Usually it’s the teaching that’s disabled, not the students.1
Millions of American schoolchildren are victims of educational abuse. These children are struggling learners who fall behind early in learning to read, write and compute. They almost never catch up. Many become mislabeled as disabled and, let’s tell it like it is, “dumped” into a special education system that for them is deplorably ineffective. In the Preface, you saw what happened to Kenny. Most struggling learners are doomed to fail in school and to suffer lifelong harm.
This doesn’t have to happen. This book will show that better instruction—better instruction that we already know about—will enable the great majority of all struggling learners to succeed. And the fact that many of them are poor and minority children is not a credible alibi for our national failure. We all—including educators and policymakers—need to learn this lesson. Parents, especially, must, first, be informed about the educational abuse and, second, mobilize to lead the battle to bring about reform.
Because we know what to do but don’t do it, the charge of educational abuse is not rhetorical overkill. The legal definition of criminal child abuse varies from state to state. But in every state it is a crime when someone abuses, neglects or fails to take proper care of a child. And these crimes do not require an intent to harm.2 It is more than enough that there is injury and gross negligence. If a child dies or is harmed because a caretaker fails to seek medical care, it is abuse. So when struggling learners are denied the right educational medicine, and when as a result they face bleak economic and social futures and are educationally and emotionally scarred for the rest of their lives, is there any doubt they are the victims of abuse?
Our nation should stand indicted. We desperately need a jarring wake-up call to action, and this book tries to sound the alarm. This Chapter overviews the content of the book, framed at the outset by the case of Marcus. Marcus, another student I represented as an advocate, is much younger than Kenny, and is another tragic example of how the educational abuse happens.
Marcus is African-American and his Mom is a low-income single parent. He has a low-average IQ, but it is well within the range that would enable him, if taught using research-based instruction, to earn passing grades. Yet, when his Mom first came to see me, she tearfully told me that although he was in the 6th grade, he was reading at a kindergarten level.
He fell behind as soon as he entered kindergarten, falling further behind in the first and second grades. Still, the school did not substantially alter his instruction. He was provided minimal extra assistance and repeated the second grade.
In the third grade, he was referred for eligibility for special education, but the school special education team found “no suspected disability.” Although he was already about two years behind his peers, the team found that he had not fallen far enough behind to warrant special education.
A year later, when Marcus was by then about four years behind his same-age peers in reading (and not much better off in math), he was found eligible for special education under the classification of Specific Learning Disability. However, the special education that he got was not very special. He still was not prescribed research-based interventions. He was mainly given the same dumbed-down work over and over again. The gap between his performance level and enrolled grade level widened farther.
All the while, gradually from the second grade on, his behavior deteriorated. He argued or fought with classmates. He often refused to do his classwork or homework. He talked back to teachers. He faked illnesses to keep from going to school, crying that he didn’t want to go. When Mom contacted me, the school, based on his behavior, was ready to change his designated disability from Learning Disability to Emotional Disability and put him in a segregated program for emotionally and behaviorally disturbed students. The school still had no significant plan to improve his reading instruction.
If he was in any way emotionally disturbed, it was not because of an underlying mental health condition. Rather, he was disturbed—unmotivated, upset and acting out—because he was so far behind his peers and unable to keep up with classwork. He wasn’t “disturbed” at home, only at school.
I was able to prevent him from being mislabeled with an Emotional Disability and placed in an even more segregated special education program. Instead, his Individual Educational Program (IEP) was revised so that he received 45 minutes of one on one tutoring. four days per week. No miracle has occurred. He is still behind and struggling. Yet, his reading level and his behavior have significantly improved. For sure, when he is in the 10th grade, he will not be in the same dire straits as Kenny.
Still, Marcus, like Kenny, deserved a lot better. Suppose each of them had been given evidence-based small group instruction and one-to-one tutoring as necessary. They could have caught up and kept up with classmates. And under the law they should have received this instructional assistance.
This book will peel away the layers of illegalities and injustices that caused both of them, instead, to be abused by the Baltimore public school system. It will show how and why millions of other struggling learners nationwide are similarly victimized.
We begin by defining the several groups of struggling learners who populate these pages.
Marcus and Kenny wound up being found eligible for special education. But the focus of the book is less on how to reform special education, as bad as it is for struggling learners, and more about keeping children out of special education in the first place. Stated another way, this book is not mainly about students with actual disabilities. It’s about struggling learners who don’t receive timely evidence-based instructional interventions in general education and as a result perform far below their grade level, especially in reading.
Many of them are mislabeled as disabled and found eligible for services in special education. But not all. Most struggling learners remain in general education without any special education services.3 So which struggling learners become eligible for special education and which don’t? Our school systems are so broken that it is nearly impossible to tell.
Practice nationwide is a maze of varying interpretations and methods of determining eligibility for special education.4 There are huge variations from state to state, from school district to school district, from school to school, and even from classroom to classroom. Two experts have noted that the sorting process is “barely more accurate than a flip of the coin.”5
Both classes of struggling learners are victimized. Most of those who remain in general education without any special education services fail to meet proficiency standards. But it is the struggling learners who are mislabeled as disabled and wind up in special education who are wronged the most. Chapter 5 details how special education, despite its lofty aims and legal promises, is not nearly special enough. Students who receive special education services continue to fall further and further behind. It seems almost inconceivable but most students in so-called “special” education would have fared better academically if they had remained in general education without any special education services.6 And they would also have been spared the stigma and segregation that students in special education endure.
This leads us to another threshold delineation that is equally essential.
The “Big Lie,” exposed in Chapter 2, is that the over six million students in special education nationally are actually disabled. In fact, the overwhelming majority aren’t disabled in the true sense of a medical disability. Under federal law they should not even qualify as students with disabilities.
The “Big Truth” is that except for students with the most severe disabilities, struggling learners should not be referred to special education unless they have first received adequate instruction in general education alone. But this law is violated every day. Astonishingly, as many as three-quarters of all students are found eligible for special education because this legal (and common sense) requirement is ignored in school systems large or small and urban, suburban or rural.
Yet, we do almost nothing about it. A fundamental reason is that educators fail to distinguish between the two relatively distinct populations of students who receive special education services. First, there are students with severe disabilities who are not able to meet the same academic standards as non-disabled peers. Most of them have significant cognitive disabilities. Let’s call them the Truly Disabled. Second, there are struggling learners who do not have severe disabilities and are able to meet the standards with the right supports. Let’s call them the Mainly Mislabeled.
The line, to be sure, is not exact.7 Disability classifications under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) are imprecise educationally as well as clinically. True disabilities lie along continuums. And there are large variations nationwide in the percentages of students with disabilities, ranging from 17.5 percent in Massachusetts to 8.6 percent in Texas.8 Variations are even larger in the percentages within the various disability classifications. For example, the percentage of students in special education classified as having a Specific Learning Disability is 60.4 percent in Iowa and 18.6 percent in Kentucky.9
Still, the differences are distinct enough to guide policy and practice. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), like its predecessor the No Child Left Behind Act, mandates that all states and school districts must be held accountable for ensuring that all students, including all students in special education, are held to the same academic standards. Yet, at the same time, ESSA and IDEA draw a distinction and allow states to develop alternate assessments based on less-demanding alternate academic standards for the Truly Disabled.10
The Truly Disabled students, as a general rule, “will have been identified as disabled during infancy and early childhood and preschool years, frequently by health-care professionals or early childhood education specialists, and they will already have begun receiving intervention services before they enter elementary school.”11 A large majority of these students have significant cognitive abilities. Others suffer predominately from deafness, blindness and physical disabilities.
It is these students who are the public face of special education. Their disabilities tend to be physically visible, arousing instant recognition and empathy—for example students with multiple physical disabilities or with Down syndrome. The heroic struggles of these students (and their parents who fight long battles to get appropriate services for them under IDEA) are often featured in the media.
Yet, the public prominence of these students masks an astonishing surprise: These students comprise only about 15 to 20 percent of all students who are found eligible for special educations.12
The remaining students in special education—those who do not have severe disabilities—are predominantly struggling learners who are mislabeled as disabled. They comprise the very large majority of all students in special education who are found eligible under the disability classifications of Specific Learning Disability, Speech or Language Impairments, Other Health Impairment (mainly attention deficit disorders), Emotional Disability, and, in some instances, Autism. They generally have the cognitive ability to meet state standards if they receive proper instruction. But their instruction falls far short.
A “dream team” of the nation’s leading experts on reading estimated that about 70 percent of struggling learners wind up unnecessarily and wrongfully in special education.13 The National Center on Educational Outcomes, the leading research organization on accountability for the achievement of students with disabilities, has found that “The vast majority of special education students (80–85 percent) can meet the same achievement standards as other students if they are given specially designed instruction, appropriate access, supports and accommodations, as required by IDEA.”14
Arne Duncan, when U.S. secretary of education under President Obama, bravely took up the cause of these struggling learners. He said, “No belief is more damaging in education than the misperception that children with disabilities cannot really and shouldn’t be challenged to reach the same high standards as all children.”15 Yet, his position was widely ridiculed. Policymakers and many educators rolled their eyes in disbelief. Mr. Duncan, they thought, must be living in educational la-la land. How can these students be expected to meet the same academic standards as non-disabled peers? They are disabled, aren’t they?
No, most of them aren’t, as stated above. Chapter 2 will further unravel how they become mislabeled as disabled, and dispatched illegally to inferior instruction and stigma and segregation in special education. But let me jump ahead and preview the most powerful and insidious cause for the mislabeling: simple expediency.
Expediency is the mother of special education invention. When general education teachers are overwhelmed by too many struggling learners who are far behind their peers and impede instruction and class management, they turn in desperation to special education. Dumping these students in special education is their lifeline to keep the whole class from sinking. That makes things better for general education teachers and other students, but the plight of students who are mislabeled as disabled only gets much worse.
Baltimore—surprise, surprise, since my city is otherwise a poster child for urban decay, including its deficient schools—is a national pioneer in trying to improve instruction in special education. But alas, implementation of the policy is lagging, as admitted in Chapter 5.
Is it really possible to rescue struggling learners in general education and special education from school failure? Right now—in general education or special education—struggling learners are likely to die slow academic deaths. Here’s a sample of the national data that tells the catastrophic tale.16
Struggling Learners in General Education (That Is, Those Students Who Don’t Receive Any Special Education Services) Nationwide
In the fourth grade, only 30% of students in general education alone achieved proficiency in reading and 35% in math. In the eighth grade, the numbers are 34% in reading and 27% in math.
Struggling Learners in Special Education (That Is, Those Students Who Do Receive Special Education Services) Nationwide
In the fourth grade, only 10% of students in special education achieved proficiency in reading and 14% in math. In the eighth grade, the numbers are 8% in reading and 7% for math.
And the scores are not improving.
If you can bear it, there’s more data in Chapter 3. And believe it or not, the data is even worse than it looks. Chapter 3 reveals how school systems shamelessly inflate test scores and cover up much of the damage done to struggling learners. In both general education and special education, struggling learners pass from grade to grade only because of blatant grade inflation. If they don’t later drop out, as alarming numbers do, their high school graduation diplomas are usually bogus; most struggling learners have not learned anywhere near enough to be legitimately college or career ready.
So the road to school reform begins in the academic pits. Then it must surmount steep hurdles if it is to get anywhere. Most daunting of all, from their first day in pre-kindergarten or kindergarten, many struggling learners carry in their backpacks all the disadvantages of impoverished families and neighborhoods. Do we in fact know how to deliver the classroom teaching that will enable them and other struggling learners to succeed? It wouldn’t be fair to level the harsh charge of educational abuse without offering credible evidence that our schools can do much better than they do. Outspoken advocates like me should put up or shut up, and in Chapter 4, I take on the challenge. It can be done. Here’s a preview of how.
Let me beat skeptics to the punch. Yes, there is no simple answer or quick fix. Education reforms are forever coming and going without reversing the academic misfortunes of struggling learners, especially students who are poor and minority. But one basic strategy with transformative potential has been grossly neglected.
It’s called Response to Intervention (RTI). RTI, as explored in Chapter 4, is a framework for timely identification of struggling learners and interventions. It incorporates:
It’s hard to dispute the logic of the process. Students get the right medicine as soon and in the necessary dosage as they need it. If done right RTI, as we’ll see in Chapter 4, will literally cause most so-called special education disabilities to disappear.
But logic and evidence alone have never been enough to cure the deep ills of public schools. As we will see in later chapters, there are formidable obstacles that stand in the way of effective implementation of RTI on a nationwide scale. Nonetheless, I’ve always taken heart from the famous children’s story I’ve read to four sons and eight grandchildren: The Little Engine That Could. RTI could be the engine that, against mountainous odds, carries struggling students to new heights of achievement.
So far, however, the RTI engine is stuck in the station awaiting a national go-signal. RTI has not been implemented, much less succeeded, on a large scale in any large school system. Yet, to borrow from G.K. Chesterton’s lament about the absence of Christian ideals, RTI has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult, and left untried. To end the educational abuse of millions of American schoolchildren, that must change.
Why is RTI stuck in the station? And who are mainly responsible for the tragic fate of struggling learners? In Chapters 6 and 7 I line up the usual, and some unusual, suspects in two large groupings: “All of Us” and “Educators.” All of Us are the policymakers, parents and the general public who don’t put up the money for world-class public schools. We don’t provide classroom teachers with the small pupil-teacher ratios, training and other classroom supports to fuel the engine of RTI.
We also do very little these days to address the conditions of poverty and inequality that cause the learning deficits of so many struggling learners. All the while, we are bogged down in ideological education wars that detour reform from its main destination: classroom instruction.
Educators, too, must share the blame with the rest of us. Educators violate federal laws governing eligibility for special education, resist the use of evidence-based best instructional practices, and don’t manage well the money they have. It is painful to say but educators who labor valiantly and deserve our gratitude are sometimes their own worst enemies.
Let me repeat, because it is so crucial, a point introduced in the Preface: my anxiety that my criticisms of Educators may be misunderstood. An indictment of the universe of individual teachers and other school professionals is farthest from my mind. Throughout the book I strive to make clear that general education and special education teachers and other personnel who are integral to special education (primarily psychologists, social workers, speech and language pathologists, and occupational therapists) care deeply and work tirelessly. Yet they work under inadequate conditions—such as excessive class sizes and caseloads, weak curricula, woeful training and far too little supervisory support—that undermine their professionalism.
They are betrayed by what the famed educator E. D. Hirsch called “the controlling system of ideas that currently prevents needed changes from being contemplated or understood.”17 The controllers of these ideas and protectors of the status quo are found in the upper ranks of what, in Chapter 7, I describe as the “education establishment.” The education establishmentarians include federal and state regulators, teachers colleges, and national associations of K-12 education professions. Chapter 7 will show how they, albeit unwittingly, contribute to the educational abuse that harms students and inflicts collateral damage on teachers.
Don’t be fooled, however. Many if not most frontline teachers know they’re being let down by the forces that be. But they are afraid to speak up because of fear of retribution. Innumerable times, school staff have stopped me in hallways and told me privately (several with tears in their eyes) that they agreed that the child I was representing needed more services. But they were afraid to say so. Several teachers or other staff have gone even farther, calling me in the evening to tip me off that a student is being egregiously under-served and harmed, and hoping I will take on the case.
I should be charged with teacher-abuse myself if throughout the book, I do not do everything possible to make clear that frontline teachers are victimized too. The wrongdoing is institutional, not individual. And the most fundamental root cause of all the wrongdoing—by All of Us as well as Educators—is low expectations.
Our society in general harbors low expectations for struggling learners, particularly those who are poor and minority. The unjustified low expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies of failure, and we then tend to blame the victims. I have witnessed time and time again that when low-income students struggle to learn to read, schools attribute the poor performance to poor homes rather than poor instruction. Later in the book, you’ll meet Devon who I represented when he was in fourth grade and reading at kindergarten level. In his case, the school’s main defense was that his single parent Mom had not made him try harder in school or helped him enough with homework. I have virtually never heard any school attribute a student’s low achievement to inadequate instruction. Blaming the victim is rampant.
One proof of this is too telling to hold for a later chapter. In a scholarly study, 50 school psychologists, who play a key role in determining eligibility for special education, were asked how often they found that the child’s learning problems were due primarily to inappropriate teaching practices. “The answer,” the study reported, “was none.” The surveyed psychologists admitted “that informal school policy (or ‘school culture’) dictates that conclusions be limited to child and family factors.”18
True, educational and economic family circumstances are potent influences. But demography is not destiny. Effective instruction—particularly early identification and intervention delivered via RTI—can overcome disadvantaged circumstances. And, therefore, “blaming the victim” is wrongful and abusive educational malpractice.
How do we get from here—the abuse of struggling learners and a badly broken system of special education—to where we want to go, particularly aboard the engine of RTI? Chapters 8 to 10 explore pathways through the political thicket. No reform route is a sure thing. Some recommendations are more long-shot and long-term than others. But there is one underlying certainty.
The path out of the K-12 wilderness will have to be blazed by the federal government. This seems counter-intuitive if not outright crazy. Isn’t our country’s love affair with state and local control of public schools as torrid as ever? Wasn’t the aggressive federal role in the No Child Left Behind Act snuffed out with the law’s repeal? And in the era of Donald Trump, aren’t the national political winds blowing in the direction of a shrunken federal presence in all domestic policies?
Yes, yes, yes. Nonetheless, consider the alternatives. First, don’t expect reform from within. There is little to no reason to believe that the education establishment will turn on itself and expose its own deep shortcomings. Habits of mind—including low expectations and the tendency to blame the victims—are hard to shake. And educators are taught not to rock the bureaucratic boat: to get along, go along with the way things are.
Second, don’t expect state and local governments to be profiles in leadership either. Chapter 8 describes the folly of faith in state and local action to end abusive practices that disproportionately harm children in poverty. Historically, the U.S. has sometimes risen above deference to state and local control to ensure civil rights and an economic safety net for its neediest citizens. But it takes time and is usually a last resort. Winston Churchill famously said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they’ve tried everything else.”
This is what has happened with basic rights in public K-12 education. Brown v. Board of Education and desegregation did not occur until 1954. It was the case with the first federal aid targeted to assist low-income students, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965; President Lyndon B. Johnson, a former school teacher, proclaimed “I deeply believe that no law I have signed or will ever sign means more to the future of America.” And it was the case with the first federal law establishing the rights of students with disabilities, enacted in 1975; that law was primarily intended to guarantee a “free and appropriate” education to students with severe disabilities who were excluded from public schools altogether or warehoused in inferior schools.
In these landmark instances, the feds had to step in because state and local school systems were not willing or able to provide equal educational opportunity. Now, the feds must step in again to stop the nationwide educational abuse of struggling learners.
A new generation of federal actions is ready to be born. At their core lies the principle that the right to succeed in school—to be prepared for higher education, jobs and civic participation—is a fundamental civil right. That right lies waiting to be recognized in the U.S. Constitution and almost all state constitutions. It just hasn’t been enforced. And students who are mislabeled as disabled and other struggling learners are the scarred poster children who prove it.
Chapter 9 contends that the best road to reform runs through the White House and Congress. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) could be amended to guarantee students the right to adequate instruction that will enable them to meet state academic standards. At the same time, loopholes and ambiguities in IDEA could be replaced with unequivocal definitions that separate the Truly Disabled from the Mainly Mislabeled. Amendments to ESSA and IDEA—if followed by monitoring with teeth in it—could go a long way toward reducing the underachievement and eliminating the educational abuse of struggling learners.
None of these federal reforms rules out creative initiatives and professional judgments by state and local educators. Amendments to ESSA and IDEA would only delineate the basic right to an adequate education and standards by which state and local educators can be held accountable. That is, when it comes to guaranteeing the rights of schoolchildren, the feds would prescribe what must be done; states and locals can go their own ways in figuring out how to do it.
The amendments to ESSA and IDEA could also lay the foundation for reinvention of special education altogether, as spelled out in Chapter 9. The big idea is that special education would be exclusively reserved for students who are Truly Disabled. Actually, as Chapter 2 tells, it would be less reinvention and more restoration of what special education was supposed to be in the first place. As Margaret J. McLaughlin, a professor at the University of Maryland and special education policy expert, has put it, let’s
alter the current construct of “disability” under the IDEA and take special education policy back to its roots as an educational law that pertains only to students with clear and evident disabilities. . . . This could focus the resources on those students most in need of specialized long term education and related services as opposed to having special education programs provide compensatory services for students whose only “disability” has been poor or insufficient general education.19
If special education were re-engineered along these lines, it would no longer be possible for general education to dump struggling learners into special education. At the same time the mission of general education could be fortified with the money and management to provide RTI-like interventions for all struggling learners.
Equally important, the truly disabled students would benefit dramatically from having special education all to themselves. Fewer disability classifications and students (recall that students who are severely disabled constitute only about 15 to 20 percent of all current students in special education) would enable classroom instruction and related services to be more specialized. Teachers would be better trained. The system could be held more accountable.
And last but hardly least, there would be more money for services for the students who are truly disabled. In the realpolitik of public education (discussed in Chapter 10), there is competition over policy attention and scarce dollars between the political constituencies for students with severe disabilities and other students in special education. Bottom line, the current system in which so many students are mislabeled as disabled “robs the genuinely handicapped of funds and services they need. . . .”20
The speed at which the nation undertakes reinvention or other legislative and administrative reforms will be accelerated by class action lawsuits in the tradition of Brown v. Board of Education. Four decades of school finance litigation, asserting a constitutional right to adequate school funding, may be running out of steam. However, there are several trailblazing lawsuits that claim a “right to read” for struggling learners under the U.S. Constitution. Reading is a proxy for the right to an adequate education in its entirety. Literacy is the indispensable foundation not just for success in school but for economic and social well-being.
One pending class action filed in Berkeley, California is based on alleged violations of IDEA, similar to those identified in this book. They include the failure to provide “appropriate RTI” defined as “intensive early and research-based intervention.”21
Another broader suit has arisen in Detroit. Brought in U.S. district court in 2016, it claims that students in general and special education “have been denied access to literacy by being deprived of evidence-based literacy instruction and by being subject to school conditions that prevent them from learning.”22 The denial, according to the class action complaint, violates the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the 14th amendment of the U.S. Constitution. While the lower court recently dismissed the suit, an appeal is likely.
These suits, and copycat ones sure to follow, face long roads and uncertain futures. But they build on the legacy of historic civil rights cases on behalf of poor and minority families and children. And there are grounds for optimism. Lawrence Tribe, a celebrated constitutional law scholar at Harvard University, expects the Detroit case to make history “much as Brown v. Board of Education did.”23 At the least, the “right to read” cases will raise public awareness of educational abuse and generate political pressure for reform.
Chapter 10 lays out political strategies and tactics for the struggle ahead.
For any reform action to succeed at the federal, state or local levels, All of Us must get our political act together. But who can be counted on to put on the pressure and lead the charge?
This book seeks to be a guide for parents in understanding the causes of educational abuse of their children who are struggling learners and the possibilities for reform. But it also comes with a big homework assignment. And that is for parents to unite with teachers and lead the fight for reform.
You would think that the parents of struggling learners who are victimized in general education and special education would constitute a large pool of volunteers ready to enlist in the political battle. After all, struggling learners comprise as many as half or more of all public school students. Yet, no such movement exists and it won’t be as easy as you might imagine to mobilize one.
One reason that parents of struggling learners haven’t coalesced is because their common cause, as seen throughout this book, is so misunderstood and concealed. At best, the interventions for struggling learners get lost in the political clamor behind more politically sexy issues, like privatization, testing and attacks on teachers unions.
Even when it comes to fighting for more money, the cause is set back by an unholy alliance of some usually stalwart liberals with conservatives. Some liberals proclaim that until our nation addresses poverty and inequality in jobs, housing, crime, drugs, health and so on, schools will be able to do very little to enable poor children to overcome the odds against them. Unwittingly, these liberals are strange bedfellows of conservatives who for different reasons—they believe family factors are paramount—come to the same conclusion: more money spent on schools would be a waste or not cost-effective.
Nonsense. To be sure, our nation must combat the disadvantages of poor and minority students with government programs outside and inside schools. Such programs would make the task of teachers much easier. Yet, wayward liberals need to more strongly recognize that more school funding and better management of it (see Chapters 6 and 7) can, by themselves, go a long way toward reversing the academic misfortunes of all struggling learners, no matter what their family income and racial or ethnic identity are.
Another fundamental drawback in mobilizing a fighting constituency is the fact that parents who have the most at stake are disproportionately poor and minority. That makes them and their children politically disabled.
However, don’t think for one second that lower income parents are less caring and less heartbroken than upper income parents when their children fail in school. Rather, their economic and political powerlessness means they lack the wherewithal to protect their children from educational abuse. Marcus’s mother bombarded the school system with pleas for more assistance as early as the first grade, before he was placed in special education. But she lacked the know-how and money to force school officials to take her pleas (and his failure to learn to read) seriously.
Chapter 10 will highlight how parents of struggling learners in general education have virtually no individual legal rights to challenge the system. And it isn’t all that much better for parents of students in special education who are supposed to have extensive parental rights under IDEA. These so-called rights exist on paper not in practice.
For example, parents are supposed to participate as partners when school staff meet to decide on the Individual Education Program (IEP) for their child. They are supposed to be given extensive documents including evaluations and be fully informed about instructional options. But much of the process is highly technical, and school members of the IEP team can be resistant, if not hostile, to parents who ask challenging questions. The whole process is lopsided in favor of schools. Parents are also supposed to have numerous avenues of appeal, but these are almost invariably beyond their financial reach. Chapter 10 suggests steps to make parental rights more of a reality.
Ironically, in the political arena, the prospects are more hopeful for parents of students who are Truly Disabled. Unlike the great mass of struggling learners, students with severe disabilities are more visible and amenable to single-focus national and local advocacy groups such as those for Down syndrome, autism, deafness and blindness. Unfortunately, collective action is sometimes missing or weak because of competition over funding. Moreover, sometimes advocacy groups for students with severe disabilities bump heads with advocacy groups for other students in special education, such as those with dyslexia or ADHD.
Chapter 10 also poses the challenge of creating solidarity between educators, including teachers unions and other professional associations, and parents. Educators have tended to be absent or tardy, rather than fighting side by side with parents. In part this is a carryover from frequent clashes at IEP meetings. Of course, parents and teachers should be on the same side. When school members of IEP teams are defensive and resentful of my advocacy for better services for students, I tell them “I am advocating for you too!” Better services for students mean more resources and better job satisfaction for teachers.
Most teachers understand this, as many confide to me privately. Still, individual teachers are reluctant to go out on a limb, fearing retribution in assignments or promotions. Individual administrators shy away too for similar reasons. This leaves unions and other professional associations to speak up and act out—unions especially.
Political action is in the unions’ DNA. Sometimes it overly protects unsatisfactory teachers, but on balance teachers unions pack the heaviest firepower and do the most to capture the most resources for public school systems. They have not, however, taken up the cause of struggling learners in a way that would greatly benefit students and teachers.
While unions have the most political potential, other associations of education professionals must also awake to the challenge. These include pillars of the education establishment including associations of administrators, school superintendents, school boards, and related services providers like psychologists, social workers, speech and language pathologists and occupational therapists. There is an abundance of them. Yet, they tend to be driven, like advocacy groups, by competition for scarce resources and fail to coalesce around collective causes like the plight of struggling learners. If they fail to rise to the challenge, their inaction will be a betrayal of their professional responsibilities and ethics.
Ok, this overview of the book has been long on bad news and gigantic obstacles to be overcome if the educational abuse of struggling learners is to end. Still, I have flunked my task if I have not also conveyed the overriding message that reform is possible. RTI is do-able. And parents and teachers, if united, can be a political force to reckon with, especially when the political winds in our country change direction.
Our national politics is cyclical. In K-12 policy, momentum for a renewed national reform movement will build if half of our schoolchildren continue to be unable to proficiently read, write and compute, All of Us will demand the end of this educational abuse.
And the fight can be won, even against the political tide that carried Donald Trump to the presidency. The American people are unified on at least one powerful desire: to improve the education of our children. We are even willing, polls show, to pay more taxes if that’s what it takes.
Let’s do whatever it takes. Let’s build a platform of policy and practice reforms that links more money to evidence-based and well-managed best instructional practices within the framework of RTI. And let’s lobby like hell for action. We owe this legally and morally to children whose lives are ruined by educational abuse. And we owe it to ourselves. Our nation cannot prosper economically or survive socially if we do not transform struggling learners into well-prepared citizens.
This book then is more than an indictment of our schools. It is a collective call for action. The pages that follow are meant to empower parents, teachers and policymakers in this do-or-die national struggle.