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Home > News > How Clip 'N Snip's Owner Changed Special Education by Brent Staples (New York Times, Jan 5, 2002) |
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January
5, 2002
How
the Clip 'N Snip's Owner Changed Special Education By BRENT STAPLES The people of Florence, S.C., know Shannon Carter as the owner of Shannon's Clip 'N Snip, a barber shop where the locals get haircuts and conversation. The Clip 'N Snip has room for seven barber chairs, but Shannon is limiting the business to two for the moment and renting out space until the economy improves enough for the barbering business to expand. Shannon's
public school teachers are no doubt surprised to see her running a
business and working out a financial plan. During the 1980's she finished
ninth grade failing virtually every subject, and was nearly illiterate.
The schools told Emory and Elaine Carter that their daughter was terminally
lazy and would "never see a day of college." The Carters then sued the school system for private-school tuition and were upheld in the landmark Supreme Court case known as Florence County School District Four v. Shannon Carter. The law before this case limited parents of disabled children to schools approved by the state. But the court ruled in Shannon's case that the school system lost its right to plan a disabled child's education if it failed to provide an "appropriate public education" as required by the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, known as the IDEA. Ask
about Shannon Carter in New York or Los Angeles, and you see school
board lawyers snarling or hanging their heads in dismay. The school
boards see Carter cases as "a voucher program for the rich,"
in which affluent parents reserve spaces in private schools and then
badger the school systems into paying burdensome tuition costs. Critics
have a point when they note that small districts can be destabilized
by the cost of one student's stay at an expensive residential school,
and that urban districts with too few textbooks are sometimes forced
to underwrite lavish private school tuition. The
task of teaching reading is undermined by the common but mistaken
belief that children are somehow neurologically "wired"
to read. This view led to the "whole language" fad of the
1970's, in which children were allowed to wander through books, improvising
individual approaches to reading. The whole language technique works
well with some children. In the most extreme cases, children seem to have abnormal activity in the parts of the brain that process phonemes — the basic sounds that correspond to the letters of the alphabet. The simplest rules of language make no sense to them. Asked for a word that rhymes with "cat," for example, they simply draw a blank. The disorder strikes children of all backgrounds. It afflicts those who are read to as infants as well as those who grow up without a book in the house. The
fortunate children are diagnosed early and assigned to smaller classes
where teachers take special care to teach them the fundamentals of
written language that others take for granted. The children are walked
through the alphabet again and again, learning to connect the letters
to the sounds, the sounds to the syllables, the syllables to words
and so on. Part of the blame lies with colleges that have resisted federal attempts to improve teacher education programs. Part of the blame lies with Congress, which has clung to the view that curriculum is a state and local matter in which the federal government should not meddle. Congress failed to even notice the reading research until just recently, when the Bush administration made reading a priority. Congress has focused almost solely on the fact that special education is expensive — and that it takes away money from regular education. The debate will go nowhere until lawmakers begin to view special and regular education as part of a single system that is being hampered by an all too pervasive problem — that schools are teaching reading in a way that fails to effectively reach millions of children. The basic lesson of the Carter case and the tens of thousands that have followed is that the country needs a national reading campaign, based on science. The longer we delay, the more families like Shannon Carter's will bolt the system, taking public dollars with them. Download "How the Clip 'N Snip's Owner Changed Special Education" by Brent Staples. New York Times, January 5, 2002. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Subscribe to The New York Times Shannon Carter's Case Shannon Carter's case is Florence County School District IV v. Shannon Carter, 510 US 7 (1993). Pete Wright was Shannon's attorney and argued the case before the U. S. Supreme Court on October 6, 1993. The Court issued a unanimous decision in Shannon's favor on November 9, 1993. Go to the Carter links page to more learn about Shannon's case, download all decisions and the transcript of oral argument before the Supreme Court. Three Generations at the Supreme Court by Pete Wright. The International (Orton) Dyslexia Society had a significant role in Florence County School District Four v. Shannon Carter. The seeds were first planted in the early 1950's. The Untold Story by Pete Wright. The story behind the story. Pete describes preparing for oral argument before the U. S. Supreme Court. Photos Photo of Shannon being interviewed on steps of U. S. Supreme Court while Elaine Carter looks on. Photo of Pete being interviewed after oral argument before U. S. Supreme Court. Links to Reading & LD Research Info Learning Disabilities & Reading Problems Learning Disabilities Research by Dr. Reid Lyon, NICHHD. "The psychological, social, and economic consequences of reading failure are legion . . ." This powerful article was adapted from testimony given by Dr. Reid Lyon before the Committe on Education and the Workforce in the U.S. House of Representatives. Key Components of Early Reading Instruction by Susan Hall and Louisa Moats. Excerpt from new book, Straight Talk About Reading: How Parents Can Make a Difference During The Early Years - An overview of the basic instructional principles necessary for sound early reading instruction, plus acitivities that parents can do with young children. Keys to Successful Learning: NICHD Research Program in Reading Development, Reading Disorders and Reading Instruction. "Learning to read is critical to a child's (and an adult's) well-being. Unfortunately, the rate of reading failure and illiteracy are unacceptably high in the United States. Over 40 percent of fourth grade students performed below basic levels on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in both 1994 and 1998 . . .' Teachers: The Key to Helping America Read by Louisa Moats, Ed.D. Testimony given to the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Education and the Workforce regarding the lack of adequate preparation of reading teachers. Why Reading is Not a Natural Process by Dr. Reid Lyon. Article provides an overview of the research findings of the Child Development and Behavior Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health. IDEA & Special Education Finn,
Chester E., Andrew J. Rotherdam, Charles R. Hokanson, Jr. Rethinking
Special Education for a New Century (2001). Lyon,
G. Reid, Jack Fletcher, Sally E. Shaywitz, Bennett A. Shaywitz, Joseph
K. Torgesen, Frank B. Wood, Ann Schulte, Richard Olson, Rethinking
Learning Disabilities (2001). Reading & Reading Instruction American Federation of Teachers, Teaching Reading is Rocket Science: What Expert Teachers Should Know and Be Able to Do by Louisa Moats (1999). (36 pages, pdf)
Moats, Louisa, Whole Language Lives On: The Illusion of "Balanced" Reading Instruction (2000). "Three
things are clear about early reading: First, it isn’t being handled
well in American schools. Four in ten of our fourth-graders lack basic
reading skills. Millions of children are needlessly classified as
“disabled” when, in fact, their main problem is that nobody
taught them to read when they were five and six years old." National Institutes of Health. Report of the National Reading Panel, Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction (2000). To order as NIH Publication Number 00-4769, contact NICHD Clearinghouse at 1-800-370-2943. More
Free Pubs
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"Reading
is the fundamental skill upon which all formal instruction depends.
Research shows that a child who doesn't learn the reading basics early
is unlikely to learn them at all. Any child who doesn't learn to read
early and well will not easily master other skills and knowledge and
is unlikely to ever flourish in school or in life."
