Category Archives: Special Education

Boise Weekly features Cavener regarding charter demographic data

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citizen_levicavenerI don’t know about the caricature, but the interview is pretty darn good.  It’s worth checking out.

A snippet from the Boise Weekly article:

Teaching is a passion. Teaching students with disabilities is doubly so. Levi Cavener, an instructor at Vallivue High School in Caldwell, has been a special education instructor for five years. As an undergraduate at the University of Idaho, he spent time abroad through the Camp Adventure program, exploring Europe with children whose parents were serving in the military. One child lost a parent during Cavener’s time in the program and he described others as “genuinely alone,” not hearing from parents for weeks on end. Those experiences helped ignite his passion for education.

 

 

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Levi Cavener Featured on Podcast Hosted by The Great Education Struggle

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wpid-img_41539946199072.jpegThis Saturday the host of The Great Education Struggle blog and podcast , Isaac Moffet, was gracious enough to open up his studio for an interview on how Common Core is impacting special education students.

It was a pleasure to take part in describing the impacts I see of Common Core and related policy in my own classroom.

Also of note, Travis Manning, a candidate for District 10A in Idaho’s legislature and Director for the Common Sense Democracy Foundation of Idaho, was kind enough to join us to share impacts he sees of Common Core in the general education classroom, particularly for special education students who have been mainstreamed into his environment.

The interview covered lots of juicy topics including common core, the SBAC, tiered certification, and the influence of politics in Idaho’s educational system.

Please check it out!

Idaho Teachers: Take Your Bribe and Settle Down

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ui_sealThe Board of Education recently sent out an open letter to Idaho’s educators regarding the new Tiered Teacher Certification proposal.

The letter flatly admits that Idaho’s teachers aren’t compensated anywhere near where they should be (true), but then argues that the only way Idaho legislators would find a raise to be palatable is to move to a tiered teacher certification system (false).

A few things to point out here: a tiered certification system is a completely separate topic than teacher compensation. The attempt to conflate the two different items as being one and the same is deceptive, at worst, and misleading, at best.

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Response to OpEd Criticism: Square Root of Stupid

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Recently my OpEd critiquing the logic of tying federal special education reimbursement dollars was published in the Idaho Press Tribune.  As with its publication in Idaho Education News it was generally well received.

However, I did receive several messages from special education advocates arguing that special education students are capable of performing at academic proficiency and thus schools should be held accountable via Duncan’s plan to withhold the purse-strings of federal coffers for districts who are not proficient under revised guidelines for special education reimbursement.

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The Square Root of Stupid

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StupidRecently National Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced that the federal government will be changing the way in which it allocates federal money for special education services to states.  Secretary Duncan wants to tie test scores for special education to the amount of money a state receives from the federal government for reimbursement of special education services.

The logic is simple:  states that send back high special education student test scores will get more money, those with lower scores will get less or even no money.  Surely this will improve student learning, right?  Clearly No Child Left Behind’s (NCLB) emphasis of tying student test scores to federal money was a major success!  Cloning NCLB tools for special education students sounds like a real winner.

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