Have you listened to any teenagers talk about school these days?
The one disagreement I have with the article is that there ARE girls in Special Ed nowadays, and they hold their placement as some sort of badge of honor, like being considered stupid is cool.
There are a number of boys who do well in school; the really smart kids always do well. The special ed kids get advantages, too, like modified assignments. The ones in the middle get the squeeze, though. They are just shunted along, unless they happen to get a fabulous teacher. But from what our daughters friends say, they are few and far between.
One of the reasons we homeschooled our younger two, starting in middle school, was because our daughter was beginning to exhibit signs of abject boredom. She approaches education much like boys; she wants to know the point, and she's not interested in fluff. I guess having a brilliant Dad and 3 brothers helped, but I'm not much of an education fluff person, either, so she gets it honestly. We sent our youngest son back to school for his first two years of high school, but it was an all boys school, and there was not a hint of fluff, anywhere, but we decided that we enjoyed the freedom of homeschooling, so he'll finish his last two years at home. It will be great having him home again. He's our youngest, and, as are his older siblings, is just fun to be around.
So this was my big beef with our school district this past year. My daughter has brain damage, and we took her to a neuropsychologist, learning specialist and a speech therapist to get a very good evaluation of her strengths and weaknesses. Everyone agrees that her strength is in math and her weakness is in speech.
However, the evaluation also showed that my daughter has auditory memory problems (1%), very poor phonemic awareness (9%), and some other poor word attack skills. She's already starting to slip in her reading level. She just finished 3rd grade, and I would estimate her reading level to be around 3.5.
The only thing the school district offered to do (besides speech) was to modify her homework. They did not want to bring up her phonemic awareness, to work on her auditory memory, or to work on her word attack skills. There are some very reputable programs to help kids like my daughter (lindamood-bell) and others, but the district just wants to give her easier school work.
I was furious!!!!!! We're putting her in private. We can't afford lindamood-bell, but we are getting he in a reading program that uses the Orton-Gillingham multi-sensory reading.
I want my daughter to be remediated. I don't want her to just be given easier homework. It would be one thing if all methods had been exhausted, and my daughter couldn't learn. However, the district has tried zero methods with her. They don't want to remediate her at all.
I hope my daughter does well in private school. Plus, it will be in a Christian environment.