#like it is critical to assess the current international law and how it overwhelmingly exist for the benefit of the opressor

[cogcltrcorn]

hm. I think some of you can't read.

[megadarkbouquettidalwavethings]

Missouri Tackles Challenge of Dyslexia Screening, Services

New state mandates start next school year

By Rachel Wegner

Kierstyn Lawson hated kindergarten. She struggled to keep up with her peers, leaving her mother at a loss for how to help.

“What kindergartner doesn’t like school?” recalled the parent, Stephanie Lawson, of California, Mo., a rural community halfway between Kansas City and St Louis.

Kierstyn was not diagnosed with dyslexia until she turned 9. Once she was, her mother said it shed light on why Kierstyn was struggling in school. Yet even after the diagnosis, Lawson had to fight to get her daughter the support she needed from her school. Eventually, Lawson hired a private dyslexia tutor—a move that ultimately helped her daughter move forward. Kierstyn, now 11, can read more fluently and comprehend what she sees on a page.

Catching Dyslexia Sooner

The state of Missouri is now rolling out a dyslexia law aimed at identifying and supporting students like Kierstyn early in their education. State-mandated dyslexia screenings for children in K-3 take effect in the 2018-19 school year in all Missouri regular public and charter schools. The law, signed in 2016, also led to the development of dyslexia training for teachers and recommendations on how best to support dyslexic students in throughout the state.

Missouri joins dozens of other states with dyslexia laws and is among the latest to face the challenge of implementing, explaining, and coordinating the screenings and subsequent follow-ups with students. While the screenings are not designed to diagnose dyslexia, they will identify where students are struggling and leave it to parents, districts, and educators to decide what is best.

Dyslexia affects the way people process written and oral language. A common characteristic is difficulty connecting letters to the sounds that those letters represent. The Education Department says that 3.4 percent of students aged 6-21—about 2.4 million children and youth—are receiving services for a specific learning disability through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The category includes children with dyslexia.

Advocates, however, argue that the prevalence of learning disabilities is much higher. The National Center for Learning Disabilities says that 1 in 5 students has “learning or attention issues,” including dyslexia.

The Missouri education department has provided a list of recommendations for conducting screenings and offering classroom supports for students with dyslexia. For some districts, the law will require supports beyond their existing special education and reading programs. The mandate also annually requires two hours of dyslexia training for every practicing teacher in the state’s 518 districts.

Rep. Kathy Swan, a Republican state lawmaker who originally proposed the bill that led to the new law, said it’s up to the schools to choose what screening tool they will use for the assessments.

“There was concern during the bill, in its passage, over the cost of that,” Swan said, adding that some screening tools are free and others come at a price.

Swan said a subcommittee in the Missouri House of Representatives proposed funding in February to cover any costs for the screenings. If approved, the funding would be part of the fiscal year 2019 budget and falls within the current Missouri legislative session, which adjourns May 18.

Efforts by organizations such as Decoding Dyslexia, which launched in 2011, have fought to keep dyslexia at the forefront of discussions among educators, parents, and lawmakers.

Erica Lembke, a member of the 21-member dyslexia task force established by the state, said a key part of the commission’s process was hearing hours of testimony from educators, parents, students, and others.

“To me, it’s a great example of how parents and families can push legislation forward,” said Lembke, who chairs the special education department at the University of Missouri.

A total of 29 states have dyslexia-support and -identification laws, according to statistics from the International Dyslexia Association available as of December 2015. Six states have resolutions or initiatives addressing dyslexia, and 14 offer procedures or handbooks for educators and parents to support dyslexic students.

Kim Stuckey was hired in 2016 as a dyslexia specialist for the Missouri education department. She worked with the task force to devise a plan to implement the legislation.

In its research, the task force discovered many gaps in how Missouri school districts and educators understood dyslexia, Stuckey said.

“The awareness piece has been really important,” she said. “For many years, teachers [would] tell you, ‘We’re not allowed to say dyslexia. We’re not allowed to talk about it.’ Anecdotally, you would hear that across the nation.”

Some school personnel have been reluctant to use the term, saying that dyslexia is a medical diagnosis, or that educators should focus on specific deficits and not a label. The U.S. Department of Education addressed that issue in an October 2015 “Dear Colleague” letter. The letter explained that dyslexia, along with dysgraphia and dyscalculia, were acceptable terms to use when discussing a student’s evaluations, special education eligibility, and individualized education program.

Stuckey said the letter, and now the Missouri state law, are steps in the right direction to remedy the lack of conversation and understanding about dyslexia. She said the screenings are designed to equip educators and parents with more information to help students who are struggling.

“At the end of the day, schools overwhelmingly want to do what’s best for kids,” Stuckey said.

Training Teachers

Lembke said she hopes universities and colleges around the state will also improve dyslexia training for preservice teachers.

After the task force surveyed higher education institutions, Lembke said she was surprised at how many were not properly equipping preservice teachers to address dyslexia. State lawmakers Swan and Rep. Donna Pfautsch are seeking to craft requirements for colleges and universities to better prepare future teachers to handle dyslexia in their classrooms.

When it comes to additional costs, resources, and time that may be required of administrators and educators, Swan said it comes down to the “right thing to do” to ensure students succeed in their education, careers, and lives.

“We are doing a great disservice to people in the state of Missouri if we do not begin to recognize [dyslexia] and do something about it,” Swan said. “It’s a critical effort.”

Vol. 37, Issue 22, Page 9

Published in Print: February 28, 2018, as Missouri Tackles Challenge of Dyslexia Screening, Services

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Rachel Wegner

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Cyberspace, secret of Chinese internet censorship?

New Post has been published on https://workreveal.biz/cyberspace-secret-of-chinese-internet-censorship/

Cyberspace, secret of Chinese internet censorship?

The delicate States Index, an annual file published by way of America think tank the Fund for Peace and the magazine Foreign Policy, defines a fragile state as one “whose vital authorities is so weak or ineffective that it has little sensible control over a good deal of its territory; non-provision of public offerings; sizable corruption and criminal activity; refugees and involuntary motion of populations and sharp financial decline”.

Some, but now not all, of this, maps smartly directly to our on-line world. There may be, in an instance, no central government that has effective control over the community’s “territory” (even though the USA, for true motives, has had more effect on it than any other country, a good deal to the annoyance of the Russians and the Chinese). In truth, one of the vital troubles posed using the community is that it is a global gadget in a Westphalian global of sovereign states and local laws.

Our quandary is that even as the future of our on-line world is unknowable, we need to reflect consideration on it because it impacts us all. The usual approach that large organisations and governments use for this cause is with the aid of imagining a fixed of viable futures or situations and assessing the implications of each one. The purpose isn’t to “are expecting” the future, however, to attempt to comic strip the range of possibilities that we would cope with.

As some distance as cyberspace is involved, the maximum thrilling set of eventualities I’ve seen come from a US think tank, the Atlantic Council. Its analyst, Jason Healey, sets out five applicants:

• Reputation quo: a continuation of what we now have. “our on-line world is commonly a safe place in which to do enterprise and to speak with others, despite the fact that criminals preserve to have interaction in multimillion-dollar heists and scouse borrow thousands and thousands of people’s personal info; countrywide Foreign intelligence groups poke and prod for army and industrial secrets.”

• Warfare area: an extrapolation of the militarisation of cyberspace that we already see – a world wherein cyber warfare becomes not unusual.

• Balkanisation: cyberspace has damaged into political fiefdoms: There’s no single internet, just a series of countrywide internets.

internet

• Paradise: cyberspace turns into an overwhelmingly sheltered area in which espionage, conflict and crime are rare. Chinese are ahead in that game.

• Cybergeddon: our on-line world degenerates into a digital failed state with all that that means. Suppose current-day Mogadishu.

Some these are greater fantastic than others. Healey’s “paradise” scenario is a natural fable. And the power of internet groups – plus the attain and dominance of country full intelligence groups inclusive of the NSA – recommend that A few form of the (likely repressive) order could be restored lengthy before “cybered on” could be reached.

So we’re left with real opportunities – Some combination of Balkanisation and inter-state Battle, both extrapolations of tendencies that we can already have a look at.

If that is certainly how things pan out, I recognise one scholar, a prominent professor of international relations, who won’t be inside the least amazed. 16 years in the past, in a conversation about the internet, he requested me if I sincerely believed that the web represented an essential challenge to mounted energy systems. I answered vehemently in the affirmative – due to the fact, in my techno-utopian fervour, I did agree with. He smiled but stated not anything, and so sooner or later I asked him what he thought. “We’ll see, dear boy,” he responded. “We’ll see.”

He’s still around, as wise as ever. And I’m an improving utopian.

In case you ever want to annoy Western policymakers or politicians, then here’s a surefire way to do it. Inform them that the only authorities in the global that is familiar with the internet are the Chinese communist regime. And If you want to feature a killer punch, upload the announcement that nearly the whole lot we Think we recognize about Chinese language control of the internet is either banal (all that stuff about the splendid firewall, paranoia about key phrases such as “Falun Gong”, “democracy”, and so forth) or simply simple wrong. Having, therefore, lit the fuse, retreat to a secure distance and enjoy the ensuing outburst of righteous indignation.

For the avoidance of doubt, this is not an apologia for the Chinese language regime, that’s as nasty and intolerant as they arrive. But it’s good to have a realistic view of 1’s adversaries. China’s leaders have invented a new manner of walking society. It’s been christened “networked authoritarianism” by way of Rebecca MacKinnon, a cited student of these items. President Xi Jinping and his colleagues are fans of Boris Johnson in as a minimum one recognise: they accept as true with that it’s far viable to have one’s cake and eat it too.

They want to modernise and energise and cyberspace China so that it may fulfil its future as a world energy. For that, they need it to transform their united states into a hyper-networked society. But however, they do no longer want democracy, with all its attendant nuisances together with human rights, governments sure by using the rule of thumb of regulation, transparency, responsibility and so on, and that they fear that the internet might also supply residents thoughts above their station. So they are determined to have the net, however also to control it. And this they may be doing with astounding success.

cyberspace

Most of what we recognise approximately how this networked authoritarianism works come from a smallish group of students. The brightest star in this specialised firmament is Gary King, who’s director of the Institute for Quantitative Social, technological know-how at Harvard. Years in the past, he and his colleagues posted a groundbreaking examine, published in the journal Science, which for the first time discovered how a way of the government censors Chinese social media.

The observe showed that, contrary to common Western knowledge, Chinese language social media is as raucous and chaotic as it’s far anywhere else, so the Daily Mail’s concept of a rustic full of timid, faceless human beings with most useful banal reviews is baloney.

The study additionally revealed, although, that these outlets are ruthlessly however astutely censored: what gets taken down, aside from the usual suspects which include Falun Gong, pornography, democracy and so on, are any posts that could conceivably stimulate joint motion, even when the posts are beneficial towards the authorities. You could say extra or less what you like in China, in different words, so long as not anything you assert might have the impact of getting people out onto the streets.

An obvious implication of this research became that the Chinese regime, aware of the difficulty of running a largely united state without the comments loops provided via democracy, is the use of the net to provide that feedback. It enables it to preserve a finger at the pulse of the society, as it were. If There may be central public situation about the corruption of neighbourhood officers in Some godforsaken province, as an instance, then tracking social media affords the centre with one kind of early caution machine.

There has been, but, one thing of Chinese language internet control that King’s have a look at did no longer touch, particularly the widespread perception that, in addition to passive tracking and censorship, the regime additionally employed legions of component-time bloggers and social media customers (maybe as many as 2 million) to submit stuff on the net that turned into beneficial to the government or refuted its critics. This becomes the “50c military” (these humans are supposedly paid 50 cents – or yuan equal – per put up). Now, in a brand new paper (forthcoming in the American Political Science Evaluation), King and his colleagues have turned their searchlight in this phenomenon.

chinese uning internet

Once again, their studies upend traditional knowledge. The 50c Navy does exist, they locate, however it’s no longer an element-time operation, and it’s greater resourceful than most people notion. King and co estimate that the Chinese language government fabricates and posts about 448m social media comments a year. But Additionally, they show that the underlying approach is to keep away from arguing with critics of the celebration and the authorities and to no longer even discuss debatable troubles. They, also, argue that the goal of this massive, undercover operation is, alternatively, “to distract the public and change the difficulty, as a maximum of these posts contains cheerleading for China, the modern records of the Communist celebration or other symbols of the regime”.

Sounds acquainted? In case you wanted a hashtag for the method, then #MCGA would do properly. It stands for “Make China terrific Again”. If Trump eventually falls out with Putin, he might locate A few kindred spirits in Beijing.