More Info to Scare Parents About Autism

I have come to the conclusion that after the countless studies about the causes of autism and how to “cure” it; we are barely farther along than when we started. And in many ways we are taking steps backwards. In the USA Today article, “Autism tied to autoimmune diseases in immediate family”, another study was released stating that there are ties between autoimmune diseases and causing autism in children. The article started out sounding like progress was being made but by the time I got to the end I found some disheartening information. Not only did it not prove anything, as stated by the researchers themselves, but now there is another news story to scare parents about how to prevent autism.

There has been a large spike in the amount of autism diagnosis in the past few years which has brought with it speculation on the reasons why. Reasons range from genetics to vaccinations to autoimmunity issues to even age of parents. The most talked about of these being vaccines. The controversial issue of childhood immunizations has been debated extensively in recent history with some claiming that it causes autism and others proving that it has no correlation. This Discover Magazine article can fill you in on both sides, but in the end it was determined that it does not cause autism. What does this have to do with education? Well, part of the hysteria of preventing autism is how to treat it. Not only have we not pinned down the cause of autism, we have not determined how to treat it either.

Public schools are required by law to provide services for these children and rightfully so, but it makes it difficult when there are many, many treatments out there that simply are not proven to work. This makes it difficult for the teachers and therapists to help the kids when parents are eager to find a “cure”. Claims have been made that autism is curable but none have been proven. The problem is that these supposed cures take away from the time that could be spent on speech therapy and other proven tactics. People like Jenny McCarthy feed into this by being very publicly vocal about her unprofessional experiences. She ends up influencing other parents which in turn takes away from quality therapy time once again.

While Jenny McCarthy’s anecdotal evidence sounds promising, in the end it only distracts parents from what logic shows to be the best method. It breaks my heart to hear about the struggles that parents have dealing with children that have autism; it pains me even more to see them try every harebrained treatment with no success. I will admit that some people will have some success with these obscure treatments but those cases are few and far between. I only hope that parents will continue to rely on the professionals in schools and hospitals for advice rather than things that end up causing more harm than good and prevent their children from progressing.

Evaluating on More than Just Grades

The idea of grading and evaluating students on grades alone has been a discussion topic for a number of people in this class. There have been issues such as how standardized tests can be a poor indicator of scholastic knowledge or even discriminatory. It is old news that teachers and school districts are being judged based on some of these tests while so many other issues that are important to students are being ignored. The new news is that a company has built a survey that can evaluate some of these traits.

In a USA Today article I have learned about a new type of admissions index that will help evaluate some of the things that can not be determined off a standardized test. The way the system works is a student will invite 5 supervisors or professors to evaluate them on 6 attributes. They are: Knowledge/creativity, Communication skills, Teamwork, Resilience, Planning/organization and Ethics/integrity. This evaluation will then be sent on to an admissions board of the student’s choosing. What is great about this is that it is rewarding students for have the traits that we as teachers try to instill in them. Since the program is still in its early stages it will only be available to students applying for graduate class but it is a step in the right direction.

I have commented in Beth’s blog that because of program cuts due to not making AYP we will miss out teaching many of these issues. These are the same issues that are in many ways more important that academic knowledge. I would like to see more evaluations of these traits in the future. We devote so much of our time as teachers to them that they should get some recognition. Also, it seems to me that in job interviews these traits come up more often than grades on a test.

An article by Richard Rutherford (and nearly every other article I find) states that there are a few key points that every good employee should have. None of these include high test scores. All 6 of the key points from the admissions index stated above can be directly linked to traits that are desired by employers. It is the mission of my school and every school out there to prepare our students for the future. This means molding them into good citizens that can contribute to society. Part of this is to get a quality job. The point I am trying to make is that we cannot put too much emphasis on test scores, even at the college level.

We owe it to our students to prepare them for the future. This means that we should not only continue to teach important life skills such as team work and resilience, but we should start evaluating students on them as well.