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. 

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.