I am a secondary teacher of special education students in Florida. There are many problems with educations that are focused on but there appears to be a limited amount of voices about special education. Teaching struggling, detached, and dispassionate students is a passion for many special education teachers. Writing individualized education plans (IEP) is not a passion. Every year many special education teachers ( in my district anyway) are faced with the burden of making sure their "paperwork" is in correct order with manufactured language about the special ed student. If the paperwork in not in order then the teacher faces the risk of termination, never mind if the goals and benchmarks have been implemented. The point is that the state of Florida only seems to focus more on documentation of IEP's rather than the implementation. This is extremely frustrating to special educators who are in this positions to help struggling students progress and to get results for themselves as educators. In the past 5 years Florida state IEP has gone from 5 pages to 20 pages. Students continue to have the same problem as the previous year (i.e. low reading and math scores, attendance issues, behavioral problems) and most parents do not understand the language used in this 20 pages legal document. I am curious to hear from other special education teachers from around the country and in other school districts. What is your experience like with IEP's and its implementation and language? Do you see IEP's as effective or a nuisance to public education?
Special education and IEP's
February 14th, 2009 | posted by nique413
IEP Observations
Your post gets me wondering what other districts do with IEPs. Do any districts employ someone to work on IEP compliance for teachers? It seems a waste of teacher time to toil over IEPs for compliance. I also wonder if the compliance is more stringent for federal or state compliance. Probably both need reforms.
Here in Washington our IEPs typically are probably about 5 to 15 pages at the elementary level (don't quote me on that; it's an approximation); it all depends on how many services students receive. The dirty secret is that other teachers, classroom teachers at the elementary and especially secondary level, don't have time to read and recall IEP details. As you mentioned, parents often struggle to understand the IEP language. And teachers too often have to much on their plate to follow the accommodation and modification as specified in the IEP, at least until the state test, the WASL, comes around, then we know who can be read what, etc.
As an ELL teacher I previously had to do what we call green files. The green files contain testing information, the enrollment paperwork, and letters sent home to parents. Every year twice a year, we ELL teachers had to put copies in each student's file of letters sent home to parents and later copies of the yearly assessment we give to ELLs. This year, the files were finally taken over by the district office. But I still must spend time testing bilingual students with a state language proficiency test that gives me little to no new information about my students.
At the elementary level each IEP team professional has the duty of putting together part of the IEP and our pyschologist manages getting everything together. Our poor pyschologist works at three schools and is always stressed about workload. At the end of the year, the resource room, or special education, services end early for paperwork. As you mentioned, more time on paperwork, less time on academic and behavior interventions...TEACHING.
The bottom line is that all teachers are overworked and education is underfunded.
Some Response to Intervention (RTI) advocates believe an RTI model reduces the number of referrals and thus some unneccesary paperwork. Time freed up from paperwork means more time for teaching and interventions for at-risk students. I've heard that even school pyschologists are freed up and thus able to participate in academic or behavior interventions for pre-referral students. Has anyone worked at a school with an RTI model? What did you think of it? Did you have less paperwork?