Greetings Fellow Members of the Illinois Council for Exceptional Children....

I am very grateful that I had the opportunity to serve as the President of ICEC for the FY2005/2006 term. It is my sincere hope that our Spring Conference and our Fall Convention provided you with inspiration, and some new ideas, to help you to better serve the children and their families.

It has been a very demanding year; perhaps I should say a very stressful year, for many of us. The federal mandates for "Highly Qualified Teachers," Researched Methods and Teaching Models," and "Evaluation of Teaching Effectiveness," has forced energy, time, commitment, and resources to be spent on highly questionable requirements. These requirements have prevented us from providing programs and services we know, through common sense and experience, will help students to learn!

At this time, the regulations that have been proposed to implement IDEA and NCLB have not been finalized. These regulations, in effect, are a strong legal effort to make IDEA compatible with NCLB. I believe that a paradox exists in this effort! These two laws are not compatible! IDEA is a mandate to assure that all children with special learning needs be provided with a free and appropriate education. NCLB is a mandate to correct "perceived problems" in the educational programs of our states, and to effect a system of accountability through the evaluation of performance. An interesting question explore at this time is "Who Wrote NCLB?" Which "think tanks" had input, and what funding sources backed this effort to so drastically change teaching methodology by demanding "researched based" programs? The authors of NCLB certainly do not have an adequate background in Educational theory!

I respectfully advise the authors of NCLB that in about 1960, advances in the field of educational psychology shook the euphoria of the Neo-behaviorists who were largely working from a database of Association Theory. Association theorists worked on the belief that learning is achieved by providing a stimulus and measuring the response, (S---R). In the field of education, the "S" became the subject matter and the "R" became the behavioral response of the student. In the latter half of the 1900's, research in educational psychology was greatly influenced by loosely related scientific fields including finite mathematics, probability theory, information theory, linguistic theory, and, computer science. The new knowledge resulted in the rise of a new school of learning theory-Systems Theory. Systems Theory psychologists proposed that Association Theory does not explain, nor adequately meet the needs of the complex behaviors that constitute man's ability to learn. Systems psychology defines learning on a model that is highly influenced by philosophical beliefs which emphasizes the "uniqueness" of the individual. Association psychology emphasizes the "likeness" in man's nature.  I suggest that NCLB leads us backwards into Association Theory. We cannot teach and evaluate all of our children on one model. "Researched based" programs may not be the only way to teach! The learner's way of learning should be our strongest guide in teaching.

Have a good year!

Sincerely,

Margaret Ortinau-Simons

Past President, ICEC