2/20-- Last week in our special ed. segment of class, our teacher told us to check out the michigan.gov website for special education; that it had a lot of great resources, such as descriptions of different types of learning disabilities. I was very excited about this, but when I got to the website I was disappointed. I don't know if I was looking in the wrong places, but all I could find were articles about the political aspect of special education, law suits and annual yearly progress, etc. I know this is an important part, but the special ed. teacher will handle most of those issues (right?) so as a general educator it wasn't very helpful. If I'm wrong feel free to inform me, but I feel that knowing about IDEA and the fact that I need to follow IEP plans is enough information for me as far as the legal issues go. I did find one fact sheet that I thought was interesting, as it was specific to Michigan. It compared the percentage of special ed students in Michigan to other states and explained IDEA. There was also a section titled "how is the impact of special education measured" that I thought was interesting, but it was only a few bulleted points. Then there were some statistics, which I found the most interesting--it stated the percent of MI students with an IEP that take the MEAP, and the trends were surprising. From 4th to 8th grade the percentage goes up, but it falls again in 11th grade in both math and ELA. (Does ELA mean English Language Arts?) I would have thought the percentages would be continuous, so I'm wondering why it is that more 8th graders with IEP's take the MEAPs. Also interesting was the rise in graduation rate for students with IEP's: in 1999 the number was 5,027, and in 2004 it was 8,358. This could mean anything though because they don't give the number of students with IEP's each year, so it might be that the program is getting better, but it could also be that there were just more students with IEP's, or just that schools are passing more of these students with lower standards to push them through the system. I just thought it was interesting that the information on the government website, which came recommended by an actual special ed. teacher, was so vague and inconclusive. I think it reflects the situation of the special ed. preparation that teachers receive--inconclusive in my opinion. How, after 6 class sessions, are we supposed to be prepared to really do the best we can to meet all of our students needs? (Okay, my dissatisfaction is a side note, back to the topic...) The link to that fact sheet is: http://www.mi.gov/documents/05-01FactSheet_123888_7.pdf
I think I'm done with that website, it seemed to be generally a waste of time. Another thing I did today is return to the AZ teacher forum (the link to that is in my last post) and create an account. I then posted a message about my inquiry project asking experienced teachers to leave any advice they feel is crucial for a teacher starting out, since I feel like our program leaves us unprepared. I was a little nervous about this since I'm not very into exchanging information on the Internet and I didn't know what was okay to say, etc. but I'm excited about hopefully getting some responses!
the link to my post is: http://forums.atozteacherstuff.com/showthread.php?t=32427