Monitor this!

Once upon a time, way before King George the W and No Child Left Behind, special educators were underfunded, mostly ignored, and blissfully ignorant to the stresses of accountability.

I was one of the blissfully ignornant....<!--break-->

Back in the day, we were separate, yet unequal and we liked it. ([B][I]Fiddley Foo![/I][/B])
We taught what we thought was the most beneficial for our students, and measured progress using CRTs and the Woodcock Johnson. We did this for one purpose only- to help us write goals for IEPs. We didn't have to be accountable to anyone, especially [COLOR="Red"][B]The Powers That Be[/B][/COLOR]. They were oblivious.

Then, one day, King George made the famous NCLB proclamation known to the masses. Special education administrators ran amuck looking for a way to show the progress that our students made during the course of the school year. Oh, we could have continued with our CRTs and Woodcock Johnsons, but they didn't really have what we needed to show continuous progress over the course of the year. We knew our students were progressing, but we just couldn't prove it.

As fate would have it, a group of wizards from Oregon whipped up a series of measures that focused on reading skills. They must have been hyper little wizards too because they made them to be given in one minute's time. They called it

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No one really knew what [COLOR="Green"][B]DIBELS[/B][/COLOR] stood for (and we still don't), but special educators were amazed because they had a way to target specific reading skills and monitor student progress. Our instruction became data driven. All we needed was a name for what we did.

[I]"Let's see here....we monitor.....we monitor progress.... progress is being monitored.....[B]THAT'S IT! WE'LL CALL IT PROGRESS MONITORING![/B]"[/I]

[COLOR="Red"][B]The Powers That Be[/B][/COLOR] in my neck of the woods decided that we should progress monitor every two weeks. They even gave us palm pilots that made it easier than anyone could imagine. At the end of the year, [COLOR="red"][B]TPTB[/B][/COLOR] would come by and say,

[I]"How are your students progressing?"[/I]

To which we would reply,

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[I]"Well, just look at this snazzy graph! The line on the graph goes up and down and up and down, but over the course of the year, it follows the AIM line! By golly, our students are progressing!"
[/I]
Things went on like this for a couple of school years. We progress monitored using our spiffy little palm pilots, we changed our instruction by following the data, and we showed our parents and superiors how our students were progressing. Life was good. Then, it happened.......

[SIZE="4"][COLOR="Blue"][B]SOME GOOFBALL PUSHED US TO THE OTHER EXTREME.[/B][/COLOR][/SIZE]

Before we knew it, we were monitoring reading every week. That took a full morning away from instruction each week. Then someone thought,

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"Hey, these [COLOR="DarkOrange"][B]AIMSweb[/B][/COLOR] guys have measures for math! Let's do math too!" So, that was added to our plate. Just like [COLOR="Green"][B]DIBELS[/B][/COLOR], we started out monitoring every two weeks, then it magically changed to every week, or as I like to call it, [B]"Hey! Why don't we cratch off an afternoon of math instruction each week too?"
[/B]
Before we knew it, writing came into the picture. "Every two weeks?", I asked with hope in my eyes. Nope. WEEKLY, and that's where we are today.

Each week, I spend all of Monday morning monitoring reading and writing and Wednesday afternoons monitoring early numeracy skills. [SIZE="4"][B]That's four hours per week, thirty-six hours a quarter and one hundred forty-four hours a school year! That's over [COLOR="Red"]twenty-five school days[/COLOR] worth of instruction we lose monitoring the progress we've made the other one-hundred sixty days![/B][/SIZE]

Add in the time it takes to compute scores and input them into their respective Web sites, (Oh? Did I mention that our palm pilots were only for the first 3 years?) and you have a hell of a lot of time taken away from planning to boot. Then, there's the two half days we take to look at our data and configure interventions for those in [COLOR="Red"][B]THE RED ZONE[/B][/COLOR]. At this point, I'm not so sure that I shouldn't be looking at the data when I schedule a restroom break.

Needless to say, I'm now suffering from [B]data driven fatigue[/B].

We have created a monster, and it's name is [SIZE="4"][COLOR="Red"][B]Progress Monitoring[/B][/COLOR][/SIZE].

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