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.)

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. 

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.