UDL Concept Map

Finally! Something I feel comfortable commenting on! After reading the UDL guidelines, and the blog post of Lisa Lingo, I got a little fired up. I have worked at the high school level for the first 7 years of my very, very young career. I have been in mostly urban settings, where there is great diversity, and often times, great poverty. Not every kid has access to content outside of school, and not every kid even speaks English. I have a problem with Lingo's assertions, as well as the UDL theory in general. In short, Lingo advocates for student freedom to learn at their own pace and style. While this does sound great, it's implications go far beyond the elementary school classroom where she exisists. Advocating for every child to have un-timed assessments is hard to swallow, if only for its real world implications. When the student gets to high school, and there is timing on tests, projects are due on certain dates, and there are penalties for being late, the student will run into trouble. In college, is the professor expected to have students turning in term papers when it suits them? What about the workplace? Last I checked in this challenging economy, people want to hold onto jobs. When a report or project is due, the boss expects to see it; the employee not having it or worse yet, expecting extra time to do it, is putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage. I just can't get behind Lingo's theory. With intellectual competition coming from China, India, and South America, US students needs to be able to adapt quickly and work under well under pressure, all while having the intellgence to be successful. How does a US student who can't take a timed test going to stack up against students in China that are 3 grades levels ahead in math, and in the long term, will be cheaper to employ? 

I have seen children coming in from non traditional middle schools, and sometimes it takes 3 years for them to learn how to function in a traditional classroom. It just doesn't translate. 

UDL is also a nice concept, but I don't see its applications in today's world of data driven results. How is a district, such as Norwalk or Bridgeport, expected to function within this model? Technology more then not is usually far behind the current curve; students coming from various SES's and cultures are going to have difficulty functioning in this model. And again, how does UDL translate in secondary education, post secondary education, and beyond? I fail to see how to get there under the current educational model of NCLB, under the constraints of todays economical crisis.