dee alpert

Recent Activity

• 

  dee signed the petition | almost 3 years ago

  Pass the Community Choice Act with Comprehensive Health Care Reform!
• 

  dee signed the petition | almost 3 years ago

  Tell Congress to Pass a Strong Climate Bill
• 

  dee signed the petition | about 3 years ago

  End the use of aversives, restraints and seclusion
• 

  dee commented on the article | about 3 years ago

  Top Five Public Education Controversies

  I think the big issue for the coming decade will be what to do about the education industry's resistance to: a) adopting research-validated programs and methodologies for ... just about anything, and b) reading, much less understanding and using, research findings from allied fields - psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and the like.
  
  The education industry seems intent on maintaining the fiction that schools are such incredibly unique environments and organizations that they somehow even manage to defy the law of gravity.  School learning is school learning, and allegedly has nothing to do with cognition and information acquisition and use.  Disabilities are just "educational disabilities," which have no relationship to professionally-diagnosed real world disabilities, and thus are impermeable to professionally-developed, research-validated programs and methods of remediation.
  
  Most of all, the education industry is fixated on maintaining that all of its failures represent flaws in its supplies - that is, flaws in the children who walk into schoolhouse doors.  Apparently the education industry is allowed to define the students it can teach  and define those it fails to teach as inherently defective.  In fact, since some schools do teach these kids - the poor, minorities, non-home English speakers, kids with disabilities - it is clear that the defect lies in the education industry - its paid adults; its structure; the training it establishes as necessary and appropriate for the members it credentials.  Yet research continually shows that fully-credentialled educators are not significantly better, in terms of student outcomes, than those who are not fully credentialled.
  
  As long as the education industry is allowed to set its own goals and measure success, without outside verification, we're going to keep on having children who are not educated well because the education industry has been allowed to define these children, ipso facto, as defective.
  
  The United States does not have defective children.  The United States has a defective education industry which appears incapable of self-improvement.  Serious change will have to be forced into the closed environment by outsiders with budget and authority to do so.  Failing that, vouchers, vouchers, vouchers ... at least for those children whom the education industry has defined as defective, but whose parents know differently.
  
  Dee Alpert, Publisher
  The Special Education Muckraker
  http://www.special educationmuckraker.com