Brutal Reality Checks - Surviving Special Education

The author taking a needed break from
pedagogy.Image of a petite brown young woman
 in  a Medieval gown, flowers in her hair
and beloved puppy in her lap. Credit
J. Richards/K.Cevik

You are a first-year upper elementary teacher in a self-contained class. In front of you are 12 IEPs. Each was written by a different teacher. Most of the goals are far above the current academic levels of your students and were clearly copied and pasted from grade level state standards. None of them follow the same criteria for measurement, which means you will need to measure each goal a different way. Each of your students has a goal for the four core subjects you teach: math, English, science, and social studies. So in total, you are responsible for 12x4 = 48 separate IEP goals, not counting objectives to achieve each goal. There is very little overlap between your students’ goals, making grouping difficult.

Given a good day with no illnesses, unexpected test prep sessions, early releases, random meetings, assemblies, “writing days”, “reading days”, fire drills, schedule changes, or behavioral interruptions, you have 2 paraprofessionals and a total of about 1.5 hours a day to work on goals.

Your principal pops in to tell you-you'll be getting a new student from out of state. No, they don’t have her paperwork yet. She’ll be here tomorrow. You will need to set up individual academic assessments for her, one on one, using one of your paraprofessionals, so plan to be down staff starting tomorrow.

Your students are back from lunch. You have about 20 minutes of instructional time.

Go.

I remember reading and rereading IEPs for students in confusion my first year. A student who was barely functioning on a kindergarten level with 4^th and 5^th grade level math goals, or science and social studies goals so specific I would need to craft entire lessons around them so that I was able to get some sort of data before progress report time. Parents seemed not to notice. Admin and my otherwise amazing mentor never commented. It was plaguing me, and from what I could tell, only me.

You see, it flew in the face of everything I’d been taught in my master’s program. It even seemed to defy professional development, all those ones that harangued us about writing measurable goals that were tailored to each student. How can you justify a 5th-grade reading goal for a child who could barely read sight words? How are you not setting yourself—and the child—up for perpetual failure?

One of my colleagues—an older teacher who had been with the district for years—clued me in.

“It’s ok if you don’t achieve the goals in a year,” she told me. “Just make sure you’re writing them how they [admin] want and you’re using the standards they’ll be tested on. Some kids may never achieve that goal, but as long as you can show you’re working towards it, you’re fine.”

It didn’t compute. For the rest of my time there, I ignored her reassurances and battled the paperwork. I wrote my own goals as much as our automated, cookie-cutter IEP writing program would allow. I changed criteria so that they were consistent with how I could measure them. Then I arranged my schedule so that I could implement every IEP possible, however possible, in the limited time I had to do anything that resembled actual teaching.

It didn’t go well. It went better than it would have if I had shrugged and chucked the goals in the trash. But I simply couldn’t, as brand new, inexperienced teacher with no point reference on how to teach 48 goals in one hour of one day, implement every IEP goal, every day of every week.

This didn’t even account for outside variables. Sometimes my students would fall asleep in class because they hadn’t slept the night before. Some would have tantrums and hurl death threats, forcing us to evacuate the room, which interrupted instruction. Sometimes they were absent. Sometimes they were sick but had been given fever reducers that worked for part of the morning and kept them in school—physically there, but mentally and emotionally drained.

It’s been years since I first read those IEPs. I’ve grown out of my outrage and I can see my colleague’s perspective. And I like it even less.

You’ve been a teacher for a few years now. You work for a chain charter school with mostly at-risk teens. There are scores of students in each course, and a revolving door of teachers, admin, and students. Keeping up to date is an art, not a science. You’re doing okay.

Schoolwide, you’re responsible for the tracking and implementation of nearly 50 IEPs, each with a novel’s worth of accommodations and varying numbers of goals. With that large a number, and with so many students MIA on any given week, you need to make sure your work is streamlined. You’ve perfected an IEP format that fits all the legal requirements for your state. You tweak it for students as needed, but it has to be fairly standard for the sake of order and sanity. Your goals are easy to justify, track, and measure, and even subject-based ones apply to a variety of courses whenever possible. Sure, you end up writing a lot of similar goals, but not blindly. Most of your students need similar things, and you make sure to document your rationale so there are no complaints.

But things are precarious. Admin isn’t pleased with passing and graduation rates. Emails start to feature graphs comparing percentages across departments, encouraging “friendly competition”. You hear a lot of “encouraging” statements about how the admin is confident the low numbers will change. So far, you’ve sat through 3 different lectures/department meetings on how to write IEP goals.

It’s simple. Admin wants the numbers to move, and have concluded the best way to do that is to witness change, first hand, in the way we log our daily work. It’s no longer enough to write the goals, to take data. Any administrator who spot checks our IEPs needs to be sold on how much of our time and energy it took to write every, single goal. She needs to be convinced that we actually, truly care about getting every student to pass every class.  

Which boils down to more paperwork.

Suggestions range from the silly to the illegal. One admin suggests writing goals for electives for failing students. The number of students being moved to SPED resource classes jumps. Admin waves away objections that there is no such thing as a resource room for art or music. If there’s no course available, case managers are to adapt the class themselves and “meet with the students to get it done”. No comment is made about chronically absent students. The expectation is that SPED staff will begin making up for the shortcomings of all other staff—that in fact, we are obligated to do so.

One admin encourages SPED teachers to provide fully included students with extra special education teacher support outside the general ed classroom in small groups—a violation of their least restrictive environment. One tells teachers to fill up every category in the “present levels” section of the IEP form—including categories in which the student has no disability or need. “So it’s clear that you know the student well, and you’re not just reading from a file”, she says. Yet another provides sample goals that were clearly taken from elementary settings and can’t be implemented in high school.

For the most part, you know enough to ignore these ravings and do the right thing. Federal law trumps school policy, no matter how bitter it may make higher-ups. But it doesn’t stop the sinking feeling you get when you realize no one at these meetings can claim the moral high ground, not even you. The lip service paid to differentiation and individualization is a poor consolation in overcrowded classrooms, poorly funded schools, and horrendously run programs. Nobody here is able to meet the lofty ideals of creating personalized learning for kids with disabilities. You certainly aren’t.

You keep writing IEPs to conform with the laws as best you can—anywhere from 30 to 50 of them.  Sometimes you mess up. When you can, you adjust for specific students—but you know one person cannot write, track, and implement 50 completely individual, completely separate, utterly unique IEP goals. Your workload isn’t going to go down. If anything, as more and more students come in, it’s likely to go up. So you need to watch your back and crank out your work as efficiently as possible without getting sued. That has to take priority if you want to keep being able to write more goals.

Every once in a while, you’ll write a great goal and get through to a student. Something will click. She’ll learn. And for that brief moment, you’ll feel like you wrote the right thing. You’ll feel like a special education teacher. 

Until the next time that happens, all you can do is keep writing. 

Winter Cevik is a small, unusually vocal hen in her mid-thirties. In her spare time, she enjoys laying eggs (usually 500 words or fewer), writing IEPs, and offending neighborhood wildlife.

When Help Harms: Surviving Special Education

The author, surveying the forest and deciding navigation while pondering how to provoke a shift in
attitudes towards disabled students on parent and educator sides that would eliminate learned
helplessness, encourage self-advocacy and self-confidence through autonomy and understanding
of real-world situations. 

Winter Cevik is a small, unusually vocal hen in her mid-thirties. In her spare time, she enjoys laying eggs (usually 500 words or fewer), writing IEPs, and offending neighborhood wildlife.


 Two perspectives plague special education. They’re twin roads paved with good intentions, and fail for the same reason: they reduce a disabled individual’s worth to how they make us feel.

We do this with everything, of course, caring about or disliking others, ourselves, even objects, based on personal utility and emotional payoff. It’s a reflex old as language, but when we’re talking about it governing how we decide the futures of other human beings, it merits a closer look.

For the sake of delineating these two mindsets, I will label my examples as “parent” and “teacher”, but these ideas aren’t mutually exclusive or limited to one side of the table. Both groups can and often do indulge in both sets of ideas, or move between them. Sometimes everything from pop culture to district-level administrators encourages and promotes them.

TEACHER:

"Lacey" is a 10-year-old diagnosed with intellectual disabilities. She’s petite for her age and often behaves like a much younger child, with language and interests far behind her peers. For most of her time in elementary school, her friendly behavior and trusting nature with everyone has made her a hit with school staff. She’s often made the unofficial mascot during trips, performances, and events. Whenever she encounters a new stranger in the school building, she will march over and introduce herself—then offer a big hug. Staff have laughed, cheered, and encouraged her. In inclusion, she often asks her gen ed teachers to hold her hand or cuddle while she does her schoolwork, sometimes taking their hands and putting them around her as she’s speaking to them. On a few occasions, she’s also asked this of friendly peers.

Her parents are concerned. Lacey will be a middle schooler soon, and she needs to learn appropriate boundaries with staff and peers. During an IEP meeting, they request that school staff stop holding Lacey’s hand when walking down the hall with her. Her parents also want to discourage her from approaching every stranger she sees in the school building—they see this becoming a serious issue as she grows older, especially if she’s in the habit of immediately attempting physical contact with strangers.  They’ve also asked that gen ed teachers be firm about making peer contact age appropriate: no “baby” talk, no attempting to pick her up/carry her, no using pet names. This, they say, is stigmatizing, and gives her peers the wrong message.

Results have been mixed. While many teachers understand that Lacey will have to deal with the realities of adulthood eventually, right now, they see a vulnerable, sweet young child who is reaching out for love and approval. What’s the harm in holding her hand while walking to the bus? What’s wrong with giving her a hug now and then? And her peers are being so supportive of her. Why ruin that relationship by pressuring Lacey to live up to unattainable social standards?

The hand holding, hugging, and greetings persist until Lacey graduates from elementary school. During the end of year party, she sits on her favorite teacher’s lap and serenades them with her favorite song from preschool.

“Everyone’s a genius. Don’t judge a fish by its ability to climb trees.”

If I could ban one quote forever from professional development meetings, it would be that one. Ostensibly, it’s a reminder to evaluate each students’ unique set of strengths and needs, rather than trying to measure potential through inappropriate standards. That part is fine. The problem is how this idea manifests in special education.

In districts with attentive management, good funding, and well-rounded teachers, this becomes meticulous data and research-based interventions, great home-school relationships, and a strong sense of what skills the student will need to thrive in future environments, including upper grades. In districts with poor management and overindulgent staff, this idea morphs into doing away with any sort of standard, lowering the bar to nothing, and refusing to acknowledge any environment but the current one for that student.

This isn’t done out of spite, or even incompetence. Worse. It’s done out of pity.

Some kids just function way below age level and continue to need adult support far beyond their peers. Some students come from heartbreaking situations and have had to grow up too fast, with no opportunity to be themselves. Some are bullied for their disabilities, by peers or staff. It’s hard not to read their stories and break down. How do you establish a loving, trusting relationship with a child who is having—and is likely to have—a very tough life, with few people showing them any love or sympathy? How do you get to a point where this child builds up self-esteem? How do you get this student to pass the class and move up a grade level so they don’t continue to be behind and feel hopeless?

It’s easy to see where the idea blurs from creating a supportive environment to creating one with few demands. Our job is to provide care, socially as well as academically. If we can give students a safe place to be their sweet, naïve selves, why wouldn’t we?  We can build up their confidence and trust in people again, we can repair burnt bridges. We can give them a chance to move up a grade level, get that high school diploma, apply to that trade school, talk for them at their meetings. We just need to do most of the work to get them there, because, bless their hearts, they just can’t do it alone right now. But they have time. Maybe in a year or two. Or three. Or after high school. There’s no rush to make them little adults right now when they can’t even feed themselves properly yet!

Let’s face it, short term it feels great. The student loves you for it. Maybe admin loves you for it because it makes you the all-nurturing, sweet-as-honey teacher-martyr special educators are often stereotyped as being. It diminishes behavior concerns. It’s more work for you than the student, but you go home feeling accomplished. It’s gratifying.

Until it isn’t.

This is how I end up with high school students who can’t tell me anything about their own disabilities. This is how I end up with students who have no idea how to follow schedules, interact appropriately in groups by doing basic things like taking turns with others, or understand what tasks they are capable of doing themselves, without any outside help. This is how they end up knowing nothing about how to achieve post-transition goals. This is how learned helplessness happens with neurodivergent students—they mentally check themselves out of tasks they have learned others must do for them.

Their educational lives had been characterized by extremes: bullying or indulgence, isolation or saccharine attention to gratify the sensibilities of a non-disabled crowd of caretakers. Rarely has it even been a balance of challenge and support, very rarely has it been age-appropriate learning. They’ve been given just the wrong kind of latitude to “be themselves” without any foundation to help them understand who they are, what they need, and what they’re capable of. They know that teachers are there to give answers to tests, give out stickers for good behavior, and snitch if you don’t comply. Their teachers are there to be needed, and they are there to need.

I’ve watched "Lacey’s" story in my own classrooms, while I chastised paraprofessionals, teachers, and peers about infantilizing students. I had strong talks with students about deadlines, missing appointments, and actually using their resources to finish their assignments once they were aware of how to follow a schedule and look up information. I fretted over the fate of students who were too touchy, too friendly, too trusting of others when administrators referred to my self-contained class as the “low babies.”

Pity kills all relationships. It reduces the other person to a thing that makes us feel bad, drives us to relieve our own bad feelings rather than see the potential in others. It goes beyond ableism: it’s a betrayal of the very philosophy of our field, to provide true opportunities for our students to mature, develop, and come into their own.


PARENT:

“Jay” was diagnosed with autism and severe intellectual disabilities when he was 2.  He’s in 4th grade now and making gradual progress. He’s learned some pre-reading strategies, is doing well with brief interactions with peers and frequent sensory breaks in between.  At his annual IEP meeting, his teachers suggest starting him on sight word recognition, early math concepts such as comparing quantities, and adaptive PE an hour a week, as well as few hours of inclusion in grade level activities. They pull out the data to back up his present levels.

Mom is not pleased. She’s heard stories of students making rapid progress in other districts, innovative strategies to get them to speak, socialize, and participate with their peers. Although Jay’s early prognosis was dire, he had made rapid progress when he was given early intervention—he was toilet trained on time with his peers, participated in inclusive preschool just fine with everyone else. Why the low expectations now?

Easy. The school is holding him back. They’re giving him work that stigmatizes him and makes him realize he has a disability. It’s hurting his self-esteem and he’s shutting down, which puts him further behind. He clearly needs school-sponsored tutoring, increased speech therapy, and social skills class to bring him out of his shell. And adaptive PE? Please. Her neighbor’s campus has a pool, and her daughter uses it daily. Aquatics for an hour a day can triple reading and math scores for kids with autism. Yet they hadn’t even suggested that for her son.

It’s time to call up that advocate.

The Parent Perspective goes something like this:

1.      My child/my child’s true potential is hidden underneath the disability. My child must be separated from his/her disability.

2.      We need to remove/neutralize/extract the disability using the right set of tools so that my child can be who he/she is meant to be

3.      Experts are there as vendors of these tools. The ones that don’t do this, or don’t feel the same way, are roadblocks to be removed from my path.

There’s an eagerness in Parent Perspective to uncover a student’s potential and a tendency to presume competence that many teachers share. But the price is often a denial of the student’s current ability, or worse, an entire part of the student’s lived disabled reality, in the name of progress.

 I have encountered adults who were never informed of their disabilities, because their parents had declined to reveal it to them, effectively cutting off avenues for self-advocacy and community by not giving their children a realistic view of what challenges may lay ahead. I’ve seen parents insist on therapies that no one in a district was trained to provide, push for inclusion during subjects that give no real benefit to the student due to the prevailing belief that inclusion will improve social skills; I’ve seen parents of young echolalic students state their children are doing math beyond grade level because the children can recite high numbers, and demand the student be placed in general education.

Many times, schools will cave in and provide some these trappings of education (I like to call this "education theater") to make the parents happy. Sometimes they do it to avoid advocates. It’s almost never done because anyone else at the table feels like it’s in the best interest of the student.

Teachers face a delicate balance between setting high expectations and documenting attainable goals based on what they can prove a student is able to do, right now, today. This is why IEPs have to be written the way they are, why goals follow a specific format. Schools and teachers face pressure to demonstrate “student growth” while facing an uphill battle to match good resources to what they know and can prove a student will need within a few grade levels. We struggle to find ways of meeting students where they are in age-appropriate ways so we can help them get to where they’re going.

This means not giving a student operating on a pre K level, 4th and 5th-grade math problems that are likely to frustrate rather than empower. It means not dropping off an autistic 3rd grader with sensory integration problems in the middle of a chaotic class period with an overwhelmed gen ed teacher in the name of “inclusion”. It means forcing ourselves, and everyone else, to stick to the facts of what we know a disabled student can and can’t do, right now, and what we can do in the near future to address it.

Denial is a death sentence to this process, not just because it makes the IEP meetings harder, but because of what it implies about how educators now must treat a student—as an extension of the parent’s will, a poor facsimile of a child the parent wants us to bring into existence. It sets a deadline for how much longer the student’s disabilities are supposed to impact him before it becomes unacceptable and we are in some way held responsible. It forces us to look at this autonomous human being, who is in the process of growing and changing, in terms of what parents want her to be, even when the dream is nowhere near reality.

This doesn’t even address what the impact Parent Perspective has on the student. Ignoring who the person is beyond what the person is to you, right now has a lasting impact on how we treat the person. Refusal to see not only a person’s disability, but how that disability’s impact on a person may change over time can mean we dwell on the highlights, rather than listen to what the person is communicating about his own body and mind. It downplays areas where a student needs support by suggesting that the only deficiency is in how we go about uncovering the real person who is unaffected and unlimited by their life circumstances, somewhere beneath the exterior. It simultaneously accuses the disabled person of being an impostor and blames others for her continued existence as a fraud, or the thief of some better, able-bodied, non-neurodiverse person’s life.

This doesn’t dismiss the need to set high standards. A person is not just a disability, shouldn’t be limited or defined solely by it, any more than by race, religion, gender, etc. Parents, in general, are invaluable for giving insight into a student’s strengths, needs, and potential future settings. They can raise the bar for special education programs everywhere. But taken to the extreme, Parent Perspective can morph into a disability erasure that poisons realistic, constructive discussion, reduces children into sock-puppets of Parent resentment, and places the student in an ableist cage of the parent’s making.

On Disparity in Education: Equality is Not Justice

There was a meme making the rounds of all the social networking communities a while ago. The meme was entitled "Equality Doesn't Mean Justice". This is a derivation of a meme by professor Craig Froehle. Let me post it here to save time:

Image is a two frame caricature the first is of a tall man a man middle height and a very short man all standing on boxes of equal size trying to look over a fence at a baseball game. The tall man and shorter man are able to see but the smallest man is not. The caption below the first frame reads "This is equality". In the next frame the shortest man is now able to see the game because he is standing on two boxes, and the shorter man is standing on one. The tall man needs no box and is still able to see the game. The caption under this frame reads "This is justice". 

It is very difficult to explain this distinction to any professional who has no understanding that my son's race, gender, perceived socioeconomic status and his degree of disability combine to leave him vulnerable to the same negative stereotypical  biases that have caused harm to him in the past. What is seen as equal is presumed to be just. My son needs three boxes to reach the justice of a free and appropriate education. He cannot be presumed to be treated fairly because his treatment is equal to another child of equal pathology who has no intersectional factors increasing risk of unjust placement and maltreatment in the classroom.

Appropriate education was meant to achieve equality with average students in public schools. But this approach is rarely just, particularly for students who must overcome misdiagnoses of emotional and behavioral disorders often placed upon them automatically. Their race and gender are used to presume that rather than educational supports they require behavioral management. Exclusively with males who are Black, the attitude with special education professionals is always an entrenched demand about controlling the pupil, and this is based on a systemic type of racism that assumes that if a person is poor, male, and Black, their behavior will become aggressive eventually.  So every action is viewed through the lens of  the racist legacy of a history of violence. The same action by a non-Black student might not be viewed in that light at all. A self fulfilling prophecy for nonspeaking autistic males, who are hypersensitive to fear in others and will react by mirroring the fear they sense in classroom staff and trying to defend themselves against whatever may come at them. Add to that administration by risk management and fear of responsibility for some imagined outcome if some child is not locked away from their peers and you have a recipe for discrimination that is an infinite loop until a student ages out of the school system. A 'good' student will then have learned to comply with rigid routine, the primary rule for living in an institution. They will learn helplessness, not self advocacy. The 'bad' student will have increasing force used against them until some catastrophic event occurs.

Sadly I realize that if my son and most of his peers did not carry these labels, what would be the primary focus of any educational roadmap would be what is just. How does one counter a mentality based on historical fear of large males of color combined with a historical fear of neurodivergent individuals? Professionals are often not even aware of the fear and bigotry driving their decisions and responses. If told "this response is ableist" or "that opinion is actually a racist assumption rather than a professional observation" they will use their credentials to balk and react with hostility. "Parent" will be used as a derogatory word. One's credibility as a parent will come into question.

In the distant past threats were made to us during meetings in an attempt to instill a fear of reprisal to our son or us should we complain or demand justice.

 Yet now my son's future, as well as that of his intersected peers, is in their hands. How can we navigate this booby-trapped environment?

I am trying to base communication on facts and focus on quantifiable observations and assessments. This is the best I can do. I have no control over the bigotries, fears, and disdain of those who might work with my son going forward except to be on the lookout for red flags in those people and how my son reacts in their presence. I have had the honor of getting to know my son well for three years. I trust him. He does not need to speak to let me know someone is mistreating him. I can only return him to being the lead protagonist in his own life and stand by him as he overcomes obstacles himself. But when you know this institutionalized ableist racism exists, and it looms over your child's world decimating the quality of life he might achieve it hurts. Beyond the injustice of it all, it is an exercise in standing by helplessly hoping your child can survive his education. It is frightening.

As we arrive with our son closer to end of our four year battle for his right to be educated, I want justice. I cannot accept less. My son deserves justice. I want him to have his right to an untainted free and appropriate education. I do not know how, under the present system he can achieve this goal. But he deserves to be back in command of his own life story in safety and peace.

Wish us luck. We really need it.