entails real

problems. The opportunity and costs of preparation

programs can easily amount to \$35,000 or more,

significantly reducing the real compensation of teachers.

In fact, teacher preparation is currently quietly funded

by this massive invisible tariff on aspiring teachers.

Certification also dissuades potentially

effective teachers. It is energetic, talented

individuals with many attractive alternatives that may be

the least willing to endure the hoops and hurdles of

certification. There has to be some way to address these

problems without throwing our classrooms open to the

dangerous or incompetent.

Strong, competitive, certification could

improve the process and provide such a model. Under

competitive certification, we would join those

competitive districts who enjoy an adequate supply of

special educators. It is the troubled districts who

currently provide long‑term substitutes and

underqualified teachers where these applicants may be a

welcome relief. While most new applicants may be deemed

unsuitable, I\'ve known few principals who would not

welcome the chance to pick and choose from the ranks of

these new applicants.

The envisioned reform will permit schools to

consider employing hundreds of thousands of

college‑educated adults who have extensive experience

working with children with special needs. It is at least

possible that a parent who had spent 18 long years

raising a child with a particular disability, for

instance, has the knowledge and skills to be an effective

special educator and might choose to use his or her

experiences to help other children.

This is not to say that such an individual

ought to be hired, only that principals should be free to

consider them. Because teachers, unlike doctors or

psychologists, always work for institutions, they will be

monitored by managers who are themselves accountable.

Quality control will require that these administrators

also be given new leeway to remediate or remove and be

held accountable for their actions.

Now, what about teacher preparation and

induction? Am I suggesting that such efforts ought to be

eliminated or scaled back? Absolutely not. In fact, I\'m

suggesting quite the opposite. The current system does

not take teachers seriously enough. What will happen

when a district hires a new teacher who has not studied

education or engaged in student teaching? First,

recognize that it happens every day in thousands of

systems across the nation, though in a haphazard fashion

and with no meaningful induction.

Let\'s consider another profession, like

consulting, that requires a mix of know‑how and

interpersonal skills. At the best consulting firms, new

employees receive a rigorous induction, are expected to

take advantage of ongoing development opportunities, and

are mentored while the firm invests in developing their

full panoply of skills. Meanwhile, the performance of

new employees is continuously monitored and both progress

and competence are demanded.

Competitive certification would create new

opportunities to enhance the quality and relevance of

professional development. Not all districts will take

advantage of this. Those blessed with plenty of trained

teachers might forego the headaches, but the less

fortunate may welcome the opportunity.

Districts might pay untrained teachers a

reduced wage in their first year or two, assign them a

reduced course load, provide mentoring and training, and

require that they observe colleagues. In fact, this

sounds a lot like model professional development. Rather

than hoping that an applicant\'s preparation is locally

appropriate, districts could tailor train to the needs of

their students and could contract with the most effective

teacher educators without regard to state boundaries.

In particular, given national efforts to

mainstream students, such changes would break down

existing barriers between special and general education.

Rather than training general and special education

teachers in largely separate tracks, providers would be

better able to prepare teachers to work with the students

they actually serve.

How to pay for all this? It will be

appropriate for states to encourage and to help fund

professional development, but it is vital to recognize

that some of the necessary resources could be recaptured

from beginning teachers at no net loss to these teachers

since they would no longer be required to bear the

monetary costs of licensure. There are legitimate

concerns that districts may underinvest in teacher

preparation, given the long‑term nature of the benefits

and the fact that teachers may move and take their

training with them. This is a common challenge in human

resources. It argues for new, targeted state and federal

support that accounts for local need.

In no sense, then, is competitive certification

an assault on professional development or on schools of

education. Business schools do a brisk business, though

no one has to attend them, because applicants and

employers regard their training as valuable and useful.

In fact, leaders of many teacher education

programs welcome the envisioned reform. Why? Explains

one: We\'re constantly worried about state regulations

and state requirements. If we weren\'t in the

certification business, we\'d be free to design programs

as we think best.

Faced with the cleansing wind of competition,

schools of education will enjoy new opportunities to

innovate, pursue research, partner with districts, and

train teachers as they deem best. At the same time, they

would be accountable for results, not to bureaucrats, but

to those who staff and run the public schools.

There are a number of incremental reforms worth

contemplating short of a full scale change. These

include: creating competitive certification zones in one

or more urban districts; expanding alternative

certification programs and making them more accessible;

directing resources to help develop and study appropriate

training and induction models; reevaluating and enhancing

the content basis and special education basis of

licensure tests, and providing support for efforts to

distill a research‑based pedagogical canon that aspiring

special education teachers need to master.

Today, while schools and school districts are

desperate to find good special educators, hundreds of

thousands of capable, committed individuals who have

extensive experience with special needs populations would

be summarily rejected if they applied for teaching

positions.

In the 21st century, having finally recognized

that accountability and flexibility allow educators to

serve children better than bureaucracy and regulation,

can\'t we do better? Thank you very much.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Thank you. Some very

interesting and provocative ideas. What we\'re going to

do is proceed the way we have in the past Commission

meetings where, if you raise your hand, you\'ll be put on

the list so we can address your questions.

But I also want to invite the panelists to

respond to one another. You know, there may be some

points that you would like to make. So why don\'t we

start with Commissioner Hunt. We can go down the table

this way. Commissioner Hunt.

QUESTIONS FROM THE COMMISSION

COMMISSIONER HUNT: First of all, I want to

thank the panel for your very interesting comments. I\'d

like to address two questions for Dr. Sanders. Dr.

Sanders, I\'ve heard all the statistics and maybe you can

help me out a little further.

First of all, you had mentioned that success

almost always falls on the shoulder of the teacher\'s

effectiveness in the classroom. What does curriculum

have to do with any of that?

DR. SANDERS: If you view progress of a kid

over time, and you think of the curriculum as a ramp, not

a stairstep, and you\'re wanting all children to go up the

same ramp, if you begin to look to see what speed is

built up the ramp, then that\'s where all of our work

goes. The accumulation of teacher effects has very, very

little evidence of compensatory effects.

Well, clearly there has got to be a curricular

ramp by which folks are expected to teach. This is not

to say that in some occasions ‑‑ and it certainly

happens ‑‑ that there might be a local policy that the

fourth grade teachers are supposed to be teaching fourth

grade curriculum.

If you\'ve got a kid who is chronologically a

fourth grader, but if that child\'s reading skills and

math skills are at the second grade level, if that

situation exists and people are not encouraged to reach

down to where the kid is and offer instruction, then

constraints of the curriculum can, indeed, affect.

But notwithstanding that, it is primary teacher

effectiveness that affects the speed that children will

progress. I\'m talking about kids across the entire

district, high‑achieving kids, average kids, kids with

learning disabilities.

COMMISSIONER HUNT: In your testimony, you had

mentioned if you had all money and you were the czar ‑‑

since we have the assistant secretary here ‑‑ why ‑‑

because he is the czar and he\'s got all the money. That

was a joke. You had mentioned that you would monitor the

progress of individual students.

DR. SANDERS: That\'s correct.

COMMISSIONER HUNT: Why is that not being done?

DR. SANDERS: As I have roamed around the

country, and in particular, the past six or seven years,

and talked literally with hundreds of teachers, what I

hear from them over and over and over is it\'s very hard

to do. Teachers are not getting the training, the

preparation to really learn how to monitor the progress

of the kids day by day, week by week, month by month, to

be able to focus their instruction on the needs of that

specific child. That\'s where it\'s got to be.

The experts are ‑‑ the real experts are already

in the classroom. What behooves the rest of us is to

learn that the variability in teacher effectiveness is

huge. It\'s true in all subjects, but it\'s dramatically

true in math.

I have been quoted widely in this around the

country. If any child, no matter how bright the child

is, catches two weak math teachers in a row, those kids

just about do not recover because math is so sequential.

This is why getting that notion in place of monitoring

where the kid is and providing instruction of where that

kid is, accelerating the progress of that kid under that

grant is what we\'ve go to focus on.

I strongly believe if we\'re going under

President Bush\'s directive of leave no child behind,

well, obviously, we\'ve got children way down here and

you\'re not reaching down to those kids and trying to

force them arbitrarily to a level that they\'re not ready,

it\'s not going do work. It is only when that instruction

is provided properly, that it will accelerate the

progress of that child.

COMMISSIONER JONES: Can I encourage all the

witnesses and commissioners to speak closer to the

microphones, although Dr. Hess you\'ve done a very good

job. I would encourage everyone to please do that so our

court reporter is able to hear.

COMMISSIONER HUNT: So how do we get to that

point? What\'s your specific recommendation that you

would want to make with regard to this?

DR. SANDERS: Well, first of all, measurement

is key. I\'m talk about the external measurement, which

under the new federal legislation, all states are going

to have to develop ways to measure progress of individual

children. Some states have already been doing that. A

lot of districts within states have been doing that. But

then, once you have the data in place, you do the very

best analyses in the world, but if teachers do not know

how to use and interpret that data in positive, creative

ways, it\'s not information.

That\'s from the macro view of looking at the

analyses, but then the micro is for teachers to better

understand how to monitor Susy and Johnny\'s progress day

to day, week by week, month by month, and so forth.

There, to me, is a major missing link in the preparation

of beginning teachers.

COMMISSIONER HUNT: One more follow‑up, then.

I\'m just trying to understand then, why you\'re saying it

hasn\'t been done to this point, what\'s the specific

recommendation?

DR. SANDERS: Well, the specific recommendation

is to go back to the teacher prep programs ‑‑ I just got

through doing an in‑service training for representatives

from across the state that were here yesterday. Most

teacher candidates are given and have been given

virtually no preparation on how to use data in the most

simple, rudimentary way.

I\'m talking about simple exercises that I

started with high‑tech stuff, a piece of graph paper and

a ruler and a pencil, to start showing folks how you can

take his test scores over time and plot over time and

what can be important from them.

So I\'m talking about starting with rudimentary

things like that to begin to give people a notion that a

lot of this can be quantified and measured to give that

feedback loop that\'s going on. That\'s what I\'m implying.

COMMISSIONER HUNT: Thank you, Madam Chairman.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Commissioner Berndine.

COMMISSIONER BERNDINE: Thank you, Paula. I

also want to show my thanks to you for showing up this

early in the morning and taking the time to prepare your

testimony. I have some questions for all three of you.

Dr. Hess, my reading has just caught up with your

recitation of your piece.

I do have some questions, and I\'ll start by

looking at some broad brush strokes that all three of you

used with regard to teacher education in special

education. I\'ll try to get those brush strokes down to

some finer, more specific points of information which my

colleague, Commissioner Hunt, was doing.

Ms. Walk, in your testimony, I was particularly

interested in your comments with regard to CSPD. In your

opinion as a state director, can you give illustrations

of where the CSPD functions in your state have been

particularly productive with regard to personal

preparation?

MS. WALK: Some of the things that we\'ve done

in Wyoming with regards to our CSPD activities, in

particular, are being carried out under our state

improvement grant and those revolving around the

preservice level at the university. We are working with

the University of Wyoming. We\'re an interesting state in

that we only have one university and several community

colleges, but one four‑year university; so we are tied

pretty closely to that teacher prep program.

The university has hired an inclusion teacher

and our state improvement grant is funding an additional

faculty member at the university. These two faculty

members are working collaboratively to develop curricula

for inclusion so that students who are in the general

education track and students who are in the special

education track will now be receiving a cross‑curriculum

of special education and general education. That\'s one

of the activities we\'re doing.

We have started a teacher mentor training,

which I believe Dr. Sanders talked about the importance

of that, of teaming experienced, quality teachers with

the new teachers. We\'re setting that up as a regional

system across the state of Wyoming.

We are also doing a great deal of parent

training because we believe the parents are the number

one educators for their children, and it\'s critical to

involve the parents in the education of their children,

especially for children with disabilities.

We have a large transition initiative going on.

That transition being transition for students from public

school to whatever they wanted to do after they finish

their education, whether it\'s postsecondary, whether it\'s

going into the work force, whatever that student\'s needs

are and what they strive for.

COMMISSIONER BERNDINE: In your testimony, you

indicate that you want to redefine the CSPD mandate. If

you\'re doing all these successful things, why would you

want to redefine CSPD? Why would you redefine it?

MS. WALK: When I was talking about redefining

the CSPD mandate, it would be to redefine the competitive

nature of how states have to receive their state

improvement grants. We used to get a separate grant to

carry out our CSPD activities; it was not a competitive

grant.

COMMISSIONER BERNDINE: It was a block grant?

MS. WALK: Exactly. And now we have to compete

for our state improvement grants to carry out our CSPD

activities. When states don\'t have a state improvement

grant, they have to use their set aside or discretionary

money to carry out their CSPD activities.

COMMISSIONER BERNDINE: So in other words,

you\'re satisfied with the CSPD model as it currently

stands with the exception as to how it relates to the

states?

MS. WALK: That\'s correct.

COMMISSIONER BERNDINE: Thank you. Dr.

Sanders, we actually have met in the past. I was

involved in the University of Kentucky. In the 80s, I

helped to develop the states first internship program,

and we modeled parts of it after Tennessee\'s and some of

your colleagues were involved in that activity. I have a

couple of questions for you. I want to compliment you

also. I think that your outline, or your description of

differentiating instructions is outstanding.

This is something that the Commission has heard

in the past; we\'ve not heard it from a statistician.

It\'s interesting that this notion of instruction is

actually starting to attract the attention of number

crunchers.

Page 1 of your testimony under differentiating

instruction, could you talk to me a little bit about any

notions you have about career‑long professional

development and differentiating instruction.

DR. SANDERS: When you begin the monitor ‑‑ I

really appreciate your comment about the number crunchers

beginning to see ‑‑ when you begin to look at the date

longitudinally, you look at the progress the kids are

making across the classroom. That\'s one of the things

that just starts jumping off the paper at you. These

highly effective teachers are doing it, and they are

doing it with a great degree of competency.

Now, when it comes to looking at beginning

teachers, which in the aggregate are far less effective

on average of 8 to 10 year veterans, and you look at the

pattern of progress that their kids are making in the

classroom, it\'s very clear that they\'re more narrowly

focused in their instruction. There will be regions

within the classroom for children who are not making

anywhere close to appropriate progress.

You see this somewhat consistently across

beginning teachers. Then I\'m left to conclude and draw

inference from that that they basically are not ‑‑ they

don\'t have that experience base on which to draw, and so,

consequently, they\'re bringing to the classroom pretty

much a notion of preparing one lesson plan, preparing

that lesson plan in one size fits all, and so forth.

You usually see in the data that ‑‑ this is

often thought of as a thumbprint ‑‑ that I can start

looking at the beginning scores by appropriate measures

of prior achievement and have a very good idea of where

that instruction is being targeted.

If this is the part that you\'re referring to, I

use that finding and particularly look at the pattern of

beginning teachers, then I have drawn a conclusion that

whole notion of differentiating instruction needs to go

back to the preservice part whereby those beginning

teachers, when they get to the classroom, at least will

have a better chance of beginning to reach upwards or

downwards to all children in the classroom.

COMMISSIONER BERNDINE: You\'re not saying, and

I don\'t believe that I heard you at all say this, but, in

any respect, would an entry‑level teacher have the same

level of effectiveness as a teacher of 8 to 10 years?

My question that I\'m driving to is: Can you

see in your data the effects over time of professional

development on teachers? You have a large database, you

have one of the largest longitudinal databases that I\'ve

heard about. Over time, can you see when you look at

that data, any trends in this level of objectiveness or

where it starts to drop off?

DR. SANDERS: Well, you definitely can see

trends in the aggregate with years of experience. Years

of experience certainly are related to teacher

effectiveness.

However, that other part that you were raising

in regard to how much of that is related to professional

development activities, I worked with another researcher

at the University of Maryland, in fact, about where they

had some large surveys done of teacher\'s separate grants

of their professional development activities. And sadly,

the results came back very strongly, most teachers feel

that the current level of professional development

activities is not giving them additional tools that they

need.

Now, I\'m a strong advocate for professional

development activities, but there\'s some work done in

either the University of Michigan or Michigan State, I

forget which, that basically came to the conclusion at

present about 90 to 95 percent of professional

development activities are not having positive impact on

teacher improvement ‑‑

COMMISSIONER BERNDINE: Michigan State.

DR. SANDERS: Okay. So consequently, that\'s

different from saying that we need more professional

development activities. I think it\'s going to be pretty

directed and pretty promulgated relative to assisting

teachers to become more effective.

COMMISSIONER BERNDINE: Did you just say that

you could pull up special ed teachers in your database?

DR. SANDERS: The Tennessee database is where

the largest one is ‑‑ that\'s our biggest one, even though

we have them in other school districts outside the state

of Tennessee.

By state law, the kids that were flagged as

special ed are excluded from our teacher level analysis.

Lookings back on that, that was a mistake. At the time,

I had drafted that, we didn\'t have millions of records

like we do now.

COMMISSIONER BERNDINE: Leading up to that,

sir, I\'m aware of that. A cautionary note is I really do

appreciate the depth of your database; the fact of the

matter is that it does not include special education.

DR. SANDERS: Let me add that since we have the

data for the special ed kids, I\'ve been able the run it

both ways. When we do the official reporting, the

special ed kids are excluded, but I do have it in the

database. Many teachers would welcome to have the

special ed kids data in there because from a value‑added

perspective, if they\'re working with those children, they

can make heroic progress.

So, in the database, I\'ve been able to locate

both the special ed kids included and excluded, even

though in the official future reports that go out, they

are excluded, I do have a way to look at it with those

children included.

COMMISSIONER BERNDINE: That would be very

interesting data. Your testimony was very intriguing.

You were using the term \"longitudinal data.\" I thought

you were painting with a very broad brush there including

all teachers not being involved in data collection. I

was surprised by that.

There is a hallmark differentiation between a

special education classroom teacher and a general

education classroom teacher in these data collections.

Now, if that\'s not an evaluation, and that\'s not

longitudinal, I don\'t know what is.

Secondly, we have, by law, in special education

classrooms something called an IEP. The IEP mandates

data collections. Were you intentionally excluding

special education teachers in this broad bush, or was

that just an oversight?

DR. SANDERS: I have had been advised to speak

to the general population of teachers with regard to

this. However, if you\'ll notice in 2 there, I\'m

including macro and micro. I suspicion if you look at

the patterns that kids are making across varying levels

of effectiveness of teachers, I think you would come to

the conclusion that a lot of teachers are not following

the progress of the individual children day by day, week

by week, month by month.

COMMISSIONER BERNDINE: I don\'t doubt that at

all. I don\'t think it\'s fair to represent special

education classroom teachers not being databased. I\'m

very convinced of that. There are many of those that are

fully qualified and trained.

I need to move on. I need Dr. Hess. I really

enjoyed your presentation, and I don\'t have time to

really ask all the questions that I have. Some parts of

your presentation seem to indicate to me that you were

saying something to the effect that we need to walk in

the moccasin of others to really understand what they

need to do. You inferred that a parent who has raised a

child with a disability over 18 years, that parenting

process alone would be sufficient to make them an expert

for a special education teaching role. Did I misread

that?

DR. HESS: Yes. What I\'m trying to do is make

it clear that licensure is a very simple premise. It

says that people making higher‑end decisions at the

school or district level cannot be trusted to make

decisions in regards to some individuals; namely, those

individuals who do not hold certification.

What I\'m suggesting is that I\'m actually much

more comfortable ‑‑ that we should be much more

comfortable ‑‑ in a world where they no longer have

captive supplies of teachers because they actually enjoy

vast options more similar to that of the white male

population.

We have started to create a more appropriate

outcome‑based mechanism. Now, of course, one question is

going to be when we actually do create an advanced

outcome‑based mechanism. To the extent that we do not do

so, this approach, obviously, runs into should we or

should we not go with this approach in terms of

certification.

My only point in terms of that example is to

say look, unless we can clearly say why we are barring

some individual from the opportunity of being able to

apply for a job, until we can discretely identify those

skills, it seems to me that there are a number of places

which an individual might be able to garner the kind of

background and kind of skill that might be appropriate.

It\'s imaginable to me that a parent who has

raised their special needs child, in some cases, in

districts where they don\'t have fully trained candidates,

might be an attractive candidate. I\'m suggesting that it

be up to the principal to decide whether or not, in that

case, they felt that individual\'s skills set was

appropriate.

COMMISSIONER BERNDINE: You talked in regard to

districts in competitive certification zones, you

referred to some urban districts having altered the

certificate route. Can you imagine any inherent

difficulties where a largely urban state, say Baltimore,

Maryland, who would be training their own teachers when

they have this critical shortage and getting a balance

between those essential skills you\'re talking about and

filling the slots? How would you handle that?

DR. HESS: I think you\'re exactly right.

That\'s one of the issues is that as we try to think about

two kinds of performance, there\'s obviously an issue of

capacity building, developing models, developing

training.

First off, as I tried to make clear, the notion

is not to do this when they are asked to do their

interning. Districts are perfectly free to continue to

hire graduates of professional preparation programs.

Nothing will change. The only change would be that it

would be permitted without going into emergency or

provisional processes to hire other people as well if

they so choose.

So, first off, everyone would be free to hire a

full raft of fully certified, trained graduates of

special education programs. Of course, as we\'re well

aware, the problem is Maryland, and most Maryland

districts, particularly Baltimore, cannot find those kind

of candidates. So right now, this is the boat we\'re

talking about.

In fact, when they go for inductions, they put

people in on emergency provisional credentials and then

ask them to go to UMBC, University of Maryland, Baltimore

Campus, and take evening courses while teaching five

courses a day or working with ‑‑ however the special

educators do assignment structure. Working with those

children from 8:30 to 4:00 every day, doing IEPs in the

evening, take these courses at night, do professional

development on weekends, it strikes me as being

impossible.

It seems to me that if you have other

individuals who would be interested in teaching in more

appropriate gradual induction models that would help them

work with this population, it is better to permit,

Baltimore schools, for instance, to partner with whoever

they choose ‑‑ University of Maryland, it could be Ohio

State, it could be Cal State ‑‑ whoever they chose to

work with, and what they would do is take advantage of

both of increased mobility, and they would be able to

work out whatever kind of arrangements that suits their

needs and their population, and they would be able to

create whatever kind of programs and mentor models they

thought were appropriate spending.

Now, where does this money come from is an

obvious question. What I\'m suggesting is that ‑‑ right

now if you ask somebody changing careers, a college

graduate, to take a year out and get a degree, minimum of

\$5,000 at some places for the actual tuition, \$30,000 low

end for opportunity costs, that\'s \$35,000.

In effect, if you paid these people \$20,000 for

each of the first two years, they come out financially

ahead of where they would have been. The additional

\$35,000 resources can now be simply shifted and the

district can now spend it on partnership programs to get

teachers or whatever models they think are appropriate.

COMMISSIONER BERNDINE: You think your model,

then, has the flexibility that it can deal with a city

the size of Balitmore that has the population the same

size of the state of Wyoming ‑‑ in fact, it exceeds

Wyoming\'s population ‑‑ that\'s the dilemma this

Commission has with your recommendations.

DR. HESS: I understand that completely. What

I\'m trying to do is ‑‑ the nice thing about the

competitive certification approach is, rather than trying

to substitute a new model for current certification

licensure requirements, what it says is, we\'re going to

trust that the officials in the many districts across the

nation; are the best judges of their needs.

If we actually hold them accountable, and to

the extent that we hold them accountable in terms of

special education, and that is appropriate, but to the

extent the we hold them accountable for serving students

adequately, then is that appropriate to permit them to be

the judge of how they can best locate and train teachers

they need?

COMMISSIONER BERNDINE: Thank you, that\'s very

informative.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Dr. Pasternack.

COMMISSIONER PASTERNACK: I\'d like to just as

one question rather than a long series of questions.

First of all, I thank you for being here this morning. I

think all the Commissioners would have been here if they

could have. I think the Commissioners here today

recognize that if we don\'t have a highly qualified person

teaching kids, with all the laws and regulations, we are

never going to do that which we seek.

I guess my question is a follow‑up to what

Commissioner Hunt asked. I don\'t understand why we\'re

not teaching teachers how to use progress monitoring.

We\'ve known about progress monitoring for many years.

Now, you mentioned in your testimony the

importance of teachers knowing progress monitoring, so

I\'m just curious from you all why you think it\'s not ‑‑

it just seems to be simple to me, and I don\'t understand

why it\'s not done and your suggestions about how we get

it done.

MS. WALK: While I think that general education

teachers may not understand the importance and may not do

individual progress monitoring, I think that special

education teachers do that on a regular basis. They have

to do that in implementing a child\'s IEP. Special

education teachers understand the importance of

monitoring a child\'s progress; that\'s what they\'re

trained for. That\'s why they write IEPs, that\'s how they

monitor a child\'s progress.

General education teachers do not have that

kind of training. They don\'t have that at the preservice

level; they leave that up to special education teachers

because special education teachers have to monitor a

child\'s progress throughout their IEP. That\'s how they

write goals and objectives; that\'s how they move the IEP

forward.

So special education teachers, I believe,

understand that. General education teachers don\'t have

that background and that understanding of monitoring a

child\'s progress. How do we fix that? Again, I believe

it goes back to the preservice level where general

education teachers and special education teachers are

being taught together. We\'re not teaching teachers in

separate silos. We have to get past that.

We\'ve got to improve that at the university and

college levels to teach the importance of monitoring

individual progress. Special education teachers do

understand the importance of that and do follow it when

they write a child\'s IEP.

DR. SANDERS: The children that are labeled for

special education service are not in classrooms of

teachers that have been trained this way. They\'re in

classrooms that are more general in nature. And so,

consequently, when you look at the data, what you will

see is some kids that have been labeled as having special

needs in certain classrooms will make progress. In other

classrooms, they make no progress.

So, what I\'m suggesting ‑‑ and I\'m not

disagreeing with what she has said or what the

Commissioner has said ‑‑ I think this whole notion of

following the progress of individual children needs to be

included as part of the teacher preparation program for

all and to move it more towards like the concept of an

IEP regardless of where the children are.

But when you look at the data very, very

carefully, what you will see is that huge differences in

patterns of growth of the kids by classrooms, strongly

suggesting this is not happening in most ‑‑ in probably

the majority of the classrooms.

COMMISSIONER PASTERNACK: With all due respect,

I hear from too many parents across the country that

their kids are not making progress in special education.

The goals and objectives on IEPs do not change year after

year, and I think it\'s an outrage that you would say that

people are trained to be able to go ahead and monitor the

progress these kids are making, where in states like

Mississippi only 12 percent of the kids with disabilities

get a diploma.

So, I\'m confused about how we say that people

are trained, but yet we have a graduation rate that is 57

percent ‑‑ 57.8 percent in the most recent data that we

have available. I\'m still asking the question: Why

aren\'t teachers trained to monitor the progress of their

kids, and how are we going to get that done? It doesn\'t

seem that we need more research, it doesn\'t seem that we

need more models, it just seems that we need to get these

skills into the hands of teachers.

And I don\'t think, based on the data that you

spoke about earlier, we need four to eight years for

teachers to become the kind of special education teachers

that we need them to become. It\'s about the research

preparation, and that\'s my question. I still would like

to hear an answer.

DR. HESS: One of the issues is that there\'s

very different standards for teacher education programs

and school districts. School districts who are actually

being held accountable for student progress have very

real incentives for professional development in these

courses to help these teachers monitor this kind of

progress in those skills. Schools of education really

don\'t have incentives to necessarily address these issues

unless it happens to be something that interests the

faculty of that particular institution. Schools of

education are simply not in any way accountable if their

graduates graduate from the skills test which emphasize

their particular approaches or particular models and

don\'t have these kinds of skills.

The fact is, at the end of the day, it\'s a

buyer\'s market, and, you know, there\'s simply not enough

trained teachers in the country that graduates will be

hired. Because teachers are hired by districts with the

presumption they are certified professionals, we will

tend to get relatively weak, watery professionals.

So, by changing both the hiring process so that

it becomes more customer‑oriented in terms of

preparation, institutions need to train teachers with

skills that districts are going to need. And then, by

moving away from this presumption that somebody who is

certified as a competent professional and moving towards

an understanding that education, like other professions,

tends to be one of continued growth. We are going to

create the opportunity to focus additional preparation

more on this kind of training and free up new

professional development resources to create this kind of

sustained enhancement throughout the teacher\'s career.

So, I would argue this is really a private set

of institutional incentives, and we can browbeat and

install folks all we want, but so long as we retain this

dichotomy produced by official certification, we\'re

unlikely to get meaningful progress on this.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Commissioner Coulter.

COMMISSIONER COULTER: Like my fellow

Commissioners, I would like to applaud you in your

efforts and your time. I, like Commissioner Fleming and

Commissioner Berndine, work in an institution of higher

education. I understand the fact that you have been

significantly challenged to look at accountability which

we do in a different way.

If I heard Dr. Sanders correctly, he mentioned

that he could track students by teachers that had taught

them, and that over time he could, in fact, construct a

profile, not just of student progress, but of the teacher

effectiveness with different students over time.

My question is if, in fact, we had those data

and the ability to make those kinds of analyses, how can

these data be used to provide feedback, incentives, and

possibly sanctions, to the institutions of higher

education that trained these folks.

DR. SANDERS: In fact, I think many of you know

that work that I started 19 years ago for many, many

years was extraordinarily controversial; some places it

still is. But I took more of a statistical approach than

what has been taken before because what I\'ve been focused

on is a massive longitudinal analysis. Humongous

technical obstacles had to be overcome.

The challenge, in my view, now is to begin to

get this information which I think is far more allowable

in the hands of practitioners to have a better

understanding of how to better use and interpret it to

assist the children. Twenty schools agreed to go back

through their transcripts of teacher candidates for the

last ten years so as to try to glean from that what could

be learned about what made folks that came to the

classrooms already more effective and so forth.

What I strongly recommend in a macro, and I

hear what you\'re saying, you can\'t waste ten years with

all the research. There\'s lots of stuff that we know

now.

In answer to your specific question, I don\'t

know why teachers are not following the individual

progress of children. They\'re not doing it, and in lots

of cases, that evidence is overwhelming. Is it a lack of

skill? I think so. Is it a lack of training? I think

so. Is that the only reason? I don\'t think so. But the

answer to your question is, now, when we begin to get

more of this, hopefully, reliable information, feeding

back in the loop is the only way we\'re ever going to

start strengthening that variability in teacher

effectiveness.

Now, I am convinced that not all, but most, of

the teachers, even the less effective ones, are sincere,

educated, conscientious human beings. We\'re not making a

value judgment. Most teachers do not realize they\'re

less effective until they\'re confronted with their own

data; confronted in a very private way. A lot of

teachers, once they begin to see the patterns that

they\'re not reaching up to their higher‑end kids or

reaching down to a special needs kid, a lot of those

teachers will start self‑adjusting.

A lot of teachers only want help. We should

try to set a climate that this is not about beating on

people, this is not about making bad judgements, it is

only about helping less effective teachers. A lot of

these highly effective teachers do not want to be

identified. They do not want to be singled out. Some of

the folks that we really need to be learning from the

most and serving as mentors are going to take some

institutional encouragement because, often, they do not

want ‑‑ that\'s kind of a shock to me ‑‑ they do not want

to be put in the position of where the light is on them,

per se.

I think we need to help break that down. If

these highly effective folks become better able to assist

these less effective folks, the problem, folks, is the

variability in teacher effectiveness. All teachers do

not need to change. These highly effective teachers, we

shouldn\'t be messing with them; we should be applauding

them.

COMMISSIONER COULTER: At the risk of putting

words in your mouth, I think many of us also assume the

teachers in higher education are also, you know,

well‑meaning people who think that they are doing a very,

very good job.

In the absence of accurate feedback about the

teachers that they are teaching and how successful those

folks are, I would assume that they are going to continue

to do what they\'ve done in the past, absent data.

That\'s why I\'m interested in the feedback

system that goes back to all of the well‑meaning people

who are working hard and assuming what they\'re doing is

correct.

DR. SANDERS: I totally agree with that. One

of the things we\'re finding that shocks me is that in

schools, where a teacher candidate went to college has

virtually no predictability on how effective they are as

a beginning classroom teacher. All schools of ed are

turning out some highly effective teachers. All schools

of ed are turning out some woefully ineffective teachers.

The overall mean difference among institutions ‑‑ and

I\'ve looked at thousands of them ‑‑ is very true.

So, consequently, I think this feedback loop ‑‑

schools of ed are doing that because it becomes a hugely

important thing. And you see, more of the data is going

to become available in the future since all states will

be testing each child each year, at least based on the

DSDA reports. This is going to mean more states are

going to have databases like this that will enable them

to perform on a feedback loop.

COMMISSIONER COULTER: And I would assume your

comments have as much to do with regard to the

reorganization of the Higher Education Act as it would

with anything else.

DR. SANDERS: That is true.

COMMISSIONER COULTER: Let me move to Ms. Walk

very quickly. You commented in your answer to

Commissioner Berndine about effective strategies, I

think, for professional development in undergraduates and

also in continuing professional development.

What measures of student outcomes or measures

of effectiveness of those particular strategies that you

just commented on are you systematically collecting so

that you know that what\'s been done actually has an

effect on student outcome?

MS. WALK: We are just starting those

activities in Wyoming. We just received our state

improvement grant last summer, so we are just instituting

those activities. How we have determined that we need to

do that was based on a needs assessment we did statewide,

and it encompassed the title programs, Title I and Title

II, Perkins, and IDEA.

We did a huge survey across the state of the

teachers and administrators who went through our

university program. Though that needs assessment, it was

determined a very high percentage of teachers left the

preservice program not feeling adequately trained at all

for teaching in an inclusive environment.

COMMISSIONER COULTER: You spoke, I believe,

very eloquently and importantly that there\'s a

fundamental disadvantage between state improvement grants

and state improvement plans. If I heard you correctly,

state improvement grants are funded on the basis of a

competitive grant that can have some relationship to

state improvement, but not necessarily so. And that, in

many instances, you were saying that the state

improvement plan was actually developed after the state

improvement was funded, those grants are usually for five

years.

What recommendations do you have to us, and

obviously to the office of special education programs, to

make a better connection between the funds that go for

state improvement grants and how that can directly affect

state improvement plans, which is the way in which

compliance is typically determined by OSEP?

MS. WALK: OSEP has changed the way they

monitor states, and we appreciate that. It is a kinder

and gentler way to monitor us, we state directors

believe, for the most part. It\'s been an evolving

process over the last several years.

Previous to the change of monitoring, we used

to have to write corrective action plans. OSEP would

come in, they would find compliance issues, and we would

have to write a corrective action plan. With the new

monitoring process, we write a state improvement plan.

It\'s a quality improvement plan.

My belief is that plan should be developed

before we get our state improvement grant because the

plan is how we are trying to move forward in providing

quality services for children with disabilities. States

have to do a self‑assessment. We determined in our own

states what our needs are. Where are our own specific

issues? My issues in Wyoming are different than

Colorado\'s issues. My state improvement plan has to be

directed towards what I need to do in Wyoming. The grant

that I receive should drive that. So, the money that I

receive from the state improvement grant should drive my

plan.

Now, the grant has been out for ‑‑ I think

we\'re in our third round. I received my grant after

trying three times to receive my state improvement grant.

My monitoring, when I do my self‑assessment, they

coincide, so my improvement plan and my grant are very

well connected.

COMMISSIONER COULTER: They\'re aligned is what

you\'re saying.

MS. WALK: Very much so.

COMMISSIONER COULTER: But not in all

instances.

MS. WALK: But not in all instances. Some

states received their state improvement grant three years

ago and they are just going through monitoring right now

in 2002.

COMMISSIONER COULTER: So it is possible they

wouldn\'t be aligned?

MS. WALK: Exactly. So when they received

their grant form three years ago, it may not be what

their state improvement plan needs.

COMMISSIONER COULTER: Thank you. Dr. Sanders,

one more quick question. With children with special

needs, children with disabilities, a lot of our

discussion this morning has been on student achievement

and student outcomes. There are other aspects, other

needs, that students with disabilities have; for

instance, related services, et cetera, that affect their

educational performance.

Does your database in any way differentiate

between those children who are receiving related

services, for instance, and those that do not ‑‑ and let

me add just one more thing which I assume you could

respond to.

In many instances, we have teams reporting to

us that children have special needs or related services

but aren\'t receiving them, and we would assume that, in

some way, is inhibiting their progress because they are

not getting all that they need.

What I would like you to comment on, in the

databases that you developed, is there any provision for

collecting information about related services being

provided and the effectiveness of those services?

DR. SANDERS: Some of the districts that we\'re

working with outside of the state of Tennessee are

beginning to put additional flags on the kids\' records

such that it makes it very easy for us to create virtual

control groups, allowing good medical experimentation

such that you could filter out what those additional

services, those additional programs, those additional

impacts might have with regard to achievement level.

This is something I strongly encourage because

that enables one to even ‑‑ once you created the database

longitudinally, it opens a wealth of opportunities to

start partitioning to rearrange their schedule. In the

Tennessee database, the only thing we have is the

official levels of special ed services, and it is a

pretty crude approach. All we are saying is to put

additional flags on the children to start partitioning,

this thing will happen.

COMMISSIONER COULTER: Not now but soon maybe.

DR. SANDERS: As soon as the data were

available, then it certainly could be done very quickly.

COMMISSIONER COULTER: Thank you.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Commissioner Jones.

COMMISSIONER JONES: I just want to ask all

three of you one question. You\'ve pointed to the

disciplines of medicine, agriculture, and law; most of

these are disciplines of biology, chemistry, and

architecture. There is a reasonably well‑agreed canon of

knowledge that has to be conveyed as part of the

education progress. Does your training have such a

canon, and, if so, is it being utilized with enough speed

into your colleges, particularly focussed on special

education.

DR. HESS: I would argue that this canon does

not currently exist, that it certainly could; that the

conditions in medicine and education exist at very

similar conditions as they did in the mid 19th century.

By choosing who\'s operating the courses, in terms of how

they go about the scientific method, and in terms of the

approach to research in the field, as compared to those

courses over the past 150 years, most of the concerns

voiced difficulty in field trials and research

clarification in terms of medicine, criminal justice,

social welfare, and welfare.

We have chosen, however, to think in terms

of ‑‑ we\'ve chosen to simplify results. To the extent

that we\'re willing to do those kinds of tasks and focus

ourselves on a couple of discrete outcomes, then it

becomes eminently possible. And we could probably quite

rapidly in human resources begin to assemble knowledge

because we have a great deal of capacity and folklore

that would actually be tested and run through appropriate

channels over time. For various reasons, regional,

political, cultural, not just for this, and that is part

of the problem in the current approach to teacher

development.

DR. SANDERS: I take a pretty pragmatic view to

this. Kids have been taught since the beginning of time;

one generation has always taught the next generation. I

think the issues ‑‑ let me say it this way. I do not

believe someone who would necessarily have the studies in

these differential equations could be a third grade math

teacher.

On the other hand, I would not want my children

to be in an algebra class in which all the math that that

teacher had was one year of algebra. That\'s where we\'re

making our research focus right now is by gleaning from

transcripts, and gleaning from other sources, to

hopefully begin to extract for policymakers along these

issues of credentialing and so forth, basically trying to

let the data speak.

I really think that until we begin to look at

it that way that we\'ll always be in this argument. Your

big question for this particular session is: Do

credentials guarantee effectiveness? Absolutely not.

Because the variability in teachers with the same

credentials is huge.

Now, if you ask a different question, what

about teachers teaching on special permits compared with

comparable years of experience with folks that don\'t have

credentials. That is a set of questions we\'re looking at

now.

I\'m not ready to talk about that publicly ‑‑

give me about two weeks ‑‑ because it\'s just recently

that the Tennessee Commissioner of Education said ‑‑ a

few weeks ago, she said, Bill, I\'m fixing to send you ‑‑

which I\'ve never had ‑‑ all of the certifications of the

teachers in the state. I\'m fixing to send you all of

that information. That enables you to begin to look at

all this variability for the folks with the same

credentials and the better comparisons. What about those

folks who have none of those credentials? Like I said,

ask me in two or three weeks and I may be better able to

shed some light on this subject.

I think that ought to be the approach that we

take in the future as opposed to just arbitrarily saying

here is a candidate.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: At this point, we are

past our deadline. What I would say to Dr. Sanders is

that this Commission will want to hear from you in two or

three weeks.

COMMISSIONER BARTLETT: I wonder if we could

officially hold the record open for that report, hold

this hearing record open, officially, as we say in

Washington.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: We have several more

Commissioners who are on the list. Maybe we should

confer about our time. What we\'ll do is, because we know

that you have a burning question, if we could just make

each exchange approximately five minutes, we\'ll cut that

out of our lunch time.

COMMISSIONER COULTER: I spent 25 years as a

special ed teacher, so there are two areas that I\'m still

very interested in hearing from the panel. I heard

something to the extent of in‑teacher training, how

significant developing the curriculum should be, and I

kept trying to hear what that actually meant, because

possibly, as the panel is aware, that when you\'re in

higher education and you are training, as I was, for the

emotionally impaired, you at that point are not trained

to deal with mental deficiency or the blind.

When you\'re talking about the development of a

curriculum in the classroom, I remember the kinds of

courses that were taught to get you ready for developing

what you were going to do with the students. Not being

aware that even with that small group of students, that I

had a mixture of emotionally impaired and mentally

deficient and sometimes hard of hearing, just a number of

them, how to put together the kinds of learning milieu

and developing the curriculum.

I didn\'t hear anyone really talking about that

as far as higher education and how you prepare teachers

for that, and again, I was here listening to ‑‑ just to

hear something about that other part of special ed

children which is behavioral. I didn\'t hear how that

actually is being addressed where you literally have ‑‑

as a special ed teacher, you have an assignment to teach

the curriculum, and one or two disruptive students, in

any given hour of teaching, you would also be called on

to handle that behavior.

I want to stress that I did this both in an

open classroom in public school, and also in a detention

facility in which the behavioral control was by

counselors. I didn\'t hear anyone address or anyone

suggesting for that classroom teacher, developmentally,

how do they prepare for this. Higher education, I can

admit, does not prepare them for their first day in

class.

DR. HESS: I would actually argue that it is

unreasonable to expect higher education to prepare them.

Generally, teacher preparation programs are operating on

kind of two simultaneous tracks. One is getting people

to go a whole bunch of potential districts within the

state, rural systems, suburban systems, urban systems,

all kinds of special needs populations. The professors

at these institutions are training these teachers in one

big classroom and cover a whole menu of potential issues

and potential situations.

There\'s another kind of situation in which

schools of education partner with local districts and are

simply working hand in hand with them, which is

prevalent, but also raises other concerns. Even in that

case, professional education, even working with a

district, even if they\'re training a teacher to go into a

district, they don\'t know the particular kinds of

challenges the teacher will meet.

These are the precise kinds of issues you\'re

talking about. The fact that preparation to deal with

one set of special needs is not transferable to other

kinds of special needs; the fact that as we mainstream,

we\'re asking teachers to deal with multiple sets of

issues in the same classroom; the fact that we\'re asking

special education teachers and general practitioners to

work together, suggesting a need for ongoing professional

development because these challenges change from year to

year.

Moreover, the very fact that these different

kinds of needs require different kinds of preparation

means that we\'re unlikely, even in a year or

year‑and‑a‑half of teacher preparation, to be able to

guess and then adequately train future professionals in

all of the different challenges they\'re likely to face.

What this suggests is not that we throw up our

hands. Any kind of task, any kind of profession where

you are going to be faced with flexible challenges that

are changing on a day‑to‑day basis, suggest that

certification is not a particularly effective approach to

quality control.

All I can do is suggest that they master an

essential knowledge of skills. What you\'re pointing out

is that knowledge and skills that educators face,

particularly special educators, tend to evolve and

change. This depends on the resources of the district,

depends on what resources their college brings to the

table.

What this means in terms of ongoing, sustained

professional development is not that you come in and say

you need to have a couple of workshops to get certified,

but that every year we build in resources into the plan.

If we deploy professional development from its front end,

we presume we\'re going to get a plug‑and‑play and

let‑them‑go‑model to sustain serious partnerships with

professional educators and in‑district trainers to help

people learn to address these challenges.

COMMISSIONER COULTER: I\'d just ask Special Ed

Director Walk to address that, too, because I remember in

my professional days that we were called in on one day

usually for about five hours. How are you able to

address that?

MS. WALK: Thank you. Professional development

is the crux of this whole matter between special

education and general education; that\'s the collaboration

between a general education teacher and a special

education teacher. At the institutes of higher

education, as far as addressing your curricular issue, is

teaching teachers about differentiating instruction,

about monitoring the progress of individual students,

teaching teachers how to accommodate for individual

needs, and providing those accommodations and

modifications in the general classroom.

On top of that, a general education teacher

desperately needs the support in his or her classroom

from the special education teacher. If that

collaboration between general education and special

education does not happen in the general education

classroom ‑‑ that\'s where children with disabilities are

being educated.

Professional development ‑‑ one day a year

maybe five hours, special educators go off into their own

domain and do their special education, and general

educators go off in their own domain and they do their

professional development, we\'ve go to stop that.

General education and special education must be

doing professional development in a systematic,

purposeful manner, and it should be carried out at their

school at their district level for their school or

district improvement plans.

This can be monitored through accreditation;

there is an accreditation model that has eight

components, and staff development is one of those

components. Districts need to be held accountable for

professional development for all of their teachers.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Commissioner Hunt.

COMMISSIONER HUNT: Thank you. And since this

is cutting into our lunch time, I\'ll be brief. I just

wanted to take the opportunity, Mr. Hess, to say I agree

a hundred percent with your model.

I got out of the Marine Corps in 1980 and was

hired as an SBH class specialist in scouting, and I had

the two most important credentials. I was a person with

a disability and I had combat training. That was about

it. Certainly, I had no business being there.

You mentioned career counseling. I can tell

you after one week in the classroom, I realized it wasn\'t

for me. So, my specific question for you is: How do we,

as Commissioners, make recommendations since certain

cases are the responsibility of the state so ensure that

undergraduate students spend more time in the classroom

because I think that ultimately is the best kind of

career counseling there can be. Is there a specific

recommendation that you would make to us?

DR. HESS: I think one of the problems is

that ‑‑ well, there\'s two markets that we really need to

bring in, two groups of individuals we need to make up.

One is people coming out of colleges, and the second are

the people who are in a career.

Particularly after 9/11, I think we\'re all

familiar with the interest that\'s being shown by people

who have a variety of professional experiences who are

looking for something more meaningful, something they

find rewarding.

Of the disadvantages to our school systems is

we\'re losing large numbers of these people to other

careers which don\'t require the same kind of procedural

and professional hoop‑jumping. In terms of the

population that we considerably talked about, yes, I

think, you know, that there\'s all kinds of incremental

sets and none of these are going to be whizbang

solutions, but they would help expose children to some of

the rewards ‑‑ not only the rewards, but also to the

possibilities.

If you could imagine some kind of scholarship

that ‑‑ we\'re talking on a very low level, \$500 or

\$600 ‑‑ for someone who we\'re interested in tracking on

the condition that they volunteer or participate in a

reading program or make some effort in a school

environment; just something to try to move these people

in.

We could make it a provision to require schools

of education to be involved in some kind of outreach

efforts. Thank you.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Well, I\'d like to thank

our panelists for their very interesting, well‑informed

comments, and we want to continue to follow up with you

frequently. If you have afterthoughts, we would welcome

hearing from you. Thank you.

COMMISSIONER JONES: I\'d like to invite our

next two speakers up to the front table, and we will get

you started.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: I believe we should get

started in the interest of time. Our next panel will be

discussing Preservice and Inservice Development, Where is

the Beef? Our panelists include Dr. Thomas Skrtic.

Thomas Skrtic is the Professor of Education and Chair of

the Department of Special Education at the University of

Kansas. Skrtic began his career at the University of

Kansas in 1986 and joined the Department of Special

Education in the former department of curricular

instruction.

He has published different books and articles

in the area of organizational theory, school inservice,

integration, and educational reform, particularly as it

relates to students with disabilities. His books

include: Behind Special Education; A Critical Analysis

of Professional Culture in School Organization. Skrtic

earned his Ph.D. in Special Education from the University

of Iowa.

Mary Brownell is a Professor of Special

Education at the University of Florida. Throughout her

career in higher education, Dr. Brownell maintained an

active research agenda. She is now the co‑principal

investigator of an OSERS‑sponsored program designed to

study teacher collaboration in urban elementary schools

and its effect on students with disabilities. Brownell

is equally devoted to preparing high‑quality teachers and

educational leaders for inclusion.

Presently, she is the co‑principal investigator

of a leadership grant funded by OSERS that is designed

with regard to students to work and unify teacher

education programs. Dr. Skrtic, you may begin.

TESTIMONY OF DRS. THOMAS M. SKRTIC AND MARY T. BROWNELL

DR. SKRTIC: Thank you. This is going to be

kind of a tag team match as Mary and I have each worked

on our testimony and began to see how it all fit together

as a whole, so we\'ve submitted a joint statement. So

we\'re going to sort of share the responsibility of going

through this presentation.

Essentially, we want to do a couple things.

First, we want to talk a little bit about what IDEA

requires of teachers and administrators in most regular

and special education, and what they need to know to be

able to live up to the intent of the law, and what that

requires in terms of accurate personal preparation and

professional development. Then, what are the barriers to

actually carrying that out that kind of professional

education. Finally, our recommendations for how to

overcome some of these barriers.

The first slide, really, emphasizes what we

believe is the genius of the reauthorized IDEA.

Essentially, if you look at it as a whole, what we have,

I believe, is a new federal framework for educational

policy. What we refer to as standards‑based integrated

policy framework. This integrated framework comes about

in several ways of linking IDEA with other federal

education laws.

We believe that is absolutely essential and has

a good chance of producing positive results for kids, but

we believe there\'s a missing link. The missing link is

between the IDEA and higher education. That will be part

of our recommendations a little later.

The IDEA, the first part of this new framework,

the standards‑based part really comes by linking IDEA

with Goals 2000. Essentially, what that does and what

the requirements specify is that schools, of course,

teachers and administrators are to improve outcomes in

the general education curriculum for students with

disabilities by aligning special education systems and

services with the standards‑based reform adaptation of

the Goals 2000. That\'s the standards‑based reform part

of the framework.

The integrated policy framework part really

comes from linking IDEA with Goals 2000 and with the

Improving America\'s Schools Act. Essentially, what we

have there is the promotion of what some people call

school unification; that is the integration of general

education, special education, and compensatory education,

systems and services, while holding the entire

educational enterprise, all three of those integrated

systems, accountable for supporting all students in

achieving higher standards.

So the question then becomes, given this

standards‑based integrated policy framework, who must be

prepared to do what? Well, obviously, there\'s joint

responsibility between general and special educators

especially since most students with disabilities spend

about half of their time in regular classrooms. And

about half of the students with disabilities spend most

of the their time in regular classrooms.

Clearly, you\'re not going to be able to achieve

the kinds of outcomes that we are hoping for under the

IDEA demands unless there\'s joint responsibility between

general educators and special educators. Therefore,

success in implementing the law depends on the will and

the capacity of general and special education teachers

and administrators to collaborate with one another and

parents to prepare and support students with disabilities

in meeting general education standards.

Now, in order to carry that out ‑‑ and that\'s a

lot to be on people\'s plates ‑‑ what must general

educators and special educators need to know?

DR. BROWNELL: The complex system that Tom

talked about in that educators have to have a complex set

of skills and abilities, general educators have to be

able to find maximumally effective instruction for all

students. They have to be able to make routine

accommodations, they have to be able to collaborate with

parents and professionals, and they have to understand

disability from multiple perspectives.

We have too many children that are minorites in

special education, so these teachers must understand not

only educational issues, but ecological, social, and

political issues surrounding children with disabilities.

Special educators have an even greater task.

They need to be able to do most of those things, if not

all, and then some. Special educators need a specialized

knowledge of assessment, instruction, assistive

technology, and behavior. For example, special education

teachers need to know about functional assessments so

that they can look at what kind of situations are causing

children\'s behavior problems so that they can remedy

those situations.

They also need more refined collaboration

skills as they are often in charge of initiating and

coordinating parents and professionals who are working

together to help the child. The need for additional

special education knowledge is well‑recognized in our

community, and it is in the INTASC standards, Interstate

New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium ‑‑ that\'s

quite a mouthful ‑‑ where special educators need to know

most of what general educators need to know and then many

skills on top of that. That\'s a very tall order for a

beginning teacher.

In the United States, we\'re in the habit of

asking beginning teachers to do everything that a

ten‑year veteran can do. Not all countries are like

that; there are some who are a lot more supportive of

beginning teachers. So, what we\'re arguing for is

looking at how initial preparation, beginning teacher

induction, and professional development can be used to

help remedy this situation.

So what does this research tell us about

beginning teacher preparation, teacher induction, and

professional development? While you didn\'t mention this,

I\'m co‑director for Personnel Studies in Special

Education, and so I feel really confident right now to

talk about some of these things.

Point one, if you look across these three

areas, preparation at each of these levels shows that we

can improve the instructional and management skills of

special and general education teachers. In fact, I just

received a study yesterday from George Mason comparing

traditionally prepared teachers with alternatively

certified teachers who had six or less hours of special

education course work, and on the practice three, which

is an excellent observation instrument that measures

planning and preparation, content instruction, classroom

environment, which has a lot to do with classroom

management, and professionalism. The traditionally

prepared teachers outscored the alternatively certified

teachers by a huge margin in the first three years, which

would be planning, classroom instruction, and creating a

supportive classroom environment. That\'s important

because those are probably highly graded areas of student

achievement.

Also, we did a study of students in our

integrated program where we were dually certified ‑‑ this

was before the unified program that we have now ‑‑ dually

certified teachers in elementary education and learning

disabilities, and those teachers, when we watched them,

were better able to plan for individual students, they

were better able to handle the classroom management needs

of students. They were better able to make behavioral

accommodations more so than you would expect of your

typical elementary teachers.

Point number 2, preservice preparation, teacher

induction, professional development, improved student

achievement for children with disabilities and without.

Some of the research in teacher education on preservice

preparation ‑‑ and I wish we had as well a complement in

special education ‑‑ shows that subject matter

preparation combined with content preparation is more

effective in producing better student achievement in

mathematics and science among secondary students than

subject matter preparation alone.

Also, there were five OSEP‑funded research

projects that looked at linking research that had been

done in the field to practice in the classroom. Those

projects found that with sufficient support in

professional development, those teachers could learn to

implement evidence‑based practices in the classroom, and,

in fact, improve student achievement.

Point number 3. These programs improve the

collaborative skills of beginning teachers and more

seasoned teachers. High quality mentoring programs in

special education have been shown to improve the

collaborative skills of not only the beginning teacher,

but also the mentored teachers.

Then there\'s a series of studies which I really

recommend you look out for which are being done by the

International Reading Association. That group is linking

exemplary programs of teacher education to beginning

teacher practices and, hopefully, they want to link them

to student achievement. What they\'re showing is that

graduates of these carefully crafted exemplary programs

in teacher education and reading, those graduates seek

out collaboration more and they are likely to be viewed

in their schools as professional development leaders.

Point number 4. Beginning teacher induction

programs in special education reduce attrition of

beginning teachers, and that\'s very important. And then

the last point that is these types of programs increase

the efficacy of both special and general education

teachers. This study is funded by OSEP and is a national

study of special educators and general educators and they

have found that teachers who have more intensive field

placement, enter graduate mentor programs, were more

likely to view themselves as effective in dealing with

children.

So what do some of these qualities, initial

preparation, teacher induction, and professional

development programs look like ‑‑ and we have probably

the best research on professional development. First of

all, they are characterized by intensive instruction

linking research, theory, and classroom practice. They

do this actively, and what I mean by that is they do a

lot of logging, coaching, and reflection that helps

teachers learn not only how to teach the strategy, but

the underlying theoretical principles for the strategy.

This type of learning is best accomplished in

the classroom where students, either preservice teachers

or inservice teachers, are learning theoretically and

having the opportunity to practice them in the classroom

and then receiving feedback. It is well‑recognized in

teacher education that if you are in a classroom that

does not support what you are trying to accomplish in

teacher education, that a lot of the learning is

basically washed out.

Second, these programs, whether they are

initial teacher induction or professional development,

are developmentally constructed as the crux of teacher

learning. What do I mean by that? They take into

consideration the prior beliefs, the knowledge, and the

skills of the teachers when the learning situation is

organized, and there are many attempts to help teachers

realize their assumptions about learning and reflect on

whether kids are learning in the classroom.

Third, all of these effective programs exist in

collaborative communities where professional

collaboration is highly valued in everyone, faculty

working with teachers, teachers working with faculty, and

preservice students working with preservice students.

That\'s imperative because it allows teachers to engage in

the kind of collective problem solving that helps consult

the problems that were being addressed earlier. They

have to step outside of what they know and find new

knowledge.

Finally, they are all characterized by specific

goals and standards for evaluating success. Professional

development programs that are effective are clearly

focused on student goals. It\'s worth stating that, in a

national study, just even participating in lots of

professional development led to increased student

achievement. Institutions of higher ed that are highly

effective, there are well‑articulated standards of

student performance and students are assessed on those

frequently.

The flip side of this is that there are a lot

of challenges to creating this kind of seamless system,

and I\'m going to talk about the challenges with regards

to shortages of special ed teachers and then Tom is going

to talk about some of the institutional barriers.

All of you know that there is a critical

shortage of special education teachers, that about 10

percent of vacancies are filled each year by uncertified

teachers affecting 600,000 students. That national

average showed dramatic shortages in states like Wyoming

and states like Louisiana where 30 to 50 percent of the

students ‑‑ 30 to 50 percent of the teachers are

uncertified.

What\'s important about that is that there is

some contributing factors that you need to understand.

The rate of growth in special education is 45 percent

more than the rate of growth in the student population at

large, which means that that\'s a good indicator that

general educators are not being prepared to handle the

kids\' needs because they\'re being referred to special ed.

Also, teacher attrition is a huge compounding

factor. Nearly 13.5 percent of special education

teachers leave the field compared to 6 to 7 percent of

their general education counterparts. This is a great

concern because novice teachers and uncertified teachers

are a huge attrition risk. When you have to constantly

hire uncertified people, you can create a revolving‑door

effect.

Also, it\'s difficult to recruit teachers in the

field for a couple of reasons. The salary for beginning

teachers is \$7,500 to \$15,000 below the salaries of

teachers in other fields. Working conditions are a huge

detractor. I did one of the large attrition studies in

special education, and working conditions, school climate

and building administrative support, role overload and

factors like that ‑‑ this is consistent with the other

attrition findings ‑‑ were huge factors in teachers

leaving the field.

Also, part D funding in terms of constant

dollars has been cut in half. Part D funding supports

personnel and preparation programs. The capacity to

prepare these teachers is well below what it needs to be.

In addition, about one‑third of faculty ‑‑ this was

mentioned earlier in IHEs ‑‑ one‑third of faculty

positions goes unfilled yearly. There\'s not the capacity

to produce teachers, nor is there the capacity to produce

the kind of research that we need to make informed

decisions.

The chronic shortages and this turnover of

staff make it difficult to create a cohesive learning

community. Many of you who have worked with principals

know that they often keep teachers in positions because

they can\'t afford to let them go, even though they know

they\'re not the kind of teachers they would like, because

they can\'t fill that position with another teacher.

DR. SKRTIC: This next slide deals with some of

the institutional barriers which are also related to some

of the barriers ‑‑ some of the problems created by

chronic teacher shortages and the revolving door effect.

Probably one of the most significant barriers or

institutional barriers is, what we\'ve called here on the

slide, lack of administrative support in schools, but it

really goes much deeper than that. It does sort of work

its way back to the administration.

Most special education teachers report

caseloads of students that are beyond their ability to

manage effectively. Competing responsibilities ‑‑ when a

teacher comes into a school setting, they have

responsibilities with respect to their colleagues.

Special education teachers have lots of other

responsibilities that are relative to the law and the

parents of students with disabilities. Oftentimes, there

are different expectations between parents and

administrators, and special education teachers get caught

in the middle between what parents want and what schools

and districts feel they can afford to provide. So, the

special ed person is often caught in the middle.

Worse than that ‑‑ I don\'t know what could be

worse than that, but as bad as that ‑‑ is that special

education teaches often find themselves at odds with

their that regular education colleagues over the

inclusion of kids with disabilities in their classrooms.

That\'s particularly problematic at the secondary level

where teachers tend to see their responsibility as

teaching content not students necessarily, and expect

special ed teachers to take full responsibility for kids

with disabilities that may be assigned to their

classrooms.

Beyond that, there\'s a lack of collaboration in

schools. Generally, all teachers work fairly much in

isolation, given the bureaucratic structure of schools,

but the law forces and requires this close collaboration

which kind of comes in contradiction for special

education teachers.

Special education teachers report not only

being isolated from their general education colleagues,

but also from each other. So, essentially what you have

is a beginning teacher who needs the initial teachers

preparation, goes into a school system where they fill a

role in which they are largely isolated for the rest of

their career; isolated from general education teachers,

isolated from other special education teachers. And what

you have then, is no feedback. You don\'t have teachers

observing each other, asking each other questions,

helping each other to improve their practice, which sort

of runs counter to the kind of ongoing system of

professional development that we, and other panelists,

have been talking about.

Finally, as far as lack of collaboration,

special education teachers report feeling like they\'re

not really part of the mainstream of schools, but they

exist sort of on the margins outside of the central core

of school.

Disincentives to collaboration in universities.

Well, to start with, higher education colleges and

universities are also organized as professional

bureaucracies which means that professors, too, tend to

work in isolation from one another. On top of that, the

reward structure in universities tends to reward

individual entrepreneurial work where you\'re out earning

your grants and publishing regularly in the scholarly

journals, and you\'re not rewarded for the kind of

collaborative work that it would take to reform a teacher

education program to make it better suited to prepare

people for IDEA implementation.

Finally ‑‑ and this is one we want to hit on

fairly heavily in our recommendations. There\'s really no

incentive for IDEA‑related reform of teacher education.

There never really has been. There was in ‑‑ since 1974

to 1984, there was a federally funded project or

initiative called the Dean\'s Grants Projects. If anyone

was in higher ed at that time, they will remember those.

There were projects that, I think at the peak, Dean\'s

Grant Projects in 305 schools or colleges of education

around the country.

The reason they were called Dean\'s Grants

Projects is they couldn\'t give the money to regular ed,

they couldn\'t give the money to special ed, so they gave

the money to the dean and made the dean responsible for

promoting reform of general education teacher preparation

programs with respect to the demands of

Public Law 94‑142. There were, I think, five rounds of

three‑year funding cycles ‑‑ my university was heavily

involved in that. Basically, the dean\'s grants failed;

there were other competing priorities for universities

and schools of education. When the funding ran out, the

activity tended to run out.

At the University of Kansas, before the dean\'s

grant, we had something called the special education area

of emphasis which regular education teacher students ‑‑

teacher education students could elect to take, and it

was 12 credit hours. 75 percent of all elementary majors

elected to take it, 50 percent of all secondary. When we

got our dean\'s grant, we adopted the so‑called \"infusion

model.\" We took all content from those special ed

courses and infused it throughout all of the general

education courses, which made a lot of sense.

The problem was when the dean\'s grant ended,

they quit teaching that content to the general education

courses, and now we didn\'t have the separate program and

we didn\'t have the funds yet integrated. We\'ve been

suffering from that for years. I think that kind of a

story was replicated around the country. Anyway, when

the dean\'s grants ended, there was nothing.

Here are our recommendations. I\'ll start with

the first one because this is a natural lead‑in from my

comments on dean\'s grants. Establish shared

accountability for student outcomes ‑‑ that\'s outcomes

for students with disabilities. In addition, establish

teacher preparation programs and beyond into induction

and ongoing professional development. What we\'re

proposing is ‑‑ and by the way, these are summarized on

page 7 of the summary that I gave you today.

Essentially what we\'re proposing is to complete

the circle. We\'ve already linked IDEA with

standards‑based reform, and we\'ve linked that to

Improving America\'s Schools Act, now known as the Leave

No Child Behind Act. What we really need to do is to

link all of that to the Higher Education Act. By that we

mean that Title II should be amended to require all

general education teacher education program completers to

demonstrate competency in the content, knowledge, and

skills necessary to serve students with disabilities

under the requirements of the IDEA.

Now, we already know that Title II does put

these requirements on schools of education to demonstrate

and publish the performance of their graduates. The

problem is that Title II just required them to use their

state teachers candidates. Our position is that most

state teacher standards are woefully inadequate in terms

of standards for general educators about serving kids

with disabilities, so that needs to be beefed up.

We\'re also proposing in that same

recommendation that an effort be put underway to actually

develop national standards, or at least guidelines, for

states of what they need to include in their standards

for general education teachers.

Finally, under that same first recommendation,

we\'re proposing sort of a new dean\'s grant. A new dean\'s

grant‑type of situation that would help schools and

colleges of education make these reforms. We belive that

adding a new dean\'s grant program without the higher

education link would be probably a waste, because you get

the same thing that I think you got back in the 70s and

80s.

The second one is to create a seamless system

of career‑long professional development. In that

recommendation, we note that ‑‑ and I think it\'s been

said already here today very eloquently ‑‑ is that we

really have to stop thinking about teachers who have just

graduated from their programs as being experts somehow.

We don\'t think that way in other fields. What we need to

think of instead, we\'re proposing, is a continuum of

confidence that ranges all the way from novice through

experts and runs throughout initial teacher preparation,

beginning teacher induction, and through ongoing

career‑long professional development.

In order to achieve that, we are proposing a

revamping of the comprehensive system of personnel

development as a component of IDEA. There have been some

comments about that already today, but we believe that

the real problem with CSPD is that it\'s not shared

responsibility between the state and the locals and

higher ed.

We would like to see joint responsibility and

joint accountability for a revamped comprehensive system

of personnel development that had equal partnership

between state education, local education, and

institutions of higher education.

The third component and our third

recommendation. Really, if we could achieve those first

two recommendations, they would feed into the third one;

that is, improving the conditions of special education

practice. If we had better‑prepared personnel and a

better seamless system for career‑long learning, that in

itself would improve the conditions. We want to go

beyond that. We really don\'t know what to do right now,

but we know we need more research on it. The information

the we have, besides Mary\'s research and some research

done by the Council for Exceptional Children, there\'s

been very little done to assess the conditions, what\'s

good, what\'s bad, what are the necessary conditions.

We\'re proposing a research‑type agenda on what are these

conditions and what are the approaches the systems change

to achieving those kinds of conditions in all schools.

Also, we are proposing under that same

recommendation that the Office of Special Educations

recently initiated research agenda on personnel

preparation in special education, the outcome of which is

the center that Mary co‑directs. That center only deals

with preservice education. The agenda should be extended

to add beginning teacher induction and ongoing

professional development, that seamless system.

The next one is to increase the number of

qualified special education teachers. We can do that if

we can improve the conditions of special education

practice and do the first two recommendations above. But

beyond that, essentially, what we need to do, given the

numbers ‑‑ we\'re producing half the number of special

education teachers we need a year, given the increasing

number of students, given the special education teacher

attrition.

A big part of the problem is because we\'re only

producing half as many special education faculty member a

year to actually carry out that trend. So, what we\'re

recommending is to double both of those and, of course,

both of those are funded and supported primarily through

Part D of the IDEA which would require increasing the

support in Part D to double the number of special ed

teachers we produce, double the number of special ed

faculty.

The next recommendation ‑‑ I won\'t go through

these individually ‑‑ but we have a series of funding

recommendations that would support achieving these

recommendations above. Then the last one there, Mary and

I just threw that on there last night. In Mary\'s work

and in our work together in preparing here, the one thing

that you\'re hit with over and over again is how

inadequate state data are in terms of number of children

served, teachers certified, and where kids are being

served.

I mean, it\'s a monumental task and it\'s very

complicated, but we believe that in doing all of this

other stuff, we\'re going to measure it and know where

we\'re going. One source of data that we to improve upon

is state collection and reporting of data.

I\'ll stop there and open myself for questions.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Commissioner Coulter.

QUESTIONS FROM THE COMMISSION

COMMISSIONER COULTER: I would like to thank

you once again for the preparation and for your passion

on this topic. One of you in particular has been doing

this for a long time.

I would like to know in terms of the attrition

studies and the work that you\'ve done in supporting new

special teachers, when you mention administrative

support, can you give us some very concrete brief

examples of what specific types of administrative support

lead to decreased attrition and better student outcomes

as it relates to the new special education teachers?

DR. BROWNELL: Who I can do is talk to you

about some of the things that special education teachers

said to us when we interviewed them. One of the most

profound things that I was struck by was teachers who

would say to me, this is a great school to work in. And

then I would start to ask why. They would say things

like, this school is my family, my principal really goes

to bat for me. The principal steps in when teachers are

being resistant to including students and reminds us of

the vision of working reform and helps us to do this.

And there is a great sense of emotional support.

Also, my work on teacher collaboration, the one

school was much better at establishing this, and what we

watched from that principal was that she was very clever

about publicizing the school\'s efforts. She was very

clever about getting resources, and she was pretty clever

about putting quality teachers into leadership positions

in the school.

Contrary to some of the things that were

mentioned earlier, my experience and my research and

other people\'s research, I would really question whether

all administrators really have the knowledge to hire the

best teachers and evaluate them.

COMMISSIONER COULTER: You mentioned the George

Mason study. I think in the last two or three days it\'s

gotten a lot of press. I haven\'t seen it. You said

you\'ve seen it. That was a dissertation, correct?

DR. BROWNELL: Right.

COMMISSIONER COULTER: Let me ask, because I

haven\'t seen it, were there direct measures of student

achievement or student outcomes associated with those two

groups of teaches?

DR. BROWNELL: Not to my knowledge.

COMMISSIONER COULTER: In terms of the

induction programs that you described and recommended,

did this study look at ‑‑ were those teachers exposed to

induction programs that would support both the certified

and the noncertified?

DR. BROWNELL: They didn\'t talk about that in

the abstract of the study ‑‑ could I also bring up

something else about alternative training?

COMMISSIONER COULTER: Sure.

DR. BROWNELL: That research example only tells

half of the story. In the state of Florida, we did a

study of traditional programs, alternative certification

programs that were developed collaboratively with IHEs

and then district‑run programs. The alternative programs

that were developed with IHEs, the graduates of those

programs came out pretty well on the Praxis III. In

fact, the looked almost as strong in many ways as the

traditional programs. They were better in terms of

professionalism, working with colleagues and things like

that. The traditionally prepared students were still

better in terms of content, which we really have to think

about because that\'s probably linked to student outcomes.

Well‑defined alternative programs that have

high standards are not a bad thing. But the key is

well‑designed.

COMMISSIONER COULTER: Thank you. Let me just

ask you both to respond to this issue because I know that

it\'s frequently mentioned that more money can help. I

was struck by Dr. Skrtic\'s comment about the fact that

the dean\'s grants, which were around for a considerable

period of time, many people, I think ‑‑ we have no data

to show that kids actually did better as a result of the

teachers coming out of these programs.

In view of the fact that, obviously, increased

resources would help, what do you see as the

accountability mechanism that should be attached to any

increased funds of Part D?

DR. SKRTIC: Well, for increased funds relative

to a dean\'s grant initiative kind of reform effort, those

funds in particular, I believe there shouldn\'t be funds

unless the first recommendation about the Higher

Education Act requiring demonstration and public

reporting of the performance of general educators and

administrators in serving student with disabilities.

And I think both of the those, especially the

performance, should look at not only student performance,

certainly, but also capacity for working with others

collaboratively in planning and working with parents and

so forth.

I think the main teachers who work would like

to see the ideal system included in those performance

updates. That would be the accountability. It\'s only

when I add, in its place, will I bring along the influx

of funding to support the reform. See, that\'s what we

were lacking back then and we still don\'t have.

I think a lot of people think that somehow

special education departments and faculty in higher

education have some control over general education and

what goes into that curriculum. Anyone who\'s ever worked

in schools of education knows that we in special ed are

really on the bottom of the totem pole. We have no say.

We are hat in hand, just like special ed teachers in

schools are hat in hand to get their kids included in the

classroom. We are hat in hand to get another course or

to allow our faculty to come into a methods course and

teach about accommodations. They\'re very guarded about

that. And we\'ve been fighting this battle for more than

25 years. What we need is some leverage.

COMMISSIONER COULTER: Thank you, Commissioner

Butterfield.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Mr. Bartlett.

COMMISSIONER BARTLETT: I have three quick

questions. One, I\'m quite impressed by your

recommendations of higher ed and linking higher ed to

IDEA. Madam Chairperson, I hope to we take those

recommendations seriously as we prepare the report.

My question is what level of support do you

believe that we can get from higher education and the

higher education community, who we\'ll probably get a fair

amount of opposition from the same community.

Could you expect ‑‑ what kind of support would

we get from them?

DR. SKRTIC: I think that ‑‑ just like there

was with Title II itself, when it first came in, it was

ridiculous, it was unprecedented, and who do they think

they are, and nobody knows the real picture ‑‑ this was a

very typical reaction. But, I think the general sense in

schools and colleges of education is that Title II is

going to be a good thing. I think that people have come

around to that.

I would expect the same kind of thing to

happen ‑‑ maybe not as easily with the one we\'re talking

about because, you know, to be frank, like it or not,

there still is a resistance, whether that\'s in public

schools or in society at large or in schools of education

to inclusion of people with disabilities.

COMMISSIONER BARTLETT: It will be a challenge.

DR. SKRTIC: It will be a challenge, but I

think the one way to overcome the challenge somewhat is

to provide the kinds of developmental support we\'re

talking about.

COMMISSIONER BARTLETT: Second question. Your

recommendations on changing federal law ‑‑ it\'s probably

unfair to overcharacterize it ‑‑ most of your

recommendations were focused on the supply side of

special education teachers.

Let me start out with the demand side. I like

the recommendations on the supply side. Let me turn over

to the demand side. Thinking about changes in the

classroom, and how those changes can be driven or

encouraged by veterans, what changes in federal law come

to mind to you in IDEA that would cause changes in

classrooms to reduce the attrition rate of special

education teachers? Is it outcome‑based measurements,

those kinds of things? What kinds of things would you

actually recommend that would reduce attrition from the

federal law point?

DR. BROWNELL: In terms of IDEA, that piece I\'m

not really sure of unless it\'s linked with some of those

other laws like the Higher Education Act. To me, one of

the biggest problems is that general educators and

building principals don\'t come to the table with

knowledge of special ed and why it\'s important to

collaborate.

In IDEA I\'m not really sure where that\'s

fitting in, unless it fits in with access to the general

curriculum, unless legislation can be written about that

that holds them accountable to increasing kids\' time in

special ed and showing them the kids are doing better and

holds buildings responsible for that.

DR. SKRTIC: If I could add ‑‑ I think one of

the changes that could ‑‑ and this is going to be

indirect and over time, it\'s not going to be immediate ‑‑

but the changes that we\'ve recommended regarding CSPD I

think could make a big difference in changing classroom

practice. The way it is now, there\'s not much support or

additional training or training on the job, ongoing

professional development available.

I think from the research that Mary cited that

ongoing professional development can change classroom

practice. CSPD changes in IDEA would be geared to

professional development to change those. The other

thing I would recommend, and this is not in IDEA, but we

might want to consider it, and it\'s in Leave No Child

Behind Act; that is, the requirement that states will

have ‑‑ all teachers will be qualified by 2005, 2006.

I don\'t know what the mechanism is to get that,

but it\'s there. It\'s certainly an incentive for states

to move. What we propose ‑‑ short of that, I think that

may be ‑‑ that\'s one way to go about it. What we

recommend is that IDEA require that on the IEP document

be listed the qualifications of all personnel who will

deliver special education and related services.

COMMISSIONER BARTLETT: You heard Dr. Hess\'s

testimony this morning in terms of replacing current

certification system. As a special educator do you think

the competency test is going in the right direction or

the wrong direction?

DR. BROWNELL: I thought that Dr. Hess was a

lot more optimistic about who\'s out there and who is

uncertified than I am. Having worked in an urban, two

urban schools now for four and a half years, I don\'t see,

particularly in the most urban school that I was in, I

did not see uncertified people coming into the classrooms

as being very competent. I think the principal that I

was working with would not have hired them.

I think if it was performance‑based, and a very

good performance‑based instrument, I would be more

comfortable with the competency paper and pencil test.

By the way, research doesn\'t link them to any kind of

student achievement or they\'re not well linked to

administrators grading their teachers. So I think the

paper and pencil tests are really problematic without the

performance‑based assessment.

I think we have to be honest with ourselves.

Special education is not a very attractive profession for

a lot of reasons. Who would we be recruiting among the

ranks of people trying to be teachers I think is really

the big question.

COMMISSIONER BARTLETT: Thank you, Madam Chair.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Commissioner Hunt.

COMMISSIONER HUNT: Thank you, Madam Chair.

With regard to your recommendations improving data

collections, is that synonomous with increasing data

collections?

DR. SKRTIC: For state education agencies?

COMMISSIONER HUNT: Right. Specifically with

regard to teachers\' work. We understand that there is a

deluge of information and reports that people have to

fill out. Does this mean we\'re going to increase that

workload?

DR. SKRTIC: I wouldn\'t say so. Right now,

they are required to collect very definite information.

The problem is, it\'s not very reliable. I think even in

the reports to Congress there\'s always the caveat

about ‑‑ this is based on the reliability of information

from the states. I just think in the field, it\'s just

known that\'s it\'s difficult to trust state data. I don\'t

want to be blaming them. Generally, they would be

relying on the data they get from the districts.

I wouldn\'t say collect more data, I would say

let\'s make sure the data that we\'re already spending

money on to collect is vital and valid.

COMMISSIONER HUNT: But reliability indicates a

more stringent goal which seems to me would require for

time on behalf of those on the front line. I\'m just

wondering, is there a way to reduce some of the ancillary

documentation that we\'re producing to make room for

improved data that\'s more important?

DR. SKRTIC: I guess you have to go that way.

I would hate to see that we put even more requirements on

people to keep track of what they\'re doing that take away

from actually doing it, even though I believe the

accountability is absolutely essential. Maybe the answer

lies in better technology, maybe better coordination.

It\'s kind of like management information system work, and

I just don\'t think we have very a sophisticated system in

place. I wouldn\'t want to increase the demands, but I

realize that improving reliability problems would take a

little bit more on the bottom end.

DR. BROWNELL: Could I make a comment to follow

up on that? It\'s really difficult because without that

data, you can\'t evaluate the quality. You can\'t tell

what effect attrition is having on improvement costs or

what effect uncertified teachers are having on the

student achievement. Those linkages in special ed are

going to be really hard to make, and I would ask you to

think about that carefully, because in special ed, we

keep talking about student outcomes. General ed teachers

are primarily responsible for them, so what\'s predicting

the student outcome and how do you measure it ‑‑ it\'s

really conflicting.

COMMISSIONER HUNT: But I don\'t understand.

Isn\'t the responsibility of our teachers to teach, not to

effect public policy? Why should we put the burden on

them to enforce public policy? Isn\'t there another way

around that?

I have a problem with making the recommendation

on improving documentation and improving reliable data if

that means that they\'re going to be filling out more

paperwork than they are teaching. I\'m just wondering,

from your point of view, how do you plan to reconcile

that?

DR. BROWNELL: I don\'t think I can talk to you

about classroom teachers. There was at one time talk

about a requirement at the state level to collect better

data on attrition of teachers and ‑‑ you know, licensure

is a real good example. I can think of hundreds of

teachers right now who are working on waivers. That

doesn\'t help us figure out what\'s going on in certain

states that are reducing shortages versus other states.

DR. SKRTIC: I think we\'re talking about

information that states are already required to keep,

like number of children served by different disability

categories, number of personnel trained, and all that,

plus the things they don\'t keep like attrition rates and

so forth. With that, I wouldn\'t see putting the burden

more on the classroom teachers.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Dr. Pasternack.

COMMISSIONER PASTERNACK: I\'d like to respond

to the point about special ed not being an attractive

profession. This concerns me greatly. I would not want

to miss an opportunity to tell you that fine teachers

work in classrooms across this county on behalf of kids

with disabilities. I really worry about the comment

being made that it\'s not an attractive profession, and I

worry about how we can continue efforts to emphasize the

critical importance of the contribution special educators

make every day in improving the quality of life for

children with disabilities.

My question to you is: Why do we continue to

use evaluations which have been in use for 25 years which

look at things like, was the room well lit, was the food

good? Are you aware of any models that are looking at

the impact of professional development as measured by the

achievement gains that students make from the teachers

that receive that certain kind of professional

development?

DR. BROWNELL: First of all, I want to point

out the state of Connecticut because the state of

Connecticut has done an A plus job of creating a safe

policy context that has eliminated the teacher shortages.

They\'ve done it by increasing teacher salary, increasing

standards to get into the classroom, and continuing

ongoing professional development that is tied to what the

teachers do. The teachers are being assessed in and

ongoing way. It has had a dramatic effect on their

student achievement scores. I really recommend you to

look at what Connecticut has done.

Professional development that works when it is

tied to student achievement and specific skills and

abilities that you want teachers to engage in. Why we

don\'t do that on a large scale basis is difficult for me

to understand. I think it has a lot to do with some of

the institutional barriers that Tom talked about already,

and the fact that it\'s driven at the district level and

it\'s not driven at the building level on focused goals.

The fact that schools are held accountable for their

results is very problematic because when it is school

based, when it is driven at that level, when it\'s around

that level, it produces more effective results.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Thank you very much for

your information. It was very, very interesting, and, I

believe, productive for us. At this particular time,

we\'re going to take a brief break of 15 minutes. We want

people to come back promptly at 11:25 so we can begin our

public comment.

(Whereupon, a recess was taken from 11:13 a.m.

to 11:27 a.m.)

P U B L I C C O M M E N T S

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: We\'re now ready to begin

with the public comments. Our first speaker will be

Richard Mainzer.

DR. MAINZER: I was really impressed by the

remarks this morning. There were a lot of good and

positive ideas. I really appreciate the opportunity to

come before the Commission really to clarify for the

Commission the CEC\'s position. The sine qua non of any

profession is its willingness to set and enforce

standards. For over 75 years, CEC has done that. It is

the largest professional organization of special

educators out there. We have been the leader in

advocating standards for special education for a good

many years.

Right now, CEC\'s professional standards are

rigorously validated by practicing special educators,

research informed and pedagogically grounded,

performance‑based and coordinated with INTASC and used in

partnership with NCATE to accredit special education

programs. The result is the most rigorous and

comprehensive study of national standards anywhere in the

preparation of high‑quality special educators.

Through the partnership with NCATE, CEC

presently has agreements with 18 states in which CEC

conducts the accreditation reviews for all special

education preparation programs that seek national

accreditation. Maryland and Alaska have signed

agreements that all special education preparation

programs must be CEC accredited. Twenty‑four additional

states have signed agreements to move their accreditation

towards CEC\'s standards. Four states have actually

adopted CEC\'s standards as their own standards. To date,

CEC has evaluated approximately one‑half of all special

preparation programs in the United States.

I want to tell you also about the conversions

between INTASC, the national board, and CEC. We\'ve been

working over the past couple of years to make sure that

our standards all align. In short, there is a set of

standards for quality in special education, and I want to

make sure you know about that ‑‑ there\'s a lot more that

I can tell you about it. They\'re published in here as an

excerpt of dealing with performance‑based standards being

tied directly to the university showing what they\'re

graduates have learned; not what they\'ve taught them, but

what their graduates have learned. That includes how

well they affect student learning. Thank you very much.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Deborah Ziegler.

MS. ZIEGLER: Good morning. I\'m Deborah

Ziegler, and I\'m assistant to the executive director of

public policy for parents with exceptional children. I

appreciate the opportunity to provide comment, and I

appreciate the comments from the panel. I think they

have identified the issue of highly qualified personnel

as a crisis of national proportion.

The recommendations for teaching these highly

qualified personnel are as follows: Number one. In

order to ensure that all children and youth with

disabilities achieve higher results, every child or youth

with a disability must receive services from a highly

qualified special education teacher or service personnel

and early intervention teachers, as well as highly

qualified general education teachers and administrators

consistent with the requirements of No Child Left Behind

Act of 2001.

This can be accomplished through capacity

building and coordination of IDEA, EMPA, the Higher

Education Act, through state, local, and families. We

would recommend that the complement system of personnel

development be amended and we have a recommendation more

specific with regard to that issue. We would also

recommend that all special education teachers and service

providers and early intervention teachers are highly

qualified by the year 2006‑2007.

CEC recommends and the law requires that

resources be dedicated through B, C, D, to address the

following priority areas: Priority area number one.

Ensure that the nation has the capacity to prepare and

maintain a sufficient supply of highly‑qualified persons,

special ed teachers, service providers, as well as

general education teachers to improve results for

children and students with disabilities.

Two. Ensure that states require a nationally

recognized entrance to effectively serve children with

disabilities.

Three. Ensure that states\' licensing

requirements for all special educators require mastery of

appropriate standards to effectively supervise, develop,

and support delivery of high‑quality special education.

Four. Establish a standard admission of

researchers, teachers, and parents in a cohesive,

long‑term research agenda to improve the knowledge as its

regarded in preparation and in professional growth.

Number five. Establish a standing commission

of research for teachers and parents to provide the

necessary cohesive, long‑term research to improve

teaching and learning conditions and enhance the

achievement of children.

CEC will provide these comments along with

specific strategies to accomplish these recommendations

in written form along with the recommendations for

implementation and manifestation of IDEA in the near

future. Thank you for the opportunity to provide

comment. CEC stands ready to assist and provide

additional information to the Commission on these

critical issues. Thank you.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: I would ask anyone

speaking after this, to please address us by speaking

directly into the microphone so that the court reporter

can hear and make a record.

RABBI ABRAMCHIK: Good morning. My name is

Rabbi Abramchik and I am the principal of Hillel Academy

of Denver. We are the only Jewish school in the entire

state of Colorado that houses a special needs program for

children of our faith. Every one of our students in this

program have one disability or another ranging from

Down\'s Syndrome, hearing impairment, social‑emotional

problems, to Williams Syndrome.

Now is not the time to describe each one of

these disabilities. However, what is important is to

make you aware how the program works and what it is you

can do to help make these children productive citizens of

society.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education

Act, as it is currently constituted, presents numerous

problems in terms of both its overall framework and

various provisions as well as in the way it had been

implemented by the local school districts in Colorado.

Allow me to suggest to you some of the changes that must

be made based on how things are currently operating.

The 1997 amendments are currently inequitable

vis‑a‑vis disabled public school students who are

receiving a full range of cost‑free special education and

related services, but denies these basic rights to other

students with identical disabilities solely by reason of

their enrollment in nonpublic schools.

The stark inequity between the disabled public

and nonpublic students under the current IDEA is at odds

with President Bush\'s stated goals of ensuring that no

child will be left behind in the nation\'s educational

system and expanding parents\' educational choices. My

proposal is to give the entitlement to every nonpublic

school student with special needs on par with public

school students.

The current method of federal allocations of

money does not seem to come down to the states and to the

local public school system in Denver. The formula should

be set up in such a way that both public and nonpublic

schools are given the same amount of grant money

proportionate to the number of students.

IDEA permits, but does not require, the

provision of services on the premises of a religious

school. As a result, the public school system of Denver

insists that the services they provide to nonpublic

school students be rendered only at public schools.

Please be aware that the IDEA regulations do, in fact,

encourage the local public schools to provide services at

nonpublic school sites so as to minimize and not cause

disruption of studies to a child\'s education.

In addition, off‑site instruction is not

feasible in this day and age when both parents are

working during the school day and there are no funds in

either the public or private sector to bus special needs

students to and fro. The statute should make the

students\' educational interests the determinative factor

in a system run by the public school regarding location

of services.

The IDEA embodies a very powerful idea; that,

if provided with the means to do so, children with

disabilities can meet the challenge of attaining the

academic potentials and become full, productive members

of society.

Unfortunately, the way the system currently

works in Colorado, and subsequently Denver at present,

the idea does not hold out that promise to students in

the nonpublic sector.

I am of the belief that if the system is

changed, as per what I stated above, not only will the

special needs students at Hillel Academy benefit, but

also all students of the nonpublic sector will gain from

these guidelines.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank

you for allowing me the time this morning to address you.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Our next speaker will be

Heather Marie, and then speaking after that will be Barb

Goday.

MS. MARIE: Good morning, and welcome to

beautiful Colorado. My name is Heather Marie, and I am

currently director for Sopris West Educational Services

here in Colorado. Before this, I was a national

consultant with Stetson and Associates, an educational

consulting firm instrumental in the 10 OSEP sponsored

\"What a Great IDEA\" conferences.

I also worked for Alief Independent School

District in Houston, as Dr. Fletcher did, as a

district‑wide behavior specialist and before that, as a

special education classroom teacher, during which time I

participated in the National Institute of Child Health

and Human Development literacy study, conducted by

Barbara Foorman, Jack Fletcher, and others.

I am here representing Dr. Howard Knoff who is

a Professor of School Psychology at the University of

South Florida in Tampa. Dr. Knoff is also a past

president of the National Association of School

Psychologists, part of NASP\'s cadre in the OSEP‑funded

ASPIRE network, and he was a committee member

participating in OSEP\'s five‑year strategic planning

process on the positive behavioral support and

school‑wide discipline work group.

Finally, Dr. Knoff is the director of Project

ACHIEVE director and the Institute for School Reform at

USF. This bring me to the point that I want to talk

about today. I want to briefly tell you about Project

ACHIEVE, and maybe, perhaps offer it as an invitation and

the blueprint for school reform, school implementation,

and improvement that is day to day, not only probably

statewide, but definitely district wide and, most

importantly, at the individual student level.

Let me offer the blueprint for you. Over the

past decade, Project ACHIEVE has received five OSEP

preservice personnel training grants, one OSEP

Demonstration Project Outreach grant, and one OERI

research grant. Project ACHIEVE was designated in summer

2000 as an evidence‑based model program throughout the

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Center for

Substance Abuse Prevention. It was cited as an exemplary

program during the 1998 White House Conference on School

Safety. It is identified as an effective school reform

program by the Center for Effective Collaboration and

Practice, American Institutes for Research. Project

ACHIEVE is an innovative school reform and school

effectiveness program that has been implemented in

schools and school districts across the country since

1990\.

Ultimately, using school effectiveness in

professional development, Project ACHIEVE\'s goal is to

help decide and implement effective schools and schooling

processes to maximize students\' academic achievements,

create safe school environments and positive school

climates, build effective teaching and problem solving

teams that speed successful interventions to challenging

students, increase and sustain effective classroom

instruction, increase and sustain strong parental

involvement, develop and implement effective strategic

plans. Thank you very much for your time.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Our next speaker will be

Barbara Goday followed by Superintendent John Condie.

MS. GODAY: We\'re definitely in a special

education crisis, and I really appreciate President Bush

appointing this Commission to do fact‑finding for all the

special education students. I have worked in the school

system as a school nurse, and I have most recently worked

in the prison system as a nurse. This is a crisis

affecting all of us in society.

I would also like to mention that it was really

hard to get information on this meeting here today. I

personally had to call Washington, D.C. yesterday to find

out the specifics of this particular meeting. If you

could pass that on to future meetings, especially about

the agenda, it would be really helpful.

I\'m a parent of children with special needs

ages 17 and 14. I am the creator and participant in an

Internet community web site for teachers and parents

joined together in a supportive, friendly environment to

problem‑solve special ed concerns. I didn\'t realize

there was a special ed support group for special ed

teachers. This is the majority of people who visit my

web site and we have about 8,000 subscribers.

We\'ve made it very clear that we have a need

and that there are problems in our education system.

Special needs children are not getting the proper IDEA

implementation. We\'ve been told by our districts that,

yes, we agree there is a problem, but where do we go

after we get this knowledge.

Recently, there was a lot of discussion about

decreasing the amount of school psychologists due to the

whole controversy about medications in the schools. I

think that is really the wrong step to take and would be

very damaging.

I guess I better move on ahead. I just want

you to know there are many, many good things about IDEA.

At this time, I\'d like to talk to you about a special

needs child named Noah. He is presently 19 years old.

He was born with cerebral palsy and basically can only

move his index finger. His mother has 29 adopted special

needs children. She lives in Iowa. Noah is a writer now

and graduated from high school in the top five percent of

his class. He sent this poem to me and he wanted me to

share this with you.

\"Just give me one chance. What if I do not run

or play, does that mean I do not feel pain? What if my

language is sign and I cannot hear, does that mean

isolation in my silent world? What if movement takes me

too long, does that somehow mean my body is wrong? It

hurts to be different, set apart from the rest. I\'m

doing my best. I laugh and cry and feel pain, too. I

dream of a friend, could that be you? I wait and I hope

with each passing day, just give me one more chance,

don\'t turn away. Just give me one chance, please open

the door to a life that holds more.\"

Thank you.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Thank you. And I would

remind all speakers if, for some reason, you don\'t have

sufficient time, you can give your written comments to

Tracey. Why don\'t you wave your hand. Tracey will make

sure that we receive those. Once again, I would ask all

speakers to speak clearly and naturally into the

microphone.

Our next speaker will be John Condie who will

be followed by Clay Gorman.

MR. CONDIE: Thank you, Dr. Butterfield and

Commissioners. There are four areas that I\'d like to

address today. Today\'s topics deal with professional

development of our special education teachers. That

almost becomes a moot point when our teachers are taken

away from their teaching duties for hours and even days

at a time to document in excruciating detail all aspects

of each child\'s special education services. It is my

contention that instead of helping these children, it is

doing just the opposite if it takes the teacher away from

providing those direct services to those needy children.

On a related note, my special education

teacher, principal, and regular education teachers are

required to spend far too much time in staffing meetings.

Again, this takes my teachers away from providing direct

service to all children, regular education as well as

special education. Federal legislation is suffocating us

with onerous requirements. It\'s infuriating and

discouraging. You must cut back in at least half the

present requirements.

Last year, Congress almost passed the full

funding bill. Should the feds provide full funding at

the 40 percent level, we would receive about \$10,000 more

in my school district. True, that\'s not a great deal of

money for many school districts across the nation, but in

our district, that would be the entire textbook budget or

would help purchase microscopes or needed playground

equipment.

The proposed legislation now states that if the

full funding is passed, we will not be able to supplant

money we are currently putting in special education from

our general budget with the new \$10,000. How does that

help us? It doesn\'t. We need to be able to shift our

funds to benefit all of our children, not just special

education.

Currently, if a student with an Individual

Education Plan, or an IEP, causes a major discipline

problem, we must treat them differently than a regular ed

student if they go beyond ten school days. We need to

have the flexibility in the school district to be able to

treat all kids the same, and have the flexibility to

adjust the suspension or expulsion of a student if

extenuating circumstances warrant. That needs to be left

at the district level or at even the school level, not at

some other level. Thank you for your time.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Thank you. Our next

speaker will be Clay Gorman who will be followed by

Stacey Parment.

MR. GORMAN: Thank you, Commissioners. I\'m one

of your special ed teachers. I\'ve been in business for

about 12 years now. The district that I work in is in

northeastern Colorado. We have approximately 200 kids

K‑12. When I look at my budget, with the five aides that

I hire and the proceeds that help us out, we

approximately spend \$150,000 a year on special needs.

That\'s just with one special needs teacher.

You\'re talking about how we\'re going to make

special ed fit all of these kids in there, all of the

teachers have the training they need for each individual

kid. When you\'re dealing with a smaller district, that\'s

going to be very difficult to do. Each year we give

greater responsibility, but yet I have diminishing

resources to deal with. That makes it very difficult.

I know right now if I walk out of teaching

today, they\'re not going to be able to find a qualified

special needs teacher to take my place. There are five

districts around us that don\'t have them.

Where are the funds now that we\'re going to get

for training for me and for my aides? If I look at the

resources right now as it stands, how am I going to find

the money to train those aides that I can\'t watch all the

time? I have five aides that work under me. I have

maybe ‑‑ in the materials that have, I get maybe 20

offers for inservices around the country, and I get at

least 200 catalogs every year. I have absolutely no idea

out of all of those which are going to be effective and

which aren\'t. Help me with that. Tell me what works.

Tell me what I can do. Everybody wants to tell me what I

can do, but they want to sell me something.

As far as education itself is concerned when we

look at special education, when we try to get people into

the business, I see it as painting a very rosy picture.

At times, it\'s not. We need to be realists and let the

people who are going to teach understand what education

actually looks like before they start. I have a lady

that I know very well down in Texas. Every year they

bring 20 people in out of the business community to go be

part of the teachers. By the end of the fourth week, two

of them are left. Help me out. Help us out. Do what

you can for us. Thank you.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Thank you. Our next

speaker is Stacey Parment followed by Lola Zussmann.

MS. PARMENT: My name is Stacey Parment, I\'m

the director of Keshet of the Rockies. Keshet is spelled

K‑e‑s‑h‑e‑t. Our web site is keshetoftherockies.org.

This is a special education program, a school within a

school at Hillel Academy Jewish School.

It has increasingly become a well‑known fact

that education is a complete experience in its finest

form. Facts and figures are not in a vacuum, but in the

context of life itself, and how that information can be

practically applied is truly the essence of quality

education. The day school, clearly, not only works

within this realm, but fully encompass it to such extent

that it actually is the embodiment of the total effort,

to teach for the purpose of not just education, but to

teach to live an educated and quality life.

This educational approach is greatly enhanced

and becomes even more critical for the children with

special needs within our community. For them, with all

their support people and support systems, their world is

clearly not in a vacuum, but learning in the context of

their own world. What better way can we, as educators,

have impact than to encompass the rich and full culture

of Judaism into the context of their unique approach to

life? By doing so, we fully support the entire

collaborative effort of all those who formally and

informally, in and out of the school program, are models

and support systems for our children with special needs.

It is vital that these children develop an

identity, just as their peers do, that complement their

entire life experience. In our case, our religion is

steeped with much religious and cultural meaning. Our

school focuses on our highest ability in today\'s secular

and Jewish community. Obviously, student/teacher ratio

and the collaborative support professionals required,

such as special educators, paraprofessionals, speech

therapy, occupational therapy, and the like, make this

kind of education costly.

Monies have been quite an obstacle for this

program. Families have come together to fund‑raise and

write grants. However, the money will run out and we

need to look at other options to continue this program.

It is only with the assistance of state and federal

funding can such programs continue to build and thrive in

meeting these vital objectives.

Each student in this program has an IEP,

Individualized Education Plan, outlining their individual

goals and benchmarks. It is important that we, as

educators, follow these objectives carefully to assume

appropriate curriculum based on the public school

assessments.

Having a school within your cultural realm is

important to not just the families, but the students

themselves. The students understand that they are Jewish

and this program enables them to become a part of their

culture. They have developed close friendships and are

socially integrated with the total school.

Many of the students at school take our

students and their buddy and help them around, either in

classroom studies, playing at gym or recess, or just

eating lunch together, et cetera. This social networking

has been an initiation by the students themselves, which

indirectly a Jewish school can teach.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Thank you. Our next

speaker is Lola Zussmann and after her will be Liz Wuest.

MS. ZUSSMANN: My name is Lola Zussmann, and I

deeply appreciate the opportunity to speak to you as a

parent of a child with special needs. I am co‑president

of Keshet of the Rockies Jewish Day School Program at

Hillel Academy of Denver.

Every family who is burdened with a child with

special needs has their own unique story. Our son,

Ephraim, was born 12 years ago and was diagnosed at birth

with Down\'s Syndrome. Ephraim was our sixth child of

eight.

Being a committed Jew is an important priority

to our family. Bar mitzvahs, holidays, Jewish rituals,

and Sabbath are something to celebrate and appreciate

every day with all our children. Our Judaism daily

permeates every aspect of our lives; it is our way of

life to be kosher, visiting the sick, is our way of

thanking God for all the kind blessings he has bestowed

upon our family.

These are all lessons we teach our children

from an early age. Our son, even though he is a child

with special needs, he is accustomed to these rituals and

feels comfortable, like all kids, in an environment which

is familiar. Effie\'s learning in school reflects this.

His success has been due to his attending a Jewish school

like all his other brothers and sisters.

When Ephraim was born, his doctors told us all

of his limitations based on medical books. He would be

mentally retarded, have poor muscle tone, poor speech, a

sweet disposition, and probably be in the mild to

moderate category given intense therapies. They didn\'t

tell us that he would have definite likes and dislikes,

strengths and weaknesses.

Our son allows us to look at the inside of

individuals and see the untapped potential lying within

every human being. For years, I have made our son my

priority of the day. I have driven him to all his

therapies according to his Individual Education Plan,

which is two to three times a week minimum.

Ephraim has tried dual enrollment at one of the

public elementary schools along with the Jewish Day

School. Unfortunately, this setup was not ideal for him.

He would wash his hands before he ate bread like he was

taught at home, and the teachers would yell at him and

tell him to sit down. How confused he was.

Unfortunately, he could not explain why because his poor

speech would not allow him to explain his feelings.

Effie would go to King Soopers with his class

and bring home non‑kosher food even though I explained to

his teachers previously that our family follows strict

religious guidelines, that we can eat only food brought

from home. This was to no avail. His Jewish attire

which he would wear every day was ridiculed by his

teachers because they found it a nuisance and a

disturbance to the entire class. This was so confusing

for him, as was Christmas, Easter, Hannakuh, Passover.

Putting this aside, dual enrollment is very

difficult for a child with special needs. Thank you.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Thank you. If you would

give a copy to Tracey, I\'ll see the rest of your

testimony. Our next speaker is Liz Wuest who will be

followed by Robin Brewer.

MS. WUEST: Hi. Thank you. First of all, I\'m

Liz Wuest, I\'m a parent, and I wanted to tell you how my

son\'s IEP has prepared him for the future. These are my

words, based on my son\'s reactions, as my son cannot tell

anyone what school truly means to him.

He is in middle school. His core classes are

English, social studies, history, along with P.E. and

choir. What he has learned, along with the other

students, that will help him in his adult life are

responsibility, getting himself to where his is supposed

to be at the right time, handing in papers when they are

due, being nice to others, the ability to work with

others in a group, using a computer, using art as a hobby

through an after‑school activity program, that learning

never stops, and the joy of being with friends.

All of this is possible because of IDEA. This

law upheld his right to pursue the American dream, which

begins with a good public education. As President Bush

has said, No child is left behind. My son would have

been one of those children who was left behind because

his disabilities are pretty obvious.

At the end of last year, he had to miss two

months to recover from surgery. He was bored sitting at

home with not much to do. He wanted to go to school and

learn. We went to a fast food restaurant and ran into

some of his classmates. They asked when he was coming

back, and that made him feel pretty good. Going to

school is more than just learning the lessons, it is also

about making friends.

Elementary school was easier to work with than

middle school has been. One reason was that I

volunteered in my son\'s class and, therefore, I felt more

connected to the school. Another factor is the

difference is size between elementary school and middle

school. The special education department in middle

school is responsible for more students, more paperwork.

If the required paperwork were reduced without

harming any legal protections, the teachers would have

more time to be with the students. The most important

part of the IEP is where the teachers and I agree on what

is the best way for my son to receive his education.

Each student is different and needs the individualized

details in their own plan.

To do the best job in fulfilling the IEP,

teachers need training, too. They need to know how to

modify the curriculum. To keep those teachers that have

been trained well, their pay should match other

professions.

Parents also need training. I know my son has

a better education because I knew what was possible. The

advocate training that I have attended and learning about

the law has helped me tremendously. Things that I have

requested rarely involve more money. Many were small but

important or changes in thinking.

When you have the best trained teachers and the

best trained parents working together to give the

students the best education so they can be their best,

you come across the patriotic ideal that American schools

truly are in first place and worthy of blue ribbons.

I just wanted to add a quick quote because I

think it relates ot IDEA. \"To furnish the means of

acquiring knowledge is the greatest benefit that can be

conferred upon mankind. It prolongs life itself and

enlarges the sphere of existence.\" John Quincy Adams

said that when the Smithsonian Institute was established.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Our next speaker will be

Robin Brewer who will be followed by Liz Hess.

MS. BREWER: I\'m an assistant professor of the

University of Northern Colorado. Today we\'ve received

some good comments that our division provided, but due to

the time, we won\'t be speaking of those now. Today, I\'m

here specifically to talk about ‑‑

COMMISSIONER JONES: Ma\'am, could you please

speak directly into the microphone so the Commissioners

and our court reporter are able to hear your comments.

MS. BREWER: ‑‑ children with behavior

disorders. The children with behavioral disorders is an

official division of the Council for Exceptional

Children. We are committed to facilitating the education

and general welfare of children with exceptional behavior

disorders.

The CCBD encourages the Commissioners to

consider the following points: Research has shown that

teachers must learn to implement classroom management

strategies early in their careers. Without this, in

addition to the other factors such as high caseloads,

paperwork, collaborative administrative support, and the

lack of financial incentives, teachers will continue to

leave their special eduction field after three years of

teaching.

Research has also shown that teachers who feel

that the environment is a collaborative one, will stay in

the environment even with all of these other aspects of

teaching. Research also shows that teachers who are

poorly prepared had more discipline problems. With the

increase in discipline problems, students were more

likely to be suspended, expelled, or drop out of school.

Some schools have tried to implement zero tolerance

policies. We\'ve also seen that research does not support

zero tolerance policies in discipline.

Research also indicates that if we have systems

that differentiate between general education discipline

systems and these are not effective, that we must have

collaborative policies that are preventive and supportive

of the standards for discipline.

Research also shows that there are effective

behavior strategies that are implemented in a three tier

system ‑‑ school‑wide, classroom, and individual ‑‑ and

must not continue to only address serious behavioral

problems. Ten percent of the teachers are uncertified in

the area of special education. This affects over 600,000

kids who are with teachers who are not certified in their

teaching, so we must address that.

With this, we urge the Commissioner to expand

professional development so that three‑tiered systems are

implemented. Develop plans for professional development

that is a requirement. Ensure that all students with

emotional and behavioral disorders are taught by fully

qualified teachers. Develop programs that train teachers

who work with the students with emotional and behavioral

disorders, using alternative programs as well as

traditional programs, to make sure they are fully

certified to a high standard. Thank you.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Thank you. Our next

speaker is Liz Hesse who will be followed by Jean

Beirdon.

MS. HESSE: Good morning, my name is Liz Hesse.

I am past president of the Learning Disability and Social

Issues of Colorado. Now I am chairman of public policy.

I am on the Colorado State Advisory Committee for Special

Education. I\'m chairman of the board for a small private

school for learning disabled children ages six through

twelve.

First, I gave you some handouts. Our national

organization asked that we present to you their position

on this subject today, so I hope that you all will have a

chance to look at that. I would like to address to you

some other comments, these are from the Local Learning

Disability Association of Colorado. One of the handouts

I gave you also is something that I co‑authored in 1996.

This was a survey that was submitted to the state

legislature about teachers\' satisfaction, especially

special education teachers. I thought some of these

results were very interesting. I will mention some of

those in my comments. I have seen no other survey since

then, and I think the conditions are pretty much the same

or not as good as they were at that time.

First, we would like to tell you that we feel

IDEA is an outstanding law, for it gives the opportunity

to those who have a disability an opportunity to succeed.

The problems with IDEA are not with the law, but with the

implementation of that law. The state of Colorado makes

excellent suggestions, but does little to enforce the

law. Despite this environment, Colorado has been an

exceptionally low ‑‑ has had an exceptionally low number

of due process cases. Out of roughly 30 cases filed each

year, there were three decisions in 1999, six in 2000,

and four in 2001. A total of five of these decisions

were appealed over a three‑year period.

Our basic problem here is that we handicap our

teachers. We provide very little substance in a

university‑level training where they are trained more to

be generalists and specialists. They too often come away

not even understanding the world of learning disability

or what dyslexia is, let alone how to assess for it, how

to do daily assessments, how to provide intensive

educational services to them.

Foreign language is too often emphasized in

reading instruction. In schools, special education

teachers have high caseloads with a great diversity of

students, a diversity of disabilities, ages, academic

abilities, social/emotional disabilities, and other

areas. They are giving the teachers limited time to ‑‑

thank you for your attention.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Thank you. Our next

speaker is Jean Bierdon.

MS. BIERDON: Good morning. I\'m Jean Bierdon,

and I\'m director of special education services in the

Boulder Valley School District. I\'d like to take a few

minutes of your time, three to be exact, to give you a

local picture of issues around professional development

and how the lack of special education funding affects

these issues.

I\'ve been the director in Boulder for three and

a half years. Since I assumed the director\'s position,

these are a few of the changes in required training.

There have been new guidelines for speech and language

services. There have been new guidelines for students

with emotional disturbances, new guidelines for students

with sexual deviant disorders. They have also had to

educate us in the implementation of an IEP, we have

restraint training, our state CSAP training in CSAP‑A

alternative testing, all of which have needed training.

Of course, costs vary.

In Boulder Valley, we must accomplish this in

six to nine hours per year of paid in‑service time.

Boulder Valley special education department has \$40,000 a

year to pay for training for about 350 licensed personnel

and about 350 to 400 para‑educators. Substitute teacher

costs are \$104 a day. Para‑educators need significant

training to work with high needs students.

Teachers no longer have the time or the energy

or willingness to donate their time for training.

Para‑educators cannot afford to. Consider all of this

with the needs of a district relative to training when

the percentage of students with autism has increased 600

percent since 1994. Consideration for the institutes

with a learning environment mandated by law is embraced

by Boulder Valley.

However, if people don\'t know how to deal with

their child with a severe disability when they\'re afraid

of working with a child with significant needs, I believe

that education is the only way to improve this situation.

It\'s the only hope we have for making inclusion really

work. It\'s the only way to change attitudes.

In terms of funding, we cannot do our effective

mandates or educate to meet our state guidelines. We are

expected to help our students meet state standards and

something other than unsatisfactory on the CSAP.

I realize that I\'m almost out of time, so I\'m

just going to say that Boulder Valley picks up 75 percent

of the funds needed to serve our special needs and

special education students. I really feel that the

system is broken and need some significant fixing. I

hope you\'ll give that serious consideration. Thank you.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Thank you. Our next

speaker is Marilee Miller.

MS. MILLER: My name is Marilee Miller, and I

don\'t have prepared remarks, but what I wanted to speak

to were some of issues that were raised earlier. After

20 years in the higher education in New York State, four

months ago I moved to take over the home of professional

development for special education in Albuquerque. I\'ve

been a consultant, and I have a child who is disabled.

And I\'ve seen many things happen over the past 30 years.

As to the issue of teachers monitoring

students\' progress, there are many institutions of higher

education who do train them. Most in‑service teachers

used to retort, but that\'s not how it\'s done. As to the

students ‑‑ the preservice students who are learning

that ‑‑ unless we went back and spent a tremendous amount

of time teaching them how to write objectives and how to

match their compilations with those objectives, they

never got to the point of monitoring student practice.

Within two months of a teacher education program, we knew

who would monitor and who wouldn\'t.

In‑service education at the higher‑ed level has

been very different in the sense that you have practicing

teachers who are culturated to the schools and come to

higher ed and say, that\'s not how it\'s really done. That

issue is one reason why I want to get into the public

schools and see if I could change it from there.

One of the models that I\'ve seen that was

highly effective was in the Connecticut longitudinal

study that was referred to by Dr. Brownell. One of the

models that came out of there was early intervention.

Another model that has come out of New York State that I

would refer you to is the Systemwide Change Project where

they funded every college to get collegialities and

collaboration within the school of education. Then we

set up a task force statewide across institutions of

higher ed.

After five years, we then moved to the K‑16

integration. Until you get the funding and the support

of all institutions to work that way, you won\'t get the

change in the classroom.

Last issue is certification. Certification is

a one‑time measure, effective teaching is a longitudinal

process. We\'re looking at two different things there.

Thank you.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Thank you. Our next

speaker will be Kelly Stallman who will be followed by

Jane West.

MS. STALLMAN: Thank you for taking time to

listen to me. I only brought one document about my kids.

I\'m the parent of three sons, and have medically fragile

twins who are nine. I\'ve really here to talk to you

about the success that we\'ve experienced over kind of an

evolution in the past five years in elementary. Mark and

Aaron ‑‑ Mark is nonverbal, nonmobile, uses a G‑tube,

speaks with a computer box, and he can navigate all of

these pages in this computer and find what he wants to

say. We now have the technology to put it in a computer,

print it out, and turn it into the classroom teacher.

One of the three points I\'d like you to leave

with are that we support IDEA; that without the IEP as a

cornerstone of IDEA, you have a lame duck piece of paper.

We have to keep the IDEA process. There used to be

accountability, and the piece to do that is fully funding

it, as well as the determination of eligibility.

By fully funding IDEA ‑‑ in Littleton Public

Schools, I sit on the special education services advisory

committee ‑‑ we get 19 cents on the dollar for every

dollar spent on special ed. You\'re asking teachers to

work in an environment that is very stressful with too

much paperwork, and in our case, they\'re doing a fabulous

job and they\'re getting the job done.

Then, the last thing that I\'m very concerned

about and have been hearing a lot of about is changing

the IDEA eligibility process. That the way to save money

is to narrow the margin and serve less children.

My favorite quote is: Facts do not cease to

exist because they are in a corner. We should support

IDEA, keep the IEP process, and continue to provide

services for the children.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Let Aaron know that we

appreciate the reading why childhood is good for you.

Our next speaker is Jane West.

MS. WEST: Thank you, Dr. Butterfield. Good

morning, Commissioners. The Consortium for Students with

Disabilities is a national coalition of over a hundred

organizations based in Washington, D.C. representing

families of students with disabilities.

I\'m here on behalf of the education task force

of the Consortium for Students with Disabilities which is

comprised of over 60 of those organizations. Our task

force decided that we would find the funds to send

someone to each of these Commission meetings because we

feel that we weren\'t represented appropriately, and we

wanted to be here to give the contributions and to

participate. I represent the higher education consortium

for special education, the teacher education division of

CEC on the task force.

Before I make a few recommendations, I\'d just

like to ask you to see if there is anything that you

could do to enhance your activities that are intended to

engage the public. If you could put more information on

your web site about the location of your hearings, if the

papers that are presented could be up on the web site,

that would be terrific. All of our districts have

affiliates in every state across the country, and I think

you would see 300 people in this room if that sort of

information was readily available. I realize you have a

short timeline, and a lot of decisions have to be made

about what\'s to be done, but whatever you could do would

increase public participation, which I know you\'re

interested in.

The Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities

has developed principles related to IDEA that has been

e‑mailed to all of you, so I know that you have those.

I\'m just going to highlight a couple of those. First,

every child should be taught by certified, qualified

professionals, sets of professionals. And I think that

the No Child Left Behind Act does offer a very good

precedent in that it requires that every teacher be fully

qualified and certified within four years. That applies

to special education and related services and all

providers of services in the school system. I would urge

you to apply that same application to special education.

Secondly, that the shortage does not give way

to questionable quality. There are a lot of alternative

certification programs out there. Many of them are very

good, but they need to have standards; they need to have

some quality control just like other programs do. That

notion of training someone in three weeks to be a

qualified teacher just does not hold up.

Also, a significant influx of funding is going

to be required to address personnel problems that you

have talked about today. One of the things that you

might look at is how Title I, under the No Child Left

Behind Act, addresses these issues if they set aside 10

percent of the funding for Title I to address

professional development issues. That money is also

supposed to be spent to train general educators to work

with students with disabilities. You might want to look

at Part B in that same vein.

Finally, the payback provision, which is in the

personnel preparation section of Part D, provides

significant assistance to recruit new people into the

program ‑‑

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Thank you. Our next

speaker will be Anne Doshen who will be followed by

Shelia Buckley.

MS. DOSHEN: My name is Anne Doshen, and I\'m a

parent of a child who is seven years old. He is fully

included in his first grade classroom. He has Asperger

Syndrome, Tourette\'s Syndrome, and obsessive‑compulsive

disorder. He was first identified when he was three and

a half years old. I had many concerns about his

behavior. He was very bright. It was Child Find who

identified that there was an issue, and I thank you that

we have that service. It really helped to have some

early intervention so that he\'s doing very, very well

right now with minimal support.

However, his teachers have been wonderful, we

have a really good working relationship. I think, to me,

the benefit is, you know, you go to the teachers and,

although there\'s not enough resources, they do more and

they are very caring; moreso than I would expect with

what they have.

As far as recommendations for IDEA in regards

to training. One of the things I\'d like to see is the

issue of behavior. A lot of kids with behavior

disorders ‑‑ it\'s a type of brain disorder, it\'s not

something that they can control. I\'m not saying that you

excuse that behavior, but really look at the behavior

plan. Everyone has a behavior, teachers have behavior,

parents have behavior, students have behavior.

Change the behavior plan into an inclusion

plan, and make it for all students requiring like a

20 percent or more self‑contained classroom have an

inclusion plan for them. Instead of addressing the child

acting out, change it to what strengths does the child

have that can contribute to their success in the

classroom.

What does the functional assessment tell us

about the needs of the child, and really make the

functional assessment a requirement instead of just

something that they need to do if they really, really

have to or the parents sue us. How can people come into

contact with a child and help them to succeed? That

would be peers, general education teachers, special ed

teachers, and parents. How can they help a child

succeed? Look at what kind of things the teachers can

change in how they teach that will help the child? What

kind of training? Peer‑sensitivity training, parent

training, communication training, just learning how to

write letters to effectively communicate.

Then, for accountability, I would report like

suspensions and expulsions of students with IEPs as well

as the graduation rates because a lot of these kids end

up in prison when they don\'t get services.

Then, as far as funding goes, tie the funding

to the specific needs.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Thank you. Our next

speaker will be Shelia Buckley who will be followed by

Ken DeLay.

MS. BUCKLEY: Thank you. I am Shelia Buckley

from the Learning Disabilities Association of Colorado.

I have a child with a learning disability. I\'ve heard a

lot of wonderful comments here. The panel, I believe,

had wonderful ideas and suggestions, far greater than I

could ever give to you. My comments are just sort of on

what I\'ve heard here.

I know we talked about the amount of the

paperwork and how teachers feel overwhelmed with that. I

think that is a product of a problem, not the problem

itself. The aspect is we have ‑‑ don\'t have enough

special ed teachers and that they have a large caseload.

To go back at looking at what your panel just said about

how to increase special ed teachers and general ed

teachers and to be able to collaborate to know what to

do, I\'m very, very grateful that IDEA is federal law and

that schools are mandated to follow that law. Like one

mother talked about, the IEP is a wonderful program for

children and thank heavens we have it.

They talked about discipline, and I know we are

very concerned about that. I think my kid has done a

good job of adjusting because we used the functional

behavior assessment. That could eliminate a lot of

problems that you\'re having. They had a lot of good

ideas; I think we just need to implement those. We need

to use the research and the data that\'s out there and

start using the appropriate programs.

One other comment I\'d like to make was on ‑‑ I

think it was Dr. Sanders talked about differential

teaching. I worked with a bunch of kids in Colorado

Springs who had formed their own support group. They\'re

high school kids, and they started this and now they\'ve

been doing this for eight years now. The first group

that came on had all been to universities, went to

college or are in college. It\'s amazing to see how well

they\'ve done.

I asked them after we started getting together

why are they successful versus all these other kids who

have not graduated from school, going into the criminal

justice system, whatever. Every one of them, all of

those kids said that one teacher really made a difference

in their lives and believed in them and inspired them.

It\'s so important that we train these teachers, either

general ed or special ed, how to make this world of

difference and that you can save a child.

Leave No Child Behind is a wonderful, wonderful

philosophy, and IDEA, I think, exemplifies that thought,

but we need to do that. In Colorado, I\'m impressed

because we do have CSAPs, for good or bad; we have to

have something to assess progress. In Colorado, we do

differentiate and pull out the disabilities. The

learning disabled category has shown a lot of progress.

So, we\'re going the right things, and there are a lot of

success stories. I\'m hoping you\'ll listen to what the

panel said and implement teacher training for

professional development as we need. Thank you.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Thank you. Our next

speaker will be Ken DeLay, and the final speaker will be

Jeanette Klinger.

MR. DeLAY: Good morning. My name is Ken

DeLay, and I am the executive director of the Colorado

Association of School Boards, but before I took this

position a couple of years ago, I practiced law for 20

years ago in this state. I primarily represented school

districts, and I spent a lot of time working in special

ed areas, so I\'m a little bit excited about some of the

issues that go on.

I know your purpose of your hearing here today

is primarily staff development, and I\'m certainly not

qualified to talk much about that. But I wanted to urge

you in thinking about staff development, to not think

about it in isolation as some of the other parts of the

system. I know you won\'t do that, and I was struck by

Commissioner Bartlett\'s question earlier this morning

about what about the demand side of keeping these

teachers in the classroom and putting these high‑quality

teachers in the classroom. I think that\'s a good and

insightful comment.

When I first started out 20 years ago, the IEP

was a couple of pages long, maybe three pages. Now, they

run closer to 50 or 60, depends where you are and how you

want to approach it. Things like standings and IEP

meetings and hearings have just literally eaten many of

the folks alive in special education.

I think Commissioner Pasternack\'s question

about how is it that we have the same IEP year in and

year out notwithstanding the training that we get to

monitor, set goals and objectives. Why is that we have

that? I think it\'s because of the way the system

operates, the system that we\'ve set up. And we need to

think a little bit about that.

Teachers are not spending time in the classroom

today. Sort of the excitement and creativity that we had

in the special ed community 20 years ago is by and large

gone. Many of the brightest and the best people don\'t

stay anymore; they get frustrated with all of that burden

and that paperwork.

I might close with a short story. One of the

last cases I handled before I left my practice and came

to this profession we had a hearing request filed against

us in a small school district in western Colorado. Over

the course of the next six weeks or so, we solved that

problem. In fact, we set up a great program.

Even now, a couple of years later, people that

I\'ve spoken to in that district tell me it\'s worked well.

But in the course of about a month, I spent somewhere

between 30 and 40 hours with the classroom teachers and

somewhat lesser time with several of the other

professionals. We spent ten hours in a mediation, and

then we had another nine hour IEP meeting. I\'m done.

But I would say to you the same thing I said in the

hearing when that was all done: Where do you suppose all

the time came for ‑‑ the educational time came from for

these proceedings? It came out of the classroom.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: Thank you. Our final

speaker will be Dr. Klinger.

DR. KLINGER: Good afternoon. I\'ll like to

address today\'s topic of professional development. I am

an associate professor with the University of Colorado,

Boulder, formerly of the University of Miami where I

earned my doctorate in reading and learning disabilities.

I worked as a special education teacher for ten years,

and I am the parent of two children with special needs,

one highly gifted and one with an emotional disorder.

I\'m also a researcher, and as the co‑principal

investigator, I\'m now in the fifth year of a grant

focused on professional development.

We\'ve been quite effective with our

professional development model. Now we\'re studying how

to scale up to sustain the implementation of

research‑based practices. I was the principal

investigator and director of a 10 plus million dollar

Title II teacher quality enhancement grant in Miami. I

was the professor of residence in a very successful

professional development school. I\'m also affiliated

with an OSEP grant focussed on disproportionate

representation, and in that capacity, worked for the

Harvard Civil Rights Project where my focus was on

professional development.

As you can see, I\'ve been immersed in

professional development for several years with many

publications, primarily with Sharon Bond of the

University of Texas Austin. I\'m also on the executive

board of the division for research out of the Council for

Exceptional Children.

My purpose in speaking to you today is twofold.

First, to let you know that I am available should you

wish further information about the special ed research on

this topic. Second, to emphasize that we in the special

education research community do know a great deal about

effective professional development and what it takes to

facilitate the use of research‑based practices,

especially with progress monitoring, which I agree is

very important. I do think the panelists today did an

excellent job of summarizing what we know.

I do think, though, that most professional

developments do not follow an effective model. As part

of my grant, we conducted a national survey with

follow‑up interviews of district‑level special education

directors and reading/language arts directors about this

professional development in their districts.

We found a great deal of money has been spent

with very few programs targeting special ed. Most of the

programs implemented are one‑shot programs without

follow‑up, without checking to see if teachers are

implementing the practices they have learned. So, I do

think that professional development is key, but that we

need to take into account what works. Thank you.

CHAIRMAN BUTTERFIELD: We\'d like to thank all

of the people who have taken the time to come and present

to us. We have come to the end of the time allotted for

public input. However, I would strongly encourage you

stick around this afternoon. We have some wonderful

speakers and panelists this afternoon, and you might have

an opportunity to address individual Commissioners.

Our lunch break will be begin now, and we will

begin promptly at 1:30. The panel discussion will be The

Medical Profession in Educating Children with

Disabilities. Thank you very much.

(Whereupon, the hearing recessed for a lunch

break at 12:34 p.m.

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AFTERNOON SESSION

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DR. BUTTERFIELD: We\'ll call the

Commission meeting back to order. Our next

discussion will be of the medical profession in

educating children with children\'s disabilities, and

we\'re very pleased to have Dr. Mark Batshaw join us.

He had to go through quite a few barriers to get

here, so we\'re appreciative of his effort.

Dr. Batshaw is Chief Academic Officer of

Children\'s National Medical Center in Washington,

D.C., where he also serves as Director of the

Children\'s Research Institute. He was Chairman of

Pediatrics at the George Washington University School

of Medicine Health Science. Dr. Batshaw has spent

more than 25 years treating children with mental

retardation and other developmental disabilities. He

is the author of the textbook, Children with

Disabilities in its fourth edition. And when your

child has a disability, it is a complete sourcebook

of daily medical care for parents with children with

disabilities.

We\'re pleased to have you here,

Dr. Batshaw.

DR. BATSHAW: Thank you. My mother thanks

you also. I actually wanted to tell you what my real

qualifications were before I go forward. They

started off that I had ADHD and learning disabilities

when I was a child at a time in the 1950s when this

really was not recognized and when I was identified

as either being dumb or not well motivated and the

treatment was that because I was so fidgety my chair

was placed outside of the classroom in the hall so I

could look in and see the teacher but I would not be

disturbing any of the other children. So certainly

special education has come a great distance since

then. I\'d also note that as a result of my

experience, when I was growing up, I wanted to do one

of three things, either to become a social worker,

which both my parents were, a teacher or a doctor

caring for kids with disabilities. And in my nuclear

family I\'ve been able to accomplish all three of

those things because my wife and one of my sons are

social workers, my daughter is a special education

teacher. Now our third son, our youngest, when he

was 6 years old and I visited him at school, it

became clear he had the same difficulties that I had

experienced, only his experience at school and with

the subsequent use of stimulant medications really

resulted in a markedly different experience in

childhood than I had. And he graduated from Vassar

and is now a computer programmer at Berkeley. And

that\'s where I came from this morning, visiting him

and giving lectures.

So with that background, I\'d like to share

with you some thoughts I had about the relationship

of the medical community and the special education

community and aspects that you may want to consider

in the reauthorization of IDEA.

One is the importance of incorporating new

medical knowledge into an educational pedagogy, and

I\'d like to talk about some recent research that\'s

been done in three different areas that show how

important this is. One, the human genome project and

the role of inheritance in disorders leading to the

need for special education services. A second, new

knowledge of neurochemistry and neuroimaging in

school age children, and especially as that relates

to what the underlying problems are with learning

disabilities, attention deficit disorders, and the

use of stimulant medications. And finally, the

emergence of our understanding of behavioral

phenotypes. That is a group of behavioral patterns

that are specific to certain syndromes ranging from

Fragile X Syndrome to Downs Syndrome.

This is from approximately a year ago.

This is the title page from signs where they actually

published the human genome, and here you can see

they did it with five individuals. These weren\'t

actually the individuals, but it was to show the

different ethnic and racial groups they came from and

the baby is to represent the child, She\'ll Lead Us

All Forward, and one of the most interesting parts of

if all was the issue of race and ethnicity really

doesn\'t make much sense in the genome, because all of

us are so similar to each other.

But what has been done is that if you look

at severe mental retardation, for example, over two

thirds of all of the identifiable causes of severe

mental retardation are due to genetic process and due

to problems that occur prior to the birth of the

child. Furthermore, if you look at autism,

hyperactivity, reading disability, and you look at

the A which is the genetic variance, and 2.2.4.6 is

the percentage, so this would be 80 percent of all

hyperactivity of kids with ADHD can be attributable

to a genetic component, with autism. It\'s even

higher than that. Reading disability approximately

50 percent. So that many of the common developmental

disabilities have a genetic component. They\'re going

to have many individuals within the family and by my

understanding, the genetic pattern will be able to

understand better and different approaches to

treatment.

This is a functional imaging study that

was done on an individual with typical reading scales

here. An individual with specific reading

disability. You can see that, while the occipital,

rear part of the brain lights up in the child with

the specific reading disability, the area in the left

hemisphere that\'s involved in phonological decoding

lights up in the typically developing individual is

not at all lit up in the individual who has reading

disability. And yet in schools we are still using

the discrepancy model between IQ and performance. We

are then developing new techniques to actually look

at the underlying cause of reading disability. And

we now know that in very specific regions, for

example, here a rule basing a base analytic function

in this area, the brain with structured memory base

function in this area here fine‑grained articulation

recording.

As we learn more and more from research,

we need to have ways of rapidly taking this from the

laboratory into the classroom. And there needs to be

funding to help this move forward.

This is from, this is a functional imaging

scan from a child who has ADHD prior to a couple of

hours after being given Ritalin. And what you are

seeing here is the actual blood flow through certain

regions of the brain. Much less blood flow prior to

the use of the Ritalin, much more afterwards,

especially in the areas that we now recognize are

involved with attention and other of the core

symptoms of ADHD. There seems little doubt in

correctly diagnosed children with ADHD the vast

majority, up to 80, 90 percent of them will have

specific benefits from stimulant medications and this

is demonstrable now by these research techniques.

This is a functional imaging of a child

who is having a seizure, a subclinical seizure, one

you can\'t really see. But you can see that as the

seizure progresses, a change in the function of the

brain in children who are having seizures that are

really controlled clearly isn\'t going to affect their

brain functioning and it\'s very important for

teachers to recognize this. But as I\'ll talk about

later there seems to be very little interaction

between teachers and the physicians taking care of

the child, and so these areas may just not be seen.

The teacher may be observing things which he can

communicate to the doctor and lead to a change in

medication. And these things are just not happening

and need to happen.

In terms of behavioral profiling, I want

to contrast Williams Syndrome, which is a form of

children of short stature and certain congenital

heart defects, and they have mean IQs of around 40 to

50\. Very similar to those in children with Downs

Syndrome. On the other hand, if you do focused

neuropsychological testing you can see they\'re

extraordinarily different in their strengths and

challenges. That while children with Williams

Syndrome have correct and complex speech and

semantics and rich linguistic affect, the children

with Downs Syndrome are very delayed in this area.

If one then looks at functional imaging studies and

compares the amount of cortex, the area that\'s

involved in language, comparing control individuals

with those with Williams and Downs Syndrome, you can

see the children with Williams have a much greater

cortical area involved with language than those with

Downs Syndrome.

On the other hand, if you look at visual

motor skills, it\'s just the opposite. The children

with Williams Syndrome do very poorly in this area,

whereas the children with Downs Syndrome do much

better. This is what he is called the global local

test, one of the neuropsychological tests. If you

see it globally, as you should, and you are asked to

reproduce this, you\'ll reproduce an A. If you see it

locally, you will reproduce the atoms. And here you

can see with the Williams children, they have no idea

of the status, whereas the children with Downs do

very well.

When a man looks at functional imaging,

you can see that the children with Down\'s Syndrome

have extremely well‑developed central areas of the

brain called the laticular area. Now if one

recognizes these differences, these two groups of

children that have the same IQ, will require very

different educational patterns, and yet they\'re

placed in the same categorical class. The children

with Williams Syndrome, who are going to learn much

better auditorily and linguistically, and the

children with Down\'s Syndrome who are going to learn

better visually may be treated the same.

This is a functional image of a child with

autism and one who does not have autism when the

child was looking at a face. You can see that, in

the child, that normally this area will turn on, this

is a typical individual, and this area will turn on

when you\'re looking at face and it\'s face

recognition. And children with autism, this doesn\'t

happen at all. We\'re beginning to understand now

what the underlying problems are with autism, and

once we you understand this, we\'ll be able to develop

improved ways of treatment.

So these are some of the issues that I

think medical research is coming out with that needs

to be translated into educational pedagogy over time.

The second point I make is there needs to

be an increased role for the physician. First of

all, the role needs to be clarified and enhanced in

IDEA. Right now it really is just sort of left out

there. The physician needs to be involved in IEP and

ISP services, but there needs to be some way of

reimbursing them for those services. The

pediatrician, on the other hand, needs to be much

better informed about IDEA. We are not trained to

learn this in medical school, and that\'s a big

problem. And we need to understand the importance of

referring early for early intervention and for other

school programs, and most physicians are not.

Pediatricians need to be involved

proactively, not just when the educational system

fails. We should be part of the whole process. We

should be involved in the diagnostic services. We

should be involved in the behavioral discipline issue

before the child is ready to be expelled and we\'re

asked to put them on medication and to write a letter

saying that they\'re ready to go back to school. We

should be more involved in this process early on and

prophylactically, if possible.

We should be responsible for providing a

medical home for the child. There should be one

physician, one pediatrician who is taking care of the

child with special needs and who can really, who

takes upon herself or himself the responsibility of

dealing directly with the teachers.

There are many technologies available now

that don\'t require the physician actually to be in

the classroom or be in the IEP meeting but still can

be an important part of that and we should be using

it more. When I first started out as a

developmental pediatrician, I went into the schools

many times a month. I haven\'t done that in years. I

haven\'t been asked to do it. And I think there needs

to be that changed.

There needs to be improved exchange of

information. I mentioned to you my daughter is a

special education teacher. She\'s been a special

education teacher in a ED self‑contained classroom

for five years, first in New York City, and now in

St. Louis. She has never once been asked by a parent

to contact the physician, nor has she been directly

contacted by a physician, and she herself doesn\'t

feel that it\'s her ‑‑ that she has the ability to

directly contact the physician herself without

permission, obviously, and she feels very frustrated

by this, and there needs to be, again, this back and

forth where we\'re dealing with ratings scales,

reporting adverse effects of medication, identifying

worsening of medical conditions. All of this needs

to have a triad of the physician, the parent, and the

teacher. Right now you have the parent and the

physician and the parent and the teacher, but not all

three of them working together.

There are also a lot of problems in the

definition of classification terms. In IDEA, the

definition of ED is very different from that in the

medical literature and Diagnosis and Statistics

Manual put out by the American Psychiatric Society.

So we talk different languages here and in other

areas.

Also there\'s the whole issue of the

medical model versus the educational model where we

physicians tend to look at deficits rather than in

education we try and look at strengths and teach the

strengths. We need to have the opportunity of

understanding each other\'s perspective. And even now

the school systems sometimes will just reject out of

hand my recommendations by saying, Oh, he\'s following

the medical model. And maybe that\'s true. Maybe

it\'s not true. But I think there needs to be much

better communication and the partnership that I

mentioned earlier.

We need to deal with related services for

associated deficits. We understand more and more

that children ‑‑ the more severe disability a child

has, the more likely they are to have more than one

disability. So the child with mental retardation is

likely to have vision and hearing problems or ADHD;

the child with ADHD is likely to have learning

disabilities. If not all of the associated deficits

are being dealt with from an educational perspective,

the child is not going to learn optimally, and it\'s

tremendously important we have these related

services.

Yet there really seems to be a lack of

clarity about the circumstances which necessitate a

child\'s exclusion from school for medical reasons,

certainly about the responsibility for our

administration of complex nursing or therapy,

inconsistencies in state and local guidelines about

interpretations, about which health care

professionals should prescribe the type and amount of

related services. Uncertainty about medical

liability for therapists administered in school

making them concerned about that, conflicting

opinions about propriety of the use of certain

therapies. You know, the medical literature very

early on felt this facilitated communication was not

a tested and appropriate means, and yet it was

continued to be used in many school programs for a

number of years afterwards.

Concerns about the rising cost of special

education, especially related services and whether

they are warranted. How do we develop specific ways

of looking at outcomes and making sure what we\'re

doing is actually having a beneficial effect if it\'s

not stopping it or changing it. A lack of provision

of related services for children who may not qualify

for special education but still have chronic

illnesses or disabilities that impair their ability

and readiness to attend or participate in school. We

need to help these children.

We need to increase access to behavioral

management, and there\'s a severelack of therapists to

provide these related services even if we think that

they\'re necessary. My personal experience has been

that over half of the kids who I\'ve asked for related

services for and the school has agreed to, there has

been a 6 months or more delay in getting those

services because of not having the therapists

available for that purpose.

There needs to be improved funding and

medically‑related services. There seems to be

inequity in interpretation and provision of services

between and within states and school districts.

There needs to be a common way of looking at this

across the country. The issues of who will provide

the appropriate services and how payment is made has

to be dealt with. There has to be an improved

interchange between the school and the HMOs, the

other insurance companies, to decide who is going to

pay for what and whether you can do things together.

Right now you\'ll have, for example, physical

therapists at school and private physical therapists

in the home paid for by two different mechanisms

working on two completely different things and not

talking to each other instead of having synergy

between them.

There needs to be improved funding of

adaptive equipment that is going to be necessary for

the child\'s ability to learn. If they\'re not in an

adaptive wheelchair, for example, with a child with

cerebral palsy that allows them to focus on the

teacher, to be able to respond in class, they\'re not

going to learn effectively, and yet there isn\'t

adequate funding for that.

There needs to be improved school nursing

training for the care of special education services

and improved training for the teachers too. As we\'re

seeing more and more severely physically involved and

medically involved children in the school, it scares

the bejesus out of, not only the teachers, but the

school nurses who don\'t have the preparation for

that. And yet, without any direct linkage to the

doctor, the medical home, who might be able to come

in and send their nurse in to help make people feel

more comfortable with the school, these kids are not

getting optimal educational care. We also need to

recognize increased prevalence of certain diagnoses

that are going to require special education services.

Autism and ADHD are the two most common examples, but

in addition to that, we have to be aware that there

are a lot of previously fatal disorders that are now

chronic diseases and will require special education

services and which we haven\'t had before. The

children with HIV, with cystic fibrosis, with

muscular dystrophy who are going to have perhaps

wheelchairs, perhaps feeding tubes or other things,

and who used to be cared for by home schooling and

who now fortunately may not die and who can come into

school but are going to need very special services

that people just are not used to dealing with.

So there will be the result of an

increased prevalence of children requiring

technology, ventilator dependent, tube feedings, and

the rest. Furthermore, teachers need to understand

the natural history of the disorder. For example,

where kids who have acquired brain injury, traumatic

brain injury, as they recover from that injury, from

a car accident, their behavior is going to change,

their cognitive skills are going to change. They\'re

not going to be at a plateau and unless the teachers

are aware of those sort of things or can learn it

from the medical team, they may teach the child at

one level when they need to be aware that that level

is going to change over time.

And in addition to that, we probably need

to consider renaming TBI, traumatic brain injury, as

acquired brain injury so that we can deal not just

with traumatic brain injury but things like

encephalitis, drowning, and other things. We need to

look at the definitions. We\'re looking and seeing

whether they need to be expanded or better defined.

So in summary, what I leave you with is my

thought that right now there is very little role for

medicine in IDEA and that\'s a loss for medicine.

It\'s not having us take responsibility for a very

important task that should be within our purview.

It\'s not giving a lot of information to the schools

and special educators that could help them teach and

care for their children better. Thank you very much

for allowing me to give this testimony.

DR. BUTTERFIELD: Thank you. Do we have

any questions, Commissioners? Commissioner Fletcher?

MR. FLETCHER: Thank you. Thank you for

your illuminating testimony. I thought the research

that you showed that demonstrated some of the

neurochemical inaccessibilities in attention deficit

disorder and brain disabilities were particularly

illuminating given the concerns some have expressed.

These disorders do not have the physiological basis

and should be part of IDEA. I think the Commission

has has got a clear demonstrationl of what this

research is really about and how far it has

progressed in the last five to seven years. In point

of fact, much of what you were showing is very recent

research; isn\'t that correct, Doctor?

DR. BATSHAW: That\'s correct. All of

these slides were taken from research published

within the last year or two.

MR. FLETCHER: And we have a real

explosion not only knowledge about these kinds of

disorders but also about disorders like traumatic

brain injury, where there have been a lot of

advances, for example, rehabilitation methods. Is it

your feeling this information has really penetrated,

for example, the training of special educators and

general education teachers at this time.

DR. BATSHAW: Not at all. I don\'t think

they have the vaguest idea about it. From my own

experience and from reading the literature, and I

think it\'s partially the fault of the medical

community for not going into the schools and making

ourselves more available. But frankly, we haven\'t

felt welcome. There really has been this medical

model versus educational model dichotomy that you

don\'t know the educational system and how can you

really contribute other than writing prescriptions?

And I think that we can learn. We need to learn, and

we need to learn from each other.

MR. FLETCHER: Thank you. I remember that

when the term mental brain dysfunction was

developed ‑‑ and I know you know the history as well

as I do ‑‑ in the early 1960s one of the impetuses

for the development of the definition of learning

disability by the then office of education was

concerns about the intrusion of physicians into

schools. But do you remember that?

DR. BATSHAW: I do indeed. But I think

times have changed and I think the problems are great

and that is, with the new healthcare environment,

physicians are having to see patients much more

rapidly. They don\'t have the time to take a few

hours off to go into a school, and ‑‑ or when I see a

patient and it takes me an hour and a half to see a

new child with learning disability as a developmental

pediatrician, I will get paid little more than if I\'m

seeing a child for an ear infection. So that there

is this dichotomy of the great needs and yet the

insurance companies are recognizing and not

compensating for it, and the educational system is

not really, I think, adequately recognizing how the

medical community can be of help to them. And should

have the responsibility to help.

MR. FLETCHER: To take the attention

deficit disorders as an example, I think it\'s also

true you don\'t have access to expert psychologists,

for example, who might do an evaluation of a child

with ADHD and advance care requires you as a

pediatrician to do the evaluation yourself.

DR. BATSHAW: That\'s right. So it becomes

extremely difficult and sometimes impossible, and

it\'s going to become more difficult as we learn more

and more about the underlying physiological

underpinnings. We\'re going to get neuropsychological

technology functional imaging which are all going to

cost more money, and the question is, are people

going to be ready to pay for that? Through insurance

companies, through other services? And the

educational system should not be responsible for

doing these sorts of things. They should only be

responsible for providing services that directly link

to education, but they should be very much involved

in promoting that so it does occur.

MR. FLETCHER: Right. To take the

attention deficit disorder as an example, there\'s a

lot of people expressed concern about the 319 percent

increase in other health impaired categories which

attribute to access to special education for children

with ADHD through health impairment categories. And

it\'s been claimed some of the things I have read that

it requires nothing more than physicians doing what

parents want. Just listening to parents complaints,

saying, Put my child on Ritalin, and then sign a

piece of paper that makes the child eligible for

special education. But in fact, aren\'t there some

guidelines for pediatricians in terms of how children

with attention deficit disorders should be evaluated?

DR. BATSHAW: Yes. First of all, there

was a recent study in the Journal of the American

Medical Association that showed one‑third of all

children who are receiving stimulant medication don\'t

have and DHD and one‑third of children who have ADHD

are not being diagnosed and treated appropriately.

So to begin with, there\'s a real problem with

diagnosis, and as a result of this, as you know, the

American Academy of Pediatrics came out with very

specific guidelines to help, first, in a step‑by‑step

fashion. Make the diagnosis, the correct diagnosis

of ADHD. And that is actually being promoted very

heavily, and the hope is it will decrease both the

false positives and the false negatives that are

occurring. The other issue that has come up has been

the concern that stimulants have been used

inappropriately in individuals who are in minority

populations and recent studies have shown, in fact,

what seems to happen is what happens in all other

aspects of health care, which is that there\'s a

disparity of care and, in fact, minorities are less

likely to be treated appropriately, for example,

being placed on stimulant medications when they have

ADHD than are the majority populations.

MR. FLETCHER: I have just one more

question. I wondered if you would comment on

legislation such as that in Connecticut that

indicates that teachers are not allowed to recommend

to patients that they use stimulant medication.

DR. BATSHAW: Well, I think teachers are

not physicians, and so they shouldn\'t be prescribing

medication. But they are extremely good observers

and most of them are very good at identifying ADHD.

And for them to be able to talk to the parents,

especially the triad I had spoken about, so that the

teacher and the doctor and the parent are working

together, that\'s the ideal situation, and then you

wouldn\'t have to consider the laws or other things

like that. It\'s really using common sense, the three

people who can interact most about the child should

be involved.

DR. BUTTERFIELD: Commissioner Coulter?

MR. COULTER: Dr. Batshaw, thank you very

much for your remarks. You mentioned several times,

and I think it\'s the matter throughout much of your

presentation about calling for some change in the way

in which physicians are prepared to meet the needs of

families and children with disabilities, especially

as it relates to the culture of the school, which, as

you so carefully pointed out, is a different culture

from medical care. Do you have any recommendations

as it relates to training of teachers and

administrators and related services personnel on how

they can better communicate with physicians, as well

as vice versa?

DR. BATSHAW: Well, let me give you the

vice versa first, which is, I think that medical

schools, as part of the training of doctors, should

include this training and understanding the

educational system, especially for those who are

going to go into pediatrics and who are, as part of

the pediatric residency, we should be having special

educators coming in to the hospitals, to the

residency program and speaking about IDEA, speaking

about the school, having the residents\' departments

make site visits to a school and see what special

education services are. That requires the school

system to be willing to do that, and to set up an

educational program for pediatricians. But I think

it would be very worthwhile to do that, and I believe

that young minds of the residents would be very, very

open to that and it would be a way of your

inculcating into us the educational model so that we

can integrate that into the medical model. In the

same sense, I think that most special educators are

not adequately educated about medical fact as to

disabilities and how they interact with the

educational system. That was actually the rationale

for my writing my textbook to begin with, and I think

more and more the school system should be inviting

physicians and other academics who have knowledge in

this area not only about the medical aspects but as

Jack was speaking of, about the new things we

understand about reading disabilities, behavioral

phenotyping that I spoke of. So I think it\'s a

question of education ‑‑ special education both for

the physician and for the educator. It is not

occurring. And the hard part of that, I think, is it

eventually will start working together and that

triumvirate I am speaking of will happen naturally

rather than having to be mandated.

MR. COULTER: Thank you.

MS. BUTTERFIELD Thank you. I have a

question. One of the points you made was that there

is an increased prevalence or recognition of autism.

And this is something that\'s vastly concerning

educators, because I think it\'s an area that we are

all learning a great deal about. And I\'m

wondering ‑‑ it\'s kind of a two‑part question ‑‑ one

is, why do you think that\'s the case, and the second

is you that you stated on ADHD about a third of the

children diagnosed as ADHD were misdiagnosed. Is

that ‑‑ is there research in the area of autism that

gives those kinds of statistics.

DR. BATSHAW: I don\'t believe that there

is specific statistical information. The studies

I\'ve been reading in terms of the issue, is autism

increasing in prevalence or just in recognition,

seems to pretty strongly point towards increase in

recognition rather than in its prevalence. Although

there are going to be some studies done, prospective

studies done by the Center for Disease Control which

over the next 3 to 5 years will really answer that

question definitively. But I think we are expanding

our understanding of, autism. We\'re diagnosing the

kids earlier, we\'re recognizing that you can diagnose

it at two years of age. We\'re expanding in the other

direction in terms of Asperger\'s Syndrome looking at

the less severely afflicted individuals. And I think

it\'s become a very hot topic, and so people are

thinking about it more. It used to be more kind of

out there, out of the main stream. Now people are

thinking, gee, every time a pediatrician is seeing a

child with a developmental disability, and now

specifically asking could this be autism, and there

are some pretty guidelines for pediatricians and

psychologists in diagnosing autism. So I think that

it\'s most likely due to increased recognition and

earlier recognition which gives us the opportunity to

intervene earlier. And as we understand more about

the physiology, as I was showing you, the face

recognition, and we can start understanding what

actually is going on biologically with autism, we\'ll

be able to design much, much better interventions

educationally.

DR. BUTTERFIELD: Thank you. Commissioner

Bartlett?

MR. BARTLETT: Are there any successful

state models, state or school district models you can

point to that are successful in education and medical

collaboration and if not, what would one look like?

DR. BATSHAW: I am not aware of that.

Jack, are you aware of any models that work?

MR. FLETCHER: No.

DR. BATSHAW: I am not aware. I suspect

they don\'t exist. I think it would have to involve

some of the things that I have spoken of, that is,

that the HMOs and other insurers would need to start

interacting with the educational services and start

sharing costs appropriately for the related services.

It would need the, a way of them funding or someone

funding the physicians to become more involved in the

educational program, and it would involve the

education system really wanting the input of the

physicians beyond the traditional model of dealing

with acute disease and prescribing medication.

MS. BUTTERFIELD Thank you.

DR. BUTTERFIELD: Thank you for your

patience, Commissioner Huntt.

MR. HUNTT: Thank you. My question\'s along

the same lines as the previous one. State and

federal vocational rehabilitation programs have a

standard fee they pay out for diagnostic assessments.

The Bureau of Disability Determination and Social

Security has standard hourly rates that are for every

state that they can pay. Mental health system is

alike. Are you saying that special education doesn\'t

have the same standard they can pay for diagnostic

assessment and be involved with the programs?

DR. BATSHAW: I\'m not aware of that.

Certainly in the states that I\'ve been ‑‑ now

certain schools will develop contracts with the

individual physicians and/or psychologists to do

testing. And there\'s EPSDT which is ‑‑ but beyond

that, I don\'t think that that exists.

MR. HUNTT: Would that be something that

would be beneficial?

DR. BATSHAW: Yes, it would.

MR. HUNTT: You would recommend adopting a

standard nationally as VR does, perhaps?

DR. BATSHAW: I would make a Suggestion.

MR. HUNTT: Well, I want to ask ‑‑

I don\'t want to take credit ‑‑ I want to ask you,

as far as the sense that there maybe a bias against

the medical model from educators, is that based on

the fact they don\'t have the resources to have you

there, or is there really a bias against the medical

model.

DR. BATSHAW: Well, I think there really

is a bias against the medical model. I think they ‑‑

for example, physicians are more likely to recommend

self‑contained classes or individual speech and

language therapy. And that, obviously, is very

different from the educational model. And so,

frequently they\'ll dismiss that sort of setting. So

I think there are certain philosophical differences.

It may also be a lack of the physician\'s really

understanding modern education and its limitations.

It\'s clear that most of the physicians I interact

with think that not all children requiring special

education should be in the general education

classroom. There are certain of these individuals,

children, who would do better in self‑contained class

and many of the physicians feel that the educational

system just doesn\'t cure them about that. So yes, I

think it\'s real. And probably from both directions.

MR. HUNTT: Thank you. Thank you, Madame

Chairman.

MR. FLETCHER: Of course, at the schools,

the child on medication they adopt the medical model

pretty quickly, wouldn\'t you say?

DR. BATSHAW: Yes, I do. But I will tell

you, I\'ve had wonderful success with teachers filling

out rating scales, and once you contact a teacher who

is having problems with one of their students and

they see that you\'re listening to them and you

develop a dialogue, it\'s just a wonderful experience.

So I know this can work. It\'s just it doesn\'t happen

very often or often enough.

DR. BUTTERFIELD: Mr. Jones?

MR. JONES: One of the things you brought

up was the growing knowledge of genetic for some

conditions and other markers for indicating existence

of conditions. How realistic is it to expect a or

easier ‑‑ much faster or easier methods of doing

screening for children early on, or the other

question, low‑cost methods of doing ED screening to

allow schools to more quickly identify which children

may have needs based on disability.

DR. BATSHAW: That\'s a wonderful question.

Let me blue sky to begin with. There is a new

technology in the last couple years called gene chips

or expression rate. And these allow you to put

thousands of strands of DNA, basically individual

genes on a chip. You can then put a drop of blood on

that chip and you can see which genes are turned on

and turned off, and if the gene is turned on, that is

not expressed. Then it may not be expressed because

there was a mutation or error that the child was born

with. Well, this means, theoretically, that the

newborn period, you know, 10 years from now, 20 years

from now, the drop of blood that we now take from the

newborn to test for birth defects you can put on a

gene chip and you would be able to tell whether that

child has turned off the gene for chronological

decoding, or the gene for autism, or because of the

high genetic prevalence for most of these things.

Many of these, once you know that very early on, you

can start treatment presymptomatically or certainly

very early on, and we all know that the earlier you

identify any of these disabilities, the better the

outcome is in most cases. But furthermore, there may

be different approaches that gene therapy or other

sorts of models that would allow you to correct or

turn on the gene. Now none of these are going to be

inexpensive. Medical technology always seems to come

with a cost, but I think ‑‑ I think what\'s going to

happen is that over the next five or ten years we\'re

going to have a proliferation of new technology, both

medical, psychological, educational, that\'s going to

allow us to identify early. But, of course,

identification early only counts if we have effective

treatment there and have the money to actually

provide it. And it always seems that our technology

is advanced beyond our society\'s ability to use it

effectively.

MR. JONES: What I appreciate about that is

that since this is a panel whose job it is to do

early identification and looking forward to what our

needs will be in five or ten years as this relates to

the conditions we\'ve had.

DR. BUTTERFIELD: Any other questions?

Dr. Pasternack?

MR. PASTERNACK: You know, one of the

interesting advances that you\'ve helped, too, in the

old days, as you know, we used to shape strategies,

mutagenic and other misdiagnoses and misattribution

and all that, we\'ve made significant improvements in

that area and realize it\'s a neurological disorder,

my question is more about the treatment issue. Kids

with autism pose such a challenge to us in special

education that my whole thing about being sure the

right kids are in special education to achieve the

right services from the right people, those results,

no one can argue those kids are critically the right

kids to be there. My question is: From the work that

you have done, do you have any sense of what kinds of

approaches seem to be showing the most value in terms

of helping unravel some of the mysteries of autism?

DR. BATSHAW: Well, it certainly looks

like autism has something to do with neurochemical

abnormalities in the brain, especially with serotonin

system. And there are some medications that affect

the serotonin system have been found to be helpful in

studies both in terms of language and social

interaction. They are clearly not a magic bullet by

any means, and advances or maybe improvement of 20

percent. But I think that it is leading us in the

direction to look further into neurotransmitter

alteration and to understand better what areas of the

brain are not turning on, and with functional imaging

techniques we\'ll be able to try different medications

and see whether things turn on the same way I have

showed what happened when you used Ritalin on the

child with ADHD.

The other thing is ten years ago we

thought ADHD was only present in individuals with

typical intellectual functions. Subsequently it was

clear to us that children with mental retardation

could also have ADHD and also respond to stimulant

medications. Once we recognized that, many of these

children who are not doing well at all because, in

addition to that, mental regardation, they also have

ADHD, and were not being treated, and once they were

treated, had marked improvement in terms of

educational functioning. So I think there may be

medications that already exist out there that may be

of some value over time in treating children with

autism. And of course the use of language‑based

therapy and imaging. It\'s going to have to be

multi‑modal.

MS. BUTTERFIELD Any questions, Doctor?

MR. FLETCHER: You were talking earlier

about training programs for pediatricians to

familiarize themselves with what happens in

education. Are you familiar with any programs that

do that successfully in, for example, Wechsler

programming?

DR. BATSHAW: I\'m not familiar with those.

I am trying to develop those now in Washington at my

institution. I figure if I can\'t do it, it\'s not

doable. But if I can serve as a model, the

initial ‑‑ we have just taken over the school nursing

program for all of DC at Children\'s National Medical

Center, so I think that\'s going to be an ideal

opportunity for us to be able to go into the schools

to train there the school nurses and to get with the

school nurses to help train the educators, and then

vice versa, bring the teachers from the school to

help educate our residents and give our residents

opportunities to work in the school nursing program.

So it would be great if you would like to fund this

initiative for us.

MR. FLETCHER: I it\'s like a hard

question. Because we\'ve had a program where we\'ve

been trying to do this in the department of

pediatrics for almost 20 years now. We\'ve have two

problems, and I am wondering what you think of these.

One is lack of support among our faculty members who

tend to tell the residents to take their vacations

during the developmental session, and the other is

lack of support from the residents themselves, most

likely doing medicine unless they\'re on the intensive

care unit or seeing really sick kids or things of

that sort. Do you have any advice about how to deal

with those particular problems other than

periodically pointing out to the chair.

DR. BATSHAW: As the residents get older,

they get wiser so that if as a first‑year resident

they want to save lives, once they get to be a senior

resident or third‑year resident in pediatrics, they

recognize when they go out and practice about half of

what they\'re going to be doing is behavioral medicine

developmental medicine. So I don\'t know when your

developmental rotation is, but I think having it

later in residency may be one approach to it. But it

also has to be that there\'s respect from the other

faculty members for developmental and behavioral

pediatrics technology. And it\'s important. So it\'s

a tough nut to crack, but I think it clearly can be

done.

MR. FLETCHER: I think it\'s fair to say

that as a developmental pediatrician, you sometimes

have experienced difficulty getting respect from

other pediatricians.

DR. BATSHAW: Discrimination. Yes.

MR. FLETCHER: It\'s not generic to any

particular part. It happens within medicine itself?

DR. BATSHAW: Yes.

MR. FLETCHER: And another question I

wanted to ask you is, I believe it\'s correct that

most health insurance policies won\'t pay for services

in regard to education ‑‑ which I suspect is one of

the problems you experience.

DR. BATSHAW: Yes. That\'s correct. And

that\'s a real problem. That\'s one of the reasons why

I think the educational and health care system has

got to do a better job of working together.

MR. FLETCHER: So it\'s an obvious problem

for learning disabilities, because as more and more

insurance companies begin to find ADHD an educational

problem, you can\'t, for example, be asked to do

medical evaluation unless the school district agrees

to reimburse you for that. Not be on the health

insurance.

DR. BATSHAW: Many times we have to use

the term encephalopathy instead of ADHD to be paid.

Encephalopathy is a medical condition, even though

that\'s not what the child has.

MR. FLETCHER: And let me ask you to

comment about two things. One is the, I\'m sure

you\'ve had some experience with the relationship of

Medicaid services and the educational system for kids

for being served in school that has significant

medical needs. How will the system work together?

DR. BATSHAW: Very poorly. And you know,

the expectation is that you can cure these

children of ‑‑ the anticipation of HMO is you can

cure the children with ten sessions of physical

therapy, and they can\'t understand the issue of a

child with cerebral palsy needing therapy over time

and that advance may be being able to take a single

step. And that\'s very difficult.

MR. FLETCHER: And then I noticed in your

written testimony that you had a section on the role

of physicians in infant and toddler programs, you get

a chance to discuss in your testimony I was wondering

your thoughts on that.

DR. BATSHAW: Well, here again, I think

just like physicians are rarely involved in the

development of IEPs, they\'re rarely involved in the

development of ISP. We\'re getting somewhat better in

terms of diagnosing the kids early enough and

referring them to early intervention services, but

even that still needs to be worked on more

effectively. And here again, physicians need more

education in terms of early diagnosis and not simply

saying he or she is going to grow out of it.

MR. FLETCHER: Thank you.

DR. BUTTERFIELD: Do we have any other

questions from the Commissioners? We find ourselves

with a rare opportunity since we have an expert here

and we have parents who perhaps would like to ask a

question, and since we have just a little bit of

extra time, I thought I would open the microphone.

We would want you to limit it. We are still on

schedule. I think the bottom line here is at 5

o\'clock they\'re moving us out and moving in 900

people for a banquet. But at this time, if we have

someone who would like to ask a question, if you

would please state your name.

MS. DAY: My name is Barbara Day. Anyway

I mentioned before ‑‑

MS. JONES: Hold on. We\'ll try to get the

microphone operating.

MS. DAY: Before break today I mentioned

before I was school nurse, and if there was a

registered nurse in every school of the district, and

there aren\'t school nurses anymore. I don\'t know if

everyone is aware. Now they have secretaries passing

out medication. So that\'s one huge area. The school

nurse is now extinct. What most districts do is one

nurse covers six or seven schools and delegates to

the secretary giving out medications. So the idea of

of having nurses, maybe that\'s not suggested, but

Washington ‑‑ secondly, I mentioned I am the parent

of a child with disabilities, and I work very much,

very closely with our physician. My son\'s problem

was attention deficit disorder, and we went to the

top people in Denver, as far as we could, child

psychologists, and initially the school tested the

child, said he needed education, to buckle down. So

we went to outside private testing and the school

district said, Wow, there\'s something going on here.

So say we do have the doctor\'s more involved, we

still have the problem of funding, because I would

take my report from the physician, the pediatrician

who diagnosed attention deficit disorder and

recommended certain things in the classroom plus the

child psychologist report and this is written in

IDEA. My sense of the IEP, looked at it and said,

We\'ve considered it, and then ignored the report. So

that is ‑‑ that\'s the problem. I think even if not

we do have the physician input, the schools and I

can\'t speak for all school districts, but most

schools won\'t want to take him on because they can\'t

‑‑ they don\'t have the resources. And I\'m not

blaming the schools, but it\'s a huge problem and we

do have the technology and what do we have. We don\'t

have the resources.

DR. BUTTERFIELD: What we want to do is

open the floor for questions.

MS. DAY: Is there a way that you can take

the recommendations back? I know this is going to go

back to the lawmakers on the funding but they could

look at the medication.

DR. BATSHAW: What I would say about the

school nursing is that it is a problem that in

Washington, for example, one school nurse may be

responsible for two or three or four schools at a

time, and some of the schools we\'ve found, when we

took over the program, didn\'t even have a

refrigerator to refrigerate the medicine. So some of

the things are extremely basic and it\'s clear there

needs to be adequate funding so that at least the

bare necessities are taken care of.

DR. BUTTERFIELD: This is time for

questions only. So if you have a question.

Otherwise, we\'re not soliciting any more testimony.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Okay. One of the

questions would be how important is delegation in the

Medicaid school district delivery of service? And

what I am getting at is that we do 12 tube feedings

per day 6 per child for two hours. When you do that

in the school system, and if you have the teachers

doing it, or the special educator, you\'re delivering

the education at the same time you\'re getting the

Medicaid under EDSTP and doctor and nurse CNA if

that\'s allowed. How important would that delegation

be to the success of the synergy of the process?

DR. BATSHAW: It\'s very important. I

think that\'s why you need to have the two working

together instead of ‑‑ what\'s happening in most

cases now are what\'s trying to hoist the cost on the

other, and so there is the parent is put in the

position of trying to mediate between these two.

There is not adequate funding for either. I think

it\'s just another example of the medical system and

the educational system not working together. It\'s

not just the doctors not working with educators, it\'s

that the health care organizations are not working

with the school systems.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Yes. Would EDSTP

allow this to happen?

DR. BATSHAW: That would certainly be a

mechanism to start the discussions, I think.

DR. BUTTERFIELD: Okay.

MS. McNAMARA: My name is Diane McNamara.

Thank you for your testimony. You have mentioned

there should be increased roles for physicians in

IDEA. One of the things we have heard today here

from a lot of educators and a few parents is the

amount of paperwork and how that\'s slows down the

process and the educational piece that does not get

taught because there\'s so much paperwork. Do you

have any suggestions as to how that can be, what\'s

going to happen, how we get another person on the

team of the physician involved, the paperwork that\'s

involved with that?

DR. BATSHAW: Well, it\'s a complicated

question. My hope would be, eventually all this

would be web‑based and you would have IEPs that would

be done on the web, and people could put in their

pieces that way. That would make it a lot simpler

and it would allow you to have things shared between

different groups. You could then have everyone

looking at the same time with video and e‑mail. So I

think that‑‑I don\'t think it has to necessarily be

paperwork, but there has to be a way of measuring

outcome, so it has to be that balance where, you

know, President Bush has, I think, rightly said,

whatever we do, we have to be able to measure whether

it works or not, and that should be true for

individual children as well. And the IEP is a

mechanism of making sure that everyone is

understanding what everybody else is supposed to do

and then looking to see whether the things are

happening or what the outcomes are. Whether there

are ways of doing it more efficiently, the basic idea

is very important.

DR. BUTTERFIELD: Thank you very much. At

this point we\'re going to take a 10‑minute break, and

we\'ll come back at 5 to 3 and we\'ll have our next

presentation.

(Brief recess.)

MS. BUTTERFIELD While everyone is getting

back in place I would like to explain something. The

names of all of the Commissioners are up there on the

screen, and I don\'t want you to think they\'re playing

hookey. The reality is the full Commission, that all

of us met last week in Houston, and this is a task

force of the Commission. Each of us as Commissioner

serves on two sub‑task forces of the Commission.

Every one on this task force was present so that we

can mark our report cards 100 percent.

We\'re very pleased to have a number of

panelists and I do not have a bio of everyone there,

so I would ask perhaps Dr. Bales could introduce her

guests, but let me start by introducing Dr. Joyce

Bales. She is Superintendent of Pueblo School

District No. 60 here in Colorado. Because of her

leadership for the first time, the Pueblo School

District students enrolled in several Title I

supported schools achieved erratic results in reading

and mathematics that were at or above school

achievement in non‑Title I schools. Dr. Bales holds

a Doctorate of Education degree from the University

of Tennessee.

Also on the panel is Dr. Thomas Bellamy.

Dr. Bellamy is the interim vice chancellor for

Academic Affairs at the University of Colorado at

Colorado Springs. He spent 4 years at the United

States Department of Education as its Director of the

Office of Special Education programs and as a Special

Education Advisor to the Assistant Secretary, Office

of Educational Research and Improvement. In Colorado

he served on the State Task Force for Special Forces

Personnel, the Colorado Education Goals Panel and the

Colorado Charter Schools Commission. Dr. Bellamy has

published books and chapters in both English and

German on the education and integration of children

and adults with severe disabilities. He earned his

Ph.D. in special education at the University of

Oregon and has spent time there as a researcher and

professor in the Division of Special Education and

Rehabilitation. We welcome our panel.

DR. BALES: Thank you.

DR. BUTTERFIELD: I have another bio here,

and I apologize to you. In addition we have Beth

Schaffner ‑‑ is that correct ‑‑ who is the Director

of Curriculum and Technical Assistance of PEAK Parent

Center, a statewide organization of Colorado parents

of children with disabilities that reaches out to

assist other parents and professionals. Ms.

Schaffner began working for Peak in 1987 and has

completed a great deal of training with educators

around friendship, facilitation and inclusion.

Schaffner worked as a special education teacher for

20 years and for about the last 6 of those years

served as Inclusion Facilitator in the school

district for supporting general education teachers to

include kids with disabilities in their classrooms.

In the midst of her 20 years of teaching, Schaffner

became the parent of a child with disabilities.

Ms. Schaffner has co‑authored several books including

teams, collaborations to connect students\' strengths,

windows into learning, curriculum, getting into the

heart of the matter, instruction‑bearing methods of

teaching and friendships building relationships among

classmates.

DR. BALES: Thank you. Good afternoon, Dr.

Butterfield.

MR. JONES: Let me also, since you came in

a little later than our early morning activities,

please speak as directly into the microphone as you

can so we can be sure our transcriber can transcribe

what you say. Thanks.

DR. BALES: Is that better? Thank you.

Good afternoon Dr. Butterfield and members of the

Commission. Todd Jones is a graduate of Centennial

High School in Pueblo School District 60. It\'s good

to have you back in Colorado.

I\'m going to introduce two people here

with me: Arianne Lane who is a fifth grader in our

school district who overcame great odds as a toddler,

been successful as a student, and her mother, Geri

Lane, who is a teacher in our district and leader in

our district. It\'s my pleasure to share some of the

things we have done in School District 60 for

children with special needs, and particularly the

focus on quality of professional development.

We do have a brief Power Point

presentation we want to share with you that will

capture our vision that all students can learn and

can learn at higher levels than previously believed.

We have proof of that.

In order to establish a view of our

district and to show our confidence in the

recommendations I\'m making to the Commission today,

particularly pertaining to quality professional

development, the first term that the state assessment

was given here in its Colorado assessment for

students is we refer to it as CSAP. We had the third

lowest performing school in the state of Colorado,

highest percentage of free and reduced lunches, and a

high percentage of minority students. Five students

could read at proficiency and only one student could

write at proficiency. So the teachers who were

there, some who were members of the community wanted

to reconstitute the school, but the teachers who were

there said, We\'re better than that. Two of those

wonderful teachers are here today: Karen Brown and

Rhonda Holcomb. The teachers decided to turn the

school around. And they did. And as you can see

from the data, the second year the school made the

greatest gains in the state of Colorado, and they\'ve

made continuous improvements since that time. And

because they\'ve done so well, parents do not want

their children to leave that school. Next year it

will be a K‑8 academy.

It has everything to do with professional

development. We did ‑‑ Lindamood‑Bell reading

process and I will describe that as we go along. One

of the other things we did is when the third grade

literacy law kicked in the next year, we had 472

students who were not proficient at reading. We got

busy that summer and all of us worked together as a

clinic in the annex building next to Bessemer, and

Arianne Lane was the first student that showed up the

day we opened the clinic for our reading assessment.

And what we\'re going to find as we go along is

professional development and teacher effectiveness is

the key to student success.

This is looking at the third grade scores

where in the first year was given we had 2 out of 3

students proficient. Now we have 3 out of 4, and the

best thing that\'s happened is fewer and fewer

students are in the unsatisfactory range. Here my

recommendation\'s not offered to the Commission today.

Every district must have a vision with a clearly

defined goal. As our first goal is that all students

will reach a proficiency in reading and that all

students will increase in academic achievement year

after year. It\'s our job, my job particularly, to

remove any barriers for children and to open doors

and support our teachers. The demographics of our

students of our district, about 59 percent minority,

our largest population is our Hispanics, and 57

percent are free and reduced lunches.

Last year to just establish a little bit

of credibility for us, we made the second greatest

gains overall in the state of Colorado with four

times the percentage of students on free and reduced

lunches as the first district that made the greatest

gains.

The interest released some information in

January of 2002. All across the United States they

beat the odds. There were 20 in the state of

Colorado. Six of those were in Pueblo School

District 60. And as you can see, these are Title I

supported schools that several of those schools were

very high. Southpark was more than 80 percent, 87

percent, both third grade and fourth grade reading.

Has everything to do with professional development

and a strong instructional leader at that school.

Quality teachers are necessary and Dr.

Sanders said earlier, teacher effectiveness is the

single most important predictor of student success.

We found that to be true in our district. The first

year we did the state assessments, I called Dr.

Sanders. Dr. Sanders was testing fourth grade

reading and writing. Next year, third grade reading,

and next year, 7th grade reading and 8th grade math

and science. I don\'t know how we\'re going to figure

out how students are making progress, and he said,

You can\'t. So we decided at that time we would put

together our own longitudinal database.

We need to recruit, prepare and sustain

quality teachers. We have a very difficult time

finding special education teachers. Presently out of

over 200 teachers we have probably 20 of those

teachers are not fully certified nor endorsed, and

this state has also relaxed the requirements for

special education. In the past you had to have an

undergraduate degree and be specialized and a lot of

people have not done that, so it\'s probably not good

for children because they\'re not coming with specific

types of techniques to work with on children. But we

are working hard to find teachers and to make sure we

find the best people and recruit them into teacher

preparation programs, and particularly the areas of

greatest needs, which, the number one need for us in

our district and several other districts in the state

is special needs.

This is looking at your increase in the

numbers of students from 8 percent 1447 ten years ago

to 2005 students this year which is about 12 percent

of our student enrollment. And most of the time

children who have special needs do not come with a

single need but with multiple needs.

Again, this is looking at the ethnic

breakdown for special needs children. We do need

full support for children with special needs. We

need quality teachers. And the other people that

need our support, for instance, the occupational

therapists and physical therapists and regular

teachers who know how to identify and really meet the

needs of our special needs children who are included

in those classrooms. Teachers for children whose

primary language is other than English, and then to

prepare our teachers to do adequate assessments of

children\'s needs and to know what to do to address

those needs. It\'s really important because IEPs are

written for children maybe to have four meetings a

month for physical therapy or occupational therapy.

That is really not enough. I think everything that

Mark said earlier to make us know that people who

have special needs in special areas need more

intensive intervention, not less.

We do work with our business and community

leaders to support us and to talk about how they can

help. We have an upwards reading program where we

have more than a thousand volunteers who read with

our children and to our children.

But professional development and

particularly being able to help teachers be

career‑bound learners is a real key to their success

and to the success of our children. What we get is

we implement a continuum of career long professional

development that, to use the best research

information available that provides leadership both

in teaching and learning and leadership. That\'s the

real key to making sure people are successful.

We now have in our district a model that

we call the Lindamood‑Bell reading model. Small in

nature. Thirty years of research. And it\'s a

medical model because we do diagnostic testing and

then immediate intensive intervention. We have

Lindamood‑Bell clinicians that we actually hire from

a clinic to come and work in our schools and to go

into the classroom and model for the people here

today our Lindamood‑Bell training. Geri Lane is,

Rhonda Holcomb is, and Karen Brown. All of these are

some of the people who became trained in the

Lindamood‑Bell reading model. Now they\'re the

literacy leaders for our district. Rhonda is

language and literacy leader for the entire

district. The state, our other person, to come and

work. We had to put together our own language and

literacy program for E and L students. Again, we\'re

not teachers trained in the student preparation

purpose here in the state of Colorado, so we put our

own program together which has become a model for the

state of Colorado. We need to make sure that our

teachers intern with master teachers, teachers who

have the strong knowledge and skill base and give a

student teacher intern a chance to practice those.

It is critically important that we have

early identification of children, and I know

sometimes that people say, Will children outgrow some

of these issues or just give them a little bit of

time. They\'re not mature. We need to do a quality

early identification of our children to give them a

headstart and not allow them to get behind.

We need to use data to improve our

professional development model. And that\'s what

we\'ve done in our district, that has been beneficial

to children. Here are eight tests that are given

through the Lindamood‑Bell model. You can see it

focuses on vocabulary, spelling, reading. It is the

gray oral test actually look at reading rate,

accuracy which leads to fluency, and the real gray

aspect of this. It is multi‑sensory visual kind of,

and the whole key to reading is to learn

comprehension. If that is the real key to learning

in every area is being able to read and understand.

The intensive intervention addresses the

needs for small children. Once we get the intense

test, we do work with those children in those special

needs. That\'s the reason we call this medical model.

We\'ve done the diagnostic testing, so we make sure we

identify and work with those children and give them

immediate attention with a sense of urgency so that

they do not get behind any more than they already

are. Our teachers in our schools, our low‑performing

schools gave up the activities that did not add value

to the children, for instance, centers, a lot of

crepe paper hung up for oceanography and rain

forests. The things they gave up to devote time on

task to the real things to help children become

independent learners was a real key to success for

children in our high‑quality schools.

Professionally developed ED teams all in

order to become a Lindamood‑Bell school, the

principal, assistant principal, the teachers and the

support staff go through the professional development

as a team so that everybody supports one another, and

then we have a literacy leader for each school that

stays in that school. Models provide feedback and

intervention with children that have special needs.

This is the Aaron Levinson. Aaron came to

us about three years ago. Karen Brown is an

outstanding special education teacher who worked with

Aaron. His mother had had an Aaron placed in private

schools. Aaron is dyslexic, dyspraxic, and on the

high end of autism. He cannot read simple words like

cat or dog. Karen did intensive intervention with

him using multi‑sensory processes. Aaron is now in

the sixth grade. He\'s not writing at the sixth grade

reading level, but he is probably close to the fifth

grade. He is operating with his peers and he still

gets the support he needs. Again, a mother who took

many avenues to try to get support for her child.

This is looking at our special needs

children and the third grade state assessment last

year 163 students and out of those students, 62

percent of those students scored proficient and

advanced on the state assessment. It tells us that

the reading model and the language development we are

doing really pays off for children. The 20 students

near the 12 percent are children who have the severe

limited intellectual capacity, but what is shown to

us is that children have greater capacity and

potential than people ever thought before.

There\'s more than ten million children in

the United States who have difficulty learning to

read. Anyway, I believe that\'s true just looking

across our district. We now have a reading clinic in

intensive intervention for children in every single

school in our district including our high schools.

There are children in every socioeconomic area and

every school that need and want to learn how to read.

And I believe that is the thing that parents would

like to have the most from a public school or any

teacher is please teach my child how to be fluent in

the language, how to read, how to think and how to

communicate.

This is just a little bit more information

about some of the statistics that we have seen and I

think some of these were mentioned earlier and about

being able to do an MRI and look at where the

language is processed. And Dr. Eden and her husband

found, and we have looked at this research, where the

language area developed about the size of a diamond

in a child\'s head and after intensive intervention,

that activity area had increased to about the size of

half a dollar, which shows that the brain can be

stimulated and that the language connections can be

developed using the right techniques.

This is some of Dr. Sanders\' work having

an effective teacher, a less effective teacher, and a

least effective teacher. We\'ve actually used our

data to take a look at the same research statistics,

and we found it to be true. This is just like

looking at one year of a child who has a least

effective teacher based on looking at the

performances that that teacher over a 3‑year period,

and the most effective teachers. And you can see

what kind of labels go to children who have very

effective teachers and those who have less effective

teachers.

This is from Dr. Robert Montrose\' work in

Dallas. We chose it to show other people have looked

at the same model. Sixth grade students who were

exhibiting in the fourth grade in the 60th percentile

and those students who had 3 very highly effective

teachers in a row, they increased to 76th percentile.

Those who had 3 very ineffective teachers in a row,

they dropped down. Those are the children who get

names and labels, remediation, summer school,

detention, whatever that the negative labels are.

And it\'s not the fault of the child. It\'s the luck

of the draw with the teachers oftentimes. And I can

tell you this, that educators put their own children

with the best teachers because they know who they

are, and we ought to be sure we put every child with

the best qualified teacher that we can prepare.

This is also data looking at 3 large urban

school districts. This is Dr. Sanders\' work, and

what he found looking at 3 years of teacher data with

with the teachers with it went from zero to ten

years, student achievement improved as teacher

experience increases. From ten years to 22 years it

pretty much plateaus, and then from 23 years to 30

years, there\'s a decline in student achievement.

This the best statement we can give for career‑long

professional development. And educators, of all

people, should be career‑long learners. Plus the

fact it tells us we\'ve got to give beginning teachers

a lot of assistance as they come in, set them up for

success, put them in with the very best teachers, and

make sure one of the things we have done with our

teachers, our university, is we decide where the

student teachers go who come to our district, and we

ask for teams of five so they don\'t feel isolated,

but we put them with our very best teachers. Past

practice was to put them in high‑quality areas where

there wasn\'t a lot of student achievement, and I can

hope to tell you fairly soon, if they\'re in our

district, they\'re going to be with the best teachers,

because most of our teachers now have been through

intensive professional development in reading.

Best practices, another recommendation,

they should be research‑based, and again, that the

only way their children will be successful is if we

have highly‑qualified teachers in every classroom.

Some of the best practices focus on

teaching and learning and looking at the two

together. The more we focus on learning, and student

achievement, the better job we\'re going to do

supporting our teachers. To place students only with

highly effective teachers and to provide appropriate

instructional services and materials. I get these

from my people, and sometimes children in special

education classes often get watered down coloring,

ditto sheets, whatever, instead of high‑quality

interaction with the teacher. We don\'t want that to

happen. We\'re the only people that can stop that and

provide professional development for all staff.

Everybody in the district.

Some of the resources ‑‑ we\'ve got to

align resources very carefully, and to make sure that

we secure additional sources of funding. We have 2

to 7 grants for every school in our district that

deals with quality professional development, new

knowledge and techniques, and it was like a lot of

work, but it was worth it, because now everybody can

say, I can do professional development for my

teachers.

This is Aaron. Aaron Torres is a student

who came to us modelling Spanish‑speaking only. His

family ‑‑ also his mother is learning to speak

English with our Lindamood‑Bell process as well, and

they have told us and teachers have told us that the

reading process we use as multi‑sensory has really

helped our parents learn to speak the language.

This young man now is reading at a senior

college level. He was interviewed by the TV station

at the opening of school and they asked him how much

television he watched, and he said, About 30 minutes

a month. And then the Denver Post came down and

interviewed Aaron. He was at Bessemer when we made

the dramatic improvement and they asked him why he

was featured on the front page of Denver Post, he

said, you know, I think it\'s just because we\'re poor,

they think we can\'t learn. But he\'s a fluent reader,

and I compliment him on almost everything he reads.

We do have grants. We help active

legislation in this state for read to achieve and for

teacher development. Read to achieve targets second

and third grade students, and the state actually

starts testing in reading at third grade. We do 3

tests on kindergarten children and also standardized

tests for our second graders, and there\'s a high

correlation between the standardized tests and the

CSAP. It\'s at. 98. It gives us some real

indications of how we help those children who are

behind. We improved student achievement by

redirecting the resources that we have about \$4.5

million in Title I funds. There was no appreciable

improvements in reading and mathematics, and on

January 28, 1998, the Board asked us to save time

out, how can you better use these funds? And that\'s

how we did the Lindamood‑Bell reading first, was with

the professional development that we funded out of

Title I plus we displaced new teacher assistance for

teacher aides who are actually teaching reading who

had been prepared. We reduced class size and put a

quality teacher in every classroom.

DR. BUTTERFIELD: I can see how

enthusiastic you are. Dr. Bellamy?

DR. BELLAMY: Thank you, Dr. Butterfield

and members of the Commission. I appreciate the

chance to be here and share some thoughts about

professional development with you. My assigned topic

was, along with Dr. Bales, alternative practices for

teacher preparation and professional development in

special education.

I guess I would start simply by perhaps

extending to members of this panel my sympathy and

encouragement that I believe you have taken on one of

the toughest problems associated with reauthorization

of IDEA and of understanding where we stand in the

nation some 25 to 30 years after the initial

Education of the Handicapped Act was passed in the

mid‑seventies. Personnel has been a consistent

puzzle for both policy at the state and federal level

and district providers of special education services

to solve. And I know that I don\'t need to review the

data for you on shortages and many of the other

issues, but there are a couple of things I do want to

highlight as I start my presentation that I think

needs some of the picture just how complex this issue

is. Not to repeat everything that\'s in the written

testimony, you have that, but let me first point out

the real difference between the vision that comes to

mind for parents and for professionals and for

administrators when we talk about highly qualified

teachers.

For a parent and I am sure that Beth can

paint this picture better than I ‑‑ but for a parent,

when we talk about the teachers having the

specialized skills they need, that typically means

really understanding the specific disabling condition

and how that condition might affect the child\'s

learning and what to do about it. A qualified

teacher means someone who really knows and cares

about my son or daughter who is going to ensure that

they\'re in a safe environment and who can provide me

as a parent some assurance that they understand both

the curriculum of the school and the picture of the

future that I have in mind or am trying to develop

for my son or daughter after they leave school.

That\'s a qualified teacher from the standpoint of a

family.

A qualified teacher from the standpoint of

the profession, I include those of us at the

universities and those in districts and others there,

is quite different. It often is the teacher who can

serve children with many different primary

disabilities, because particularly in the rural west,

it\'s not possible to staff schools so that there are

specialists associated with each condition. It\'s

frequently a teacher who knows a particular program

such as the Lindamood‑Bell program that fits within

that district as well as the programs that might be

used in other districts, so that possibility across

districts can be supported. It is an individual who

understands the regular education curriculum and can

coordinate between special and regular education who

can help keep schools safe, keep the school district

operating legally, provided liaison with the

community, the Court system, and so forth.

In other words, we have quite a different

picture, and I suppose making both those two even

more complex is the fact that the knowledge base

associated with special education teaching is still

contested across several different professions, as I

am sure you\'ve already heard. We have quite

different visions of what knowledge is required that

come from educators and psychologists, from

clinicians, from medical practitioners, and on and on

and on. In fact, there are many different aspects of

what someone needs to know to serve a child with

disabilities well, and the teacher as the person on

the front line, has to be a very good broker of all

that information.

So the demands associated with these

positions are quite extreme. A secondary that I

think highlights the complexity is that there are

many of what the current statute calls low‑incidence

problems associated with serving children with

disabilities, whether they are disabling conditions

that occur in a very small number of people, whether

they are therapies required by only a small number of

people, or perhaps, in the rural west, again, there

are a fairly small number of special education

directors and other kinds of administrative or

faculty positions that are often needed.

And see that creates a real puzzle in

terms of the way that the normal financing works for

higher education preparation because there is not a

market for higher education programs that sustains

the investment of the university. And so what tends

to happen is those programs disappear. They often

start with the interest of a particular person, but

then disappear.

We see an awful lot of faculty members who

have been trained in some of these low incidence

areas who, before too long in their career, begin to

retool their skills in other areas and leave service

to those low‑incidence professions and areas.

Particularly in the rural west we have a real problem

in serving children and supporting professional

skills in a lot of low‑incidence conditions.

The next complexity I would like to

highlight is one of persistence. I expect that

members of the Commission know the data as well as I

do about the number of jobs that go unfilled each

year and so forth. One bit of data from the recent

studies in personnel preparation caught my eye, and

that is that ten times as many special educators

leave their jobs to go to general education

positions. That\'s a pretty clear statement about the

demands of special education versus teaching as they

are perceived by the teachers themselves. So these

aren\'t individuals who are leaving education or

leaving school teaching. They\'re simply moving from

special education to general education. So that has

a lot to do with some of the shortages we have today.

There are two other aspects, I think, I

would highlight. The first is what general education

teachers and principals know is of paramount

importance in those districts or the special

education programs. In fact, we\'ve got quite a bit

of data that the most important influence on teachers

during this initial two or three years is the

principal of the school. Even more than another

teacher, mentor or other groups, the principal is the

primary influence as reported by teachers in terms of

the developing skills, their decision to stay or not,

the way they perceive the working conditions in the

school, and so forth. And I will come back to that

in a moment with my recommendations.

The second general bit of data that I

would highlight to note the complexity of your task

is that the federal investment in professional

development is a very tiny fraction of the funds that

are actually spent on professional development each

year. Most funding for professional development

comes either from universities, school districts, or

teachers and prospective teachers themselves. The

federal investment ‑‑ I expect ‑‑ I am not sure if

there\'s any data on this ‑‑ is far more than 5

percent of the total. What that means is there\'s a

huge challenge to leverage how funds are used by

universities, distributions and teachers and

prospective teachers if we\'re going to have any

impact upon the problems that we have. Let me move

from that picture of complexity to a couple of quick

stories, if I could. The first is of at least a

12‑year partnership between the University of

Colorado at Denver and the Commerce City, Colorado,

schools Dr. Elizabeth Koslowski here in the audience,

one of the primary architects of that partnership,

has been a leader for sometime. This is an effort to

work in‑depth with one school district to prepare

teachers who then can serve much of the metropolitan

area. The Denver metropolitan area has some 20

school districts and serves some 350,000 children

and, of course, what we do in one school district

doesn\'t meet all of that need, but I think it does

provide an example of what universities and districts

can do working together. Some 8 years ago there was

a decision all teachers prepared in the CU Denver

program both general and special education teachers

would spend pretty much an entire year in the

professional education development school and we set

about creating long‑term partnerships between the

universities and professional development schools,

mostly in the poorest, most adverse communities in

the metropolitan area. In this commerce city school

district, we also worked very hard to build several

alternative routes into teaching for special

educators, what I called the Cadillac model is

spending your partnership schooling learning to teach

and then move from there typically into a leadership

role as a teacher. There are other models that

involve career development, math from

paraprofessionals to teachers, others involved, paid

interns, paid by school districts or half‑time

internships as they\'re taking university courses, and

of course the sink‑or‑swim model where people start

immediately in the classroom and are working on the

coursework while they\'re teaching in the day, and

while that\'s pretty tough to take on, many people see

success that way as well. What I think is impressive

about these alternatives, while they provide many

different pathways to teaching, they ensure the same

high standards before a licensed provider and I think

that\'s a key concept that I hope the Commission will

consider that we do need many different pathways.

There are many people who can start a way

with the sink‑or‑swim support but by the time we

license a teacher as fully‑qualified to teach in

special education, we need to make some kind of

guarantees to the parents on what that teacher knows

and can do. Alternate routes should not be alternate

standards. Some observations about which partnership

over a period of 12 years I would want to share,

first when university faculty members spent a day of

the week out of their life over several years in a

school, you get a deep appreciation of the reality of

life in schools that profoundly affects curriculum,

admissions, standards for performance, and a number

of other things. It creates a grounding in what

happens in schools that is critical if university

faculty are going to be really effective in preparing

teachers. Secondly, I think that this kind of deep

partnership is probably the most important way to

stimulate renewal in both districts and universities.

We can always find individual leaders in districts or

individual leaders in universities who can prompt

significant progress. But for sustained ongoing

renewal, the kind of push and pull that occurred in a

partnership, if that partnership is really mandated,

if you will, from the top of the two organizations,

we get renewal that can stimulate changes far better

and far more quickly than a federal or state funding

loan can do. The student learning outcomes in these

partnerships, like those in any high impact school,

are present, but they\'re hard won.

I\'m reminded of a school in Colorado

Springs, one of our faculty members has been working

with the last couple of years that has the same sort

of dramatic improvements in reading and math scores

that you saw on the slides earlier. It\'s clear these

are possible.

And I think the final point, I believe,

has some important implications. I\'ll come back for

a moment to the legislation. Within the framework of

alternative routes to teacher preparation, the

distinction between initial licensing, preservice,

full inservice, professional development has been

very significantly blurred. What it traditionally is

called, preservice often happens when people are on

the job. What happens for preservice very often

happens for preservice candidates who are working in

partner schools. The providers of preservice in

partnerships or districts and both universities, and

the same is true for inservice. That would be a

different conceptualization than underlies the

current statute.

If I may, I want to close with four quick

recommendations for the panel for the statute. The

first relates to learning the strategies for earning

federal funding. I guess I would suggest it\'s a

waste of money to spend federal funds directly on a

professional development program where most of the

funding is supported by federal funds. Since the

federal funding is such a tiny percent, we need a

strategy built into the legislation that assures that

the primary purpose is to leverage how the fund is

already being spent by universities, districts, and

individual teachers and prospective teachers, to

leverage how that funding is used. That is a

different model than exists overall, although

certainly we\'ve been making step by step progress in

that over the years in implementation of IDEA.

A related issue is that we need to reduce

the decline in the investment in professional

development with inflation adjustments. It\'s less

than half what it was 20 years ago.

My second recommendation is that the

Commission look seriously at the kind of partnership

models between universities and districts that can

result in sustained ongoing improvements in both

inservice and preservice, or as I suggested, in

blended models of the two.

And third, I recommend that the Commission

look very seriously at funding models that stimulate

cross‑university coalitions in these low‑incidence

areas. With distance learning and other means of

collaboration, it\'s quite possible to imagine right

now a coalition of five or six universities in a

region joining together to develop programs in some

of these low incidence areas that no university on

its own can afford to do. We have a long history of

trying to regionalize those programs and what that\'s

typically done is create a lot of richness in the

immediate vicinity of the regional program and not

much elsewhere. But with distance learning and some

other connections, I think there\'s some possibilities

of some new models to address that.

My final point would be that one way or

another we need to pay very particular attention to

the role of principals and the knowledge that

principals have about special education. It\'s

something that the statute ‑‑ that IDEA has never

really dealt with directly. It\'s been permitted, but

it\'s not something that\'s been carefully attended to.

And I will say one other thing, and that is that I

recently chaired a task force for the American

Association of Colleges and Teacher Education that

resulted in a set of recommendations for colleges and

university faculty about how to improve both general

and special education, teacher education in order to

serve children with disabilities well, and we will

provide a copy of that report to the panel. That you

very much.

MR. FLETCHER: Thank you. Ms. Schaffner?

MS. SCHAFFNER: I want to thank you on

behalf of the PEAK Parent Center for the opportunity

to talk with you today. PEAK Parent Center is

Colorado\'s centrally‑funded Parent Training

Information Center or PTI. We were actually funded

through a piece of IDEA, and it actually is part of

IDEA. The personnel present and I mentioned that

first off, just because I feel I\'d like, probably,

the opportunity to question, that I want to address

with you all day related to the personal

preparations. Where do families fit into this

picture of professional development? And in order to

do that, you already heard in the introduction I want

to just share with you briefly my own personal

experience, and you did hear that I am again

teaching, actually, pre IDEA, in 1973, became a

parent after I had already been a special education

teacher. And my perspective changed quite

dramatically when I became a parent, and what I

learned as a parent and what I felt and believed as a

parent actually really challenged and changed my

beliefs and practices as a special educator. So the

most important point from that for me is that it is

so critical that families\' perspectives and families\'

participations is a piece of what happens in training

and to prepare and to support an ongoing educator to

do a good job for children. So my approach with you

today is to talk about an alternative or alternatives

to traditional professional development in terms of

how families need to participate in being included in

that.

So what I would like to talk about are

four basic pieces of that. First of all, that we

need to ensure that families are included as key

participants in professional development activities,

and that is as collaborators, as mentors of

educators, and also as learners themselves. It can\'t

be a hierarchical kind of a set up. It needs to be a

truly collaborative kind of set up where families are

seen and are interacted with and participate and

often can be leaders in this approach. It also

involves an integrated approach to teacher training

which is focused on strategies that are really

student‑centered and focused on strength and really

designed to lead towards the desired outcomes for

life outcomes for students.

Then also we want to make sure that

information is provided to families and educators in

a very accessible way, that it\'s practical, easy to

implement, and it can assure that everyone can be on

the same page.

And that, finally, the systematic approach

that really emphasizes the best practices for a

student with disabilities need to go hand in hand

with the development of practices for all children in

schools, and that we need to work on improving the

nature of learning experiences for all students.

PEAK Parent Center has been a PTI for, I believe,

about 17 years now. Early on in our experiences we

received 4 different innovation grants from NIDRR,

National Institute for Disability and Rehabilitation

Research to provide training and information to

families and educators. So we have developed a model

over time where we have collected data from families

and educators through the projects that we\'ve been

involved with, through a hot line we have, or we

accept calls from families and educators throughout

the state of Colorado, through various other means.

We have an annual conference on school reform,

inclusive education practices, that draws upwards of

a thousand participants every year. And there\'s a

whole range of participation. There are family

members who participate, as well as special

educators, as well as administrators, as well as

general educators.

So through the different types of

activities we\'ve been involved with, also developing

publications that we have, we believe are designed to

be truly accessible to families and educators. We

have been able to identify that some of the issues

that are key. And I\'m not going to go through it all

in my testimony, but I do want to emphasize that many

of the issues are related to the IEP process and the

fact that the implementation of IEPs. We find that a

common issue from families is that their children are

not receiving the support and services that are

identified on their IEPs, and of course, they are

experiencing failure in school. And what we have

learned is that ‑‑ and what we feel we can teach to

educators is a focus on the holistic kind of approach

where we really are understanding that academic needs

cannot be met unless we look at them in relationship

to all of the other needs that a student has. And so

we want to make sure that we\'re looking really

broadly at meeting the needs of the student.

We find that in another justification for

training families and educators together is that

families report they know the provisions of IDEA that

need information on the actual supports and services

that work well for their children, so they know what

to advocate for in their children\'s IEP process.

Also, families know they are entitled to due process

if the child is not successful but most want to avoid

using due process unless it\'s absolutely necessary.

Families, of course, first prefer to work

collaboratively with the school to design and

implement an effective IEP, but to address this, the

family must have access to this information and

families and educators must have access to the same

kind of information and opportunities to dialogue

with each other.

So training parents and educators together

can result in IEPs being implemented in a quality

way.

Many families report to PEAK that their

children\'s IEPs, even when they are well‑developed

and they are not put into actual practice, and so the

schools will often revert back to using more

traditional kinds of practices that are more of the

norm of what they have traditionally done rather than

looking at the individualized pieces of the IEP and

implementing the practices recognized in the IEP.

In the past five years, whenever requests

PEAK has received for doing workshops on

accommodations and modifications has increased

tremendously. The 85 percent of the calls we receive

on the hot line are from families requesting

information about the supports that might help their

children to learn successfully in school. In

addition, families ask for strategies on how they can

advocate for those supports to be put into practice

for their children.

Families are traditionally not being

included in inservice training. In fact, families

report to PEAK that not only are they not provided

with the information about the best practices that

ensure success with their children, but they are

often not asked for their perspective or included in

decisions being made about their children\'s

education. Families really have no other means for

gaining that kind of information about performing

initiatives or best practices and must be

deliberately included and involve them. One of the

parents this morning shared with you that she, when

she learned what was possible for her child, she was

able to go out and truly being a strong advocate for

her child. There is certainly a need to show them

what\'s possible.

PEAK participated in a monitoring survey,

actually facilitated a monitoring survey the OSEP

monitoring survey in 1999. On that survey, 50

percent of the parents who responded to that survey

said that they were not substantively and adequately

engaged by schools in educational planning. And so

our main point is that people ‑‑ it\'s critical that

families and educators learn together. It\'s critical

because both belong to the communities they serve,

and indeed, for them to be successful, families must

be actively inspired leaders and standards‑based

achievement for all students with no student left

behind only occur if there\'s alignment and a

collaborative relationship between schools and

families, and when families are recognized by

educators as a necessary and substantively involved

in school and reform.

As families participate in classrooms and

in school improvement efforts, the school community

as a whole is benefitted and educated about what it

takes to achieve success. We hear from the schools

who report that when their school faculty and school

community outside of the staff learn together, there

is much quicker implementation of standards and best

practices.

Another piece of this is to benefit

educators. We have learned that educators who have

had opportunities to learn alongside with and to

dialogue with families regarding best practices

report that they come away with a different

perspective. They learn the importance of a

person‑centered integrated ‑‑ student‑centered, I

should say ‑‑ approach. They learn the appreciation

of critical knowledge a family has about the child.

Planning supports and services. They develop an

understanding and empathy regarding the family\'s

sense of urgency and concern when their children\'s

needs are not being met.

Clearer focus on long‑term goals for

students and sensitivity to the effects that

short‑term year to year decisions about educational

programming can have on whether or not those

long‑term goals will be achieved. So when I shared

with you earlier about how my perspective changed

when I became a parent, that those are the pieces

that really changed for me, because as a parent I was

focused solely on that one child, that wonderful

little being who was my child. And so I alone had

the sense of urgency that things work for my child in

a way that we\'re going to make a difference for him

so that he could learn and so that he could, as Dr.

Bellamy mentioned, reach that long term vision that I

have for his future.

So families have that critical role to

play, and we believe that the outcome of joint

training and collaborative efforts between families

and educators will be or is IEPs which are

implemented in a quality way and without the need for

families to exercise due process or mediation rights

and an entire school community which are most

effectively or more effectively meeting the needs of

all students and ensure all students meet high

standards.

So I would like to let you know that with

my testimony I have included some of our concerns

about IDEA, free authorization, some of the other

issues around behavior, around restrictive

environment and parent participation, general

responsibility. I am not going to go over everything

with you now, but those were included in here because

this is information we thought was important for the

panel to have or the Commission to have. Thank you.

DR. BUTTERFIELD: I\'d like to thank you

for a wonderful and enthusiastic presentation. I am

wondering, we are going to move to, what I would like

to do is ask you to stay because Dr. Hamilton will

also be speaking, and we\'ll have an opportunity to

question a number have practitioners. But Arianne,

is there anything you would like to add to this that

those adults didn\'t say?

MS. LANE: No. Not really.

DR. BUTTERFIELD: I like a woman who knows

her mind and is brief in what she says. Who has met

all these ‑‑ she met Garth Brooks. That\'s pretty

special. So thank you very much. And if you could

stay, we would certainly appreciate it, because we

don\'t know how much time we have to have some

questions. Commissioner Bartlett?

MR. BARTLETT: Questions now?

DR. BUTTERFIELD: We are kind of running

against time. I know you are leaving. If you have

some burning question.

MR. BARTLETT: Well, I do have to leave in

five minutes. I do apologize, but Superintendent

Bales, I do have a couple of questions. I most

admired your testimony, but also your results. Both

your spirit and your results. Some details, when you

began rebuilding the school district, did you replace

many principals, or did you empower the ones who were

there?

DR. BALES: We actually provided them with

the same professional development. The people going

through the professional development with the

teachers is what really made a difference. We have

had some people who did leave the district but they

were asked to leave. They just didn\'t want to work

as hard as we needed to work.

MR. BARTLETT: Nicely said. So even with

the principals as well as the teachers, then, as a

matter of professional development, the principals

as well asthe teachers.

DR. BALES: Yes.

MR. BARTLETT: Could you quantify for us,

it sounds as if your professional development was

mostly inservice or with existing personnel. Could

you quantify that for us? Was there a certain number

of hours? We\'re from the government, so we\'re trying

to put bureaucratese on there.

DR. BALES: We did ‑‑ the old model of

professional development mentioned earlier today, one

or two people will learn something and try to change

everybody. I would say that I did that when I was

younger myself, and I would wonder, why don\'t people

get it when they come back and explain it? We

actually have brought commissions to our district to

work with the team, and including our support staff,

to work with them, to give them the new knowledge and

techniques. For instance, a week at a time, learning

the reading process 8 hours a day with the entire

team, and they do sign on they were willing to do

that, because we do invest about \$60,000 for a

clinician to come and stay in the district who

already knew how to do the diagnostic testing and how

to teach us. So it was a week of intensive

intervention and then we turn around and use it right

away. When you learn something new, you should get

to use it. And we still do that. Every summer we

do, we have professional development for all of our

new requirements to learn this reading method and

process and then immediately get to use it in summer

school. We increased our summer school participation

from 250 students to 2,000 last year because we

really wanted our children to learn to read.

MR. BARTLETT: So your model was to bring

the professional developers team to the school

district and essentially learn it as a team in house

or in district.

DR. BALES: Onsite and actually used our

data to find out what we needed. When we saw the

results that we got and we knew what we wanted to

get, that\'s how we designed the professional

development.

MR. BARTLETT: How did you pay for it?

DR. BALES: Title I funds.

MR. BARTLETT: Did you have any barriers

to paying for it that way? Were there any barriers

in the federal law we should know about.

DR. BALES: No. Actually, we decided,

actually Title I, nobody can get Title I unless

they\'re doing what we\'re doing. Actually, it says

you will improve in reading and mathematics. So we

chose to go with reading first and what we found is

we improved reading success, the professional

development for teachers and achievement for

children, math started going up too because it has

everything to do with comprehension.

MR. BARTLETT: Madame Chair, as we prepare

the report, I wonder if we can take some lessons from

what Pueblo was able to do with Title I and transfer

that into IDEA. And I don\'t know if it\'s done.

Perhaps it is, but look at that benevolent section of

Title I that allows you to do that and be sure you\'re

doing that under IDEA. You didn\'t‑‑you may be the

first superintendent in the history of ‑‑ since 1975

not to complain about paperwork. And I am curious to

know about that. Do you not have excess paperwork

you want to complain about or are you trying to

figure it out? I\'m kind of brutal.

DR. BALES: Actually, we have a business

model, whereas the performance, the principal they

received from performance pay depending on 65 percent

of student achievement, and that also includes making

sure IEPs are written and followed, and we look at

those each quarter to be sure they\'re done correctly

and accurately. IEPs are time‑consuming, but it\'s in

the best interests of children, and if I were making

a blanket statement, I would say every child needs an

education plan.

MR. BARTLETT: Wow. Last question. On

page 6 you said, Clearly, the accountability

standards, testing assessment, and accountability for

performance should apply to, should be rigorously

enforced with no exceptions. Do you intend to

include all special education students also?

DR. BALES: Yes. I think that the adults

have to‑‑the accountability picture on adults. This

is a cheese factory and the people there sign their

names. If they\'re going to check the product and it

was excellent, and move on. I think when teachers

and myself would stand and say, This is my child. I

was responsible for it. I helped this child reach

the fullest potential, and I want this child to

remember me forever, and to carry my name forward,

and I will carry this child\'s name forward. And

that\'s when you have quality of education.

MS. BUTTERFIELD One last observation to

the Chair and the staff, it could well be this would

be an example of a kind of resource intervention and

assistance, technical assistance that we provide to

failing schools to bring, if we could find just 3

more superintendents like you, and I know we can,

around the country, in addition to the consulting

model we often bring to school districts, if we could

bring a week of you to a school district that needs

some technical assistance, it might be helpful. The

only other thing, I have now learned George W.

President Bush has only made one mistake since he\'s

been President, and that was not putting you on his

Commission. Thank you.

DR. BALES: Can I quickly tell you that

Washington did call me and ask me if I supported

Leave No Child Behind. I\'ve been wearing this pin

for two years thanks to Cindy O. Smith. We\'ve been

saying we will Leave No Child Behind for the past two

years. Thank you very much.

DR. BUTTERFIELD: We have one final

comment. Commissioner Coulter?

MR. COULTER: I would just like to

compliment Arianne because she has sat very nicely

throughout this presentation, something I couldn\'t do

myself, and I think the whole audience deserves to

give you some recognition for your excellent behavior

and attentiveness through this session.

DR. BALES: May I say we have given you a

booklet of our district and Arianne\'s story is in

that booklet with the other children who we featured

today, and I think you\'ll find it very, very

interesting. Thank you very much.

MR. COULTER: If you could all stay

behind ‑‑ no pun intended ‑‑ so that Dr. Hamilton can

give her presentation and if there are other

questions, because I know that Dr. Hamilton ‑‑

DR. BUTTERFIELD: Dr. Rebecca Hamilton,

whose career has spanned 32 years with the Denver

Public School System. She was a public school

teacher for 14 years and 18 additional years served

in various administrative capacities in the school

district. Dr. Hamilton presently serves as Senior

Officer for the Liberty Plus Initiative of the

Pittsburgh Public Schools. She also teaches graduate

courses at the University of Pittsburgh. She\'s

co‑authored with Dr. Isabel Beck and has also

published numerous articles in professional journals.

Dr. Hamilton has special interests and expertise in

issues associated with remedial reading programs and

instruction. She is a member of the International

Reading Association Special Commission on the Reading

Specialist. What she has contributed to the

development of a national survey will expand

understanding of the current roles and curricular

emphases of reading specialists in this country.

DR. HAMILTON: Thank you. And thank you

commissioners. I thank you for the opportunity to

share with you some of my thoughts and

recommendations. My field of expertise, as Dr.

Butterfield says, is in the area of reading. And so

I would like to really focus my presentation in

particular in the area of reading and share with you

some of the problems and also recommendations for

change that I have seen and that I would love to

bring to your attention this afternoon. First time I

have served as a panel of one, so if you would ask me

questions at the end, I would be able to refer to my

colleagues.

I would like to start with one of my

favorite cartoons in this area, which shows someone

getting a little bit of therapy. Let\'s see. Your

feelings of insecurity seem to have started when

someone said, Maybe you don\'t have a reading

disability, Mr.Jones. Maybe you have a teaching

disability.

And from everything I have heard all day

long today, that summarizes a lot of the things we\'ve

been hearing, and I could probably, given the

lateness of the hour, end right there. That being a

lot of the core of what I am about to say. But with

a few other things I need to address with you, I

really want to focus my presentation this afternoon

on two basic issues, one to deal with some of the

flaws as I see them, and I have experienced them in

common practice, with some of the conventional

wisdom, I guess, as a practitioner on both sides,

general education as well as special education, and

also then from that how distant is some of the

practice, as we know it, particularly in the field of

reading, in current reading research? What do we

need to do about that? And that will bring me to

some of my recommendations. So to deal with some of

the flaws in common practice, what we know is that

general education teachers most frequently are the

ones who identify students for special education.

And there are two problems, as I see it inherent in

the system for referral. One is, typically, general

education students recommend ‑‑ or teachers, excuse

me ‑‑ recommend students in the early grades who are

not successful in the regular and unmodified

curriculum. What I see out there is the \"I caught

it. He didn\'t get it\" syndrome. Therefore it must

be the child. The child is the problem, not the

instruction.

I have heard all day today on numerous and

eloquent references to the lack of differentiated

instruction and that our general education teachers

do not know how to do that, nor do they feel that

that is part of their responsibility even, which

begins to kind of open the seat of the problem.

Now given the influence of what is kind of

generally known as the whole language orientation,

the beginning of reading the past several years, the

general education and instruction, particularly in

the beginning years in K‑1 was presumably incorrect

to begin with, and I am going to speak to that issue

a little bit later.

So basically what we have is that we have

a child who is now referred, and sometimes the

referrals, particularly in reading, are based upon

some of the instruction that was poor to begin with.

Now they\'re referred and they\'re given

recommendations for interventions that don\'t match

current theoretical orientations to learn to read.

And so this problem of a child being caught,

especially in the area of reading, in a revolving

door phenomenon. He\'s recommended because you have

poor instruction, and then, once into the

recommendation process, recommendations for

instruction are as poor as what put him in there in

the first place.

So there\'s an old song by the Kingston

Trio, I think, He Never Returned. And that\'s

essentially what we have.

Let me give you an example. Consider

Amanda, a pseudoname. But this is a real child who I

just was working with in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago.

A beginning third grade child who was recommended for

special education because of the following

indicators, and these are direct quotes from the

teachers of the IEP, Amanda continues to confuse long

and short vowels and uses several word substitutions

during oral reading. Her fluency is slow and

belabored. Amanda\'s comprehension skills are below

grade level. All that really means is that Amanda

can\'t decode very well. And if she\'s not decoding

well, the likelihood of her not comprehending very

well is pretty high. So you kind of get a sense here

again of why I am talking about in this revolving

door problem with referral.

A brief investigation into Amanda\'s

beginning reading history revealed that her early

reading experiences consisted almost exclusively of a

literature‑based instructional program with virtually

no systematic or explicit decoding instruction. And

then we see down the road she\'s recommended because

she\'s confusing long and short vowel sounds. And why

that is a surprise by third grade on the part of

general education teachers is still part of our

problem and reflects a lack of knowledge as how

important and what that really means in terms of what

is really going on with Amanda here.

Now what we also have that adds to the

problem is the decoding problems are also attributed

to comprehension problems, as Dr. Bales said,

Comprehension is the purpose for reading in the first

place. But we see over and over again in the field,

not just in Pittsburgh but nationally, that children

and if you\'ll notice, it\'s the third problem with

Amanda was that her comprehension is below grade

level. Makes perfect sense because she\'s not

decoding well. So why does that happen? What is it

the general education teachers have not been trained

well in so that when they see decoding problems,

similar to Amanda\'s, they say, Well, it\'s

comprehension. That\'s the problem. This child can\'t

comprehend. Part of the reason why, and I don\'t have

time to go into that this afternoon, is that conflict

of allocation is really part of the issue. When

children are struggling at the word level, when most

of their cognitive attention and resources are used

simply to try to pronounce a word, there\'s not a lot

of cognitive attention left to devote to what\'s the

most important goal, reading, which is comprehension.

Therefore, what we have to do with children is to

make sure in K through 1 we have children reading

accurately and fluently to get the lower level

processes of reading out of the way virtually. What

we do know from research and what we\'ve known for

quite some time, as you can see by the years that are

marked next to the researcher names, a child\'s speed

of word recognition in first grade is an excellent

predictor of the child\'s reading comprehension in the

second grade as well as in sixth grade. So when we

have children not comprehending, we need to take a

strong look at why. What\'s going on here, really?

Is it a comprehension problem or is it a decoding

problem masked as comprehension?

Now look how decoding difficulties ‑‑ safe

decoding difficulties for comprehension plays out in

an IEP. Amanda\'s IEP, her measurable goal, was

written exactly as this: Amanda will increase and

improve comprehension skills. So now we\'ve heard

about her long and short vowel problem, we\'ve heard

about her lack of oral fluency, but her measurable

annual goal comes out as, she will increase and

improve comprehension skills. Now it gets worse when

we look at how comprehension is described. This is

directly from the IEP. Her short‑term objective and

benchmarks, improve Amanda\'s comprehension skills by

stating the main idea, recalling factual details, and

sequencing five to six events. I was wondering if

four events didn\'t cut it. Or what would happen if

seven or eight were sequenced. But in any case, we

have a problem in understanding what comprehension

really is.

Research on comprehension currently has

shown that retrieving information, low‑level kinds of

things like stating main ideas on a superficial level

or sequencing facts are not reliable predictors of

really understanding anything that we read. So what

are the good predictors of comprehension? What we

know now is that understanding is more complicated

than that. Comprehension is way more complicated

than that. It\'s a process now. It\'s not a product.

It\'s a process of building meaning by grappling with

ideas, not merely recalling factual details. You can

recall the factual details if she has a good memory,

but it may not necessarily prove you can comprehend

well. It means wrestling with multiple ideas

simultaneously, not merely stating a main idea.

Think of the last several novels you have read. How

many novels have a single superficial main idea?

Collaboratively exchanging knowledge and

understanding. It\'s not merely locating or parroting

back an author\'s words. In fact, the location

reminds me you would not necessarily have to speak.

You could use your finger to answer most questions.

If you can point to it in the text, it\'s not a good

question. Obviously, all it takes is having a real

estate license, or I don\'t know, location being so

important.

So what do I propose instead? I would like

to replace the language for using IEPs and using

things like expected performance task outcomes. What

do you really want Amanda to be able to do? And how

is she going to demonstrate that knowledge? A better

statement for little Amanda might be she will

demonstrate oral fluency by reading 80 to 90 words

per minute of grade‑appropriate text materials. That

is going to deal with the issue of what is probably

causing Amanda\'s problem to begin with. She had

difficulty learning the code. And she needs a lot of

work in learning that and I will get to that in a

second.

Some specific strategies that are

research‑based do not accomplish that. Are 30 to 40

minutes per day for a minimum of ten weeks? We\'re

not talking about regrouping for one period on

Wednesday morning to help Amanda learn the code.

We\'re talking about daily intensive intervention

that\'s very research‑based and that we know shows

evidence of being able to turn kids around in this

area.

Word building is about that. It is one of

the finest resources we have in the field and we\'re

using her word building sequences right now in

Pittsburgh as our primary systematic and explicit

method for delivering good strong decoding

instruction to our children.

Cumulative blending activity. There\'s

many of us. Repeated reading of decodable text which

means simply reasonably constrained vocabulary text.

Words represent the phonic elements that have been

most recently taught to Amanda. The method of

evaluation is curriculum‑based oral fluence using

something that can show and monitor the progress. I

think one of the things that came up this morning is

that Dr. Pasternack asked why to teachers refuse to

monitor, why isn\'t this monitoring in the general

education program taking place? And I don\'t think

‑‑ I think part of it is the teachers don\'t know what

to use. They\'re willing to monitor. They\'re willing

to do the graph and do the points along the graph to

show the progress, but they don\'t know what to use to

graph. What are they graphing? And I am alarmed

sometimes when I am working with teachers as to what

it is they are, A, either told to use which are not

effective ways of monitoring, or, B, that there\'s

simply the absence of, they don\'t know what to use.

They will tell you unit tests or chapter tests, and

that\'s not going to do it. They\'re also suspicious,

I think, of what the data is used for. Quite

frankly, teachers are afraid. Is this some kind of

implicit evaluation of me? Because not all children

will move up on a graph in exactly the same speed and

the same rate, and typically growth is more like this

than this. And at any given point, you may find the

child has dipped very temporarily and teachers are

afraid. Who are they going to share this with? What

is it going to say about me? Then they don\'t know

how fluent is fluent. How accurate is accurate? How

do I know at every grade level that this child,

Amanda, is fluent enough at third grade? And we have

some things out there, I mean, just to give you a

couple of examples, there are fluency norms that we

can use, both with students with exceptionality, the

special education students, and regular education

students which give teachers a sense of a range, at

least, of approximately where a child\'s grade level

needs to be in terms of his fluency.

We use this in Pittsburgh. We also use

pseudowords, one of the strongest predictors of

decoding success. So that at various stages

throughout the year at every grade level,

particularly K 1 and 2, children are tested

informally by their teacher to see exactly how they

are doing. How accurate are they?

So continuing on with Amanda, an example

of a performance outcome test for comprehension, if

indeed comprehension was really Amanda\'s problem in

the first place ‑‑ I am suspicious about it not

being ‑‑ might be Amanda will demonstrate the

ability to identify and elaborate the most important

ideas of grade‑appropriate text, condensed ideas of

text, personal experience, articulate an author\'s

purpose. This requires a deep understanding of what

it is you read. You have to be able to process and

not just point to answers in order to be able to do

these things.

So what does all this tell us? I think

Dr. Butterfield said you were all in Houston last

week, and I\'d be tempted to say, Houston, we have a

problem. But there is an apparent and very

disturbing disparity between current reading research

findings and the IEP goals as they are frequently

written. I am disturbed by them as the person in

charge of literacy in our district, because I review

these on a regular basis and I look at these and I

see many of the quality of Amanda\'s, and I am alarmed

and concerned about what it says on both sides of the

fence for general education as well as special

education. One possible explanation for special

education side is that IEPs continue to be grounded

in more of a behavioral orientation to learning

rather than a cognitive. We keep looking for

measurable goals, and in doing so constrain what it

is Amanda can do. It\'s much easier to measure how

many main ideas she got right. How many factual

details were correct. It\'s harder to measure how

many times she was able to grapple with the text\'s

meaning to connect ideas, to deal with ideas over

information. So what we know is what\'s been said all

day long here, which is, the teachers of regular and

special education are simply not well‑trained in

current research on reading which views the process

of reading now as a complex cognitive phenomena, not

a series of behaviors or skills that have to be

learned and/or memorized. As such, ISP teams tend

to write measurable goals on the poor quality of

Amanda\'s.

Reports on teacher preparation have shown

the teacher\'s lack of understanding of the psychology

of reading and development, the language structure,

best practices to teach language structure and

comprehension. You cannot know best practices until

you deeply understand the first two bullets. We

cannot jump to what best practices are with teachers

unless they understand what the psychology and not

what the linguistic information they need to know

about the language. Reliable quality assessments to

inform classroom instruction. Beyond the basal unit

test which becomes the thing that teachers rely on

most.

Which brings me to my recommendations.

Early identification of decoding difficulties is

critical. Why? To prevent inappropriate

identification of students, which concerns me a great

deal, and prevent teachers from convoluting what, I

don\'t know how else to describe it, garden variety

decoding difficulties with true learning disabled

classifications. We need to know, is this child

simply having difficulties learning the code? And if

so, we need to catch them early and load them with

good intensive practice. We need to catch students

before they fall. The famous line, Not wait until

they fail by providing intensive systematic

instruction to students showing early signs of

difficulty. We know now when they\'re in trouble. It

is no longer a mystery. But we need to pay attention

to it. And what I don\'t see is teachers sensitized

enough to really pay attention to it. Because part

of the problem is in K and 1, when you see a child in

trouble, they\'re not going to be huge differences on

a graph. They\'re much smaller in terms of how they

look when they are graphed. But very minor

differences in what a skilled versus unskilled

reader, particularly with a code, can have great

effects later on. And I will show you what I mean in

just a minute.

What we know, sadly, the bad news, is that

children do not catch up, left to their own. There

is no more, Maybe he\'ll get it. I hear that so many

times from teachers, a kind of benign optimism.

Maybe next year he\'ll get it. Like reading is

something you throw and you catch it or you don\'t.

National longitudinal studies report that 1 in 6

children will encounter a problem in learning to read

during their first 2 to 3 years of instruction. And

in addition, children who fall behind in first grade

reading have only a 1 in 8 chance. As a matter of

fact, there\'s some evidence now it\'s going to 1 in 10

to ever catching up to grade level unless something

really serious is done.

As many as 80 percent of the students

identified learning disabled are referred to special

education because of reading difficulties. We need

to really take a strong look at that.

The next graph shows you it\'s out of the

California Comprehensive Reading Leadership Program

and it gives you kind of stark and sobering

information, but it proves the standard, the rich get

richer and the poor get poorer kind of phenomenon.

But when you have kindergarten and first grade

children starting out with first grade level reading,

even when you see minor differences, you see how the

graphs of the poor readers versus the rich readers,

there\'s very small differences when you graph them in

the early years. But look at what happens ‑‑ to kids

who do not get the code, who are not fluent readers,

get worse. And dramatically worse as time goes on.

The advantage of lots of reading by fourth

grade. That is, if you are accurate and fluent, if

you have learned how to read, you will gain fluency

in word recognition, you have knowledge of specific

words and vocabulary repertoire that grows in leaps

and bounds year after year and comprehension will

improve as well.

Now think about a lot of things, Amanda

was referred to. She needed to improve her

comprehension skills because she could not recall

facts or state main ideas. So when you reverse some

of these, poor fluency, poor vocabulary, repertoires,

limited knowledge base, these are perilously similar

indicators of specific learning disability. So it\'s

a chicken/egg dichotomy to me. Which came first?

Did the disability in the child contribute to the

decoding problems or has decoding problems

contributed to disability in children?

In either case, and here\'s my main point,

the interventions are the same. There\'s no magic

bullet for special education versus regular

education. What differs is the intensity and the

duration of these research‑based instructional

strategies.

As Dr. Batshaw has shown us, scientists

have now isolated in the left hemisphere of the brain

the place where phonological decoding takes place.

We know now we can see differences in the brain, and

due to the plasticity of the brain, the good news is

if we catch kids early and we do the right thing, we

can change how that brain looks. There\'s been

studies done by McCandless and Beck just in 2000, \'99

and 2000, where for 12 weeks working with sixth grade

children classified as learning disabled and having

tremendous difficulty reading, within 12 weeks the

neuroimages of the brain change to look much more

like the skill reader.

Second recommendation is obviously, then,

knowledge of research‑based interventions. What are

they? Do our regular education teachers know what

they are and do our special education teachers know

what they are? And everyone, teachers,

administrators , para‑educators, everyone has to be

trained in current theory and best practices. They

must know what to do, how long to do it, and why

they\'re doing it. Consistency of research‑based

message is critical. Everyone has to hear the same

message. One of the things I have done in Pittsburgh

is to develop staff development modules in various

areas of reading, decoding, vocabulary, comprehension

and writing. We have about 4 modules in every major

area and everybody gets them. The administrators as

you were doing it in Pueblo, the para‑educators, the

parents, the teachers. Now how did we do that? We

do that with a residential coach model. In a very

similar way we took Title I money and we reallocated

it to purchase reading residential coaches. They

were trained for 4 weeks last August, an intensive 8

hour 4 weeks, 5 days a week kind of training and they

continue to be trained one day a week all year. We

pull them out of the buildings and they work with me

and my program officers every single Friday of every

single week because if we\'re talking about continuous

ongoing training, that doesn\'t mean the coaches just

because they got into training in the beginning, are

done. It\'s never done. I actually had one of the

principals say to me, which is one of the obstacles.

I don\'t mean principals. I mean the question., that

why do we have to have these Friday training for

coaches? If our coaches need all this training, do

we have the best people? And my answer was, That is

why we have the best people. Without that we\'re

going to revert back.

We have to have efficient but effective

diagnostic assessments. We have revised and devised

every single informal classroom‑basedd diagnostic

assessment K‑12 both inclusive of pseudowords and

oral fluency for every grade level.

Finally, quality implementation and

coordination between special education and regular

education programs is critical. Shared

accountability issues is big, as we well know.

Preservice training is not enough for anyone, no

matter how good it is. Intensive and ongoing

training helps catch teachers before they fall. The

way to fail phenomenon is not restricted to students.

Let\'s not wait for teachers to fail to train them. A

very strong system of accountability but also support

system. Teachers are scared to death of

accountability systems because what that implies is,

We caught you. Not doing what you were supposed to

be doing. These things, really good research‑based

instructional strategies, take time to learn.

Implementation is slow. Feedback has to be constant.

And therefore the support that that coach can

provide, not being an administrator, the coach has no

other axe to grind except to help that teacher

understand reading.

What have we done in Pittsburgh about

aligning. Special education teachers, supervisors,

ISP coordinators with the training of the general

education, reading coaches, teachers and building

administrators. Everyone is getting the same thing.

Training modules are now being developed for all

special education and general education teachers so

they can work together. We\'re developing a proposal

for the purchase of a collection of materials already

embedded within the core curriculum for regular and

special education teachers to use for prevention and

intervention. As a matter of fact, our district

sales personnel or consultant we work with on our

core curriculum created a new ISBN number because we

pulled together, and they never have before, with

their own basal program. So now there\'s going to be

this new collection that will be available for

special education teachers to use that perfectly

matches the regular education curriculum and does the

exact same thing with maybe more intensity and slower

duration.

And we are implementing a residential

coach model for special education as well, so there\'s

kind of a mutual exchange going on between the

departments. So just some concluding comments, the

depth of pedagogical understanding and depth of

quality implementation are, to me, what matter most.

Together they represent the most promising way to

help children, whether they\'re special education

children or general education children. And my

favorite quote for the last year or so has been, in

the long run, how hard schools try, how eloquently

they are structured or restructured, matters not at

all. What matters is the experience of the student.

Good schools help. Great schools help even more.

But great teachers are a far more precious commodity.

And then I couldn\'t resist one more from

Al Shanger because one of the things was the, Where\'s

the beef? There\'s a lot of bull in education reform,

but no beef. I thank the Commissioners for looking

for the beef and knowing what it is and searching for

it. So thank you for your time.

DR. BUTTERFIELD: Thank you. Are there

questions? We will open questions to Dr. Hamilton as

well as our past panel. You can come back up on the

podium. You\'re not off the hook yet.

MR. FLETCHER: Remembering that we\'re all

going to be kicked out of this room at 5.

MR. COULTER: I have a couple of questions

for Ms. Schaffner. You recommended in your remarks

that training as it relates to professional

development activities needed to include families and

educators working together. I think some people

would conclude the current regulations is actually

require that now, and have required it since \'97.

Beyond requiring this joint training, which I think

some people feel is not occurring or at least not

occurring in sufficient frequency, what other

strategies do you have beyond simply requiring that

will ensure that families and educators, both general

and special education are trained to get?

MS. SCHAFFNER: I think that for one

thing, one of the things I forgot to say earlier I

truly think we need to have some real honest dialogue

just about what is the role of families. Why is it

important for families to be a part of things? I

see a lot of lip service with schools and educators

in general talking about involving families but it\'s

a pretty trite kind of statement. So one of the

things is just to facilitate dialogue. I guess I am,

to strengthen I know IDEA in 1997 did strengthen,

facilitate and piece of our participation in the IEP

process, but I am not sure that it articulated really

clearly that broader piece about families as

co‑contributors and as collaborators and on an equal

plane with educators. So I guess that\'s all I can

tell you at this time. I think it\'s fairly

important. One of the projects that I\'ve been

involved with and Pete has been involved with which

actually began through the University of Colorado at

Denver was our Statewide Assistance Change Project

that focused on inclusive learning communities and

building a sense of community in schools. It was

very important for all of the collaborators at the

University of Colorado, as a collaborator with the

Colorado Department of Education with the Parent

Center and the reason PEAK became a part of that was

for the disparity at issue. We need to model at all

levels that families are leaders and are participants

along with educators in these processes, so I would

say that also focusing on those kinds of projects

that will build a sense of ownership and community

throughout the school community are important as

well. And none of the department does fund those

kinds of projects.

MR. COULTER: Thank you. I think we\'re

just struggling with such an emphasis on results and

outcomes. It\'s difficult, I think, sometimes to

measure the degree of family participation and parent

participation. What I am hearing from you is that

that is still a struggle.

MS. SCHAFFNER: Very much of a struggle.

One of the other focuses that we have had with our

inclusive learning community projects was that the

whole issue of insuring that all families are

included, not just those families who are the first

to come to the table who might have professional

experiences themselves, who may be seen as a little

bit safer sometimes by educators as being

participants and we\'re trying to work the schools to

develop strategies for insuring that all families

have a voice in what\'s happening, even though they

can\'t necessarily come to the meeting, that it\'s

really changing the culture, the need to change the

culture so that families are seen as valuable

participants no matter what their educational level,

no matter what.

MR. COULTER: Thank you. Dr. Bales, a

question for you. First of all, I want to join

Commissioner Bartlett in complimenting you and your

staff. I know you didn\'t do this by yourself and

that\'s evidenced by the fact you brought a lot of

support with you today. So we wanted to compliment

them as well. I want to also compliment you for a

different reason. It\'s heartening to have a

superintendent come and talk to this Commission about

results and about how they produced those results and

not the same time whine about needing more money for

special education. So I think one of the things

we\'re concerned about is that certainly more

resources could be applied to make things better, but

we don\'t want to put resources where we haven\'t

gotten results in the past. How would you see

extending, if you got additional resources, whether

they\'re special education or Title I or whatever? How

would you see extending the results you got in

elementary school at the middle school and secondary

level because we\'ve learned a lot of results today

about elementary, and I think some of us are

concerned about what happens to kids once they get in

the upper grades? How will you handle that?

DR. BALES: That\'s a great question and a

great challenge for us as well. I want to say one

thing about parents coming into schools. We

personally invite our parents to come into the

schools and we get the best results at elementary.

We have 97 percent to 100 percent parents coming in

for conferences at elementary schools, and I think

because those people really do the personal

invitation and I think we need to do a better job of

that for our middle schools and high schools. I

personally believe if we would have year‑round

schools with breaks throughout the year, there would

be less regression for children. And for middle

school students, I am positive we need to have more

active engaged learners in the middle schools. We

know that children are active. They have a lot of

excess energy, but we still have children sitting a

lot instead of applying what they know and

application should be very strong for our middle

school students. And then in high school most people

would probably make a general comment that teachers

teach content and they forget about nurturing the

students. We\'re actually looking at four schools

next year in our district becoming pre K‑8 schools

because the biggest trauma for parents of all is

actually when students leave elementary school and go

to middle school, and regression is there. What Dr.

Sanders refers to as the building effect, and I think

it has everything to do with quality professional

development that sending teacher and receiving

teachers have conversations about where the child

left off and where they get the next level. And we

do individual literacy plans for the children,

individual math plans for our students who are not

proficient, but we have to do a better job of the

intensive intervention for students continuing into

middle school and high school.

MR. COULTER: I want to say once again,

you\'re the kind of superintendent who, when they

produce results, we certainly need more resources but

the resources need to go to people who are

successful. Thank you very much.

DR. BALES: Thank you.

MR. PASTERNACK: I will pose two questions

to the panel. Anyone cares to take a shot at it.

The first one I am curious about is how much does the

Department of Education develop for recruiting and

selection practices in Colorado and the content of

the programs to align with teacher characteristics

related to student achievement?.

MR. BELLAMY: I will give that a start and

invite others to respond. Colorado went through a

process two years ago aligning all teachers educators

to teacher standards that had been closely linked to

the standards for student learning. And in

generating a set of performance assessments that

universities and collaborating districts will jointly

use to ensure that all teacher candidates met with

the performance assessments before they were

recommended for licensure and that process is

gradually now being applied to all the various routes

into teaching so that we built from the content

standards to the standards for teachers to the

curriculum and design programs. I think what that

has done, I think first, at a structural level, is to

encourage an awful lot of the programs in the state

to take components of what Dr. Koslowski developed in

Denver with more intense partnerships in the

districts and universities. So I would say that was

one. The recruitment selection of teachers in the

special education in this state, I suspect as to the

others, has been really a joint process. There are

chronic shortages with districts hiring people

typically with general educational credentials

teaching with temporary authorization in special

education, and those people referred by the school

districts to universities to begin the course work.

So that\'s one pathway in selected by the district and

then supported by the university. Increasingly

universities and districts are working together on

the grow‑your‑own programs in a para‑professional to

teacher program, intern programs where there\'s joint

selection. I would say that in Colorado a very small

percentage of the people going into special education

are initially selected because they applied to a

university first. There\'s still some of that but not

at the level you would have seen 10 or 15 years ago.

It\'s a much more collaborative process with many

different routes.

MR. PASTERNACK: Thanks. I guess a quick

question. We know that over the next decade in

school districts across this country will need 2.2

million additional teachers. The quality must be

raised at the same time. We know that current

certification and licensure doesn\'t really predict

teacher quality or student achievement and learning,

so with funds available under the No Child Left

Behind Act, what do you think are the best ways to

increase the quantity as well as the quality of

teachers?

DR. BALES: I think what would really make

a difference is just looking at the data of beginning

teacher who did come to us, really struggles with

improving student achievements. I think if we would

have, if we could place them with the very best what

we call master teachers who are getting the good

results so they can learn from them during the

preparation process or immediately upon entering, we

do expect all of our new teachers to learn the

reading process. I think every teacher, no matter

what area, should be a teacher of reading and should

have background into identifying children who have

special needs. Because I think children are often

mislabeled, for whatever reason, because we haven\'t

taught people how to identify the special needs

children have. And I\'m particularly talking about

reading, dyslexia, all of those areas, I think people

think that children are often lazy and just can\'t

finish their work. I know personally of a boy locked

in a closet because he couldn\'t finish his work as

quickly as everybody else in first grade, and I think

with people who are latent ADHD, they need the

energy, so they\'re punished when they don\'t do their

work or get off task, make them sit in their seats

longer or not going out to play. We\'re doing the

wrong things to get the results we need. And I

think it\'s because everybody does not have the

information on how to help children get to where the

goals are.

DR. BUTTERFIELD: Commissioner Berdine?

I\'m sorry. Are you finished?

MR. BELLAMY: Add one more. I need to.

It\'s a great question. It clearly is a challenge to

take a relatively small creation and figure out how

to leverage the funding that\'s going into teacher

development at all stages through the career. I

guess I would have a couple of things I would say to

the earlier testimony and maybe you can add one more.

In order to leverage that effectively, I think that

my recommendation would be to first use the structure

of priorities and competitions to insure deep

partnerships with the universities and districts.

That\'s where most of the money is to provide

professional development and ensuring that there are

some partnerships that create some self‑renewals is

important. And I don\'t mean partnerships just

created for the sake of raising rent but long‑term

structures that connect the two institutions that

have the primary resource base. The second will be

to use the funds to stimulate a continuing renewal in

the teacher education curriculum so that it conflicts

with the current knowledge base. There\'s always

pressure on teacher education curriculum from all

sources, but the, I think the appropriation in

special education, probably more than in any other

aspect of teacher education, there is an opportunity

for the federal government to leverage the content of

the curriculum in important ways. So that would be

the second point.

The third would be to insure that there is

a supply of leaders in districts and universities who

can translate the research that\'s coming out of our

best laboratories into teacher education programs and

that that involves perhaps some rethinking of how

doctorate‑level preparation in special education has

occurred in the past. But I think the supply of

faculty members at universities and curriculum

leaders in districts, the supply of people who can

provide the leadership we need, need some attention.

So I emphasize these three areas.

DR. HAMILTON: I want to say I agree with

the three areas. I was thinking about in particular,

I think the first, talking about the partnership

between the district and the university, local

universities. One of the things we\'re beginning to

do in Pittsburgh because I happen to also work at the

University of Pittsburgh, is to make clear to the

schools of education and other places within the

university and special education also exactly what it

is we expect a candidate who is coming out of the

universities in our city to know. What competencies

do we want for them to be hired as a Pittsburgh

public teacher? And that has had one of the

strongest effects I have seen in kind of having the

academic community kind of sit up and take notice,

because one of the things they want to do is to place

their graduates, and if they know that the largest

place to place some of their graduates is looking for

very specific competencies, very specific

research‑based knowledge, then the tendency for the

isolated profession that sometimes the academic

profession can be to come together and to say, All

right, so what are we going to do to change

curriculum? It doesn\'t speak to the quantity issue,

but it certainly does speak to the quality.

DR. BUTTERFIELD: And I believe that we

have to stop now, and I know that there are more

questions because we have more Commissioners who want

to ask questions. I think that will have to occur

out in the hall, because otherwise we\'re being

whisked away. Yes, Dr. Huntt?

MR. HUNTT: I wanted to throw in a quick

thank you to Dr. Hamilton. We didn\'t have the

opportunity to thank you for taking the time and

giving such an excellent presentation. Talk to you

later. I understand your pseudowords.

DR. BUTTERFIELD: I would like to thank

all of the panelists who came and spoke with us

today. I personally feel like I have learned a great

deal. I would like to thank all of you who have come

to testify before this task force and who have stayed

so patiently throughout all of our proceedings. We

want you to know that we listen. We take very

seriously the Commission that the President has given

us and want to leave you with the very best

recommendations. So with that, I bid you good night

and hope you have a safe journey wherever you\'re

going. We\'re adjourned.

(The hearing concluded at 5:00 p.m.)