Special education is not special and it’s barely education.1
The system of special education nationwide is in desperate straits. It deserves all the abuse I heap on it in retaliation for all the educational abuse it heaps on so many struggling learners. And yet, as prior chapters have explained, special education is not itself the prime offender. It’s overloaded with students who are mislabeled as disabled and dumped into special education because RTI is not done right in general education. Our first priority then is to keep these mislabeled students out of special education.
Still, as long as any children–wrongfully or rightly—are in special education, parents have a right to expect teaching and learning that is truly “special” education. But special education is far from that. As we now know, virtually all students in special education make little to no academic progress. They are stigmatized and segregated. They would almost always be better off if they remained in general education.
Why? Why is special education not nearly special enough? A look at what happened to Kimberly shines light on how and why special education goes astray.
Kimberly, when I first met her and her Mom over a decade ago, was shy and really didn’t want to talk about school. And no wonder. She was in the fourth grade but reading at a first grade level. She had been retained in the first grade and so was already three to four years behind where she should have been. She had been found eligible for special education in the third grade under the classification of Other Health Impediment, which for her was ADHD. But as a practical matter, the real basis for eligibility was the big discrepancy gap between her reading level and her enrolled grade level.
On her Individual Education Program (IEP) at the time, “Goals” and “Objectives” for reading phonics, fluency and comprehension stated that she “will make progress” over the one year period of the IEP. But how much progress? There was no specific indication of how much progress she would make. Six months? Nine months? Twelve months? I asked how that could be. Didn’t the law require “measurable Goals”—for example, that she progress over the next school year from her first grade current performance level to say the second grade level? Without numerical Goals, how could parents hold the school accountable for any amount of progress?
Members of the school IEP team responded first that the Goals were not measurable because the central administration said they didn’t have to be. About a year before, the routine practice of setting Goals calling for one year’s progress over a school year had been stopped. Why? Administrators said that each student was different and Goals had to be set individually for each student. Well then, how did IEP teams go about deciding on individualized Goals? And why weren’t the individualized Goals written on the IEP?
The team’s answer to these questions was, trust us, we’ll do the best we can. But the team also said, don’t expect even one year’s progress. After all, she has a disability, and look at how little progress she’s made so far.
In the course of an IEP meeting that lasted five hours (and still had to be continued to another day), I particularly zeroed in on the team’s reliance on her lack of prior progress. Well, I asked: couldn’t Kimberly have made more progress if she had received more and better services? The team was indignant. The team chairperson said, we “love our baby, Kimberly’s a wonderful child who gives us no problem in class, and don’t you think we’re doing all that we can to help her? We don’t appreciate that you think we’re not . . . And even if we had more services to give to Kimberly, we’d have to do the same for many other children who are as far behind as she is, and that’s impossible.”
The message was (a) the school didn’t have the staff or money to give her and other students more services; and (b) the staff were not going to bend over backward to give Kimberly special treatment just because she had an aggressive advocate. Those considerations overrode the fact that Kimberly was clearly denied her legal rights under IDEA and suffering irreparable injury.
Kimberly’s meeting was par for the course then in the Baltimore public schools. There was enough illegality and absurd illogic in the Team’s actions and inactions to fill a textbook on educational abuse. But that was more than a decade ago. How much has changed since then? Would Kimberly be better off today? Not much as we’ll sadly see. Parents pay heed.
Is it realistic to think that even the world’s best special education services can enable Kimberly to overcome the four-year gap between her age and class grade levels and her first grade reading level?
No doubt, closing such a gap is very difficult if near-impossible. In the absence of early (very early!) RTI, the students who wind up in special education are too far behind. Remember the “Matthew effect”: students who fall behind early keep falling farther and farther behind. Kimberly’s achievement gap is not unusual. The deficit for struggling learners in special education is often five years or more by the time they get to middle school and high school. Many, because of their frustration at being so far below their peers, have lost their motivation and engage in problematic behaviors. As a result, special education services are usually too little, too late. So, the best thing we can do for Kimberly is to implement RTI in general education.
Nonetheless, special education need not be a total lost cause. Special education can be a whole lot more “special” than it is. Learning deficits can be closed or narrowed if specially designed instruction and related services are substantially upgraded. This means generally the Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions, notably tutoring, that Kimberly and other struggling learners should have gotten in general education but didn’t get.
This Chapter describes steps to bring about such realistic and dramatic improvements in special education. To start with, deeply engrained habits of mind and practice must be overcome. Most of all, the misbelief that students in special education are doomed to failure—the bigotry of low expectations—must be rooted out. It must be replaced by an understanding that the overwhelming majority of struggling learners in special education are capable of attaining much higher heights of academic success than they do.
Each student’s IEP is supposed to contain measurable “Goals” that specify the amount of expected progress.2 For example, let’s return to Kimberly. Given that she was in the fourth grade (including having been retained once) and reading at a first grade level, where should her reading Goals for the next school year have been set? How much growth should have been expected?
Those are the questions I’ve posed not just to Kimberly’s IEP team but to innumerable local administrators and teachers and national experts over two decades. Yet, almost without exception, they cannot or will not give parents a straight answer. They dodge and evade as Kimberly’s IEP team did. Either they don’t know the law or they deliberately ignore it. Answers have been all over the map but there are common threads. They say things like:
If you didn’t know from Chapter 2 that so many students were mislabeled as disabled and that their learning ability had been underestimated, these answers would seem to make common sense. But what seems intuitively right turns out to be almost wholly wrong. It ignores the fact that, if the students receive proper instruction in special education (which they should have received in general education), they have the cognitive ability to narrow or close achievement gaps.
That’s what the federal Individual with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) recognizes. The basic legal mandate goes like this: Students in special education (who are not significantly cognitively disabled or otherwise severely disabled) are entitled to services that are reasonably calculated to enable them to meet regular state academic standards.
Whoa. Did I really just write that students in special education should be enabled to meet the same academic standards as their non-disabled peers who aren’t in special education? Yes, I did, and yes, they can.
That’s not to say that the legal standard has been bright and clear from the start. Recall the history introduced in Chapter 2. The law has evolved since the first version of IDEA passed in 1975. It guaranteed students with disabilities a “free and appropriate” education. But Congress never defined how much student progress was “appropriate.” And over the past forty years or so, that definitional void has led to confusion, controversy and educational abuse.
From time to time Congress tried to clarify its intent, usually with the explicit purpose of raising the bar for the meaning of “appropriate” instruction and progress. Amendments to IDEA in 2004 stated that students with disabilities must receive “specially designed instruction . . . to ensure access of the child to the general education curriculum, so that the child can meet the education standards . . . that apply to all children.” (italics added)3 In other words, “appropriate” meant that students should be enabled to meet the same state academic standards as other students.
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 had paved the way. NCLB explicitly mandated that students with disabilities be held to the same academic standards as their non-disabled peers and be given full opportunity to meet those standards. All students in special education, except for a small number of students with the most severe disabilities, were to take the same state tests as their peers, their test scores were to be separately reported, and states and local districts were equally accountable for the performance of students with and without disabilities.4 A manual on testing of students with disabilities under NCLB published by the Council of Chief State School Officers states that “Step 1” is “Expect Students with Disabilities to Achieve Grade-Level Academic Content Standards.”5 The relevant provisions in NCLB are essentially preserved in the successor Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015.
The federal legal standard also went hand-in-hand with the growing movement in the states beginning in the 1980s for “standards-based IEPs.” As specified by the National Association of State Directors of Special Education, standards-based IEPs “contain goals aligned with, and chosen to facilitate the student’s achievement of state grade-level academic standards.” States vary in their approaches but standards-based IEPs point towards “goals that designate the necessary learning—the specially designed instruction—that will lead to the student’s attaining the [state] standards. . . .”6
Surveying the legal landscape, two experts in special education and civil rights law summarized that special education instruction and other services must “be reasonably calculated to enable the child to achieve passing marks, achieve passing scores on high-stakes exams, and advance from grade to grade, eventually meeting state and district graduation requirements.” (italics in the original)7
But educators didn’t follow the law then and they don’t follow it now. The intent of federal laws has been in lost in practice. Practice varies among states, school districts, schools, and even classrooms within the same school. Still, school systems across the country almost universally apply a low, minimalist standard for how much progress students in special education should be expected and enabled to achieve. In particular, as will be explained later in this chapter, they fail to expect and enable students to achieve basic proficiency in the foundational skills of reading, math and writing. For all practical purposes, the de facto standard has been that almost any progress is enough.
Parents should be scratching their heads: How do school systems get away with violating the law? In part the Supreme Court has given them cover, beginning with the landmark Supreme Court decision, Board of Education v. Rowley, decided in 1982.8 That decision was the first to try to interpret the basic provisions of federal special education law and has been cited endlessly. But the Court’s ruling was a source of massive uncertainty that allowed millions of students in special education to be greatly harmed.
The pivotal language in the Rowley decision was that “some benefit” was the standard for whether students received appropriate services. But “some” was expressly left undefined. The Court declined “to establish any one test for determining the adequacy of educational benefits conferred upon all children covered by [IDEA].”9 As a result, confusion bordering on educational chaos ensued.
It would take a legal treatise to convey the multitude of hazy and conflicting post-Rowley court interpretations. Courts attempted to clarify the meaning of “some benefit” through a wide variety of would-be explanatory phrases. Among them, “equal opportunity,” “significant,” “meaningful” and “more than de minimis.” But even these phrases were themselves susceptible to different interpretations. The net effect of the uncertainty was that school systems had wide leeway to set low expectations, dumb down Goals and minimize their responsibilities, which they did.
In an eagerly anticipated ruling, Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District, decided March 22, 2017, the Supreme Court was called upon to dispel the confusion. However, the Court, as in the Rowley decision, wasted the opportunity and missed the mark.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for a unanimous Court, stated that the standard is whether the services are “reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress appropriate in light of the child’s circumstances.” That, the Court reasoned, means more than de minimis, but how much more? The Court chose not to say. The vague language was deliberate to allow, Chief Justice Roberts explained, “deference” to the expertise and judgment of school authorities.
Some observers hailed the decision as a victory for students with disabilities. But don’t believe it. Under the prior de minimis standard, there was almost nowhere to go but up, and the Court went up only a very little. An 8–0 vote by a Court that is usually sharply divided is a sign that the decision may lack clarity or bite.
The Endrew F. decision lacks both. The Court displayed a superficial understanding of special education in three crucial ways. One, it did not recognize that IDEA, ESSA and the standards-based movement in the states called for the great majority of students with disabilities—those without severe disabilities—to receive services that would enable them to meet regular state academic standards.
Two, it failed to take into account research showing that students without severe cognitive limitations were capable of meeting the standards if they received adequate instruction. As found by the National Center on Educational Outcomes, the leading research organization on accountability for the achievement of students with disabilities, “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 federal law].”10
Three, the Court failed to comprehend the critical distinction between IEP Goals that enable students to pass their content courses like literature, science and social studies, and Goals that enable them to meet standards for independent proficiency in the foundational skills of reading, writing and math. This distinction befuddled the Court justices, as it has educators, and will be further discussed shortly.
Notwithstanding these errors, some advocates applauded the decision. But they viewed it almost exclusively through the lens of how it might raise the bar for services for students with the most severe disabilities. That is a welcome possibility but it is too soon to tell.
It is not too soon, however, to foresee that the decision will be of little help to the four times as many students in special education who are not severely disabled—most of whom are mislabeled as disabled. The Court decision did not preclude schools from providing services reasonably calculated to enable them to meet grade-level standards in foundational skills like reading. But it simply left them with too much room to keep doing what they are doing, which is to harbor low expectations and set low Goals for student progress.
As this book goes to press, there have been few consequential court decisions that try to interpret Endrew F. However, a leading legal expert on special education law observed in early 2018 that the decision’s “net effect appears to have been close to negligible.”11
Students deserve better, school systems could do better, and Baltimore, of all places, is attempting to show the way.
Brooks Robinson and John Unitas have pretty much faded from memory. The city of Baltimore, my hometown, has become—in the wake of the television shows Homicide and The Wire, the killing of Freddie Gray and other sad stories—a poster child for the tragedy of urban America.
The disrepute includes our schools. We are in many respects worse than urban public school systems elsewhere. The data cited in Chapter 3 shows, for example, that in Baltimore over 90% of third graders in special education are already two or more grade levels behind in reading. By fifth grade, over 60% are three or more grade levels behind, including 16% who are still at kindergarten level and 30% who are at first grade level. Still, there is one point of pride: our school system’s trailblazing initiative to raise the bar for student achievement in special education.
It got underway when, as a member of the Baltimore school board in 2005, I approached our new CEO Andres Alonso about my distressing experiences as an advocate for students in IEP team meetings. At the time, an informal memorandum by Baltimore school officials tied Goals to the student’s disability and IQ. For a student with a Specific Learning Disability (LD) and low average cognitive ability, the memorandum said, “The IEP team may determine that the student will be able to make 6 months’ growth in a year.”12 In a discussion of the memorandum, administrators added that as few as four months progress could be a realistic expectation. In other words, it was expected that students with LD (including students with dyslexia) would fall six to eight months further behind grade level each year.
What was especially astounding at that time was that no one in the school system ever mentioned the possibility, much less probability, that students could achieve much better progress if they received much better instruction. No one ever factored in the inter-relationship between Goals and services. Wouldn’t the amount of expected progress depend on the quality of the research-based “specially designed instruction” and related services that the student received?
It boggles the mind that educators could disregard what is so obvious. Yet, they did, for reasons that include some we’ve already uncovered and others discussed in the next two chapters. No matter. To Dr. Alonso and me, no excuses were acceptable. The Baltimore school system was, in violation of IDEA, either writing Goals for one year’s progress but not taking them seriously, or not writing measurable Goals at all. Low expectations reigned.
Dr. Alonso, a former special education teacher and bold reformer, was the first educator I encountered, locally or nationally, who understood how the system abused children. Together he and I developed what became known as the “One Year Plus” policy.13 It stated:
Dr. Alonso and I acknowledged that even if the policy were well implemented, it would hardly be a surefire educational lifesaver. For Kimberly, it would be difficult to close the performance gap between her first grade reading level and her enrolled fourth grade level. She had fewer than two years left in elementary school, so even if the gap were narrowed by three to six months per year, she would still be at least three years behind when she entered middle school. And once any student gets to middle and high schools, narrowing the gap, much less closing it, is even more problematic because secondary schools have far less teaching capacity and teaching time for remedial instruction in foundational skills.
Still, better late than never. 15 or 18 months progress in reading over one or more school years would reverse the student’s steady decline, increase the ability to understand demanding coursework in upper grades, and probably boost the student’s motivation to try harder to succeed. Of course, all of this is if the One Year Plus policy is implemented effectively. A big if as we shall see. Yet there is widespread agreement that the policy has transformative potential.
Shout-outs across the country greeted the adoption of the One Year Plus policy. Baltimore’s special education plight, as bad as it is, is not substantially different than school systems across the country. And so One Year Plus was seen as a model for nationwide reform. Here’s a sample of the high hopes of renowned special education experts:14
Donald Deshler, then Professor of Special Education, Director of Center for Research on Learning, University of Kansas.
Rachel Quenemoen, then National Center and State Collaborative Project Director at the National Center on Educational Outcomes.
Edward Kame’enui, first commissioner of the National Center for Special Education Research in the Institute of Education Sciences and then professor and director of the Center on Teaching and Learning, University of Oregon.
This acclaim helped to lay the foundation for a national stamp of approval by the U.S. Department of Education near the end of President Barack Obama’s second term. A federal guidance letter dated November 15, 2015, though not explicitly mentioning the One Year Plus policy by name, adhered closely to it.15 Then secretary of education Arne Duncan had long been on record as seeking to shift the federal role in special education from enforcement of procedural compliance to lifting student achievement. “No belief,” he declared, “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.”16
The guidance letter says, “Research has demonstrated that children with disabilities who struggle in reading and mathematics can successfully learn grade-level content and make significant academic progress when appropriate instruction, services, and supports are provided.”17 To that end, “[G]oals should be sufficiently ambitious to help close the gap” between performance levels and grade levels. In the example in the guidance, a student in the sixth grade and reading at a second grade level might—dependent on individualized needs and circumstances—have a Goal of “an increase of at least 1.5 grade levels in reading fluency.”18 That is, the student should be expected to progress from say early second grade in reading fluency to mid-third grade, narrowing the gap. The guidance letter conforms closely to the letter and spirit of the One Year Plus policy.
That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that there is no reason to believe that the U.S. Department of Education under President Donald Trump and Secretary Betsy DeVos will pursue the cause. Still, some day, parents and other reformers can take advantage of the federal foothold in the guidance, as detailed in Chapter 9.
In the meantime, no state or local school district has adopted Baltimore’s pioneering approach. That includes the state of Maryland which is generally reputed to be near the top of state rankings for K-12 public school systems. So far, to its credit, the Maryland State Department of Education has acknowledged the need to have a “narrowing the gap” policy, and has recently developed policy and practice guidance for local school systems.19 But it remains to be seen whether it will take concrete actions—like dissemination of best practices and especially rigorous monitoring—to assure statewide implementation.
The situation is worse nationwide. The spark of the One Year Plus model has not caught fire. It has been snuffed out by all the forces—chiefly lack of funds to provide the additional instruction, low expectations and poorly trained teachers—that cause struggling learners to be mislabeled as disabled and dispatched to special education in the first place. Moreover, another painful truth is that Baltimore has botched the chance to be a beacon for the nation.
The Baltimore school system has done a feeble job of implementing the One Year Plus policy. The first question any parent should rightfully ask about its implementation is: Is my child really improving and narrowing the gap? What does the data on student performance show? When the answer is, Baltimore doesn’t have any specific data tracking implementation of One Year Plus, the first question tends to be the last question. Interest quickly dries up.
For a while, after system-wide adoption of the One Year Plus policy in 2013, there was a modest effort to collect data. But it collapsed after initial monitoring exposed the lack of effective implementation and improvement in student achievement.
In fact, Baltimore’s experience with One Year Plus has been full of disappointments. That’s hard for its architects and supporters, me included, to swallow. But it’s best to own up, and take stock of how Baltimore has fallen short. There have been two particularly vexing trials and tribulations that, as an alert to parents, are briefly summarized.
The great majority of students in special education receive “accommodations” under their IEPs. As discussed in Chapter 3, accommodations are intended to fulfill the IDEA requirement that students in special education have “access” to the general education curriculum and are enabled to meet state standards. In other words, accommodations are supposed to level the playing field so students can pass courses and demonstrate their true ability on tests despite their disabilities.
Accommodations can thus be necessary and proper. But they can also be misused to inflate the student’s actual progress in meeting Goals. This almost invariably occurs with the read-aloud accommodation that allows texts to be read to the student during classroom instruction and on tests.
For example, suppose Kimberly made it (without dropping out) to the 10th grade, and suppose, generously, she is by then reading at a third or fourth grade level. The read-aloud accommodation would enable her to have “access” to the materials in the general curriculum and earn passing grades in her high school literature, science, advanced mathematics and social studies courses. Without this accommodation, she would be unable to understand the textbooks and other materials and have no chance of passing.
So far, so good. But in other ways the accommodation can do serious harm. When students have materials read to them, especially in the early grades, they don’t learn to read on their own. The read-aloud accommodation conceals deep deficits in their ability to read independently. Proper IEP services are delayed, shortchanged or denied altogether.
As earlier noted, I have represented many students who received the read-aloud accommodations as early as the first or second grades. That stunts their independent growth. When Kimberly is on her own in the world of work, she won’t have someone to read to her.
Legal restrictions exist to prevent this misuse. But IEP teams are tempted to cross the line in order to pump up student achievement and overall test scores. Baltimore is no exception. The One Year Plus policy sought to get schools to strike the right balance between proper accommodations that provide access to the general curriculum and improper accommodations that mask students’ lack of independent foundational skills, especially in reading. But it hasn’t happened yet.
The One Year Plus policy permits exemptions. Goals can be less than One Year Plus based on compelling individualized circumstances that are documented by the IEP Team. For example, Kimberly may be much farther behind in reading than math so her Goals for math might be for just one year’s progress. There is only so much time in the school schedule and only so much intense instruction that a student can absorb. Or Kimberly may be subject to absences for sickness beyond her control, or in the midst of what appears to be a short-term emotional problem involving her family and/or relationships with other students.
Yet, many IEP Teams persist in finding unwarranted exemptions. They think, as in Kimberly’s case, that the student cannot be expected to make one year’s progress, much less One Year Plus, because the student progressed far less than one year in the prior year(s). They do not take into consideration the interdependency of Goals and services: student could grow more if given more nutritious instruction.
They also claim bogus exemptions based on the student’s “lack of effort” or “lack of motivation.” They say, what can we do when Kimberly won’t try? Of course, they overlook the likely fact that, as much research shows, what they think is Kimberly’s indifference is actually fear of further failure, as explored in Chapter 2. Students are discouraged when they are so far behind peers and stigmatized as “dummies.” These students figure, why not play it cool and pretend not to care, while diverting attention with disruptive behaviors?
In some instances, the off-putting motivation or behavior may be intrinsic to a valid disability. For example, brain research has shown a link between lack of motivation and attention deficit disorders.20 Still, the fundamental purpose of IDEA is to require services that enable students to overcome common learning problems. When these services aren’t provided, schools shouldn’t be allowed to get away with unjustified exemptions that give schools a “Get Out of Jail” card.
To correct the illegitimate exemptions and misuse of accommodations, Baltimore has conducted frequent staff trainings, issued guidances, and for a long while convened an advisory panel of advocates and school officials to discuss ongoing concerns. Nonetheless, implementation in general and crucial monitoring in particular are still lagging badly.
There is one more dimension to the Baltimore experience that demands attention. Does One Year Plus apply to students with severe disabilities? The short answer is, it doesn’t apply explicitly but its basic principles should.
As earlier shown, only about 15 to 20 per cent of students in special education have severe disabilities, mainly involving significant cognitive limitations like Intellectual Disability, Autism, and Multiple Disabilities. It is painfully true that sometimes the cognitive capacity of these students is underestimated. Yet as a general rule, even assuming they receive excellent instruction and other services, they cannot be expected to meet the same state standards as other students. They do not earn regular graduation diplomas but far less rigorous “certificates of completion.”
Therefore, these low-incidence students do not fit exactly into the One Year Plus policy which is based on the legal premise that students who are not severely disabled should be enabled to close performance gaps and achieve regular state standards. Baltimore applied the policy only to “students who are on a diploma track (that is, who are not severely cognitively disabled).”
In retrospect, this policy choice was shortsighted. There is no reason why its underlying principles should not be adapted to raise the bar for growth of students with severe disabilities. They too can achieve at higher levels of academic achievement and other functional life skills than they do. Yet, let me as an architect of the Baltimore policy explain (not justify) why they were left out of the policy.
One reason was the fear of biting off more than the school system could chew. The One Year Policy was a giant leap. It was clear that the school system could barely manage to try to implement the policy for students who are not severely disabled, much less take on both populations at the same time. While the underlying principles for both are similar, they involve fairly distinct educational nuts and bolts.
Until lately, the process for developing Goals for students with severe disabilities has been uncharted and neglected. School systems have ignored guidance from the U.S. Department of Education that alternate assessments and standards for them must “Reflect professional judgment of the highest achievement possible.”21 That should and could change.
Vital technical assistance is available to guide schools and to hold them accountable for offering appropriate Goals and services. The National Center and State Collaborative (NCSC) has developed common alternate assessments and standards for about 25 partnering states, including Maryland. The NCSC model is described as a comprehensive system of curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Part of the process is to strengthen the body of research-based best practices for students with severe disabilities. To date, there has been meager alignment of alternative standards with growing research on how to raise performance levels, notably for students with autism and intellectual disabilities.
Another factor that went into the judgment to exclude students with severe disabilities from the One Year Plus initiative is the fact that, as noted in Chapter 1, these students—compared to students in special education who are mislabeled as disabled—are relatively well served. Which of course is not good enough.
In Baltimore the NCSC model has not yet taken hold. IEP teams are not trained in the research on best practices and cling to outdated low expectations. And as always, they are handcuffed by pressure to keep down costs. Reform is overdue.
. . . . . . . . .
Up to now, we have seen how—through RTI and the principles of One Year Plus–struggling learners can be enabled to succeed in general education and benefit more in special education. We can end educational abuse. We desperately want to do it and know how to do it, but we’re not doing it. Why not? The next part of the book answers that question. We look at the causes of inaction and who’s to blame.