March 24, 2008

Obama's Race Speech & Special Education

The recent speech of Barack Obama on race in America had a broad spectrum of reactions, depending on the life experience of the listener. He talked about stereotypes, about unequal treatment, of the continuing anger of those who lived through the period of racial segregation in America, of the unanswered questions about black youth, poor youth, urban education, the experience of being other than mainstream white America. As I listened, I wondered how many others listened and substituted “special education” every time Obama spoke about the historic and continuing discrimination against people of color in America. I have often written that being devoted to the needs of disabled children, of being the mother of a disabled child, was no different than being black because of the separation in our life experience, our inability to obtain an even playing field for children and families, the overt anger of the establishment when we pushed our cause, the daily injustices suffered, and the refusal of state and federal governments to enforce the laws that should make such discrimination impossible.

I do not know what has become of the political passion of those of us in the 1970s who were the first to implement special education. I do not know why the millions of families who now experience the breakdown of special education have not organized and made their voices and fury heard. It seems that marching has gone out of fashion. Obama’s white grandmother spoke about stereotypic fear of black men who passed her on the street. It is not uncommon for me to hear about grandparents who deny that their grandchildren have disabilities, never visit them except on holidays, and if they do accept the disability, blame it on the person their child married. It is not uncommon for families to disregard the learning disability of the child because they cannot see it. We deal in stereotypes in special education in every way. When a reporter wants a picture in an article about disabilities, the child is in a wheelchair, on crutches, or is overtly, visibly disabled. It’s the “sympathy picture”. The entire notion of invisible disabilities, including mental illness, is much harder to sell because there is no “look” to it. We don’t know how to react unless we can visually label something. Black. Blind. Asian. Crippled. Latino. Deaf. This relentless and mindless approach to disabilities has led us to the point in education where government has tried to get rid of the very concept of “learning disabilities” by using the term synonymously with “handicapped”. And so we continue to pretend that children with invisible disabilities could really overcome them if they tried. America builds more prisons to house them in adulthood than any other country on the planet.

The way special education parents speak to each other in their own groups differs dramatically from the way they speak in public, in a way similar to discussions within black churches on Sundays that Obama described. Visceral rage at the injustice suffered within school buildings and school systems is spattered on the walls and in the air. Each parent tells another version of the same story. They are every color and shade of complexion, from every cultural mix, from all socioeconomic levels except the very rich. They buy out and escape the ghetto of limited expectations and unfulfilled promises. A few parents in the system have been successful and attempt to share what they did to help fellow parents. They bring a tiny sliver of blue sky into an otherwise dark and unhappy room.

In the same way that Obama addressed racism in America’s past and present, we await a similar honesty to one day appear in a national special education leader. The reviewers of Obama’s speech quoted the same sentence, “Unless we recognize we have a problem, we cannot fix it.” He recognized the problem and gave it a face and a voice. Never, never in the history of special education has that happened. The closest it ever came was in the late 80s when we had our first epidemic of crack and FAS babies. Many conferences recognized that we could not pay for all of these newly born disabled children and would be faced with a crisis. Many suggested that we would simply define the crisis away by changing the description of an educational disability. But there was never a public discussion. Unless you were a professional you did not know of the looming crisis at the start of the 90s. There is still no public discussion as we watch the dying child of special education taking its last breath and pretend it is sleeping and will wake up in the morning, happy and healthy.

We began to play with the definition of learning disability from 1990 to the present. Beginning in 2004 we didn’t want to recognize invisible learning disabilities at all, inventing “response to intervention” to delay both evaluation and services at the earliest possible time. Funded parent training and information centers are now more supportive of state government than of parents. They will not admit the problem, so cannot be a part of the solution. None will say there is a problem, specify the problem, and offer a solution. They can’t. They are muzzled with a paycheck.

It looks as though education generally will never be an issue within the upcoming presidential election. So we must think of what we need as families, as professionals, as supporters of special education and its individual elements. We cannot be followers of any specific political party but must, must examine each issue and candidate for the truth of what they say as it relates to our needs as Americans raising children with disabilities. These are frightening times from many perspectives. But the most frightening aspect of all is to think of America’s unborn children eight years from now if the wrong person is elected President. What we need is more than money. We need the will to change and reinvent an entirely broken system of education and human services. We need to take greater responsibility for our actions. And we must always look behind the stereotypes each of us carries in our heart to find the intricacies of the person behind the mask of the label we give them.