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?

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.