ADHD And rural students

Children in rural areas are more likely to have developmental disabilities and are less likely to receive special education or early intervention services than children living in urban areas, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The study from the center's National Center for Health Statistics found that almost 20 percent of children ages 3 to 17 in rural areas qualified for a developmental disability diagnosis, compared to roughly 17 percent of children who live in urban areas.

Using data from the nationally representative National Health Interview Survey, researchers explored the prevalence of 10 developmental disability diagnoses: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, blindness, cerebral palsy, moderate to profound hearing loss, learning disability, intellectual disability, seizures, stuttering or stammering, and other developmental delays.

About 11 percent of children living in rural communities were diagnosed with ADHD compared to roughly 9 percent of children in cities. Research has shown that children with ADHD were not taking their medication 40 percent of the time, which could make it difficult for them to focus in class and work with their teachers and classmates.

The study explored whether children had contact with a mental health professional, a medical specialist, or a therapist.

Despite the wider prevalence, children with developmental disabilities in rural areas were "significantly" less likely to have seen a mental health professional, therapist or had a well-child checkup visit in the past year compared to those with similar diagnoses who lived in urban areas.

Children in rural areas were also less likely to receive special education or early intervention services, which should be a point of interest for schools. A 2019 report from the federal Government Accountability Office found that differences in how states identify and evaluate students with disabilities may lead to significant disparities in the percentage of children served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

So much for self governing schools in NSW

The government will take back control of schools and reduce the power of principals, admitting it had lost its ability to intervene in classrooms and keep track of more than $1.25 billion in Gonski money.

Education Minister Sarah Mitchell on Friday said she was unhappy with the way Local Schools, Local Decisions (LSLD) reforms – introduced by the Coalition in 2012 to give public school principals more power over their own schools – were working.

"It is clear that changes are necessary to lift results," she said. "It is time to rebalance LSLD, giving greater ability for interventions in instances where schools are seeing particularly concerning outcomes for their students."

There should be several layers of accountability to ensure principals' decisions were focused on student outcomes, Ms Mitchell said, but "[that] cannot happen across the whole system while we have a policy that totally devolves decision-making power to each local school".

"Everyone should have accountability in the chain."

The acting president of the Secondary Principals Council, Craig Petersen, said he would welcome anything that reduced unnecessary red tape, but principals were already held accountable for their decisions.

"If there was a change in what that looks like, it needs to be carefully considered to ensure we are not adding another layer of accountability into a highly regulated system of education," he said.

"It should be supportive, not punitive. The assumption should be that you are doing your best, rather than assuming teachers are incompetent and principals don't know how to run schools."

The president of the NSW Teachers Federation, Angelo Gavrielatos, said the union warned the government about the consequences of LSLD when the policy was introduced.

About bloody time.

A school principal from a small town on Queensland's Gold Coast wins $6,000 in damages from two parents who wrote derogatory comments about her on social media, after a long and distressing defamation trial.

Nothing new about this

NAPLAN results released today show some country school kids are up to 27 per cent behind their city peers in reading, writing, and maths. After nearly seven years of the Liberals, too many Australian kids are failing to master the three Rs. 

Criminal

Between 2013 & 2017, Australia’s four richest schools spent $402 million on new facilities and renovations, $37 million more than the 1800 poorest schools combined. 

NAPLAN SHMAPLAN

In the past few years the repetitive refrain has been that educational outcomes in Australia are stagnant; and the policy response has been to ramp up the focus on standardised testing.

It is not just the outcomes that are stagnant but the education debate itself.

The problem is that NAPLAN has moved from being a mechanism to check the pulse of one part of the education system, to being the reason that schools exist.

Improved NAPLAN results have become the purpose of education.

Despite the fact that it only deals with literacy and numeracy, NAPLAN has become the surrogate arbiter of educational standards in all aspects of education.

As more NAPLAN-based targets are set each year, the focus on the annual standardised test becomes ever more intense, and the education debate is narrowed.

And as it narrows, we ignore some of the big trends that are causing considerable damage to our education systems, including:

• Inequitable educational outcomes – students in the bottom socioeconomic scale are falling further and further behind their more advantaged peers;
• A socially segregated schooling system – the proportion of students who attend a socially mixed school is lower in Australia than in most other comparable countries, including Canada, New Zealand and the UK;
• Downgraded systems of public education – through inequitable funding policies, public schools are seen increasingly as safety nets for families who can’t afford private schools instead of as the centre-piece of schooling provision;
• An impoverished view about the role of education in the 21st century – the richness of education is reduced to a narrow focus on literacy and numeracy, and the kinds of creative capacities needed for the future are ignored.

The response to these wide-ranging and damaging effects of current education policy cannot be addressed by simply modifying or even removing NAPLAN after a ‘review’.

The more we focus on NAPLAN in the name of lifting educational standards, the more we get away from what really constitutes a deep and enriching educational experience.

Clearly we need to expand our education horizons.

As more NAPLAN-based targets are set each year, the focus on the annual standardised test becomes ever more intense, and the education debate is narrowed.

And as it narrows, we ignore some of the big trends that are causing considerable damage to our education systems, including:

• Inequitable educational outcomes – students in the bottom socioeconomic scale are falling further and further behind their more advantaged peers;
• A socially segregated schooling system – the proportion of students who attend a socially mixed school is lower in Australia than in most other comparable countries, including Canada, New Zealand and the UK;
• Downgraded systems of public education – through inequitable funding policies, public schools are seen increasingly as safety nets for families who can’t afford private schools instead of as the centre-piece of schooling provision;
• An impoverished view about the role of education in the 21st century – the richness of education is reduced to a narrow focus on literacy and numeracy, and the kinds of creative capacities needed for the future are ignored.

The response to these wide-ranging and damaging effects of current education policy cannot be addressed by simply modifying or even removing NAPLAN after a ‘review’.

The more we focus on NAPLAN in the name of lifting educational standards, the more we get away from what really constitutes a deep and enriching educational experience.

Clearly we need to expand our education horizons.

For the past 40 years education policy makers have been in the grip of a standardising educational narrative of which NAPLAN is just the most prominent feature. It includes school choice, competition between schools in an education market, narrowing the curriculum, and mistrust of educators.

Trump and DeVos lie...

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Trump singled out a child from Philadelphia who, he said, was “trapped in a failing government school.” In fact, the child attends one of the city’s most elite charter schools. Didn’t Betsy DeVos realize she had given $1.3 million to the self-same charter school in 2019?

President Donald Trump turned a Philadelphia fourth grader into a poster child for the school-choice movement Tuesday when he told the nation that thousands of students were “trapped in failing government schools” and announced that the girl was at last getting a scholarship to attend the school of her choice.

But Janiyah Davis already attends one of the city’s most sought-after charter schools, The Inquirer has learned. In September, months before she was an honored guest at Trump’s State of the Union address, she entered Math, Science and Technology Community Charter School III.

MaST III opened in the fall in a gleaming facility on the site of the former Crown Cork & Seal headquarters in Northeast Philadelphia, part of a charter network so popular that the school received 6,500 applications for 100 seats next year. Like all charters, it’s independently run but funded by taxpayers — meaning that Janiyah and the other 900 students at the school do not pay tuition.

How she landed in the audience during Trump’s prime-time speech Tuesday remains a bit of a mystery even to Janiyah’s mother, Stephanie Davis.

In an interview Friday, Davis, a teacher’s assistant who lives in Northeast Philadelphia, said she received a call several weeks ago from the principal at Janiyah’s former school, Olney Christian School at 425 E. Roosevelt Blvd.

After attending public kindergarten, Janiyah moved to Olney Christian for first through third grades. Tuition there is $5,200 for elementary students. She received a partial scholarship, Davis said, but it was still a struggle to afford. So Janiyah transferred to MaST III after she was accepted there last summer.

So the student was NOT attending what Trump and DeVos call a “failing government school.” She attended a private Christian academy, then transferred to a highly selective charter school. But she was singled out as Trump’s example of a student “trapped in a failing government school.”  Was she trapped in a a failing public kindergarten four years ago?