This chapter reviews a number of secondary school options for youth with emotional or behavioral disorders. Postsecondary educational settings are all too often inflexible in their responses to divergent lifestyles and behavior patterns. One of the important aspects of any program for youth with emotional and behavioral disorders is to ensure the availability for support and instruction in areas other than traditional academic skills. College is a reasonable goal for some youth with behavior and emotional disorders, but only with careful planning and the provision of ongoing support. The distance between the idealistic and inclusive nature of our best schooling and the harsh realities of the world at large is still great enough to create high risks for youth deprived of special options. The Belief Academy is an attempt to enlarge what the Career Ladder Program began, and to address the coordination-of-service issue—it creates long-term program relationships with youth beginning in the middle school.

This dissertation investigated the use of speech recognition technology as a means of remediating the writing problems of students with learning disabilities. The research question focused on whether young children with learning disabilities (LD) could produce narratives with higher fluency/quantity and/or better quality when using (a) a traditional paper-pencil mode (HW), (b) a dictation mode using normal speech-to-text technology of speech recognition software (SR), which students could see on the monitor what they had dictated, and could edit their dictated text if and as they chose, or (c) a simplified dictation mode using a digital voice recorder (DR), which students had no immediate visual text feedback or access to text editing. A single subject, alternating treatment design was employed. The study participants included four 9-year old students, who had been diagnosed with LD, were receiving special education services, and having writing objectives addressed in their Individualized Educational Plan. The results indicated that the two dictation modes (SR and DR) were notably superior to the handwriting mode in terms of the fluency and mechanical aspect of writing, but there was little to mild difference between the dictation modes and the handwriting mode in terms of the syntactic complexity and story structure level of the writing. The transcription demands of writing appeared to have significant influence on the writing performance of students with LD. All students performed better using the dictation-related technology, but different students on different technology. Considering the wide spectrum of differences among the struggling writers with LD, the dictation strategies implemented in this study may also serve as an assessment tool to match students with the proper type of technology support.

To bend back, ... [to give] careful consideration to important matters and [to be] open to the voices, opinions, and advice of others (Valli, 1997, pp. 67-68). I am bending back my mind (and often, it seems, my soul) to reflect on high school programs for students with learning disabilities (LD). This is a painful process. My focus on secondary issues did not start until 1980 when I received a grant from the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) to study forms of interagency collaboration (Single Portal Intake Project, 19801983). In our work related to this grant, we found that (a) interagency collaboration was logical when agencies had reason to collaborate; and (b) transition times (when a student moves from one agency to another) were one of the prime opportunities for collaboration. One of the transitions we studied in the early 1980s was the one from the public schools to adult life. The first big question was happens to special education youth after they graduate from high school? This question led to the beginning of the follow-up studies on special education graduates I have conducted, almost yearly, since 1983. These studies have produced data that have raised new questions, including what conditions could improve the post-school status of special education graduates, how can we keep more special education students in high school through graduation, and, finally, what is the purpose of public schools in a democracy? For some these questions might not seem sequential; for me they were a straight line to my present position on schooling and special education. The current condition of schools with regard to youth with LD is worse than it was 20 years ago. This is not because many good, well-intentioned people did not spend oodles of time and energy on the problem. Nor is it because we do not have good, competent people working on the issue today. Indeed, the quality of the people working on these issues today seems superior to those of 20 years ago. The decline in the quality of schooling stems from other factors, factors that are, in my mind, a clear indication of the failure of the P-20 public school system due to the loss of a moral compass of schooling. The post-school outcome data on graduates with LD has remained pretty stable over the past 20 years. Males with LD who graduate from high school are employed at more or less 70-80% levels, similar to males without disabilities (Murray, Goldstein, & Edgar, 1997). Although many of these students plan to go to college, few do (about 25%), and even fewer graduate from some form of postsecondary education program (Murray, Goldstein, Nourse, & Edgar, 2000). Females do less well; their employment rates are 50-60%, primarily due to child bearing without partners (Murray et al., 1997). Additionally, about 40% of students with LD fail to complete schooling (Kortering & Braziel, 2002). For both graduates and dropouts, we have virtually no information on the quality of their lives or evidence of their overall citizenship. This is, sadly, also true of young adults without disabilities. Instead, we measure employment status and college attendance as keys to post-school success, rather than the more difficult analysis of quality of life and productive citizenship. This is, I am afraid, a cop-out to the pressure of the American worldview of free market economy and consumerism as a measure of goodness. It is an embarrassment. There are several major problems facing those of us who care about students labeled as LD. While there are technical problems that we as educators should be able to fix (definition of LD, best instructional practices for students so identified, powerful secondary programs that hold students and add value to their lives), these issues, while important, are not nearly as important as the shift of the aim of public schooling away from preparing democratic citizens and offering meaningful opportunities for all students. …

Special education teacher attrition has been a major concern for over fifteen years. There have been numerous studies and proposals to explain this problem and suggestions offered for interventions. In general, the studies have reported that approximately 50% of newly certified special education teachers leave the field during the first five years of their career. This study presents data from seven cohorts of special education teachers (n = 161) who were trained in one program. The study documented their employment histories since graduating from the program and the reasons they changed jobs. The teachers were not leaving the field in large numbers; however, they were very mobile.

This study examined the postsecondary education status of 1985 and 1990 high school graduates from three large school districts in the northwestern United States. Each cohort included all of the graduates with learning disabilities (LD) and a stratified random sample without disabilities from the same graduating class. Interviews conducted with the graduate or with another informant during the 5 consecutive years 1991 through 1995 generated data regarding their postsecondary education status. Because of the 5-year difference in graduation years (1985 vs. 1990), these data allowed us to examine the postsecondary school attendance and completion rates of these youth during the first 10 years following high school. Findings indicated that graduates with LD were significantly less likely to have attended any form of postsecondary school and were less likely to have graduated from postsecondary programs throughout the first 10 years following high school. An analysis of the employment rates and earnings of the...

This article presents a proposed narrative for thinking about special education. This narrative stresses the interconnectedness of special education with the overall public education system. The narrative posits that the purpose of public schools in a democracy should be to: 1) to enculturate youth into social and political democracy 2) ensure excellent and equitable educational outcomes for all youth, 3) use a eating pedagogy to achieve these ends, and 4) all educators should be stewards of the public schools. Special education must be part of this overall narrative and special educators need to take seriously the role of steward of the public schools. Part of this role is for special educators to view themselves as public scholars, with an ethic that emphasizes the entire community.

This 5-year longitudinal study investigated post-high-school employment, postsecondary school degree attainment, and engagement outcomes for youths with behavioral disorders (BD). Subjects included graduates with BD and a random stratified sample of their typically functioning peers from three school districts in western Washington State. The study tracked two cohorts, 1985 and 1990 graduates, with annual data collection from 1990 to 1995. The data reflected what was happening in the lives of these youths, who had been out of school from 1 to 5 years and from 6 to 10 years. Outcomes are compared for the youths with BD and for their peers without disabilities. Employment rates for the graduates with BD were significantly lower at only 2 of 10 data collection points. Engagement rates were significantly lower at 6 of the 10 points. Rates of postsecondary degree attainment at the end of the study were significantly lower for the graduates with BD in both cohorts.

One of the positions of postmodern thought is that there are no overriding theories that explain the world or specific phenomena in the world. David Elkind expands on this idea in discussing behavioral disorders. This response to Elkind proposes three possible metanarratives that could be useful in thinking about behavioral disorders: democracy, spirituality, and the notions of Nick Hobbs. These narratives are described as universal—ideas and notions about which the majority of people who think about them could reach consensus. What postmodern thinking has provided us is the gift of different voices and different ideas. We should welcome these ideas but never give up evaluating them or trying to find overarching narratives that can guide our work.

This study analyzed gender differences in postschool outcomes for youth with learning disabilities, mild mental retardation, and no disabilities. Data were collected on two cohorts of graduates (549 youth who were graduated in 1985; 398 youth, in 1990) from three school districts. Data were collected at 1, 2, 6, and 7 years postgraduation. Comparisons were made between genders within disability groups on employment, postsecondary education attendance and graduation, engagement, independent living, marital status, and parenting. In contrast to the findings of other studies, few significant differences were noted between genders, except for the parenting category. A similar analysis between youth by disability category resulted in considerably more significant differences.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsErnest JohnsonEugene Edgar is Professor of Education, Area of Special Education, College of Education, at the University of Washington in Seattle. Walter Parker is Associate Professor, Area of Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education, at the University of Washington. Shepherd Siegel is Director of the King County Vocational/Special Education Cooperative, Special Services, Puget Sound Educational Service District in Seattle, and Ernest Johnson is Director of the Belief Academy, Special Education, Seattle Public Schools.

This paper reviewed several barriers to the development of a work study option for students labeled mildly mentally retarded. These barriers included: the debate over the existence of the entity mental retardation, the relationship of political/economic factors and schooling, the purpose and content of secondary education, and the interaction of personal values with these factors. Tentative conclusions include: mental retardation is an entity; this condition is defined by social context; social systems (such as education) can make a difference; and, on the whole, special education is a "good thing."