Special Education Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Special Education - Essay Example This assumption and accusation comes from the fact that schools stand to get more funding from the government if they have more special education needs students. In this regard, it is assumed that schools are more likely to label more students as special needs students so as to acquire more money from the government. However, as Freeman (2012) says, this is not only incorrect, it is also impossible. He argues that this accusation is incorrect because of various reasons. First, in any school, just one qualified teacher can have a child into the special needs status. This member of staff, who should also be a qualified teacher, and the special education needs coordinator would at the same time have to communicate and consult with so many other parties before he or she is finally able to have the child labelled as a special education needs student. These other parties include the board members, the parents of the child, the head teacher, a government body and many others. This means tha t the school cannot just decide to make a certain student a special needs student and start getting funding for the same. Secondly, Freeman (2012) argues that this claim is wrong because even if it was possible for schools to decide to label a child as having differentiated needs, this does not necessarily lead to the school getting lots of money. He argues that even after a school makes a certain student or group of students special needs students, this does not necessarily lead to the government increasing funding to the school. In such a case, the school may be required to meet the special needs of the students within the already existing resources. Again, even in the rare cases where the government may increase funding to the school, the increase in minimal and not so much as to be seen as a improvement of the students that the school gets. To counter this belief that schools and teachers are getting into the habit of unnecessarily labelling students as special needs students in order to get more money, Freeman (2012) argues that schools have over time tried their best to improve the learning environment of students with disability. This means that contrary to the belief that teacher and schools are using special education needs students to get more money, they are actually more interested in helping these students and do so with or without increased funding. Thirdly, Freeman (2012) argues that this argument is incorrect because even in cases where a school gets more support from the government for helping in taking the needs of these students with special education needs, this increased funding is usually in the form of teaching staff as opposed to cash money. In the article, he also looks at another issue that is more fundamental. The Second issue is that it is not the labelling that is important but how challenges of special students are dealt with. He looks at how the history of taking care of students with special need has changed. In particular he ar gues that teachers and school in general have turned to not caring too much about labelling but to coming up with different ways in which to assist students. He stresses that the label that the child gets is not important to the school staff, both teaching and the other members of staff because what matters to them is identifying the barriers and coming up with sensible practical solutions to help these students. Freeman (2012) stresses at least two things here. First he stresses the fact that labelling student

Eutrophication Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Eutrophication - Term Paper Example The Eutrophic waters favor quickly developing plants and algae's. These long living species cannot resist competition and develop into oligo or mesotrophic waters which make these waters of less interest in terms of biodiversity and ecological quality. Thus they die of indigestion. The process of eutrophication is clearly described by the following figure; The main cause of eutrophication is large input of nutrients to the water body and its effect is on imbalance of the food web which results in high levels of phytoplankton biomass in stratified water bodies. This can lead to algal blooms. The direct consequence is an excess of oxygen consumption near the bottom of the water body. Additional factors supporting this process are Along with carbon, oxygen and hydrogen which plants get from water they also need nitrogen and phosphorous which are necessary for the development of aquatic life thus during eutrophication the concentration of nutrients in the water changes, phosphorous is usually a limiting factor for phytoplankton in fresh water, large marine areas have nitrogen as limiting nutrient especially in summer. Intermediate areas such as river plumes are often phosphorous limited during spring. Once eutrophication is detected in the water body it is considered sensitive under the European Union Urban waste water treatment directives and is declared nitrate pollutant according to the Nitrate directive and is an indicator of disturbed ecosystem. A healthy ecosystem is the ecosystem that functions well and is able to resist or recover from disturbance. The organization of the ecosystem refers to the food web and the biodiversity; ecosystem resistance is the non-response, up to a certain extent, of impacts such as nutrient enrichments. The ecosystem elasticity refers to the ecosystem ability to survive through the applied pressures. Although all these ecosystem characteristics contribute to the ecosystem health and integrity, they induce a non-linear response to the ecosystem which complicates the quantification of the assessment. The initial effects from eutrophication are negligible as they are below the carrying capacity: any measurable effects are less pronounced than seas onal fluctuations and therefore, any assessment seems to be uncertain. As the phenomenon of eutrophication is getting established, changes in mean nutrient and chlorophyll concentrations as well as changes in the community structure become obvious. This stage can be the early warning for the ecosystem quality. Causes Human activities are main cause of eutrophication all around the