What’s the Difference Between General Ed and Special Ed?

What’s the difference between Special Ed and General Ed? This is a great question which parents are sometimes afraid to ask. The simple answer is that general education is the typical classroom that we think of when we think of school.  Special education is more complicated because it has changed over time.  Years ago before […]

If You Think Your Child Has a Learning Disability, Do these 5 things.

If you think your child has a learning disability, do these 5 things. I am a mother and a special-education advocate, and I have dyslexia. Many parents have confided in me that they had a “hunch” that something was not right with their child. More often than not, a parent’s hunch turns out to be […]

Charter Schools Have a Great Opportunity to Serve Sped Students Well

In the spring of 2012 the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a study concluding that charter schools enroll a lower percentage of special education students than traditional public schools.  The latest is that the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights has deployed “several broad compliance reviews” to address enrollment as well as legal […]

Finally, Some Good News for Gifted and Disabled!

Finally Some Good News for the Gifted and Disabled One of the most challenging and infuriating areas in which I practice is advocating for the gifted and disabled (called “twice exceptional”).  I feel particularly passionately about these cases because I fall into the category of twice exceptional.  I suffer from multiple learning disabilities.  When I […]

Response to Intervention: Misused to the Detriment of ASD Students?

The implementation of RtI (Response to Intervention), a new way to identify students as learning disabled, may result in delay or failure to properly identify students as eligible for special education services, and in my experience some school districts have been overbroad in their application of RtI – causing students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), […]