“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”1
Struggling learners aren’t the only ones who have a lot to learn. So do their most passionate advocates, most of all parents. I hardly need tell parents how much they suffer when their children are mislabeled as disabled and under-educated. There’s even a recent study that shows the “psychological fallout” on parents of children with learning problems.2
Yet, parents are not as aware as they should be. A leading researcher in the field, who is also a parent of a student with a true disability, has lamented, “I am afraid that students with disabilities have been facing systemic and institutionalized low expectations for so long that these low expectations are internalized even by their advocates.”3
To be more effective advocates, parents need to learn that:
Parents who learn these lessons will become enraged and hopefully insurgent, like the television newscaster in the movie Network who couldn’t take it anymore. But that’s not enough either. As their children struggle and suffer in school, they must channel their anger and heartbreak into advocacy for their own child and political action to change the system altogether.
It won’t be easy. The parents of struggling learners—whether their children languish in general education or special education—are, as a general rule, politically disabled, particularly since so many are poor and minority.4 So what can parents do about it? And with what allies?
This chapter looks at the obstacles that stand in the way of empowerment of parents. Parents must overcome the deep political inequality in our country. The political deck is stacked against them when they try individually to get assistance for their children. And it’s stacked against them when they try to organize and collectively campaign for system-wide reform.
As if that were not enough, parents of struggling learners sometimes splinter into factions that are more politically competitive than cohesive. And even when they do get their act together, they do not get as much support as they should from those who should be their strongest allies—like educators, including teachers unions, and political liberals.
Still, a campaign to end educational abuse can be mobilized and won if parents and allies unite and fight. This chapter tells how it can be done.
The environment for parent advocacy is so inhospitable that even the wealthiest parents of struggling learners are disadvantaged.5 School systems conceal the lack of student progress. Timely interventions are delayed or denied in general education. And the elaborate parental rights contained in IDEA for students in special education exist far more on paper than in practice.
As ineffectual as the procedural protections are under IDEA (as we will shortly see), there are no comparable protections, even on paper, for parents of struggling learners in general education. When parents raise concerns about their child’s lagging progress, and when they are dissatisfied with the school’s unresponsiveness, they have no practical place to turn. They have no explicit legal rights or remedies.6 While some state or local regulations call for some elements of RTI, these provisions are typically not monitored or enforced, and any requirement for parental participation is either non-existent or token.
In Baltimore, local regulations call for school “problem-solving teams” prior to referral to special education and for individual remediation plans when students are in danger of failing courses and not being promoted to the next grade. These processes sound good, but they are generally ignored.
Even when schools claim to be providing some interventions through the framework of RTI, parents have little to no clue that there is such a thing and their children are entitled to it. Minimally, parents should receive more information than is contained on regular report cards about their child’s skills deficits, any research-based interventions that have been tried, progress reports, and recourse to some kind of appeal if they are dissatisfied. The procedural protections afforded parents and children under IDEA—if they were meaningfully enforced—should be models for procedures during RTI and before referral to special education.
There are countless good intentions and high-sounding phrases in IDEA about parents being equal partners every step along the way in the determination of Individual Education Programs (IEPs). The steps include: consent to have their child evaluated by school staff and initial determination of eligibility; access to evaluations and other reports on the student’s performance and problems; full participation in meetings at which eligibility is determined and when an IEP is developed or revised; periodic progress reports; regular re-evaluations of eligibility; and appeal procedures if parents disagree with IEP team decisions.
That all sounds well and good except for the overriding realities. School systems prevent parents from meaningfully exercising the rights. IDEA’s procedural protections have been called an “empty ritual.”7 That may be too strong a term but parents are under-resourced and overmatched in dealing with schools.
These facts of life for parents are brilliantly captured in a 2011 law journal article “Special Education, Poverty, and the Limits of Private Enforcement.”8 Peel away the legalese and the footnotes (373 in all), and the point is indisputable: only highly-educated and wealthy parents have a realistic chance to take advantage of parental rights under IDEA, and even they are up against formidable odds.
All parents, and even their advocates, must confront the technical jargon of instructional specialists, psychologists, speech and language pathologists and other school staff. Moreover, parents and their advocates are rarely privy to all that school members of the IEP team know and think. School staff—at least when the student has an advocate—almost invariably meet beforehand to discuss the IEP and make tentative decisions. Countless times, a parent and I have been made to wait outside the meeting room for a long time while the school team members finished their private pre-discussions.
Worse, school team members are under intense pressure to only discuss and recommend services that they think the school can afford. Many of them know that this violates the letter and spirit of IDEA: students are supposed to be guaranteed the services they need, not what the school or school system thinks it can afford. Yet, the system pretends otherwise, and parents are denied crucial information such as the range of options for evidence-based instruction and related services like counseling and speech and language therapy.9
All told, in the so-called partnership, schools hold decisive cards: parents can participate in the IEP team deliberations but can’t control most of the final decisions.10 Team decisions are supposed to be made by consensus, but when necessary, the school members on the team simply steamroller the parent. Parental consent is primarily required only for evaluations and the first IEP. Otherwise, IEP teams have pretty free rein to revise IEPs without a parent’s approval.
Indeed, parents aren’t even that much better off if they have an advocate. I know from my own frustrating experience as an advocate at hundreds of meetings that frequently IEP teams resent the presence of an advocate and may double down on their defensiveness. IEP teams have flat out said to me in clear violation of IDEA, “we’re not going to give [Marcus or Kimberly or Arianna or others] more services just because you are here . . . we’d have to give it to everybody and that’s impossible.” Well, it isn’t impossible but parents don’t know that.
But at least parents have the right under IDEA to appeal team decisions, don’t they? Not really. Parents are even more at a loss after they’ve struck out with the IEP team. It says in IDEA and it says on the written notice they are given at the end of the IEP meeting that they have various options for other turns at bat to reverse the team decision. These options for “conflict resolution,” as the appeals stage is called, sound promising.11 But they are largely illusory.
Central is the right to a due process hearing, which means a trial before an administrative law judge (ALJ). And before the trial, the parent can request mediation. However, school systems do not have to agree to mediation, and even if they do, the mediation process is hard for a parent to access without an advocate.
Also, in lieu of mediation, the parent can opt for what is misnamed “resolution.” Resolution is a conference that the school system must convene to consider the parent’s grievance.12 But it is solely within the control of the system. Typically, the resolution meeting resolves nothing; the school system goes through the motions and defends the IEP team’s decision.
If the parent, with or without an advocate, does go all the way to an administrative law trial, ALJs almost always rule in favor of the school system. A public interest law group under the auspices of the Maryland Center for Developmental Disabilities at the Kennedy Krieger Institute examined the results of ALJ decisions in Maryland over a four year period ending in late 2017. Parents prevailed in only about 10 percent of the trials.13 The odds weren’t much better even if they were represented by an attorney.
The main reason for these lopsided results is Deference. The capital “D” is to underscore its almost insurmountable effect. The ALJ mantra is that they must defer to—they cannot substitute their judgment for—the expertise of the professionals on the IEP team. Deference is a fundamental principle that courts apply in rulings on challenges to the decisions of all administrative agencies, including public school systems.
But should it apply to schools when, as detailed in this book, IEP teams engage in so many illegal and one-sided practices? Like underestimating the cognitive potential of most students with IEPs? Like misunderstanding or ignoring the standard for students’ progress? Like failing to use evidence-based best practices and tailoring IEPs to fit the school’s budget rather than the student’s needs? Like limiting information provided to parents? Of course not. But Deference still holds sway.
In partial defense of the ALJs, they are barely if at all trained to grasp these issues. In Maryland ALJs are not specialized; they conduct at most a handful of special education trials per year. So it’s unrealistic to expect them to know enough to penetrate the intricacies of special education law and school systems’ lack of transparency. Thus, Deference is their escape hatch.
On top of all that, the ALJs can take advantage of the fact that in some states parents have the burden of proof. Meaning, that if the ALJ thinks a ruling could go either way, the ALJ is bound to find for the school system. You would think that with school systems having so many advantages to begin with, it would be only natural and fair for them to shoulder the burden of proof on appeals. But it ain’t necessarily so.
This issue made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Schaffer v. Weast, decided in 2005.14 The Court held that states were individually free to impose the burden of proof on school systems. Numerous states do. But the Court balked at interpreting IDEA to require that the burden should always rest on school systems. Justice John Paul Stevens in a concurring opinion stated the rationale: “we should presume that public schools are properly performing their difficult responsibilities” under special education laws.15
That presumption was skewered by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in dissent. School systems command huge advantages, she wrote: “the school has better access to relevant information, greater control over the potentially more persuasive witnesses (those who have been directly involved with the child’s education), and greater overall education expertise than the parents.” Further, she noted, “school districts striving to balance their budgets . . . will favor educational options that enable them to conserve resources.”16 In other words, in violation of their legal responsibilities, schools will balance budgets in part on the backs of vulnerable students in special education.
Fortunately, for the reasons expressed by Justice Ginsberg, a majority of states have opted to impose the burden of proof on the school system. Unfortunately, my own Maryland is not one of them. I have testified at legislative hearings and lobbied for changes in the Maryland law. Attempts, however, have failed because of the powerful opposition of local school systems who want to preserve their substantial advantages. They realize that the burden of proof is more than a minor legalistic matter. It has the power to tip the scales of justice in their favor and against parents.
The same kind of handicap attaches to the parent’s right to appeal an ALJ ruling to the courts. The court review involves even more time and expense, including the practical necessity of a lawyer.
Because schools recognize that the appeal system is rigged in their favor, they have less reason to be receptive to parents’ concerns. IEP teams can sound reasonable, even sympathetic in dismissing the concerns. “Don’t worry, you can always appeal.” Since I am often on the losing side of IEP team decisions, I have heard this party line innumerable times. But it is disingenuous, if not downright dishonest, for all but the wealthiest parents.
No one would deny wealthy parents the chance to spend as much as it takes for their children to gain adequate educational opportunity and escape educational abuse. But it is not just that other parents are far less likely to obtain equal opportunity for their children. There is another downside to the superior wherewithal of wealthy parents. When they can afford legal assistance and get the system to fix their child’s individual situation, these parents have no reason to join less endowed parents and engage in advocacy for system-wide change. Moreover, there is the perception (sometimes well-founded) that the children of wealthy parents may be able to buy their child more than the law requires. Sometimes school systems give preferential treatment to avoid public controversy and enormous legal bills. These occurrences and perceptions create a backlash that undermines wide political support for system–wide reform.
To turn their rights from empty promises to viable realities, parents of struggling learners must have help in gaining appropriate RTI in general education and stronger IEPs in special education.17 But it’s nearly impossible for them to get the help. Only upper income parents can afford private attorneys and educational and other experts. Middle class parents are typically priced out, although some take a second job or eat into their savings to scrape up the money. According to a legal scholar on parental rights, “the evidence suggests that children from wealthier families enforce their rights . . . at higher rates than children in poverty and that the enforcement disparity has a negative effect on the amount and quality of services children in poverty actually receive.”18 Duh.
So where does this leave other families and the poor in particular? As the saying goes, when Americans as a whole catch a cold, the poor catch pneumonia. With the double whammy of having a child who is a struggling learner and not having the means to pay for private assistance, call it double pneumonia. Nationwide, a smattering of free or reduced price lawyers or lay advocates can only meet a minuscule fraction of the need.
The powerlessness is all the more unjust because it is poor and minority families that not just need assistance most, but want it most. Conservatives often try to minimize the urgency of school reform by citing research that shows that most Americans give their own local schools a high grade. Yet, a poll reported in early 2018 revealed a huge economic and racial divide on the issue. Under the headline “New survey of minorities adds dissenting view to public satisfaction with schools,” a Brookings summary of the report noted:
64 percent of African-Americans, 45 percent of Latinos, and 40 percent of Native Americans agree that children in their own racial or ethnic group don’t have the same chances to get a quality education as white children. While many African-Americans, Latinos and Native Americans see their children as disadvantaged by the school system as a consequence of their race or ethnicity, most white Americans and Asian Americans do not share this concern.19
Most higher income families (and not exclusively white ones) would not stand for the deplorable schooling in low-wealth school districts and neighborhoods. In Baltimore in early 2018, frigid weather conditions caused water pipes to break and heating systems to crash in many dilapidated school buildings, resulting in school closings. Bravo to the parents for the outrage that followed. Yet, a vital point is lost: While kids can’t learn in freezing classrooms, they also can’t learn in classrooms where the research-based instruction is subzero. Parents must register comparable outrage at the horrible learning conditions inside schools even when the weather outside is perfect.
This chapter chiefly focuses on empowering parents to spur political action that will end the abuse of struggling learners. That will never happen unless, as spelled out in Chapter 9, there is a clear legislative or judicial right to adequate opportunity to learn to read. The biggest idea and best hope is national reform.
Still, there are significant ways to bulk up the muscle of parents of struggling learners in their individual dealings with schools. Almost invariably, parents must go it alone without the assistance of an advocate. Yet, self-help resources are very scarce too.
Parents of students in special education receive some information that school systems are required to provide under IDEA, and there are some commercial guidebooks on the market. However, these usually fall short and in any event are usually too late to do students mislabeled as disabled much good. Still, this information for parents of students in special education is light-years ahead of the guidance available for parents of struggling learners in general education.
School system guidelines may purport to assure parental involvement in the RTI process (if it exists). Yet, the guidance offered to parents is almost invariably long on words and short on practical usefulness. It’s rarely written in words that are easy for parents to understand. And it is rarely provided to parents when they need it the most: that is, as soon as their child starts to fall behind and they are seeking explanations and assistance.
The basic remedies for these wrongs are straightforward enough. They are included in standard RTI protocols and require parental notification and involvement at every step in the process. Schools should be required to schedule meetings to fit the parents’ schedules and send out advance notices that include a summary of the child’s difficulties, efforts to provide extra assistance, and options for further interventions. The advance notices should also include a clear statement of the school system’s legal duty to provide adequate instructional interventions so the child can close achievement gaps before referral to special education; and this statement should be explained orally to the parent at the start of any meeting.
And two more parental possibilities should be added at the end of any RTI decisions. One, school systems should establish some form of internal “complaint” procedures for parents that are less forbidding than the legalistic due process appeal rights under special education. For example, a school system ombudsperson or real resolution specialist should be available to review the parent’s concerns. Two, some kind of external review—perhaps a last resort administrative appeal remedy—should also be established for parents before RTI is exhausted and their child is destined for special education.
In theory, parents can turn to various “parent centers,” largely federally funded, that train parents to better navigate the IEP process.20 However, these centers are few and far between. And even the best trained parent is likely to be overwhelmed by the technical subject matter. Further, if the parent is too assertive, the school system is likely to send in one of its lawyers to prop up the school IEP team.
As noted, school systems are supposed to provide parents with guidance, and there are many commercial guidebooks for parents on understanding and navigating the IEP process. But none expose the educational abuse that occurs before and after referral to special education. Bewildered parents are offered few practical do’s and don’t’s. Therefore, let me share a few that I think can make a difference. They are gleaned from my experience on the frontlines and are tips that most school systems would not want you to know.
School teachers sometimes say the darndest things, like the plain truth about how and why your child is struggling, and why they can’t provide more instructional help. Innumerable times, parents have told me that Teacher Jones admitted to them in casual conversation that Marcus or Kimberly wasn’t getting the instruction that they needed. For example, that the extra help wasn’t really helping much, or that the pull-out intervention was occurring only two days per week, not four days as it was supposed to, or that the instruction was the same old stuff that hadn’t worked before. These admissions are often recanted or covered up in meetings, but parents should insist that the information in their notes be made a part of the student’s file.
Even with a paper trail, it can be hard to hold the school system to its word. Nonetheless, something is better than nothing and parents should keep a paper trail of every communication with the school.
Schools tend to exaggerate student progress. Recall grade inflation and “social promotion.” So don’t buy at face value claims that Marcus “is coming along well,” or Arianna “is improving.” And don’t rely on teacher-made tests. Insist on seeing curriculum-embedded and/or standardized test data that substantiates measurable progress in narrowing the achievement gap.
A corollary piece of advice: go see for yourself. Naturally, parents should be closely attentive to and engaged in their child’s progress. Help with homework. Communicate regularly with teachers. Volunteer at the school if you can and participate in the PTA. But, also, don’t forget to visit the classroom, even though some schools are not as welcoming as they should be. You may be able to see whether your child is really in tune with the classroom instruction as reports of his or her progress may indicate.
For all my bouts with schools, I’ve never seen this happen. I have too much respect for educators to think it would happen. School officials may stop returning your phone calls or make you feel unwelcome, but they will do the very best they can for Kenny or Kimberly with the institutional hand they have been dealt.
And need it be said, not all parents are pitch-perfect either. Some parents can be downright rude and unreasonable. Still, they endure much more than they inflict, and will almost certainly be outgunned by school officials if they don’t have the assistance of an advocate.
Is any advocacy assistance within reach? It is common practice at IEP meetings for parents to receive the names of non-profit organizations, including legal aid societies, which provide some form of help along the continuum between a lawyer and a trained volunteer. But what is left out of the notice is that these organizations are extremely underfunded and inaccessible.
The same holds true for “independent IEP facilitators,” who are beginning to appear in school systems across the country.21 The facilitators are supposed to improve relationships between parents and school staff. But they are not only in very short supply. They are a mixed bag in terms of training, and their role in IEP meeting is minimal because of their strict neutrality.
More robust models for assistance are highlighted in an article in the Yale Law Journal, “When Parents Aren’t Enough: External Advocacy in Special Education.”22 One model is based on the public defender advocates appointed for children in child neglect and abuse cases. Another would fund well-staffed legal aid organizations. In both, trained community volunteers could supplement lawyers and paralegals.
And here’s one more idea that comes to mind. How about if conservatives who so fervently advocate for school vouchers would propose vouchers so parents can pay for private assistance in IEP meetings? Ok, that’s fanciful.
To sum up, the prospects that parents will be individually empowered to stand up for their own struggling learner, with or without an advocate at their side, are far-fetched. Even the best possibilities are, by no stretch of the imagination, probabilities. Each would more or less have to surmount general resistance to more government funding and the all-out determination of school systems to preserve their upper hand over parents.
Which brings us to the urgent imperative of collective political action by parents and their allies.
As we’ve just seen, advocacy for parents in individual IEP meetings and appeals is a long way off. But even if it were more available and many students benefited, individual advocacy would not reform the system. School systems under pressure in individual student situations—whether the pressure comes from a parent or advocate or political official—can “fix” the individual complaint while deflecting attention from the urgency of system-wide change.
The Baltimore school system trumpets its Special Education Parents Response Unit which is supposed to investigate parent complaints. But its historical tendency has been to side with the school system while sweeping under the rug whether any violation is evidence of a system-wide pattern. The Maryland State Department of Education also has a unit to investigate parent complaints. Its investigations are more thorough and competent than the city’s, and its findings not infrequently call upon the school or school system to review whether the individual complaint is evidence of a larger pattern. Yet again, there could be much more follow up to see whether there is a pattern and, if so, whether it has been meaningfully addressed.
The cold truth is that the educational abuse of struggling learners will never be halted without laws that explicitly guarantee system-wide rights. And such laws—whether federal or state—will never be enacted without forceful political action.
But how will parents get the force to be with them? How can parents be organized? And who will march arm-in-arm with them?
For all the reasons that permeate this book, the education establishment will be AWOL from the battle. Its institutional allegiance is to the status quo. Witness the enduring folly of state and local control and the “race to the bottom” to undermine the reform goals of the No Child Left Behind Act. Chester E. Finn, Jr., a longtime school reform warrior, concludes, “In my experience, it’s a system that bends—and then not nearly enough—only when powerful force is applied from outside. As soon as that force eases, the system resumes its previous shape.”23
The system will be particularly unyielding in owning up to the abuse of struggling learners, especially students in special education. To illustrate, in 2013 the national School Superintendents Association issued a report that flew in the face of all the obstacles that parents face in exercising their appeal rights.24 The report actually called for restricting parents’ rights to due process, while trying to cover its tracks with weaker proposals. A national advocacy organization, the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, called the report “nothing more than a shameful attack on parent and student civil rights.”25
Usually the education establishment is not so brazen; it’s able to cover its flanks through concealed tactics. The biggest special education scandal in recent memory erupted in Texas in 2016 when a Houston newspaper exposed deliberate attempts over many years by the state education agency to suppress eligibility for special education.26 The state did so not on the grounds that students were mislabeled as disabled, but solely to save money. The misconduct was so blatant that even the inert U.S. Department of Education launched a prompt investigation that confirmed the wrongdoing and ordered corrective action.
But where were state and local educators while all of this was going on? Why were state officials silent except when, finally caught in the act, they put all the blame on the Texas legislature? And why didn’t local special educators blow the whistle on the state? Obviously, bureaucratic fear or inertia reigned at all levels. Local special education administrators offered various excuses. The excuses ranged from “limited resources, limited training, and inconsistent guidance” to “it is not a dereliction of duty to follow a directive from your state regulatory agency.”27 Bottom line: there is nothing in the public record that any part of the spineless Texas education establishment spoke up.
Texas has been outsized in its wrongdoing. But when it comes to the educational abuse of struggling learners, there is silence all across the land. National, state and local associations of elementary school principals, secondary school principals, superintendents and school boards have been virtually silent. None of this, as this book has unveiled, is a surprise. It’s even no surprise that associations of special educators—for example, teachers, state directors of special education, psychologists and speech and language pathologists—have not blown the whistle on the system’s illegalities and injustices.
And so the fight for reform will have to be led by outsiders. But alas, that is not as straightforward as it would seem. The potential reformers—among them parents, their advocacy organizations and liberal Democrats—not as poised for the battle as they should be. We next look at what’s behind this unexpected political foot-dragging.
To start with, the parents of struggling learners are difficult to organize cohesively despite their vast numbers. A primary reason is that the educational abuse their children suffer is largely hidden from their view. They recognize their children are struggling, but they don’t realize how much better the children could and should be doing. They aren’t aware how school systems cover up failure with fake grades, “social promotion” from grade to grade, and bogus high school diplomas.
At the same time, the parents of struggling learners who lag in general education and the parents of struggling learners who are mislabeled as disabled and dumped in special education don’t realize their common cause. They aren’t aware of their legal rights and mutual needs for early instructional interventions through the framework of RTI.
And even if they did, they don’t have a bigger education reform movement to latch on to. Instructional reform in the classroom, let’s not forget, is lost in the sound and fury of the nation’s most polarized and raging crusades, such as school choice, privatization, testing, and local control.
And there’s still more to the lack of unity. While all the parents of struggling learners should recognize they’re more or less in the same boat, differences often arise that keep them from steering in the same political direction. The biggest difference is the tension, if not outright competition, between the two main groupings of students in special education.
Recall that the first group, mainly those we have called the Mainly Mislabeled, may comprise as many as 85 percent of all students in special education, usually under the classifications of Specific Learning Disability (including dyslexia), Other Health Impairment (predominately ADHD) and Speech or Language impairments. They are able to achieve regular state standards with adequate interventions.
The second group, mainly those we’ve called the Truly Disabled, are students with severe disabilities like Intellectual Disabilities, severe Autism and visual and hearing impairments. Not all but most of these students cannot be expected to meet the same academic standards as nondisabled peers.
Parents and other advocates for the Mainly Disabled and Truly Disabled could more successfully accomplish their complementary purposes if they were pulling together politically. But that is often not the case.
I have worked little on the national stage of disability politics. But I have interacted with many of the leading players who work for national organizations and with their state and local chapters in Maryland. Most represent the Truly Disabled, such as several groups that advocate for children with Down syndrome, the Arc for persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and the National Federation of the Blind. A smaller number represent the Mainly Mislabeled, including several groups representing students with dyslexia, the Learning Disabilities Association of America, and CHADD (Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder). Several organizations that advocate for students along the autism spectrum tend to pitch their tents in both camps, though most of the focus is on the severe end of the spectrum. And many more disability-specific groups could be listed.
What is to be made of this array? There is some common purpose and blood, sweat and tears but it’s mixed with disarray. Some national coalitions attempt to play a unifying role. Among them, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the National Disability Rights Network, and the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities. There are also state and local councils such as Councils on Developmental Disabilities and special education citizens’ advisory committees. Yet, these tend to show little stomach or muscle for taking on the establishment. And the web of professional organizations of general and special educators, mentioned earlier, rarely makes its presence felt.
This is a cursory scan of the political landscape, but it shows clearly enough that strong and cohesive political resistance to the educational abuse of struggling learners is usually hard to find. Its most prominent feature is the tension between the Mainly Disabled and Truly Disabled organizations, but friction sometimes pops up between different groups that represent the same population.
I’ve encountered this first-hand in the rough and tumble of my own efforts in Maryland and nationally over the past decade, both to campaign for RTI and for Baltimore’s One Year Plus policy described in Chapter 5. These policies would raise the bar for the goals and services for the Mainly Mislabeled and Truly Disabled, but their chief impact would be on the first group. For that reason, advocates for the Truly Disabled have done relatively little to join the causes. Even Maryland’s coalition of advocates for students in special education, in which I have actively participated, has given relatively little support. It’s dominated, as are most umbrella organizations in the field of special education, by parents and advocates for Truly Disabled students. And advocacy for the Truly Disabled has tended to center on issues other than instruction—like expulsion, restraint and seclusion, transportation and transition planning.
These are worthy concerns, and none of this means that advocates for the Truly Disabled are uncaring about all struggling learners. Instead, it mainly reflects competition for money and attention in a political environment that is inhospitable and unjust to all. Frequently, attorneys and other advocates for the Truly Disabled are themselves parents of children with severe disabilities. I understand the pain and passion that drives them. I would do the same if I were in their shoes.
Still, the competition between the Mainly Disabled and the Truly Disabled over inadequate resources sets back reform overall. Even before the first version of IDEA in 1975, there was, as an education historian has found, “disunity among the different organizations representing children who were deaf, crippled, blind, mentally retarded, and otherwise handicapped.”28 This flared up over the decades as special education rolls swelled with students who were Mainly Disabled, especially the students who were classified with a Specific Learning Disability (LD). A scholar has noted that “Students with LDs were viewed as competing for scarce resources with other ‘deserving’ groups.”29
Over the years, some of the disability nomenclature has been changed but not much of the disunity. The reaction to the Supreme Court decision in the Endrew F case reflected this. Advocates for the Truly Disabled tended to see it in a positive light (for reasons that are mystifying to me as discussed in Chapter 8), while advocates for the Mainly Mislabeled were more skeptical and muted. Another fairly recent example arose in late 2015 when the national organization Decoding Dyslexia sought certain amendments to IDEA that were opposed by organizations representing students with the most severe disabilities. The head of a group devoted to students with intellectual limitations said the dyslexia advocates “give the impression, whether it’s intended or not, that students with a certain type of learning disabilities have more pressing needs than other students with disabilities.”30
One more sign of discord requires mention, I’m sorry to say. It isn’t just advocates for the Truly Disabled and Mainly Disabled who often go their separate ways. Within advocacy groups for the Mainly Mislabeled, there are some unspoken differences too. What I call “the politics of dyslexia” sheds light on this.
Dyslexia is an endlessly fascinating and instructive subject. It embodies much that is good, but a little that is troublesome, about the plight of struggling learners. It has its own political dynamics, and discussion of it carries special risks. I am skating on thin, politically incorrect ice with the analysis that follows. Nonetheless, I think it’s vital to note that many parents of students with dyslexia, while understandingly zealous in their advocacy, could play a more pivotal role in ending the abuse of a more broadly defined population of struggling learners.
To begin with, dyslexia commands a special resonance in the public mind. It garners great media attention. It has savvy and influential advocates. The online publication of the NASET (National Association of Special Education Teachers) Week in Review contained this item:
QUESTION: Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves, Whoopi Goldberg, Cher, Selma Hayek, Richard Branson, Henry Winkler, Tim Tebow, and Magic Johnson. What do all of these famous people have in common?
ANSWER: They all reported having DYSLEXIA.31
Notice there is nary a postal worker, or home health aide, or clerk, or dishwasher among them. But so what? Isn’t the success of celebrities inspiring to all struggling learners? My answer to that question is: this kind of publicity is not nearly as beneficial as it should be, and it can be counterproductive. It’s too restricted and laden with adverse consequences for political reform.
A few years ago a foundation report supporting more services for students with dyslexia stated, “Multiple and sometimes competing constituencies,” in the Specific Learning Disability field that includes dyslexia, “are divided and disorganized more often than they are unified, and it’s usually children with LD who pay the price.”32 The way I see it is that sometimes advocates for dyslexia limit their reforms—usually state laws that call for screening and interventions and teacher training—without broader reference to RTI for all struggling learners.
These parent-advocates are typically well-educated and well-off financially. They pick up fairly early that their children are struggling to learn to read, and that school systems are missing or delaying the identification of dyslexia and timely instructional assistance. These parents may be able to hire private experts who document phonological processing deficits and other markers of dyslexia with a depth and expertise that public school systems lack. With evaluations in hand, the parents fight fiercely for services for their children, and if all else fails, they hire private lawyers. They are also the founders of dyslexia-only advocacy organizations.
But their view can be narrow. They tend to miss the “invisible dyslexics” that I wrote about in a report published by the Abell Foundation in 2003. The full title of my report was “The Invisible Dyslexics: How Public Schools in Baltimore and Elsewhere Discriminate Against Poor Children in the Diagnosis and Treatment of Early Reading Difficulties.”33 These “invisible dyslexics,” first brought to light in Chapter 2, don’t have high IQs, or exceptional ability in the arts or sports or anything else. They aren’t lucky enough to have parents who can afford—through pricey private psychologists, reading specialists and lawyers—to establish their “dyslexia.” Yet, they, by most common definitions, have dyslexia too.
This disservice to the reform cause happens when the reading problems of poor children are typically attributed not to dyslexia but to low-average IQs and poverty backgrounds. This is flat-out wrong, a triumph of stereotypical blaming the victim over the science of reading. Reading scientists have established that “invisible dyslexics” struggle to become proficient readers because of the same underlying causal factors as students from better-off families whose dyslexia is more visible, and they can benefit equally from the same evidence-based instruction. Dyslexia-only advocates tend to ignore or downplay these facts, narrowing and weakening overall political support for RTI and IEP reforms.
My own experience illuminates the danger of this happening, though it has a happy ending. A grass roots movement in a small county in Maryland founded a vibrant Maryland chapter of the national network Decoding Dyslexia. Its stellar accomplishments in a short period of time include pushing through state legislation to create a Dyslexia Task Force which proposed significant steps to increase diagnosis and treatment. Yet, for a while, a smaller band of advocates, including me, had trouble enlisting them in more inclusive attempts to address struggling learners. Now, to their credit, that’s changed. We are allied in efforts to increase funding and accountability for RTI in general education and One Year Plus-like IEPs in special education.
Still, just the fact that there was some distance for a while between our efforts seems symptomatic of the national failure of the popular dyslexia movements of the day to embrace struggling learners defined more broadly. Dyslexia organizations can bring potent political support when they fight on behalf of reforms to end the educational abuse of all struggling learners. Decoding Dyslexia of Maryland is showing the way.
The political tensions among advocates for different disabilities, as troubling as they are, are far more defensible than the educational free-for-all among political liberals. Nothing seems more in the natural political order of things than liberals leading the charge to establish a civil right to an adequate education, thereby laying the foundation for ending the abuse of struggling learners. The civil right would include guarantees of RTI-like interventions and the money to pay for them.
The opposition of conservatives is certain. Conservative orthodoxy holds that privatization and emasculation of teachers unions would do the job without legal guarantees or more money. Yet, over the past decade or so, some liberals have spent too much time warring against each other rather than against conservatives. This stems from the tendency of some liberals (not all!) to agree with conservatives that school reform cannot be accomplished without larger economic and social transformations outside of school.
The tendency goes back to the famous 1966 Coleman report findings that school resources meant less in determining student achievement than family economic and educational background. Still, there is a world of difference in why odd liberal and conservative bedfellows climb into the same political sack.
These liberals dwell mainly on the conviction that society at large is at fault. Inequality of opportunity—poverty, un- and under-employment, poor housing and neighborhoods, crime and the scourge of drugs, and other economic and social circumstances—are the root causes of student failure in school. Conservatives believe it is not society but individual parents who are most to blame. Family culture, they think, counts more than teachers or other school resources. In their view, homework doesn’t get done, absences and latenesses pile up (reading instruction is often the first class in the morning), and teachers are disrespected.
While liberals are unified in fighting for more funding, they splinter on strategy.34 One camp argues that the primary focus must be on fighting poverty and inequality outside of the schools. As articulated by Richard Rothstein, a brilliant researcher and political progressive, “The influence of social class characteristics is probably so powerful that schools cannot overcome it, no matter how well-designed are their instructional programs and climates.”35 That doesn’t mean schools can’t do anything by themselves. Rothstein would “never say public schools can’t do better . . . [but] they can’t do much better” without first redressing the social and economic ills of the poor.36
Other liberals—and I am staunchly one of them—believe that this focus on economic and social programs outside the schools lets educators too easily off the hook. The former reform-minded superintendent of the Baltimore city schools preached a “no excuses” culture: “we take kids the way we find them and educate them well no matter what.” I agree.
In a sense, that’s a bottom line message of this book. Notwithstanding all the social and economic problems that disadvantage struggling learners, and all the policy and political obstacles to reform, public schools can improve mightily. Student achievement can rise. And in particular, we can end the educational abuse of struggling learners if more money and better management were devoted to RTI and related programs.
There is one further significant division in what should be a united liberal front: conflicting priorities between low and upper income parents, usually over budget priorities.
One telltale example is whether pre-kindergarten programs for four and three year olds should be available for all children (the universal approach) or only for “at-risk” poor children (the targeted approach). Research shows that the advantages of pre-k programs accrue generally to at-risk children but not others. Yet, parents across the economic spectrum seek the programs for their children too. Without the votes of legislators representing middle income and up constituents, it is more difficult to enact targeted programs, even when funds are lacking for the universal approach.
Other examples of competition for scarce funding range from smaller class sizes, to summer school, to programs for gifted and talented children—all of which provide greater benefits for low- than high-achieving students. It’s political triage really. As a member of the Baltimore school board, I was the lone dissenting vote against providing extra funds for gifted and talented programs because I felt, given the system’s threadbare budget, the funds in question would be more cost-effective if spent on interventions for struggling learners. Proponents of the gifted and talented funding argued less on its academic merits and more on its importance in keeping the dwindling public school population of middle class children. People can rightly differ in making such damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t decisions. What’s clear, however, is that the budget competition strains political unity among liberals.
Still, the point should be kept in context. The differences among liberals are nowhere near as dangerous to school reform as monolithic conservative doctrine is. Nonetheless, given the prevailing conservative political supremacy, liberals can be much more politically astute and victorious if they heal the breaches in their ranks.
And here’s one more big political “if:” there is a much greater chance to end educational abuse if teachers unions can be fully engaged in the campaign. Unions are an admirable mainstay of liberal politics in many respects. I usually admire and defend them. In particular, they are the backbone of political efforts to increase school funding. Yet, they have almost exclusively linked the need for more money to higher teacher salaries.
True, teacher compensation definitely lags behind comparable professions. And unions have every right to campaign for higher pay and benefits. Yet, they have done relatively little to flex their muscles behind more funding for other reforms, notably RTI for struggling learners. This shortsightedness does their membership a disservice since it neglects other factors that are essential to teacher recruitment and retention. To underscore a point made many chapters ago, teachers rank working conditions ahead of pay. Few conditions are more demoralizing to general education teachers than having so many struggling learners in their fairly large classes. Job satisfaction suffers when teachers are unable to boost far-behind struggling learners or bring out the best in students who aren’t struggling. And pity most of all beleaguered and abandoned special educators who must cope with so many students who are even farther behind (and mislabeled as disabled).
Teachers unions need to get this message and place it high up on their political agenda.
As this book comes to a close, I have left you my dear readers with a balancing task of your own. First, I have hardly pulled punches in indicting public education. I’ve also tried to be open and honest in not glossing over the many ideological and political obstacles to reform. As a nation, we are divided over causes and cures for inequality, including unequal educational opportunity. And educators themselves are institutionally resistant to change.
Still, I hope that I have left you with another strong impression: the conviction that reform is possible. I have shown how there is a credible and feasible way to elevate student achievement to a higher plateau. Struggling learners can be taught to meet grade level standards. It’s a matter of ways (RTI and better management) and means (resources). And it’s up to all of Us including Educators to deliver them.
Don’t let the Trump-era politics discourage you. Yes, present prospects for change for the common good including public education are bleak. And they look worst at the federal level, where the prime foundations for reform must be laid. The U. S. Department of Education is now in reverse overdrive, crushing even modest reform roots.37 The same is true for K-12 policy in many red states. But in blue states like my Maryland, there are near-term opportunities. Best of all could be passage of legislation that incorporates the recommendations of the Kirwan Commission whose work has been profiled earlier.
In any and all events, be of stout resolve. Our nation’s politics run in cycles, and the current one shows signs of running out. Take heart too from the Winston Churchill’s maxim that we Americans do the right thing only after we’ve exhausted all the other possibilities.
Some day we the American people will look back on the educational abuse of struggling learners. On our failure to enable our children to learn to read and have a fair shot at higher education and the workplace. On the particular discrimination against poor and minority children. And on the self-inflicted decline in our nation’s economic and social well-being.
We and future generations will say: how could we let it happen and go on for so long? Shouldn’t the educational abuse of struggling learners stir up some of the same emotions and shame as our national past on school segregation? Shouldn’t we end once and for all the education abuse of struggling learners, who are predominantly poor and minority children?
The answers should be self-evident. Let’s unite and organize to end this national disgrace. We owe it legally and morally to our children, and we owe it to ourselves. Our standing as a just nation is at stake.