Archive for the 'Musings' Category

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Who has rights?

Published on 21 October 2007 in Acting in, Acting out, ADHD, Autism, Behavior management, Conduct disorder, Families, Musings, News, Policy and Research. 2 Comments

When should a student’s right to participate in education be denied because his or her behavior is inimical to rights of other students’ to benefit from education? When is one student’s behavior so problemsome that his “right” to be in a classroom is trumped by his peers’ right to participate in an orderly learning environment?

Most educators, I would hazard a guess, want to make it possible for students to participate in a minimally restrictive environment. Although the “least restrictive environment” clause of the US special education law is buried pretty deeply in the structural outline of legal guarantees, it is advocated strongly by many people (educators, parents, attorneys, etc.) concerned about special education. And, many advocates argue that it—the “right” to the “least restrictive environment”—is the ace of trumps.

Is it? When does the balance shift from the access rights of an individual to the access rights of the individual’s peers? When are the interests of an individual to participate in “mainstream” education of lesser importance than the interests of peer students’ access to an environment that is conducive to learning (i.e., not disrupted)?

These and some other matters are the likely subjects of discussion at a forthcoming meeting on classroom disruptions. Suitably scheduled for Hallowe’en, the meeting will be held in Washington (DC, US). here’s the basic info:

Class Disrupted: Disorder and Its Effects on Learning and School Culture

October 31, 2007

Location: Washington, DC

Many teachers and principals struggle to create and maintain positive classroom and school cultures–free of disruption, disrespect, bullying, intimidation, and violence. While public school systems are rightly focused on meeting AYP and the other requirements of No Child Left Behind, they must also address the fact that without order and respect, little learning and progress can be achieved. Student misbehavior that goes unaddressed in the hallways and the classroom undermines instruction, stifles the development of character and social skills, and contributes to teacher burnout. This forum will:

* Examine disorderly conditions in schools, including factors contributing to the problem, looking beyond traditional concerns about safety and violence, to acts of disrespect, disregard for school rules, and disruptive behavior;
* Highlight the consequences of disorder in schools, specifically on learning and culture;
* Present new ideas on how law impacts student discipline at the school level; and
* Share key perspectives on what must be done to help restore respect and order and maintain safe and productive schools.

Date: October 31, 2007
Time: 8:00 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Registration begins at 8:00 a.m.
Lunch will be provided
Location:

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
1779 Massachusetts Ave., N.W.
Washington, D.C.

If you’re interested in this topic, contact RSVP@cgood.org. (or for more information, contact Ali Kliegman at akliegman [at] cgood.org or 212.681.8199 x14.

Flash of the electrons to Elona Hartjes of Teachers At Risk whose post, “Class Disrupted: Disorder and Its Effects on Learning and School Culture” brought this to my attention.

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Prevalence

Published on 7 October 2007 in Assessment, Families, Musings, Policy and Research. 1 Comment

How many students have Emotional and Behavioral Disoders? Is it 1%, 5%, 10%, or even more? What is the true prevalence of EBD?

Some children and youth with problems in the emotional and behavioral area have difficulties that do not rise to the level of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders. Reasonable adults know that every individual experiences bumps along the road. But what counts as a legitimate Emotional or Behavioral Disorder, not just a bump in the road?

This begs the question of how we define EBD. That’s a serious issue, one that policy makers should examine. And they should turn to the extant data about what’s normal. There are plenty of data that address this point.

The philosophical side of the question about what is normal turns, in part, on the question of whether “normal” is defined as what’s “right” or what’s “average” (borrowing from Ullman & Krassner). Some behavior among children and youth (say, sexual contact with peers) may be common (i.e., average) but not socially acceptable (i.e., ideal). Societies must wrestle with this matter, and social mores (e.g., religious views) often enter in the discussion.

But, another way to examine this matter is to ask how often people (parents, teachers, and individuals themselves) report that children and youth display behaviors that are so unusual that they are abnormal. Is, for example, Jim’s nosepicking such a problem (he really gouges the nostrils all day long!) that it’s more frequent and more severe (deeper pentration) than 99% of other children? Well, if the answer is “yes” and we consider nosepicking an inappropriate behavior, then it’s a problem. It’s abnormal.

It turns out that researchers have lots of data about the important others’ (parents, teachers) ratings of of children and youths’ behavior. Some kids do things that are generally out of the range or normal often and over extended periods of time. Sometimes, multiple raters—parents and teachers or teachers over several years—give similar ratings to the same youths.

If there is convergence among these ratings, wouldn’t one think that they represent problems worth examining? I’d say, “Yes.”

My colleagues and I are examining all the empirical studies we can find that report data about the prevalence of emotional and behavioral problems among school children. If we find that scientifically trustworthy studies show a higher prevalence of EBD among school children than the percentage of students identified by the research samples, we’ll have to suggest alternative explanations for the findings.

What might those explanations be? Why are more (or fewer) students with EBD identified in the US schools than are pesent in the population, according to prevalence research?

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Adolescent psych

Published on 28 September 2007 in Autism, Bi-polar, Causes, Musings, News, Research, The press and Treatment. 0 Comments

Altough I’ve only recently skimmed it, Erica Westly has a blog that appears to have some relevant content. Readers might wish to take a peek at Adolescent Psych. I saw content on many topics that overlap with those we cover here at EBD Blog.

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Arsenault on Adam

Published on 13 August 2007 in Autism, Families, Musings, Policy, The press and Treatment. 0 Comments

What happens when a child with Autism grows up? In “Raising Adam,” Charlene Arsenault explores this issue by examining the case of Adam Davis and his family. Ms. Arsenault’s article, which appeared in the Worchester Magazine (published by Worcehster State College, MA, US) 09 August 2007, has a good combination of tugs on the heartstrings and the difficult real-life problems encountered in providing care for adults with disabilities.

But Adam’s 27 now, and Nancy finds herself stepping toward the most major decision of her life. For parents with severely handicapped children, there usually comes a time where they’ve got to put their faith in another caregiver — when their “kids” have got to move to another living situation for everyone’s sanity. Adam has to move on so that Nancy herself can finally live. He is so ingrained in her daily existence that she has little separation from him; and he is an integral part of his sister Sarah’s and father Rich’s lives as well.

Although the problems are substantial—they must sometimes be overwhelming—for the individuals and their families, there are also problems for public policy. Contemporary emphasis on de-institutionalization, normalization, community services, inclusion, and other similarly widely championed movements add to the problems. Is an in-home placement the appropriate one for everybody? Is a community living environment right for individuals with the most substantial needs for help?

Ms. Arsenault does not directly address these and other related questions, but her story does provide a valuable glimpse at some of the problems that lie just beneath the stories of individuals like Adam and their families. Read the article here.

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Onion

Published on 15 July 2007 in ADHD, Autism and Musings. 0 Comments

Caution: Irreverant humor ahead.

The Onion, which publishes (sometimes scatological or profane) humor about nearly anything, has a parody of the person-in-the-street poll under the headline “202 Chemicals Linked To ADHD, Autism.”

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Ethnicity and diagnosis

Published on 31 May 2007 in Assessment, Autism, Families, Musings, News and Policy. 2 Comments

Earlier this week, the Charleston (WV, US) Daily Mail carried a story entitled “Black children with autism diagnosed later” that reported about the problem of false negative identifications by ethnicity. The story recounts the case of a boy named Ronnie who went through a string of other diagnoses before being identified as having autism.
Continue reading ‘Ethnicity and diagnosis’

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Schools failed

Published on 21 May 2007 in Acting out, Musings, News, Policy and The press. 1 Comment

In an article entitled “City special-ed lapses increase school violence,” Martha Woodall and Susan Snyder of the Philadelphia (PA, US) Inquirer describe how the local education agency’s failure to provide appropriate services to a student with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders played a role in that student’s beating of a teacher. On 23 February 2007 in a hallway outside Frank Burd’s algebra class, student Donte Boykin pushed his teacher (Mr. Burd) into another student, James Footman. Mr. Footman punched Mr. Burd in the face repeatedly, and Mr. Burd fell, breaking his neck.
Continue reading ‘Schools failed’

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Handcuffs in school

Published on 4 May 2007 in Acting out, Behavior management, Musings, News and Policy. 2 Comments

A school board in Milwaukee (WI, US) voted to develop a policy that would allow schools to permit the use of handcuffs on students. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel commented on this issue in an editorial in late April. Here’s the beginning of that editorial:
Continue reading ‘Handcuffs in school’

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What counts

Published on 3 March 2007 in Autism, Behavior management, Families, Musings, News and Research. 3 Comments

As a part of an effort to prepare a paper about what counts as evidence-based education, I’ve been poking around the Web for places that use that phrase to refer to their products. They are legion, but I spent a while drilling down into one that I want to use to illustrate a point. Thus, I’ve been learning a bit about Autism Pro.
Continue reading ‘What counts’

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Cute temporarily

Published on 3 February 2007 in ADHD, Behavior management and Musings. 0 Comments

Over on Mentor Matters, Mrs. Ris has a quick post that captures an almost-forgotten element of teaching students with Emotional and Behavioral Disoders (and, likely, just about any students). One day what a student does can seem nearly endearing and a source of wonder, but an experienced teacher knows that those same behaviors will not be acceptable in the longer run. It’s a good lesson about what it’s like to teach and see children day-in and day-out..

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Charge dropped

Published on 7 January 2007 in Behavior management, Musings and News. 0 Comments

The disorderly conduct charge brought against a 12-year-old special education student in Danville (PA, US) has been dropped according to a story carried by the Associated Press. As I noted in an earlier EBD Blog entry, the child was charged with disorderly conduct after she wet her pants during an encounter with the school principal.
Continue reading ‘Charge dropped’

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Diagnoses galore

Published on 11 November 2006 in ADHD, Bi-polar, Families, Musings and News. 0 Comments

Children receive diverse psychiatric diagnoses of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders that leave parents and the children bewildered, according to a story entitled “What’s Wrong With a Child? Psychiatrists Often Disagree” by Benedict Carey, in the New York (NY, US) Times. Mr. Carey recounts multiple examples of children who have been characterized as having bipolar disorder, attention deficit disorder, oppositional-defiant disorder, pervasive developmental disorder, depression and anxiety.

At a time when increasing numbers of children are being treated for psychiatric problems, naming those problems remains more an art than a science. Doctors often disagree about what is wrong.

A child’s problems are now routinely given two or more diagnoses at the same time, like attention deficit and bipolar disorders. And parents of disruptive children in particular — those who once might have been called delinquents, or simply “problem children” — say they hear an alphabet soup of labels that seem to change as often as a child’s shoe size.

In my opinion, this is a pretty predictable consequence of approaching these problems as something that should be handled by medical practices, when many of them would be better managed by environmental manipulations. We need to identify the specific needs of the children and design methods for teaching them how to do things. If the problem is “argues with adults,” we should analyze the conditions under which the behavior occurs—the antecedents and the consequences of arguing—and either modify those events or teach the child a self-management strategy (or both). If the problem is fidgeting (is that really a problem?), we need to determine what fidgeting does for the child and address that function; I suspect that most children can learn non-fidgets activities and, when we make them more rewarding than fidgeting, the salience of the problem will be reduced greatly.

What happens too often, in my view, is that we go through a checklist of “symptoms” looking for a secret, hidden pattern that represents an underlying disorder. We’re still trying to do Freud here. What we actually get, of course, is a cluster problems. Evidence may show that these problems do, in fact, cluster together, but such clustering doesn’t necessarily indicate that they reflect an underlying organic base for the individual problems.

I also recognize that providers of mental health care for children must use a diagnostic system so that costs of providing services can be charged to insurance companies. Just because someone has to pay for therapy doesn’t mean that therapy has to be medications nor that we should ignore simple and practical means of addressing problems.

Link to Mr. Carey’s article (free subscription may be required).

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