The importance of classroom interventions

Academic literacy is so important, yet I often observe that a majority of students with language processing difficulties, learning disabilities, home language other than English (HLOTE) and other factors that interfere with literacy attainment often never get the level of help they need to be successful in a school setting. What's troubling about this is the poor outcomes these students have. Consider the following:

-74% of children who are unsuccessful readers in the third grade are still unsuccessful readers in the ninth grade. (Journal of Child Neurology, January, 1995)

-Only 52% of students identified with learning disabilities will actually graduate with a high school diploma.

-Learning disabled students drop out of high school at more than twice the rate of their non-disabled peers. (Congressional Quarterly Researcher, December, 1993)

-At least 50% of juvenile delinquents have undiagnosed, untreated learning disabilities. (National Center for State Courts and the Educational Testing Service, 1977)

-31% of adolescents with learning disabilities will be arrested within five years of leaving high school. (National Transition Longitudinal Study, 1991)

-Up to 60% of adolescents who receive treatment for substance abuse disorders have learning disabilities (Hazelden Foundation, Minnesota, 1992)

-62% of learning disabled students were unemployed one year after graduation. (National Longitudinal Transition Study, 1991)

Clearly these students need serious intervention in order to have good outcomes, but the truth is, few are getting it. The bulk of the problem can be blamed on poor educational funding (which impacts staffing levels). To some extent, it is also one of training.

For one, most mainstream classroom teachers have never been trained in any way to work with students who have language-related difficulties. This wouldn't matter a whole lot, except that mainstream classrooms are where most of these students spend the vast majority of their day. Few classroom teachers have much training that goes beyond the typical demands of their subject area. If they have any training related to learning disabilities, it's from attending a one-hour in-service and mostly of the "awareness" variety. The majority of teachers never receive any practical training on how to work with students with learning disabilities or language acquisition difficulties, and yet nearly all teachers will have one or more of these students in the classroom.

Why is that a problem? After all, mainstream teachers didn't sign up to work with these kinds of students, right? Well, the reality is, most mainstream teachers are doing so, whether they want to or not. Due to the funding cuts over the last several years, fewer of these students will be served by trained specialists regardless of placement (there aren't enough Special Ed personnel or resource teachers in most schools to realistically provide an adequate level of service to students with learning disabilities, so guess where most of these student will end up? Your fourth period class! (After all, the person who does the scheduling appears to have a perverse sense of humore and will probably lump all of your most challenging students together in one period.)

Furthermore, in many or most schools in this state, you won't even have a para in the classroom because most of the paras who once provided some additional support for students placed in mainstream classes were laid-off in the past couple of years). I've noticed that with ELLs (English Language Learners), most are being dumped into mainstream classes with little ongoing support from anyone from the ESL department either. In the case of ELLs, as with many of mainstreamed students with IEPs, most of the support that was formerly provided by paras in a mainstream classroom was withdrawn when the majority of bilingual paras were also laid off. (Basically, outside of self-contained Special Education or ESL, except in the instances where an individual student is receiving one-on-one support, you won't see a lot of paras in a mainstream classroom anymore--if you do see one, he or she is likely there to assist one student very intensively and won't have time to work with any other students who might benefit from having an additional adult in the room. Yet, as I said before, that is where the majority of students are.)

To make a long story short, what has happened, at least in my state, is that these students were systematically dumped into mainstream classes with teachers who were never trained to work with them, and left to sink or swim. It's no surprise that the majority sink...A few of the luckier ones will receive intervention outside of the school day, but most will not. The kinds of programs that offer targeted interventions in literacy acquisition are usually not adequately funded, so they can rarely serve the number of students who truly need them. Tutoring and other fee-for-services programs will naturally only be able to serve those who can afford to pay.

Educational funding is unlikely to increase to the point where students who need help will get it anytime soon. In the meantime, I would recommend that ALL teachers who care enough to want to do right by these students take the time to self-educate about learning disabilities, language acquisition issues, and other related topics. For your students who have IEPs, find out which specific learning disability/ies your student/s have, and learn what you can. The internet is a good place to get started, but for quality information, you are really better off checking out books from the library, or acquiring textbooks on learning disabilities (a good source of affordable books on this topic is previous edition of whatever textbooks they are currently using in school of education courses--because they aren't the newest latest edition, they are usually not being used by colleges, and therefore a lot cheaper. If you're really lucky, they'll turn up in places like Goodwill or a yard sale). For ELLs, besides the obvious step of learning something about the cultural issues in your particular population (do you work with Mexican migrant families or refugees from Somalia?), I would highly recommend learning about second language acquisition and its impact on academic learning in English. There are some really good websites, journals, and books on this topic.

Particular strategies and interventions can be learned either through training, or consulting with a specialist (your school or district specialists may or may not be able to camp out in your room, but they would probably be more than happy to share their knowledge and expertise with you). In the case of learning disabilities, make sure you stay in regular contact with the student's Special Ed teacher/s, case managers, or the student's family. All of these people are a potential source of valuable information about ideas for working with your students.

Until the general populace and politicians come to their senses and make educational funding a priority (rather than an afterthought), those of us in education are stuck with a huge mess. As cathartic as it may be to blame others, it's even more cathartic to increase your own effectiveness in working with students who have educational challenges. The more you know about the difficulties your students face in school, the more effective your teaching will be in reaching them. You may never realize what a difference you could potentially make when armed with new knowledge, but even the smallest thing (like suggesting a simple strategy) might really have an impact on the performance of a kid in your classroom.