My son has the math problems read to him but no scribe. I guess I didn't realize until too late that the math portion of the testing had a written component. Now he is in third grade and it is fourth grade that is when they make kids retain a grade. My understanding is that there are no real consequences for him for poor performance because he is classified as LD. There seems to be a policy of not retaining LD kids.
I sympathize with you. We are on a mission in this country to make every one alike. We are doing this under the guise of leaving no child behind and all the great sounding, rah, rah, rhetoric. Who can argue such noble goals? I think there is more than one way to teach people. I also don't think everyone needs to become an author. I do think that we should hit reading really hard in elementary school (esp. forLD) and in secondary grades hone in on functional writing skills. NonLD can do more with writing earlier. Elem. for LD writing should focus on learning to write a good sentence or two, perhaps to write a strong paragraph by the end of 6th grade (essays are just multiple paragraphs). We should explicitely teach the elements of a good paragraph, in depth. I.E. we could focus for as much as a year on teaching the art and skill of topic sentences. We examine many well-written paragraphs to locate the topic sentence. We discuss what makes it a good topic sentence. We encounter hundreds of examples and are led to writing our own (after we can already write a good sentence). Then we focus on a good concluding sentence the same way, lastly to supporting details. We practice with paragraph frames where most of the paragraph is provided, gradually the frame is reduced. Nobody out there that I am aware of in public school is teaching LD students to write in a manner that they can learn to write school essays and functional life-oriented writing in a fashion that is very systematically structured in teeny tiny steps so the children can succeed and actually learn.
I have totally stopped, for many of my students, writing goals that state, "Carol (who is 10) will write a 5 paragraph essay that includes correct indentation, 90% correct capitalization and punctuation, 85% correct spelling.........to a teacher provided prompt that is measured by work samples." That is hogwash, yet get students who cannot write a sentence that starts with a capital and ends with a period AND is well stated that move in with IEP goals similar to that. And we wonder why the goals are not met.
I am too long, sorry. I think we want too much, too fast and we are in a rush, this does not get the job done. The best approach is to teach for long term learning, retention and success. This may not be the fast and furious route.
We are in a race here in education. One school is pitted against the next, district against district, state against state and finally we compete against other nations on a regular basis when tests are given across 50 or more nations and the nations ranked. The education olympics and the individual child is totally lost in the numbers. Dreadful.