Reason #5 to Pick a New State Superintendent: Fabricating Special Education Percentages

In case you missed yesterday’s endorsement of Superintendent Barresi from the Oklahoman, well too bad. I’m not going to link to it. At best, their praise was tepid. While I mentioned it briefly in yesterday’s post, I didn’t come close to the takedown provided by The Lost Ogle today. They mention the link between the paper and Barresi’s campaign:

Jennifer is a close ally of State School Superintendent Janet Barresi. She was Barresi’s first campaign manager, first chief of staff, and oversaw the creation of Barresi’s squadron of evil winged flying monkeys. She also pulled a Barresi in 2011 and referred to educators as “dirtbags” on Twitter. She’s now doing work for the Barresi campaign through her firm Jennifer Carter Consulting.

I’m telling you this because Jennifer’s husband, Ray, is a former PR flack who just happens to be an editorial writer for The Oklahoman. For a living, he regurgitates conservative talking points, protects the newspaper’s friends and allies, and attacks and destroys their enemies.

They conclude by expressing disbelief that anyone would vote to stay the course.

So there you have it, The Oklahoman thinks you should vote for Janet Barresi because… she’s an abrasive, alienating, bridge-burning tyrant lady who wants to improve education for all students? Uhm, can’t we find some nice qualified person who wants to improve education, too? In case you care, the answer to that question is “Yes.” Just don’t expect the Oklahoman editorial writers to tell you about it.

And that, my friends, is why I have a list.

#10 – Ignoring Researchers

#9 – The A-F Rollout

#8 – The 2014 Writing Test Debacle

#7 – PASSing Around Our Standards

#6 – Learning to Use Reading for Political Gain

#5 – Fabricating Special Education Percentages

Looking back upon the first half of the Top 10, I see trends. For misinformation, see #10 and #6. For incompetence, see #9. For a combination of those two things, see #8 and #7. Today’s post is about a topic that amounts to part misinformation, and part bullying – which will be a running trend throughout the top five.

I feel I start a lot of paragraphs with the clause, One of the most outrageous/ridiculous/disingenuous things she Barresi has ever said was…. Well that’s where we start tonight – with a line that she has repeated and revised may times since November. To my knowledge, the first iteration was at the candidate forum in November that I often reference (because it is so rich with material). She told the audience that 75 percent of all special education identifications are incorrect; that the school just hasn’t taught children to read. Not only is this complete nonsense; she has to know it is. Sometimes, it’s actually 50 percent. Sometimes it’s a vague number. Whatever it is on a given day, she tends to repeat some version of this line every time she discusses reading.

This statistic is supposed to be evidence that she knows something that we don’t know. It’s a refrain with no intent other than to perpetuate a lie – public schools are failing – and to do so using special education students as a prop.

Few things anger me worse than mistreating students on an Individualized Education Program. This includes dismissing their needs as well as dismissing their abilities. For years, schools have worked to curb over-identification of special needs students, knowing that getting that label early can lead to a life of low expectations. At the same time, when students are struggling to the point that their education suffers – whether it be for cognitive, physical, emotional, or any other set of reasons – we would be wrong not to accept the fact that an IEP is necessary.

Statewide, schools have held steady at an average of 15 percent of students on an IEP for years. That doesn’t mean we can’t find instances of over-identification or under-identification. After all, Cottonwood, the district that Barresi’s executive director of literacy led for years, has one of the highest special education identification rates in the state.

The belief that we don’t know how to place special education students correctly is a terrible indictment of teachers in the early grades. Most students placed on an IEP start to receive services before third grade. With this made-up statistic that Barresi tailors to her audience on any given day, she calls into question the competence of every single teacher children have before age eight.

This is worse than the learning to read, reading to learn trope because repeating the lie as she does undermines the work we do with some of our most vulnerable students. As I’ve repeated on this blog and on social media, the exemptions in place for special education students under the third-grade retention law do not provide much of a safety net.

This is one of the shorter posts of my countdown, but honestly, it doesn’t take a thousand words to remind readers that Janet Barresi does not understand special (or any other kind of) education. Rob Miller explained this well last week in one of his Really posts, hitting several points that I will again raise as we approach the top of the charts.