Week Two Reading Reflection - Disrupting Class

One thing that I learned through this week's reading is that a school is composed of four interdependencies - temporal, lateral, physical, and hierarchical (33).  I knew that a school had to conform to mandates from different authorities, but I did not know that this dependency relied on three other dependencies.  These four help explain why a school functions the way it does and why it is often hard for a school to change.  A second thing that I learned through this week's reading is how much is spent on educating a special education student.  As the author points out, in Rhode Island "it costs $22,893 a year on average to educate a special-education student, whereas it costs $9,269 for a regular education student" (34).  I think the reason why so much is spent on special education is because the teacher training is more difficult, the lessons must conform around the student's disability, and the supplemental material that is needed in order for a student to succeed is costly.  Finally, the third thing that I learned was about Henry Ford.  I learned that when he first started making his Model Ts, the steel he used to make auto parts sprang back from their die, so that there was a range of different size auto parts.  These differences meant that the car parts would not easily fit together.  Since steel suppliers could not solve this dilemma, as they were not stamping the steel in Ford's environment, and since Ford could not solve the dilemma either, as he was not making the steel, Ford decided to make his own steel plant and have his workers conform the steel to the dies (30-31).  This short vignette shows how when different problems emerge within a single structure a solution that satisfies all of these problems must be produced and how everything is related.  So one could apply this dilemma to the current school situation.

One thing that I have a question about also relates to the special education funding.  The author points out that over the last four decades, funding for this has increased so much that in many districts it accounts for over a third of all funding (34).  If that is the case, then why do schools consistently put ELL students or children with mild learning disorders in special education?  Is it because the teachers who had these students before do not want their future teachers to go through the ordeal of teaching them?  Maybe if we stopped putting ELLs and students with a mild learning disorder in special education, then we can stop spending as much money on this and spend more on regular education. The second question I have relates to the efforts of teachers.  The author states that "in most U.S. schools, especially at the middle and high school level, even the heroic effort by a teacher to pay attention to multiple intelligence patterns is...almost guaranteed to fail" (37).  Why is that so?  I know that it may be because of the school's structure or because of the way the teacher presents the material, but is there another explanation?  I think there may a combination of other factors that may cause a teacher to fail.

Finally, one additional thing that I would like to learn more about is if other schools have gotten on the same path as the Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland have when it comes to personalized learning (36).  It seems as though the program they have works well, as teachers can see where students are in their learning and can then customize their instruction to meet every student's needs/progress.