|
 Demeaned,
Diminished, Demoralized, and Drained
by Shari Krishnan, Our Children Left Behind, April 15,
2004
For more articles like this
visit
https://www.bridges4kids.org.
In the overall
context of IDEA reauthorization from a parent perspective, this
week has been full of rumors, anxiety, and emotions on
overdrive. This is because amending Part B of the IDEA is one of
the most important, if not the single most important, decision
that our legislators can make in the lives of 6.5 million
students with disabilities.
The anxiety and emotions, resulting in some of the rumors we’ve
heard, seem to be stemming from the fact that it is has become
clear that our Senate and House offices had not previously been
well informed. They didn’t understand the consequences and
far-reaching damage to students and their futures that could
result by simply changing a word here and there in S.1248 and
H.R.1350. They didn’t understand that Special Education supports
general education, and that without a finely carved and crafted
IDEA, there is simply no way that No Child Left Behind (NCLB)
would work.
Special Education, as a system, is still struggling to provide
students with access to the general curriculum. And access to
special education professionals with expertise in doing so
remains limited for many students across the country. It is
staggering to know that there are students in this country who
may never learn to read, and not necessarily because they don’t
have the ability, even with disabilities involved. It is because
special education is not strongly positioned, even in 2004, to
correct decades of considering special education to be a place
rather than a service to help students gain access to learning,
including reading and math.
The prevailing casual district level dialogues surrounding
educational proficiency for students with disabilities have been
absurd, and this is not the fault of students with disabilities
whatsoever. Just take a look at some of the articles in which
school administrators have been interviewed about our students.
Whenever I read one, I need to be prepared for a rapid onset of
nausea. The blame for school failure is often placed on students
with disabilities and rarely on those who never gave these
students access to successful learning experiences in the first
place. Shame on them, making the public feel that our kids
cannot learn, hence suggesting that they are not worth the
investment! Makes you wonder why they really put students with
disabilities into a subgroup to begin with, doesn’t it? Unless
attitudes toward what people with disabilities can and are doing
change, and the skill sets of those who serve them embrace best
practices, NCLB is just a fine political move for legislators
who love it, with lousy policy and education outcomes for the
subgroup it is supposed to protect.
Ironically, there is a major problem at the heart of this IDEA
“reauthorization”: even with NCLB being the law of the land,
many school professionals (at all levels in the system) still do
not have a confident vision for naturally, thoughtfully, and
confidently delivering the general curriculum requirements to
students with varied disabilities in a way that works. When
parents first heard talk that this IDEA reauthorization was
necessary to align IDEA with NCLB to make them both work
together, they accepted this as a reasonable scenario. It seemed
to make sense that, without a stronger IDEA, the system would
remain resistant to change. We figured that with the forces
against change being so very strong, it would take legislation
to force even the smallest move in the right direction. Thus,
many parents and educators bought into the belief and trusted
that IDEA reauthorization would help, not realizing that this
has been one of the biggest NCLB lies ever told.
Since NCLB has rolled out, some educators have become even more
afraid of including students with disabilities in their school
communities, due to the remaining pervasive prejudicial
assumption that students with disabilities are certain to “fail
the test,” thereby making the school community itself appear to
be failing. The perceived “risk” of accepting children with
disabilities into school communities has rapidly overshadowed
the moral imperative to rise to the challenge of educating
students without disrupting the stability of their lives;
instead of helping educators rise to this challenge, therefore,
NCLB has instead become a compelling reason for educators to
seek opportunities to dump students into any setting, anywhere
else, to avoid this perceived “risk.”
For the education lobbies to be requesting more money, without
engaging in honest self-reflection as to why they have
contributed to the failure of educating students with
disabilities and why they are failing to promote improvements to
IDEA that would truly help students learn, is simply selfish and
frankly unprofessional. People in other caring professions pride
themselves on enhancing the personal lives of those they serve.
No one can deny the fact that in the special education system,
families are often demeaned, diminished, demoralized, and
drained. In other fields that deal with children, families are
identified as critical partners to successful outcomes. But,
because parents are often stuck with their school systems and
have no choices, this mean-spirited behavior is perpetuated.
Where does this IDEA reauthorization address the well-known
expectation that parents are actually being asked to cooperate
instead of collaborate? Don’t tell me that paperwork reduction
is about making more time for student contact. It has nothing to
do with that. It has more to do with lessening even one more
structured reason, presently built into the system, for
educators to meet with families for the benefit of students,
those students who in fact most need for these meetings to
occur.
This IDEA reauthorization would be successful if all schools and
their related lobbies across the country could be identified as
true friends to students with disabilities and their families;
if they could look sincerely to help students learn as opposed
to placing blame and seeking ways to avoid doing what is right;
and if subgroups of data were not being used to further
segregate and discriminate against a federally identified
subgroup of people that has tried so hard within its own culture
not to be a subgroup in the community in the first place!
Do you think that this proposed IDEA reauthorization does a good
job of aligning NCLB with IDEA? As always, we’d love to know
what you think about this.
Shari Krishnan, today’s
parentvolunteer@ourchildrenleftbehind.com
©2004 Our Children Left Behind
Our Children Left Behind [OCLB] was created and is
owned/operated by parent volunteers (Sandy Alperstein, Tricia &
Calvin Luker, Shari Krishnan, and Debi Lewis). Permission to
forward, copy, and/or post this article is granted provided that
it is done in its entirety and is attributed to the author(s)
and
www.ourchildrenleftbehind.com. For more about OCLB or to
share information, please contact
parentvolunteer@ourchildrenleftbehind.com.
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