Special Ed. Teacher Instruction in Law
Justin Bathon on Wednesday, August 19, 2009 at 3:29PM The big news making rounds today is the new GAO report on teacher education as related to special education. In it, the GAO finds that most schools of education require at least one course related to students with disabilities and only 20 percent offer instruction related to ELL students. One of the elements mentioned as a component of the special education training are the federal laws.
Well, from my experience, this training is woefully lacking in quality. Every time I have undergrads or teach grad. level courses (at multiple institutions now) the story is the same - students don't even know the basics of special education law. Simple stuff like FAPE is a new concept to them.
So, while schools of ed. may be devoting courses to special education, those courses are not conveying even a basic level of legal knowledge. I think there are probably several reasons for this, but chief among them are that people with no legal training are teaching these courses. As such, they simply require students to read a chapter on the legal basics and leave it at that - and that legal information is not soaking in.
Thus, this is yet another reason to support the argument for a real law course in initial teacher preparation. Special education, ELL, and other neglected categories are not neglected in real ed. law courses, even at the undergraduate level.
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