5 Special Education Misconceptions

AZTF Fellow - Jon Short

I’m not surprised that most people don’t know much about Special Education. I didn’t before I joined Arizona Teaching Fellows. Most people have little to no exposure with SPED in their entire lives. Well, actually, they do have plenty of exposure, they just don’t know it.

The more I teach Special Education, the more I realize how misconceptions have hurt this field and its students. There’s a reason no one wants others to know they are in Special Education. No one wants to feel inadequate. And SPED students by and large do a great job of hiding their inadequacies. Consider this:  approximately 11% of the student population is in Special Education. That means in a class of 30, at least 3 students are in SPED.  With that in mind, I’d like to dispel some common myths about Special Education.

#1 - Special Education students are mostly students with mental retardation.

The vast majority of Special Needs students do not fit into this category. While many Special Needs students do have moderate disabilities, most Special Needs students have Learning Disabilities, like dyslexia or math disabilities. Most Special Education teachers work with students only part-time on core academic subjects. More than 60% of students with learning disabilities spend less than an hour in a Special Education class each day.

#2 - It takes a very uniquely dedicated person to be a SPED teacher.

Well, it takes a very dedicated kind of person to be a teacher in general.  And, being a Special Education teacher is no different. I assign my 8^th graders 2 hours of homework a night, math problems, writing assignments, book chapters, and everything else that goes on. Students with more significant disabilities still learn how to read and write and do math. Our job is to teach them exactly what they need to know to be successful.

#3 - The need for SPED is not as great as other teaching subjects.

Nothing could be further from the truth! SPED positions are often the most difficult to fill.  The need is HUGE. Just look at this excerpt from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: “The number of special education teachers is expected to increase by 17 percent from 2008 to 2018, which is faster than the average for all occupations. Although student enrollments in general are expected to grow more slowly than in the past, continued increases in the number of special education students needing services will generate a greater need for special education teachers.”

#4 - SPED students are likely never to achieve.  We have to lower our expectations of them.

Unfortunately, this is the biggest and saddest misconception about SPED. This has been a terrible stigmatization that is simply is not true. Students with disabilities have different needs in order to achieve the same result. For example, take a dyslexic student in a science class.  Reading about “mitochondria” can be exhausting and fruitless, but that doesn’t mean the student can’t learn about it. By offering video presentations or audio books, the student can learn at the exact same pace as the other students, but they receive the information through a different medium. More importantly, the idea that SPED students are doomed is just false. Here’s a short list of well known individuals with disabilities: Thomas Edison, Jimi Hendrix,Cher, Danny Glover, Robin Williams, Leonardo Da Vinci, John Lennon, and Whoopi Goldberg.

# 5 - It doesn’t matter what SPED teachers do b/c they don’t affect a school’s report card.

Think again! 25% of each school’s pass/fail determination is now dependent on how much the bottom 25% improves. That means that if you bring all the average kids up to excelling, but the bottom 25% don’t move up, your school can still fail. The fact is that most SPED students are in the bottom 25%.  So, the SPED teacher has all of a sudden inherited a huge responsibility that has very real consequences for the entire school.

If you’re applying to AZTF, please take a moment to consider whether you could be an effective SPED teacher. SPED students need the unique strengths, subject area knowledge, and diverse life experiences you bring to the classroom.  And trust me when I say it doesn’t take a miracle worker to be a SPED teacher. It takes a teacher who’s dedicated and through that dedication...miracles do happen for these kids.