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IEPs shouldn’t just be about “Special Ed”
Four of my five children have been on an IEP (Individual Education Plan) at one point or another in their lives. Kid #5 is only three, but I’m sure she won’t want to be left out. She never does.
Any glibness aside, two of my kids has speech impediments that a couple years of speech therapy in school (and associated IEPs) addressed handily. Two of my kids are on the autistic spectrum, though, and have carried their IEPs all the way through graduation. Overall, they did well (fortunately, they’re very high-functioning, one struggling with the social/emotional components of autism and the other with specific aspects of language processing) and their IEPs gave them access to special out-of-school programs, testing accommodations, etc.
The technology is there, folks. We’re at a tipping point where business intelligence, decision support, and predictive analytics tools refined in the business world are now robust and user-friendly to the point that teachers, parents, administrators, and developers can begin leveraging them to easily personalize instructional practices, learning materials, and assessments for students, all in a largely automated fashion.
We’re not replacing teachers here. Instead, when there are 32 children in a classroom, wouldn’t it be handy for a system to automatically break students into 7 or 8 cohorts, recommend particular supplementary materials for each, outline standards-based activities appropriate to their strengths and weaknesses, and provide links to the best open educational resources matched to each cohort? The technology is there to do all of that. But instead, we’re building new assessments and collecting demographic and discipline information on our students, all the while teaching to the middle.
http://bigthink.com/disrupt-education/ieps-shouldnt-just-be-about-special-ed