Dear Dr. Superintendent,
Thank you for attending the Elementary School's parent meeting last week. I just spent some time reading and contemplating the report from the City Schools Efficiency Survey.
I note that when asked to prioritize district services, 6% of respondents ranked gifted services as their top priority. According to the state data released this fall, about 6% of District students receive gifted services. I feel it is reasonable to conclude that nearly all of the families whose children receive gifted services see it as having such value as to outweigh even maintaining class size.
Furthermore, I note that 44% of the district students qualify as gifted according to state rules. Offering college-level coursework is ranked as #1 or #2 by 46% of respondents. I wonder if this a signal that the district is indeed underserving its gifted population.
Sincerely,
The Mom Advocate, PhD
Associate Professor
STEM field department
My University
I just sent the following to the superintendent of the school district, cc'd to the director of intervention services (including gifted). In an effort to show that the district is being wise with its funds, it sent out a community survey on ways to cut spending. It asked respondents to rank the relative importance of 6 things: class size, gifted services, college-level coursework (AP & dual enrollment), use of technology in the classroom, arts & performing arts, and sports, clubs & extracurriculars. More than 1800 people responded. The results of the survey were recently posted. My response:
5 Comments
Email is a good way to communicate with many teachers. It removes the time pressure and it allows for reflection when necessary. My guidelines come both through experience emailing my children's teachers, but also from receiving emails from students (and yes, occasionally their parents).
*Keep it short. Teachers often try to squeeze in emails in little gaps in their day. If you make it too long, the email gets relegated to the “deal with it later” pile. My target is generally something that will not require scrolling on a typical computer screen. *Keep it to one issue at a time. If you have a concern about how much lunch Suzie is consuming, make this a different email than a concern about reading levels. Make the subject line relevant and descriptive. *If you are upset in anything besides an issue of safety, set the issue aside for a day. Have someone else read it for you to make sure your point comes across clearly and dispassionately. *Make it a real letter. Salutations, capitalization, and punctuation all count. *Keep the emails to a minimum. If you are emailing weekly, you rise to the "nagging parent" level. Fewer emails get more attention. My basic outline is this: Dear Teacher (use first name only if she introduces herself with her first name. Otherwise, keep it formal) Compliment/appreciation Statement of agreeing with the teacher Statement of what I see at home/or statement of what my child reports Generalized but leading request to address the issue. (while always being careful to not tell the teacher how to do her job) Sincerely, Name So, for instance: Dear Ms. Teacher, Thank you for the update on {my daughter’s} reading scores. I appreciate you taking the time to do that outside of the regular reporting cycle. I share your concern about impacting his love for reading. At home, we're indeed seeing a lot of resistance to reading the bag books sent home, which is a concerning trend indeed! However, we've noted that he takes great joy in reading books that he’s picked out for himself, most recently Diary of a Wimpy Kid and a variety of non-fiction science books. I see that his reading level has increased by 2-4 months in the last year. Is there some way we can take advantage of his love of self-directed reading so that he can show more than 2-4 months of reading growth this year? Sincerely, Parent Reading levels and the level of reading instruction is often a point of difficulty for gifted kids in early grades. Teachers are obligated to make certain that every child in the class be reading at grade level. As someone paying taxes to support public education, I also want everyone in that classroom to be able to read. I believe it is best for society. Rant all day long about teacher evaluations and tenure and anything else, but at the end of the day, I want to know that everyone can read sufficiently to understand their electric bill, and also to tell that the other thing that came in the mail is not a bill but a scam.
As a result, though, the child who is already reading fluently is easy to overlook in the classroom. Sometimes these teachers are not familiar with the contrast in progression of skills for a typical student compared to a gifted student. Sometimes teachers pick up on weaknesses that we as parents do not. When you sense that your child isn’t getting reading instruction at an appropriate level, and your child is not drawing benefit from that instruction, then it’s time to ask questions. My job as parent advocate is to work together with the teacher to find mutual goals for growth in the child and to motivate the teacher to work with a child even though he is functioning above the level of her responsibility. I think the reading level issue is many parent's entry into the world of gifted advocacy. First, it helps to understand reading assessments. Our district, along with many others, uses the DRA. Other assessments are different in detail, but any reading program worth its salt will focus on a similar triad accuracy, fluency, and comprehension. The DRA reading levels are numbers, which if you divide by 10, can be translated into grade.month format. That is, a DRA level of 24 is targeted to the average child in the 4th month of 2nd grade. Be aware that Reading Recovery levels are similar to DRA, after which they diverge. It's a similar issue with the lettered Fountas and Pinnell levels and the A-Z levels. It’s helpful to have a reading level equivalency chart handy, especially in the early years. DRA Reading levels ending in ‘8’ are the highest level for a given grade level. Be aware that being told your child reads at a 38 might signal that the teacher stopped assessing at this level, and not that your child made errors at this level. DRA tests fluency, accuracy, and comprehension. For a typically developing child, this is a good test, as all three are needed to progress in reading. DRA leveled books are leveled in such a way that the expectations of each skill progress together. For children with disabilities or vast asynchronicities, some of the levels will become impossible walls to climb. In DRA-speak, each child should have two levels: the instructional level and the independent level. The instructional level is the level at which the child makes errors in at least one of those skills. The teacher should be able to report, “Johnny is instructional in fluency at a level 20.” The independent level is the level at which the child passes all three of the skills at a particular level, and therefore can likely read a book at the level with relative ease and minimal frustration. Accuracy is quantified as a percentage calculated by the number of reading errors or skipped words divided by the total number of words in the passage. Passing is generally ~90%, but I think it increases with higher levels. This is difficult for children who typically read a lot faster than they can read orally. Fluency is a combination of reading pace, with words-per-minute oral reading benchmarks that increase with increasing level. Fluency also includes a very subjective “measure” of how much voice the child puts into the reading, including pauses for commas and periods. This is difficult for children who mostly read in their heads. Comprehension for the DRA is not answering a series of questions about the passage, but determined based on retelling the story. The child closes the book and tells the teacher about the story he just read her. Points go towards telling it in order, naming characters, and at lower levels, including information contained in the pictures and not in the text. At higher levels, students need to answer questions that require inference – 18 requires coming up with the moral of the story, 38 requires inferring unstated intentions of characters in the story. 38 requires a level of inferential sophistication that many young children simply don’t yet have the maturity or experience to answer sufficiently. Stories include things like sleep overs, airplane trips, and other things that younger or economically disadvantaged students might not have encountered. At 28, the student does the retelling bit through writing. A child whose writing skill develops out of sync with his reading, will likely struggle to pass beyond a 28 unless the teacher scribes the answers. Next: How to probe the teacher for reading levels and to guide the teacher towards providing your child with appropriate instruction. Building positive relationships with the school
A lot of 2e kids fall in a gap. A lot of these kids can use their intellect to compensate for their disabilities. Sometimes the compensation takes so much work that the child can’t qualify for the school’s gifted program (if it exists), leaving the child to suffer without services, not appearing gifted enough to qualify for gifted services and not appearing disabled enough to qualify for special education services. This is where a lot of the systems within a school break down. We’ve been lucky that my kids’ issues don’t extend to taking standardized tests, and they both qualified for the gifted program. Still, when we started to get a much clearer sense of the kids’ difficulties, qualification for services wasn’t likely to happen. My daughter did ultimately qualify on a discrepancy model. I strongly believe that a lot of this happened because I have a very positive relationship with the school. I haven’t just failed to burn bridges, but I’ve built a positive relationship with those that matter. Here’s what I’ve done: Maintain a positive relationship with teachers. I keep my communication down to a minimum when at all possible, and I’m exceedingly polite. The teachers were needed to advocate for my children’s needs in intervention meetings. More on this later. Build positive relationships with the administration. One thing I’ve learned in this whole adventure is just how much control lies with the school principal. The principal manages and protects the teaching staff. The principal is the one who makes things happen, both formally and informally. That is, the principal is the ultimate arbitrator of teacher placement and signs off on a 504 or IEP (note: I understand there’s supposed to be a district representative at these meetings, but I didn’t see one until this year – our entrance into the special education world was literally controlled by the principal). I need to be seen as a concerned parent, not a pushy parent. I need to be seen as recognizing that I am working from within the system to address a complicated kid, instead of trying to find the “best” for my snowflake. My approach has been to be seen as a problem solver, who views the entire school community as important. I walk my kids to school each day. I speak to the principal every day about… nothing. I say good morning. I mention the weather. I thank him for being out for the arrival. I laugh at his large variety of crazy outfits (there are many). When the school wins an award or there’s another school-wide success, I send him a note of congratulations. Never in these interactions do I mention my kids. The school is big for an elementary school and has no busing. Traffic around the school is a problem, and the behavior of many drivers (parents!) created some very dangerous situations. The district got a Safe Routes to School study grant, and I jumped on. I got together with a few very high energy parents who orchestrated a walk to school program and found ways to address traffic. This was a volunteer role for me that took two evening meetings per year, and I would volunteer to help with the walk to school day on the way to school. I was done with my volunteer time before school starts. We worked out rewards for meeting walking goals, and I would emphasize to him that my hope was that because walking benefits everyone (even those still driving, since there was significantly less traffic) the rewards should be community wide. Anytime I brought a problem to him, like ice on the sidewalk, I would thank him for solving it. When the ice problem stayed solved this winter, I sent him a note thanking him and the janitors for their continued efforts. The result was that when we went into the meeting to qualify my daughter for an IEP, the principal viewed me as someone who was watching out for the safety and development of every kid in the school, not just my own kids. I’m not suggesting that everyone go out and run a SR2S program (but OMG, it would be awesome if every school had one), but that you find something you are passionate about that has the potential to impact kids across the school and do it. A lot of this can be done outside school (& work) hours. Some things I’ve seen: Cub scout/girl scout leader Junior Great Books leader or Classical Kids Run a Destination Imagination Team Establishing activities for kids during indoor recess days Designing t-shirts for “Spirit Days” Shelving books in the library Revamp the school website Weed the school garden Most importantly, say thank you. These administrators will need to motivate teachers and staff to do something different than their usual. Show your appreciation. I send a thank you note at the end of the year, delineating everything that went well. I keep anything that could come across as a complaint out of the than you letter. What else is a way to serve the whole school? Any other ideas of things that can be done while parenting and working full time? I just got my daughter's draft IEP in advance of our annual meeting next week. I'm so giddy to see her amazing progress (standard scores moving from 30th percentile to the 99.9 percentile), I can't really focus today. There's still so much more to do for these complicated kids. But for today, I'd like to extend an amazing THANK YOU to all intervention specialists, gifted teachers, and general education teachers that can look at the strengths and weaknesses of our children, and help them truly take off. It has been a long, difficult journey from "your kid is just too immature," to "your kid is so smart, she's just lazy," to "she's got a disability, reconsider your goals for your child," to "get out of this kid's way, she's going to take over."
So again, thanks to those professionals who dedicate their time, energy, creativity, and intellect to helping out some very difficult and complicated children. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means All professionals use a specific vocabulary in their field. Educators use particular terms to describe their field. Speaking the language helps. One error we made early in our lives at advocates for our child was we went in asking that she be allowed to learn math at a pace more quickly than the pace her class was moving. When you have a particular speed at present, and you increase that speed, that’s acceleration, right? It turns out that asking to accelerate my child in math was asking for something very different than we were asking for. The school heard the term accelerate and applied their specific meaning to the word, instead of listening to the words around the request, which should have been obvious that we were asking for something they actually call differentiation and compaction. Because of the error in our vocabulary, we were left to endure an increasingly hostile and difficult meeting in which little was accomplished. Had we known that acceleration meant something different to the educators in the room, I would have not spoken the word, and hopefully that conversation would have gone better. So, for you dear readers, some vocabulary: Differentiation: This means altering lessons to meet the child’s needs formally or informally. Informally, a child with a higher reading level can have his reading instruction differentiated by being provided books written at a higher level and taught to comprehend the text at a deeper level. Not all spelling lists have to be the same for all children. Published curricula generally come with differentiated materials for the teacher. These materials generally differentiate down two grade levels (that is, a 5th grade teacher’s materials would accommodate a child working at a 3rd grade level) and up one grade level (that is, that same curriculum package would give the teacher materials for a child working at a 6th grade level). I’m not certain if teachers are aware of the degree of differentiation, and many curricula make it somewhat difficult for the teacher to actually provide those materials to a student. The existence of differentiated materials is a the reason why schools don’t always see the need to adjust grade placement, as the teacher ought to be able to provide differentiated materials for a child working above grade level. Compaction: Compaction is doing the content of a class at a faster pace than typical. Many gifted math programs will do a year of covering the late elementary grade more quickly than typical. For instance, a gifted class may do 4th, 5th, and 6th grade math in 4th and 5th grades, allowing for these children to do prealgebra as 6th graders. Other programs might cover the content of a middle school class social studies in the first semester and then address other subjects not typically addressed in a middle school curriculum. Acceleration: This is skipping a year of content. When skipping a year of a particular subject, this is called a single-subject acceleration. “Skipping a grade” is whole-grade acceleration. A post on the pros and cons of each of these interventions will come later. I also promise to provide more edu-speak decoder rings. For those reading along, what terms have tripped you up? Advocating for complicated kids (gifted, 2e, LD, or anything in between) is stressful. IEP meetings are as draining for me as my PhD qualifying exams were, and it sometimes feel as though I put as much time and sense of self worth into preparing for them.
Keep in mind that this is a marathon, not a sprint. You don't stop for a Gatorade in a sprint. You do, however, "walk the water stops" for a Gatorade in a marathon. Your body needs replenishment. Marathons also go better if your run with a friend. It's someone there to support you, encourage you, and be there for you at the finish. Don't forget to take time for yourself. Lean on your partner if possible. Find a friend who's been there, and lean on that person for moral support and guidance. And remember to walk the water stop and get that Gatorade. Gatorade in this case could be a milkshake, a margarita, or a diet coke. Take some time and do something that satisfies you and signals to you that *this drink is for you.* A friend is on her way over. We're going to go over the draft IEP for her 2e son. She's stressed, feeling out of her depth, and feeling unprepared. Hopefully we'll get her feeling a little better about the whole thing before the end of the evening. And we might crack open a bottle of wine while she's here. Treat teachers as professionals: They have a degree in their field, often a MEd and additional certifications. Even if you feel the teacher is failing your child, all communication is with respect and deferential to the teacher’s expertise. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the teacher is the expert on your child. It’s certainly appropriate to explain disabilities, personality quirks, and other features that are unique to your child.
Assume that teachers have your child’s best interest at heart. They do. They may have different priorities for your child, but they are acting in what they view as your child’s best interest at heart. Even if you have evidence to the contrary, set your demeanor to be one of respect and acknowledging of your child’s teacher and her goals for your child. Having both these rules, teachers are professionals and teachers have my child’s best interest at heart as part of your mindset will make all advocacy easier, as the teacher is less likely to see you as a pushy parent and more as a concerned parent. That teacher is then much more likely to include you and your perspective as part of your child’s educational team. Always speak positively about your child’s teacher in front of your child. Wow, this one can be hard. Particularly in the early grades, all advocacy on behalf of your child should be as behind-the-scenes as possible. Have conversations between you and your partner after bedtime. When your child complains about a teacher (or complains about school in which you identify the source of the issue to be the teacher), help your child see all parts of the situation, including the teacher’s perspective. By all means give your child tools to self-advocate (hmmm, that should go on my list of upcoming topics – an important set of skills to teach as your child heads towards independence), but never say, “Mrs. Smith is a bad teacher,” or anything that could translate like that in your child’s head. Burn no bridges: I’ve got two kids. Between then, I’m spending 8 years working with our local K-5 school, and it’s teachers, aides, and administrators. Thank goodness we had a change in principals after our third year with the school, because it gave us a fresh start. Errors in advocacy I made when my daughter was in 2nd grade, however, impacted my son when the school was looking to move him into first grade part way through kindergarten. For many reasons, the best option would have been to move him into the class headed by my daughter’s 2nd grade teacher. That teacher said no. We were given a different excuse, but I’m 99% sure that the teacher said she didn’t want to work with me again. My son’s acceleration was impacted because of bridges I’d burned in ineffectively advocating for my daughter with that teacher several years previously. There are words that I’ve learned should never pass my lips when discussing my children’s needs with teachers or administrators at their school:
Gifted. There are too many ways to define what is gifted and it’s a loaded word and bring with it baggage. Just don’t go there. It’s not necessary. Unless your child is identified gifted according to your school’s criteria and it’s a term your school uses and the person you’re talking to uses it first, don’t say the word. Say, “highly capable,” “bright,” “learns quickly,” “intense,” “mini philosopher,” “introspective,” or “loves reading/math,” but don’t utter the word gifted. As an example of this confusion, consider the rules in my state set a series of criteria for gifted identification. Under these rules, nearly half the students in my children’s district are gifted. However, state law also leaves the criteria for gifted services up to each district. In this district, only about 5% receive services. The teachers and administrators in this district only acknowledge those served as gifted. Are those kids ID’d by the state but not served by the district gifted? According to the state they are. But those parents will come across as ill informed (or cocky or suffering from special snowflake syndrome) if they call their kid gifted because of the local terminology. Just don’t go there. There are more accurate ways to discuss your child’s needs anyways. It’s best to be specific anyways. Bored. Never. Say. Bored. Many parents hear their bright child is bored and immediately jump to “the school isn’t challenging my child.” That may be the case. But take a moment to think about when you’re bored in your personal or professional life. I’m often bored in faculty meetings because I don’t find the material interesting, even though I need to know the content of the discussion. I also get bored when the content of my day doesn’t engage me intellectually, or because the work is mundane and routine (grading). I also get bored when the content is too hard. At a recent conference, I had two talks I wanted to attend in a session, with one talk on a different topic between the two. Instead of walking out for the 15 minutes of the intervening talk, I stayed. I had no idea what the talk was about, totally lacking all the background knowledge to follow the talk. The result was that I was bored stiff. As with gifted, there are better terms to use to describe the situation. My favorite term is “engagement.” For example, “I sense from my son that he’s not engaging with the reading lessons.” My child reads at a X grade level. I never, ever state to a teacher or administrator that my child is at a particular grade level. Parents tend to look at it as, “my kid read this book and it’s a X a grade level, therefore my kid reads at that level.” Seems reasonable and logical. The problem is that there are so many ways to measure reading level. No two assessment schemes do it the same way. Teachers will likely look at more than whether or not your child could read the words or if your child understood it, but they measure things like how fast your child read it, how many errors in accuracy were made, whether or now your child had a good “voice” to the reading, or could answer detailed questions on the passage, including making inferences. By stating that your child reads at a particular level, and that level is different from what the teacher has assessed, then you lose credibility. The teacher goes away thinking, “wow, that parent has an overblown sense of their kid.” Instead, try “My son read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMN this weekend. On the way to school, he brought up a discussion about how it made him think about how technology is both a positive and negative in society.” This communicates something significantly more concrete: the child read a book in a short time period and was able to discuss some of the implications of the story. My child can do X grade math. This is the same issue as reading levels. Teachers are looking at more than whether or not your child can add 3 digit numbers. They look at mathematical thinking and reasoning, and particularly in math, teachers tend to be very scared of gaps in your child’s knowledge. Instead, try, “My daughter noticed that things like trees have patterns that repeat at a smaller and smaller level. We watched a video on fractals, and she’s started drawing these illustrations.” Better or Harder Work: Some of my reasoning here harkens back to the issues of perceptions of the place of gifted education in public schools. To come across as advocating for the special snowflake, by all means say you need your child to have better work. To come across as the parent that will drive your child into a nervous breakdown, by all means say your child needs harder work. Go for “more appropriate” as an alternate. This puts the focus on your child’s needs, and also uses a term the teacher should be familiar with from meeting the needs of children receiving special education services. When you have a sense that your child needs something different from school, resist the temptation to fire off an email or corner the teacher at drop off. Take a deep breath, remind yourself that children are resilient, and remember that you need to keep your relationship with the school positive for several years to come. Advocating for children in public school is a marathon, not a sprint. Don’t act quickly unless you child’s safety is at risk. All discussions with the school require evidence. Take notes and collect evidence. This is step 2. My first experience in one of those Huge, Intimidate The Parents Meeting (aka “intervention team meeting”) at my child’s school came part way through my daughter’s 2nd grade year. As any good, modern parent, I googled and posted questions on message boards seeking guidance on how to prepare (Here's the most comprehensive article I found, though there are major gaps that I'll address in time). My kid was bored, clearly ahead of the class in multiple areas, and asking for more. And suddenly, she was refusing to go to school. Something had to change. The universal response to my question was to bring evidence of what the child does at home, like workbook pages. Ummm, my kids don’t do workbooks at home. They don’t like them, and I have been cautious to not make the fit between my child and their school day worse. I had no evidence, or so I thought. My main problem, in retrospect, was in record keeping. Start this now, even if things are mostly ok. It's a good habit to establish. When planning this blog, I asked folks for topic suggestions. Organization came up several times. I should be the last person on this planet to discuss organizational schemes. Here goes nothing. Note taking: Jot down direct quotes from your child with dates and times, and annotate the context. I now use a calendar that sits near that spot where paper accumulates in the house. I print out a stack of 1-month calendars at the start of the school year. Each kid is in a different color. I also jot down notes of other issues that may or may not be related to school. As a parent advocating for my child, I need to figure out what my child is experiencing as well as to figure out what my child needs. I don’t get a lot of details from my kids about their day. Sometimes issues require sleuthing out an underlying cause not directly evident to my child or that my child can’t or won’t express. When my daughter was in second grade (in this blog, you’ll see lots of her 2nd grade stories. It was a pivotal year in many ways), my daughter was having awful days about twice a week. She would be upset at the end of the day, only saying she hated school. Jotting notes on the calendar, I noted that it was a consistent two days each week, days that I ultimately traced to days her class went to art. Something in the art class was causing her tremendous stress. This allowed me to have a productive conversation with the teacher about art class, and the issue was ultimately addressed. On this calendar, I now also note things my kids do that surprise me, books read, startling questions and uses of vocabulary, as well as comments about wishing she could learn something at school just once. I go for direct quotes when I can (denoted by double quotation marks) and as approximate as I can remember (denoted with a ‘~’ and single quotation marks). This long record is not necessarily immediately useful, but it’s potentially very valuable in the long run. I had no such thing available to me at the time of that first intervention meeting. Collect evidence: Teachers generally do not see or hear the same things about school you do. When your child is asking for more or is struggling in a particular area, start a folder and collect returned schoolwork or other things your child does. I keep the folder the teacher passes out for back to school night and shove everything into it for later sorting. Things I keep include spelling lists where my child miscopies the words from the book, speed multiplication tests where handwriting causes issues, math worksheets where my child shows real insight, and poetry with adult-like vocabulary. I also collect drawings and other things my kids do at home spontaneously. Add the date and the child's naThe one pictured here is the single piece of evidence I could bring with me to that intervention meeting when my daughter was in 2nd grade. On the walk to school one day, she’d noted how tree branches were like mini tree trunks, and twigs were like mini tree branches, and so forth. I told her what that was called, and we discussed other examples of fractals (mountains and coastlines), and I later showed her some mathematical ones when it came up again at home the next day. My drawing was black and white lines. This fairy drawing is what she drew in indoor recess about a week after those discussions. I brought the to the meeting (it went badly. Very badly. Note the planned post on Mistakes Were Made). Part way through the meeting I gave up on the rest of the 2nd grade year, and decided not to say anything about the drawing. It was silly, I thought. My daughter was asking to learn multiplication, what did this fractal fairy have to do with that? By this point, the teacher had seen dozens of such drawings that my daughter had put on school work, filling time when she was done with her work. No one in the room would care. Well, I placed the drawing next to me as I looked for a different sheet of notes. Sitting next to me was the gifted teacher. At the end of the meeting, the gifted teacher quietly and casually said, “you know, we can test your child to see if a subject acceleration in math might be warranted. All you have to do to get the process started is to fill out a form.” In the end, the right person saw the necessary evidence. More fractals |
AuthorSTEM Prof. Mom of 2 extraordinary kids in public school. @StemMomAdvocate Archives
May 2014
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