What Is The Importance of Person-First Language?

-->

            I want to keep writing this week about the meanings behind person-first language, and about some of the implications of this kind of language in terms of best educational outcomes for students. 

            The emphasis for person-first language has been on not saying, “Ishmael is disabled,” but rather “Ishmael has a disability;” not “Christopher is autistic,” but rather “Christopher has autism,” or “Christopher has ASD.”  The political reason for this – what I’ve heard said, derogatorily, as “PC” – is that no one is disabled, that nobody is defined or essentialized by his or her disability.  However, this also means that a disability becomes something that you have – we have transitioned from talking about disability as something that you are to talking about it in terms of something that you own.  Disability, in this sense, becomes property. 

            On the other hand, dis-ability means quite literally the absence of a property, of not having the ability to do or to grasp something.  So a disability becomes something that a person has that is marked by a lacking or an absence.  (This makes me think back to my Collaborating with Families class, and how many mothers of persons with disabilities talked about their feelings of guilt and of loss when their children with severe disabilities were born.)  My student Baldur has a physical disability, it is something that he owns, but he has it based on the criterion of what he cannot do – walk down stairs without assistance, run for long distances, etc.  So why should we talk about his disability as if it is something of value that he has, hung around his neck like an albatross?

            What does this look like in the classroom or in the community?  I still want to be thinking about disability as something that is context-dependent, and therefore not a permanent or unchanging state of being.  But this perspective gets challenged by thinking about disability as a property.  I am responsible for my property – for my clothes and books and food and school supplies.  I also have certain rights because of my property – I can tell a teacher if someone steals my pencil, I can use the money I earn at work for snacks off the snack cart, I can shoot someone for breaking into my house.  But then, what rights and responsibilities do I have for my disability?  Thinking about disability in this sense gives students a basis for advocating on their own behalf because they can point to their rights and responsibilities that they have because of their disabilities.  On the other hand, this also means that students with disabilities can’t easily “pass” from one environment to a different one and leave their disability behind; it becomes something, something that they have ownership over, that they have to carry with them from place to place.  And so, in this way, disability, which we thought we had demystified through the practice of person-first language, becomes reified as property. 

More on Disability and Etymology

-->

            One of the advantages of conducting community-based instruction with students with disabilities is that you get to see how these students “perform” across different environments and in different contexts.  This is a part of conducting environmental inventories for your students; in each of the disparate environments in which the student is likely to be, you need to be able to know what assets are at-hand for students, and what situations can best emphasize their strengths and abilities.

            When we approach special education from this perspective, it helps us to rethink how to consider disability.  We talk a lot about the importance of “person first language,” but often do not interrogate why this is important, or why we must mean what we say.  Because a person is never “disabled” – this is not some kind of essential or fundamental part of an individual’s identity. (Or, perhaps more accurately, this shouldn’t be the case.)  Rather, being disabled, in the verb usage of the word, not the noun, entails being in a context where there is something lacking at-hand. (“Able” comes from the Latin habilis, which means “easily handled,” “easy to be held,” “apt,” and “fit for a purpose.”  Our English words “handled” and “habit” are related.) We are disabled when we literally lack the tool necessary for the purpose at-hand.  I have said this before, but a short person is disabled when he needs the brand of detergent on the top shelf; the tall person is disabled sitting in coach class on an airplane.  A student with a reading disability is disabled when she has to read Romeo and Juliet; she isn’t when she watches it on stage. 

            This is, of course, also true with students with “severe and profound” disabilities, and those following alternate, life skills curricula. My student Odin has autism and a cognitive disability.  But he knows how to use the internet, how to conduct a Google search and check his e-mail, and he’s memorized all the lyrics to the songs by Meek Mill.  My student Forseti is mostly non-verbal and has a hearing impairment.  But he can work the school snack cart almost entirely independently, and memorize routes for us to take as we go door-to-door selling chips and soda.  The question, then, is how we apply these students’ abilities to other environments, how we enable them to possess the tools they need to for the purposes they will encounter.  (This is part of my attempt to trace disability back to the concepts of ownership and property rights.)

Something About the Meaning of the Word "Occupy"

-->

            Occupy (v.) - "to take possession of," also "to take up space or time, employ (someone)," irregularly borrowed from O.Fr. occuper "occupy (a person or place), hold, seize" (13c.) or directly from L. occupare "take over, seize, take into possession, possess, occupy," from ob "over" (see ob-) + intensive form of capere "to grasp, seize" (see capable).

            This semester, I will be working with my students on the skills that they need in order to transition into independent living as autonomous adults.  These students are no longer following the general curriculum that most high schoolers are on; no algebra or trigonometry, no physics, no AP French.  And, honestly, if they were in these classes, it would most likely be a waste of their time.  Rather, we work with them on the skills that they need, and we focus on three main domains: domestic, community/vocational, and recreation/leisure.

            I’m currently writing assessments for two of my students who will be working on several goals related to their vocational and leisure domains.  These are young men – 16 and 18, respectfully, both with cognitive disabilities who are on an alternative curriculum – who have very definitive concepts of what they want to do after they graduate.  And so much of it revolves around how they want to spend their time.  “I want to have a job.”  “I want to start a blog.” “I want to hang out with my girlfriend.”  “I want to play the drums in my basement.”  These sentiments have an effect on how we plan our curriculum; if a student wants to start a hobby of playing the drums, then he’s going to need how to get to the music store, how to ask the clerk about the differences between the products*, and how to budget for buying what he wants and needs. 

            The key concept that I want to take away from this is that a major part of focusing on a student’s right to self-determination – the belief that the locus of power in a student’s life ought to exist with that student– is dependent upon how that student chooses to occupy his or her time.  From where they work to who they hang out with to what their hobbies are, students with disabilities need to have the know-how to make use of their time in a way that the see fit.   

NB: I wrote this for class, hence the slightly different voice. 

* I don’t really know anything about drums.

Independence

This semester, I am working in a functional life skills classroom at one of the local high schools.  A lot of our class day is spent on "community based instruction," which entails traveling about the community, working on skills such as buying goods, riding the bus, making plans for future trips, ordering in restaurants, etc.  Today, Robyn pointed out this nice post from Crooked Timber about a father learning to cope with his son's increasing independence in New York City. 

Oh, and to keep the old-school philosophy blogs rolling, Brian Leiter at Leiter Reports has an excellent perspective on the Chicago Teacher's Strike:

Of course, it would be hard to generate enthusiasm among hedge-fund billionaire busybodies for doing something about the economic environment in which the victims live, so instead we are presented with the absurd idea that if only the teachers were better, everything would be dandy, as well as the destructive idea that to make the teachers better, we need to measure their performance based on standardized test results.

As for me, I've got a bunch of backed-up blog posts talking about the strike, property rights, teaching vocational skills, and teaching to the common core state standards.  But I also have, you know, work to do.  And it's college football season.  So I'll try to get more interesting reads out shortly.  Happy Sunday!

Images of Disability in Twin Peaks

Happy 20th Anniversary of David Lynch's "Fire Walk With Me".

Joel Wright ‏@joelwrig

Going to teach a functional life skills class after watching a bunch of David Lynch clips. I am the best special-ed teacher ever. 

Joel Wright ‏@joelwrig

Speaking of which: Who's written about Lynch and images of disability? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Big Business of Charter Schools

CNBC, from k12newsnetwork.com :

Tuesday Links

Orientation at the high school today!  Oh boy!

People with Autism and the Budget Crisis -

"Preservation of the most essential programs for people with autism, intellectual, or developmental disabilities is vital. Medicaid is a lifeline for the majority of people with autism and other forms of significant disabilities. Medicaid is the largest funding source of long-term family and individual supports in the state and federal developmental disabilities systems and is, for many people, their main source of health care payments."

Agencies Spar over Standards for Special Education Students -

"The policy says, essentially, that only students with severe cognitive disabilities and English-language learners who have been in the country for less than one year should be excluded from taking the exams in reading, mathematics, and other subjects.... As it now stands, states that exclude more students with disabilities and ELLs have a record of posting better scores than states that are more inclusive."

Getting the Most out of Working with a Learning Disability - 

"Madaus polled 500 university graduates from three different schools, and found that while 100 percent of these students disclosed their disability in college, only 55 percent did so on the job, and of that 55 percent, only 12 percent asked for workplace accommodations. Furthermore, 20 percent of the students who disclosed reported experiencing negative consequences such as lack of respect, lowered expectations or confidence from others, lost job responsibilities, and exclusion from promotion."

Why Special Education Should be Cold to Charter Schools

From the AP this morning, "Special Needs Students Staying in Traditional Schools":

"The high cost of educating students with special needs is disproportionately falling on traditional public schools as other students increasingly opt for alternatives that aren't always readily open to those requiring special education."

Highlights:

- In Cleveland, the district has lost 41 percent of its students since 1996 while its proportion of students with special needs rose from 13.4 percent to 22.9 percent last year. In Milwaukee, enrollment has dropped by nearly 19 percent over the past decade, but the percentage of students with disabilities has risen from 15.8 percent in 2002 to 19.7 percent in 2012.

- The U.S. Department of Education's office of civil rights is investigating charter school practices relating to students with disabilities in five districts around the country.

- While the number of students with special needs has not increased, the rising proportion has driven up costs for cash-strapped schools.

- Public Schools of Philadelphia, for example, spent $9,100 per regular education pupil in 2009, $14,560 per pupil with milder disabilities and $39,130 for more severe disabilities

- As districts increasingly offer other options, kids with disabilities are not enrolling in the alternatives at the same rate. (NB: This seems poorly worded, as if the students are the ones making the decision NOT to enroll.  When politicians support "school choice," we should ask them "who's choice?" - JW)

- Many charters have been reluctant to tackle special education because they lack expertise, but that is starting to change.


There may be a place for charter schools in the public education system.  But what is trending right now across the country is that public money is being transferred from public schools to private schools that do not have either the capacity or the cash incentive to provide appropriate education to students with disabilities.   Therefore, the per pupil financial burdens on urban public schools is increasing rapidly while their funds are being depleted. 

Even charter schools that do educate students with disabilities are not held to the same standards as public schools.  Their teachers often do not have the necessary training or experience as public (read: unionized) teachers, and their schools do not have to operate under the same "zero reject" principles that public schools have to.  (Although federal law prohibits charter schools from rejecting a student because of a disability, many of them have certain stated student minimum requirements that prevents many students with disabilities from enrolling.) 

I believe the appropriate phrase for this is "resegregation." 

Charter School Shut Downs Abandon Thousands of Students

It is a cool and breezy August afternoon here in east central Illinois.  Robyn and I have been taking it easy.  We watched the "Hunger Games," and I was like, "Holy crap!  This is PG-13?" Then we watched "Zombieland," because I wanted to watch something uplifting, and I guess I was into having a "Woody Harrelson Drunkenly Stars in Post-Apocalyptic Films" Festival.  That should be an entire genre in itself. 

So that's what I did instead of blogging.  I do have a lot of things to share though:

Kansas City Public Schools are expecting a huge increase in enrollment this year after several area charter schools were closed down for failing to provide their students with a curriculum aligned with state standards.  Via the AP:

Enrollment has swelled in unaccredited St. Louis and Kansas City public schools as about 5,000 students from shuttered charter schools find a new place to get an education.
Years of declining enrollment, spurred by families moving to the suburbs or enrolling child in private, parochial or charter schools, meant the two districts saw less money from the state, which forced deep budget cuts. The Kansas City district had to close nearly half of its buildings before the 2010-11 academic year to avoid bankruptcy.

Of course, because of these budget cuts - partially caused by the loss of revenue as students left the district for these same charter schools, run by the Imagine Schools management company - means that KC is not able to accommodate all of these new students.  There was a plan to move some of these students to neighboring districts, such as Independence, Lee's Summit, and North Kansas City.  According to EdWeek, "Missouri law allows students in Kansas City to transfer to nearby accredited school districts, at the expense of the Kansas City district."  However:

A Missouri circuit court judge sided Thursday with three school districts that said they would suffer financial harm if students from the unaccredited Kansas City, Mo. school system were allowed to transfer in to their smaller, accredited districts.... The judgment was a victory for three Kansas City-area districts—Independence, Lee's Summit and North Kansas City—which were able to demonstrate to the court that the cost of educating transfer students from Kansas City would impose a financial burden.

 This is the danger of the public-private charter school system: Public funds went to Imagine Schools, which are not held to the same state standards, and eventually leave town.  This leaves their students, who are predominantly minorities, and have high levels of students with disabilities who have a federal guarantee to an education back in a system that has been robbed over the previous years.  And there is no incentive for the suburban districts - which are both whiter and wealthier - to take in those urban students.  I have no idea what Kansas City is going to do.

Paging Professor Harold Hill:

More on the social construction of disability

Here are a few of the articles that I have read today, and pieces that I plan to incorporate later into some of the larger themes of this blog, themes of inclusion, education, and access.

First, is this op-ed in Education Week by Rick Hess, a fellow at the conservative American Education Institute.  Mr. Hess is concerned about certain criticisms of charter schools in Washington, D.C., specifically, that critics of these charter schools will not be able to "meet the needs of low-performing, English-language learners and special education students."  Mr. Hess believes that highest achieving students in the D.C. area deserve to have access to better performing private/public charter schools, and that it is unfair for bureaucrats to prevent the upward mobility of these inner-city students because of the needs of low-performing students.  He goes on to say that "the notion that families and students in DC shouldn't have access to a high quality liberal arts curriculum just because many students in DC need something more remedial in scope strikes me as a perverse vision of 'social justice.'"

I disagree.

Second, is this piece from Disabled World on the social construction of disability, a topic that I briefly touched upon yesterday, by Wendy Taormina-Weiss.  Ms. Taormina-Weiss emphasizes the application of new technologies such as email, web conferences, and cell phones, that allow persons with disabilities the ability to access situations in which they do not manifest themselves as disabled.  She says:

The world today still finds many people viewing those who experience forms of disabilities in ways that are incorrect or misconceived. For example, some people still view the experience of a disability as the person’s entire life instead of something that is located within their body or mind and merely a part of who they are. Social constructions identifying people with disabilities with the diagnosis they have received from a physician such as autism, intellectual disability, cognitive disorders, or many other forms of disabilities identified through use of medical terminology are still used to label and somehow construct the entire perceptions of some in association with a person who experiences a disability.

I like what Ms. Taormina-Weiss says about the construction of disability, and I applaud her efforts.  However, a part of me wishes that she would go ... further ...  That she would take a stand that is, maybe, a little more radical.  Specifically, that she would get rid of the notion that a disability is located at all in the body or the mind, that, instead, that it is entirely a social construct.  I think she is right to say that a disability cannot define the totality of what a person is, but she should push this thought further, to the point that a disability exists only in context, is only something that is socially constructed, and that exists only outside of the body and the mind.

On the other hand, this contention may work against another principle that I think is important: that individuals with disabilities ought to take ownership of their abilities, and take responsibility for them.  (This is not a real contradiction, just one that I am entertaining for the moment, in blog form.)

Rethinking Disability in Contexts

Also, another reason why I wasn't blogging was that bad stuff just kept happening.  One of the things we talked about in my Education and Technology class this Summer was whether or not we need the ability to "tune out"* all of the media and information that we are bombarded with on a constant basis.  I hardly ever watch television, but between Twitter, Facebook, my iPhone, my online classes, and my job researching online, I am pretty much attached to some stream of news and information for my entire waking experience.  The singularity approaches. 

So, one bad thing that happened that I would like to share with you is that a judge in Pennsylvania decided not to issue an injunction blocking the state's voter identification law.  Hopefully you know this by know, but voter ID laws in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and other states are being passed in an attempt to suppress voter turnout amongst the poor, students, and minorities this November.   Why should someone in special education care about this?  Well, in a word, accessibility.

Part of the definition of "disability" is that a disability necessary restricts access for a person to something.  A physical disability restricts access to certain physical environments, a reading or learning disability restricts access to texts, a behavioral disability restricts access to social environments and cultural exchanges.   Voter ID laws disable a huge amount of the population - as many as 1 in 7 in Pennsylvania and as many as 1 in 3 in Philadelphia - by restricting their access to the voting booth.  Call it a political disability.  And the connection to disability rights is very real; according to this study from USA Today, only 27% of polling places in the U.S. are unobstructed, which may prevent 3.2 million Americans with disabilities from voting in 2012.

I have read some very good literature this Summer about how we need to rethink the ways in which we consider disabilities, and how a disability is constructed through context. There is a tendency to think about "being disabled" as a permanent state, but it's not, it is a state of flux.  A person in a wheelchair may not be disabled working as the IT lady when your cable is on the fritz; a student with a reading disability may not be disabled when she's on the track team; another student with an emotional disorder may not be disabled when he's in the chemistry lab.**  The big idea here is that "disability" is not something that people are born with and always have, but it something that is created when an individual's access to something desirable - a job, an education, an ID card, leisure time, the brand of dish soap on the top shelf of the grocery store, a vote - is restricted. 

Or what about liberty?  Being a minority student may be considered a disability in New York City, where more than 95 percent of the 882 students arrested during the last school year were black or Latino.

* "Turn off, tune out, drop in"?
** Or maybe they are still disabled.  What happens when the Chem teacher decides that 50% of the grade is based on class participation and etiquette?

Preparing for Returning to the Classroom

I haven't been writing in this space for the last couple of weeks.  Robyn and I have been pretty busy having fun here at the end of Summer.  We went up to Chicago for her birthday, and saw Goodbye Cruel World by one of our favorite theater troupes that we also saw three years ago.   Two weeks ago, we went to New Hampshire for Robyn's cousin's wedding, and we got to spend some quality time with her family, and then last weekend we got a visit from my sister and her family, and then went back up to Chi-town for sole and very serious purpose of introducing my brother-in-law to Chicago-style pizza.  Phew!  Now, we are in that brief, two week period between the end of summer semester and the beginning of fall, and have some time to catch up on things like blogging and jogging and, um, clogging?  (Also, I am a level 15 orc!)

So, there has been those, practical reasons for why I have been absent longer than intended.  The other reason has been that, sometimes, the absurdity of certain things is just too sad to write about it.  For example, in education and specifically special education, we speak often of the school-to-prison pipeline, the mechanism in the United States by which disadvantaged students are moved from the public education system into the penal system.  Think cradle to grave, in a very real sense. 

However, when we speak of this system, we have not meant it in the most literal of meanings ... until know.  According to CNN.com, Lauderdale County, Mississippi, has been incarcerating students in a local prison for school disciplinary actions.  The Justice Department is planning a suit against Mississippi, and is citing that, "Students most affected by this system are African-American children and children with disabilities." 

The alleged mistreatment included youngsters being "crammed into small, filthy cells and tormented with the arbitrary use of Mace as a punishment for even the most minor infractions -- such as 'talking too much' or failing to sit in the 'back of their cells,'" the [Southern Poverty Law Center] said in a statement.

One of the issues that I consider to be the most pressing for special education teachers is the ways in which race, poverty, and disability intersect in the lives of their students.  In June, I attended a conference on Critical Race Studies in Education, and came away with a lot of exciting ideas, which I plan to put into action over time here and in other spaces.   However, one of the things that always unsettles me is how, as a teacher, I see the theories and ideas and philosophies that are bandied about in university lectures and conferences having real, sometimes terrifying, effects on the lives and the bodies of students.  This is very real, very serious work, and when teachers fail, they are not the ones who feel the worst of the consequences. 

Stephen Colbert on Critical Thinking Skills

Stephen knows what's up:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - On the Straight & Narrow-Minded
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

On Alternative Education Placements

Salon.com has an article up today about the Aspen Education Group, and its role in the negligent death of a 14-year old boy from Oregon with an Autism Spectrum Disorder.   Aspen is owned by the CRC Health Group, which is owned by (bum bum bum) Bain Capital.  Salon writer Art Levine writes:

Our investigation found previously unreported allegations of abuse and neglect in at least 10 CRC residential drug and teen care facilities across the country, including three I visited undercover in Utah and California. With rare exceptions, such incidents have largely escaped notice because the programs are, thanks to lax state regulations, largely unaccountable.

Court documents and ex-staffers also allege that such incidents reflect, in part, a broader corporate culture at Aspen’s owner, CRC Health Group, a leading national chain of treatment centers. Lawsuits and critics have claimed that CRC prizes profits, and the avoidance of outside scrutiny, over the health and safety of its clients. (We sent specific questions on these basic allegations to CRC and owner Bain Capital. CRC would answer only general questions; Bain did not reply.)

I was all getting set and ready to geek out about this conspiracy theory change of Aspen being owned by CRC, which was owned by Bain, and so on.  Then I looked back at what I wrote about Aspen in 2009, and was surprised to be reminded that I knew all this back then:

Aspen Education runs wilderness therapy, residential rehab, and weight loss programs across the U.S., including SageWalk, which is the program that I had heard the most about, and Youth Care of Utah, where a resident died in 2007. Bain Capital is a private equity firm that was founded in 1984. One of its founders was - get this - Mitt Romney. 

So let me put aside the strict politics of this and try to discuss what it means for education and, specifically, special education.  Aspen Education reflects a lot of the systemic problems that come up with privatized, for-profit education.  Specifically, groups like Aspen can take advantage of parents of students with disabilities who do not live in public school districts that have the capacity to meet the students' needs.  (In the Salon article, the example is a boy with an Autism Spectrum Disorder who was too disruptive to remain in his inclusive setting.)  The school district, however, is still legally responsible for providing those students with a Free And aPpropriate Education (FAPE).  So these students end up getting "outsourced" to private, for-profit organizations that oftentimes claim to have the necessary facilities to education their children, but end up cutting corners for the sake of keeping costs low. 

The sad ironies of this system is that the students, more often than not, get a less effective education at a higher cost to the public.  If the community is able to adequately fund their schools in order to accommodate students with disabilities, then the can end up saving money by not being sued by parents and being forced to ship their students to private organizations that do not have to fulfill the same legal standards that public schools do.

I want to come back later to some of the issues that this article brings up.  Essentially, "alternative educational placements" like Aspen are bad ideas.  When students with disabilities are segregated from their peers, they will not receive the same quality of education that their peers receive.  When we speak of inclusion, we need to understand some of the less convenient outcomes. 

Sunday Reading List/ I Don't Wanna Do My Homework!

I hope everyone is having a nice Sunday afternoon.  If you need some more help procrastinating, here's some stuff that I've been reading on the great big series of tubes:

On the trail of the Piggyback Bandit - The weird and tragic tale of Sherwin Shayegan, an adult with an intellectual disability, possibly an Autism spectrum disorder, who has been banned in five states for jumping on high school athletes' backs. 

Texas's road to victory in its decades long fight against voting rights - I don't mean to be picking - "messing," I guess, would be the term - on Texas here.  I'm a big fan of Texas toast.  And, um .... Tim Duncan.  But, historically, Texas has been on the vanguard in opposition and resistance to the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  Something I learned was how the existence of the poll tax has morphed throughout the decades.  As Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo and proud racist prophesized: "“If the poll tax bill passes, the next step will be an effort to remove the registration qualification, the educational qualification of Negroes. If that is done we will have no way of preventing the Negroes from voting.”"

 Moving Beyond the Stereotypes - Thinking about images of persons with disabilities in the media.  Your always either Quasimodo or Captain Ahab, Tiny Tim or Richard III.  Is this changing?  Also: Peter Dinklage fan club!  He's going to be rocking my alma mater this summer. 

And now for something completely different: Yesterday was Bastille Day.  Also the anniversary of the beginning of the Third Reich's program of sterilization of persons with disabilities.  Fucking Nazis.
Finally, ForgetBobbyJindal. #FBJ: The boy-faced governor of Louisiana continues to dismantle his state's education system through voucher supported private schools. (i.e., public funding for private institutions.)  From the article:

A big chunk of the money already out there is being snapped up by conservative evangelical schools with exotic and hardly public-minded curricular offerings, with the theory being that any public oversight would interfere with the accountability provided by the market.

 At Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, pastor-turned-principal Marie Carrier hopes to secure extra space to enroll 135 voucher students, though she now has room for just a few dozen. Her first- through eighth-grade students sit in cubicles for much of the day and move at their own pace through Christian workbooks, such as a beginning science text that explains "what God made" on each of the six days of creation. They are not exposed to the theory of evolution. "We try to stay away from all those things that might confuse our children," Carrier said.

Unfortunately, because the true core of the voucher movement is made up of social conservatives who just want taxpayer help sending their kids to Bible schools and consider "accountability" to be a code word for an assault on religious freedom, he's not likely to do anything of the sort.

This is the model for education that Mitt Romney has endorsed.

The Purpose of Challenging Fixed Beliefs

I want to go back for a second to the Texas GOP Party Platform on education.  This summer, I'm taking a couple of online classes for my Master's in SPED, one of which is "Technology and Education," which is taught by Wittgenstein scholar/ liberal blogger Prof. Nicholas Burbules.  Anyways, the class got into an awesome chatroom conversation about the statements made by the Texas GOP, and I think we got just a little bit closer to the heart of the matter.  For a refresher, here's the statement again: 

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcomes Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

And here's the part that the class highlighted: "...have the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs..."  At this point, there was this kind of communal epiphany, that was kind of cool coming from an online class, as you can "see" everyone thinking because they have all stopped typing away furiously in the little chat box.  The point is that people tend to have a certain set of beliefs that provide the foundations for their world views, beliefs that provide the scaffolding for all of the other things that they believe in the world.  These include certain assumptions that we act upon all the time without thinking about it - "The world has lasted longer than I have been alive," or "I have two hands." - as well as beliefs about ourselves, our identities, and our place in the world.  ("I am a man." "I am a Christian." "I am a homosexual." "I am Hispanic." "I have a disability." "I am poor.")  It is these types of fixed beliefs that influence how folks behave, and in a very real way enter the political sphere, because they influence who we (think) we are, and how we ought to treat one another. 

This is why critical thinking, or, as I like to call it, philosophy, is such a dangerous thing, and why the Texas GOP is so openly hostile to it.  An individual who can think critically about her self, her world and her place in it can also analyze and discern facts about that world; she suddenly has some kind of power.  And because "authority" - even parental authority - is predicated on a certain imbalance in power, it will always be hostile towards critical Thought.   As Prof. Burbules put it in our class, " "Belief" can sometimes be a real impediment to learning." And so we have two very different perspectives on the meaning of education: One that calls for it to reinforce the dominant values, and to ensure the perpetuation of the current state of affairs in the world, and another, which calls for a purposeful challenging of fixed beliefs for the purpose of evaluating authority and, if judged necessary, challenging it.  As a Special Education teacher, that is, someone whose job it is to best serve a population of citizens who are dis-served by the prevailing authority, I don't think I really have a choice in the matter. 

This, of course, is nothing new.  When the Athenians brought Socrates to trial, they charged him with three things: Atheism, making the weaker argument appear the stronger, and corruption of the youth.  I would bet dollars to dimes that, if you asked a Texas Republican to list three things wrong with public education today, his list would sound strangely similar.   

On Teaching Critical Thinking Skills to Students With Disabilities

Last week, several websites reported on the Texas Republican Party's official platform opposing the teaching of critical thinking skills in schools.  For the record, here is the line from the official party platform, under the heading of "Educating our Children":

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcomes Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority. 

Education Week pointed out that the opposition to the teaching of critical thinking skills in public schools has corresponded with the rise in the push for standardization, but that this new statement is a first in openly stating the opposition to the teaching of thinking itself.  The progressive AmericaBlog thinks that "What this really means is that the GOP is doubling down on learn-by-rote fact recitation – of the kind spearheaded by the worst of the pro-testing advocates, and locally by IDEA Public Schools, which has committed to the anti-analytical direct learning model (aka "press button A, B or C.")"  And the Austin Chronicle goes further, saying that, "The Texas GOP is officially enshrining blind obedience into its doctrine of political domination."

As someone who is going into Special Education, this statement is both frightening and revealing.  Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA), I, as a special-ed teacher, am legally bound to provide my students with a free, appropriate education in the least restrictive environment possible.  These are required under the federal law - in fact, students with disabilities are the only students in the United States with a federally protected right to an education.  So what happens when one of my federal obligations - such as providing an appropriate education - conflicts with state law, such as refusing to teach higher order thinking skills?

This conflict also comes into play when considering "multicultural education".  The Texas GOP platform is also opposed to that, stating, "We believe the current teaching of a multicultural curriculum is divisive..."  Of course, this becomes an issue for most sped teachers, as African Americans are almost twice as likely to be labeled as having a disability than their White peers are, and Hispanics are about a third more likely.  So, here you are, Mr. Wright, and two-thirds or maybe three-fourths of your students are minorities, and you are forbidden to teach a "multicultural curriculum."  Please keep this in mind as we proceed.

But here is the thing that, I guess, really gets my goat.  In one way, students with disabilities are those who have been, in some way, disadvantaged in their lives.  This means that they can be someone with a physical disability, like me, or someone with Autism or Down's Syndrome, and it can mean someone with a reading disability like dyslexia or ADHD.  But it can also mean someone who is poor, or who is Black, or who has been born into a single-parent home, or someone who speaks English as a second language.  And I don't mean this glibly or as an analogy; statistics prove that these factors of race and class and stature are massive contributors to students being labeled as having a learning disability, a cognitive disability, or an emotional disability - the so-called "invisible disabilities."  In a very real way, being a minority, being poor, being "multicultural," are disabilities. 

This is because these are the students who are let down every day by education, public or private.  They are less likely to pass standardized tests, less likely to go to college, more likely to drop out, more likely to go to jail. (I have the stats, if you want them.)  These are the students for whom the traditional system is not working, for whom "the return to the traditional basics of reading, writing, arithmetic, and citizenship with sufficient discipline to ensure learning and quality educational assessment," as the GOP Platform says, means a return to those things that don't work.

All of the data and research that I have been exposed to points to students being more successful in and out of school when they are taught critical thinking skills and strategies, and not merely rote memorization lists of facts.  Within special education, we talk about this in terms of maintenance and generalization, and of the functional application of learned skills; the most valuable things that we can teach our students are strategies and skills for solving the types of problems that they are most likely to face in their day-to-day lives.  To this end, teaching by rote, teaching to not question one's fixed beliefs, failing to teach strategies and skills, leads to predictable ends.  I feel a little guilty because I'm not going into the details (maybe I will later), but the big idea is this: Not teaching critical thinking skills will lead to predictably poor performances among students with disabilities, minorities, and other disadvantaged students.

I imagine that a Republican would retort that the current system is not benefiting these students either, and that we ought to abandon the advocating of teaching critical thinking skills and embrace a "return to basics," and that this would benefit everyone, not just those select groups that I brought up.  But then I would bring up all those parenthetical statements in their policy plank - (HOTS)(values clarification)(OBE)(mastery learning).  From where I stand, seeing how the ways in which we have been teaching have been failing all these groups of students that I am obliged to serve as a Special Education teacher, I cannot help but think that these clauses and clarifications have been included in the Party Platform in order to make it clear against whom this policy is aimed, with whom the Republican Party is fed up, and for whom they have decided that they have no obligation to teach:

Students with disabilities. 

As American As Baseball

Happy 4th of July!

It's kind of weird having the holiday in the middle of the week, on a Wednesday.  Robyn and I have the day off from school and classes, and we're spending the afternoon loafing about our apartment.  Robyn is making one of her trademarked delicious pies, and I am alternating between blogging and working on a research project involving the implementation of the Common Core State Standards.

This is not what she will be making, but this is her splendid American Apple Pie!

But I feel like I have been being a bit of a downer lately, what with all of the talk about the sad state of public education.  So, in the honor of the Fourth of July and of America, I want to talk about the one thing as American as apple pie: baseball.

I think that my new favorite player is the White Sox DH, Adam Dunn.  Dunn is one of three ChiSox to be selected for this year's All-Star Game, along with pitcher Chris Sale and 1st baseman Paul Konerko.  Dunn is also coming off of what, when measured some ways, was the worst season any baseball player has ever had, in which he hit .159 with an on base percentage of .292 and a slugging percentage of .277, with 177 strike outs and only 11 home runs.

Obviously, the big man is doing better this year.  But what I absolutely love is the fact that he is an All-Star with a batting average of .216, the worst of any starter for the White Sox.  So why is he an All-Star?  Well, his line this year is .216/.366/.525 .   That means that his slugging percentage is almost double what it was last year.  Dunn is no where near the top 100 in the AL in batting, but he is 17th in OBP, 14th in slugging, and 12th in OPS.  Why is this?  Well, because Dunn leads the AL in walks with 66, and is tied for second in homers, with 25.

But here's my favorite thing about Dunn.  Sure, he's 1st in walks and 2nd in homers.  That's great.  But he is also 1st in another category: strikeouts.  The man has 126 K's, which is more than twenty more the second place in AL.  In fact, Dunn is on pace to shatter the MLB record for strike outs, which is currently 223, set by Mark Reynolds in 2009.  If Dunn continues his pace, he'll have 50 HRs, which is great, but he will also have 252 strike outs.  This is not new territory for Dunn; he currently holds the #5, #10, and #11 spots on all-time strike outs per season.  But this year could be something special.

And that's why I love the guy:  He is going to swing at that ball.  He has had 278 official at bats.  126 have been strike outs.  25 have been home runs.  With him, it is going to be all or nothing.

Or a walk.  Which is good, too.   

Educational Links - Dwelling on Thinking

So I'm at lunch on campus right now, and my dashboard is overflowing with tabs of links to different educational stories that I want to talk about.  Here's a run-down, and hopefully, after I am done with the work that I'm actually getting paid to do, I'll be able to come back and address some of these issues in depth:

- The Washington Post has a guest column from a "veteran teacher", Marion Brady, enumerating his complaints about standardized testing.  Some excellent points he makes: "Teachers oppose the tests because they measure only 'low level' thinking processes .... they limit their ability to adapt to learner differences ... and penalize test-takers who think in non-standard ways."

- There are lots of reasons to oppose, or at least to be skeptical of, voucher-based charter schools.  One practical reason is the amount of corruption and graft that that kind of a system can lead to.  The private, faith-based New Living Word School in Louisiana had received over 300 new students who would be paying their tuition using publicly funded vouchers.  Unfortunately, the New Living Word School currently has only space for 122 students.  In addition, "New Living's leader told the News-Star that most instruction at the school happens via DVD." Governor Bobby Jindal's office and State Superintendent John White have recently released e-mails regarding how they could "muddy up a narrative."

- American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten said that she would support the establishment of a "bar exam for teachers."  "She said a bar exam for teachers today should emphasize the instruction of critical thinking."  Oh, and speaking of critical thinking ....

- The Texas Republican Party stated in their official party platform that "We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs..." Lots of pixels have already been spilt over this, including at Education Week and Care2.com.  I know that I want to say something about this, although I don't know quite what, yet.  In the meantime, I'll be checking out this website I just found called HOTS.org, a "general thinking skills program for Title I and LD (learning disabled) students in grades 4-8 that dramatically accelerates learning, test scores and social confidence."  

On Sweat and Sweating

Good Lord, Friday was hot.  I left the apartment at eight, and walked three blocks to catch my morning bus to get to class, and by the time I got to the corner, I had sweated through my khakis and my new, green t-shirt.  And I don't mean like a couple of pit stains and a little moisture around my butt; no, I mean a full-fledged deluge through every article of clothing that I had on, everything sticking to my body in that way that the bed sheets stick to you after a night with the flu, like all you're wearing is a warm and moist shower curtain.

There were a couple of other U of I students waiting on the street corner for the bus, and I tried my best to hide the fact that my shirt looked like Michael Phelps' shorts; what can I do about it? I'm a sweaty guy.  But that doesn't mean that I'm not self-conscious about it.  Robyn is always telling me not to worry about it, that all it means that it's hot outside, and probably everyone is sticky and sweating.  But, still, my sweat is something that concerns me, that I spend a little too much time worrying about it, and trying to hide it by layering unnecessarily, and crossing my arms in front of my chest when someone is talking to me in order to hide my pit stains.

At some of the schools that I have worked in, there is no air conditioning, or only air conditioning in a few of the classrooms.  So when school starts in September or in the end of August, the students are in class a time when it is still sweltering outside, and the school building quickly becomes a crucible filled with hot, fragrant, and easily irritated students and adults.  Of course, this means that, for the first couple of weeks of the school year, I've got to be constantly worrying about my sweat.  And students, even students with cognitive disabilities, are experts at figuring out whatever it is you're self-conscious about, and bringing it up over and over again.  Even when I think I'm doing a good job of not letting them know that it bothers me when they say, "Ew! Mr. Wright, you're sweating!", and even when I try to explain that everybody sweats, and that it's no big deal, and that we should all just try to focus and finish our math here, it still boggles my mind how they pinpoint that one thing, and keep bringing it up over and over again.

Of course, this whole situation could be avoided if we could just afford air conditioning in all classrooms.

Kids Say the Darnedest Things, Episode 1

A case in point (Most of this story is true):

Two years ago, I was working as an aide in a local middle school, assisting students with learning and cognitive disabilities in their English and math classes.  In March, all students were required to take the ISAT (Illinois Standard Achievement Test), a trying ordeal that takes up at least a week of classes, and has the additional benefit of just stressing everybody out.  (Remind me to give you my take on standardized tests someday.)

Most students with learning disabilities in Illinois also take the ISAT, although the majority of them are allowed certain accommodations, such as having someone read the test to them, being able to take the test in a quiet, isolated room, or having extra time to finish the test.  As an aide, one of my duties during ISAT week was to act as one of these accommodations for students, reading the tests to them and then sometimes writing down the answers. 

So there I was with Ishmael, a 7th grader with a learning disability, as he was working diligently - and if you asked me to describe Ishmael in one word, I would seriously consider "diligent" -  his way through the word problems on his math ISAT section.  Now, one of the trickiest parts of being an "accommodation" is that you can't actually help the student.  This is particularly difficult because, for the other 31 weeks of the school year, that's a big part of your job.  But for the single week of ISATs, the aides had to learn to be as helpful as a rock.  A rock that reads word problems to you.

I can't quite remember, but I think that the word problem was asking Ishmael to identify the volume of an object, and how to calculate volume for an object, and then describe how he came to that conclusion.  He had an inkling of what to do, but he had learned through working with me since September certain strategies for getting the right answer out of me; "Is this right?" he would ask.  "Oh, I know this is right," and then he would look to me for confirmation, like a poker player trying to read a bluff.  "Do you know the answer?"  "You know the answer, don't you?"  Finally, after watching him work and struggle and fight for fifteen or twenty minutes, I couldn't take it any longer: "Yes, I know the answer, but I can't tell you."

He looked at me in incredulity.  "You know the answer." I nodded. "And you won't tell me." I nodded again.  Then, he smiled this odd smile, and then put both his hands on his face, and groaned, and said, in exasperation, "Mister Wright!... You know the answer, but you won't tell me."  I nod.  "I wish, I wish that..." He looks around the classroom for the right words.  "I wish that I had your mind, in me."  I was surprised.  "What?" I said.  "I wish that I had," and here he began gesturing frustratingly with his hands, miming this brain transplant that he had in mind, "your mind... in my head."

Now, I've seen Freaky Friday, and I know that, when you say "mind switch" you mean that the ghost in my machine trades places with the ghost in your machine, and then I get to look out at the world through your eyeballs, and you through mine.  In other words, I get your body and you get mine.  And this would be a surprising thing for Ishmael to wish, because, even though he's a 7th grader, he's still a district champion wrestler, and my body is racked with scoliosis, bad balance, and limited fine motor skills.  So, in my interpretation, I would get my sharp mind in his functioning body, while he would continue to find math difficult and, on top of that, have a crappy sense of balance and bad posture.

But that's not what he meant.  When he said, "I wish that I had your mind..." he was talking about all of my knowledge, my experience.  He would still be himself. His sense of himself was not contingent upon his cogito, that narrow band of his experience that (I think) includes speaking and reading and contemplating.  Instead, Ishmael saw himself as this more dynamic whole person, someone who is funny and good at art and has a few friends but wishes he had more and is bullied sometimes and it's hard to be a black kid with white parents and is good at wrestling but wished that he was a little skinnier; he's not concerned with the philosophical problem of the duality between body and mind.  He just wants my mind - access to my information and experience and, yes, wisdom, so that he could use it for his own benefit.

I think about Ishmael a lot whenever I am trying to be a good teacher.  If I had been a good teacher to him, then he would have had access to that kind of information that he craved; he would not have been frustrated on test day, flailing at the air for the key to that privileged knowledge that was locked up inside me.  But he would still and always be himself.  I have faith that he's being successful now, because he's a hard worker, and skilled, and friendly, even if reading is hard for him.  And something that I learned from him was that not everybody thinks like me, not everybody has the same wants and needs that I do, but that they all want equal access, that I have something of value inside my mind.

If I were a good teacher, I'd figure out how to share that value with my students.  I would figure out how to switch minds.

A Note on Authorship

One thing that will be a little different about this blog, when compared to my old blogs, is that I'm going to be a little less anonymous of an author.  In the past, I kind of went to lengths to conceal myself and my personal life from any audience who didn't already personally know me.  However, over the course of four years of blogging, this wall, as it is wont to do, kind of eroded.  In particular, readers got to know, eventually, where I lived, and with whom I was living, and what I did for a living (or, really, what I didn't do) and so on.  On some level, I think, it's kind of pointless to strive to maintain this level of anonymity; and yet, on the other hand, it feels absolutely essential.

I have just started my second year of master's program at the University of Illinois, where I'm getting my teaching degree in special education.  Before I started this program, I worked as an aide in a local middle school, working with students with cognitive and learning disabilities.  Hopefully, if all goes to plan, I'll be working in a  school again as a teacher in a little more than a year and, in the meantime, I have been in local schools as a practicum student.  I have blogged about my students in the past, and I plan to blog about them again in the future.  But these are students, who have their basic rights to privacy, especially students with disabilities, who have a legal right to privacy.  So be sure, first of all, that whenever I'm talking about students, everyone will be pseudonymously named, and I will go to great lengths to protect their identities.  Furthermore, I hope that I will never write about my students out of malice.  Sure, sometimes kids do stupid stuff, and sometimes they do things that are hilarious, and sometimes they do things worth making fun of.  But if I were ever to mock, deride, or humiliate my students - even anonymously - in any kind of public forum, well, then, I would seriously question why I wanted to be a teacher.

Audiences Will Listen to Anything in Anticipation

Welcome to Mr. Wright's Blog.  My name is Joel, and this is the beginning of my new (semi) personal blog.  I live in the college town of Champaign, Illinois, and am currently a graduate student preparing to become a special education teacher.   I live with my wife, Robyn, and my two cats, Coraline and Marlowe. 

For your pleasure, there are three other of my blogs that I would like to draw your attention to.  The first is my old blog, Logios Dolios Eriounios.  This was my personal blog from 2008-2012, but, you know, it really petered out after 2010.  Logios is a chronicle of Robyn's and my years in Chicago - my starting at the University of Chicago, a lot of talk about Obama, some cats, some baseball, then the economic collapse and unemployment in Chicago, followed by our move down to Urbana, my working as an aide in a special ed room in a middle school, and Robyn's beginning at the Library and Information Science program at the University of Illinois.  I tried, rather lamefully, to revive this blog once or twice, but there really was no direction or purpose to it. 

The other two blogs that I want to mention right now are my totally awesome sports blog, Fourth and Inches, and my professional blog, http://joelwrig.weebly.com/.  The sports blog is mostly my personal excuse to obsessively rank college football teams according to my own whims and whimsies.  The Weebly blog is my official University of Illinois website, and mostly contains examples of my lesson plans, my educational philosophy, and my reflections on the state of education - especially special education - in Illinois and in America. 

So why am I writing this?  Blogs are hard to keep updated, and it's especially hard to identify what needs to be recorded on your professional blog, or your personal blog, or your hobby blog.  But I guess that I have missed having this kind of public thread documenting my life, talking about myself, reflecting on my thoughts, and having a venue to broadcast to friends and to family.  Nevertheless, I also just like talking about teaching, about philosophy, about cooking and sports and public transportation and politics and mythology and good books.