April 11, 2008

Children and a Long, Hot Summer

I’ve missed a blog or two. It’s one of those situations where there is so much work, so much I want to say and can’t for a while. It’s one of those times when people you thought were good guys turn out to be bad guys. It’s one of those times when every fear I have about justice and due process for parents pales by comparison with the real thing on a daily basis. Give me a month. By then, some of these things will be sorted out and I won’t have to be oblique or careful.

The New York Times Book Review and Magazine of 4/6/08 both featured children on their covers, perhaps for the first time. “American Children” discussed a series of short stories about children from other countries who ultimately settle in America. The theme was about which country they felt the strongest attachment for- and the fact that the strongest attachment may not be the country of your birth. It examined childhoods of different cultures, generational conflicts, and the fight for connection and control. These past two weeks I’ve sat next to a family in a courtroom, who were born in another country and culture than the U.S. Their differences have been used to paint them as disengaged and unloving parents, manipulative, untrustworthy. In spite of every objection, it is evident that what they face is cultural and ethnic discrimination of the most racist kind. So the issues relating to the unmet needs of their child are bound up in the differences they bring to the table from far off lands with exotic names. They face the insults the judge permits day after day, somehow believing that there will be justice in the end. Their strongest attachment is not for the country of their birth but for America. I wonder how they will feel when this hearing is over and justice has not prevailed…

The Craftman, by Richard Sennett, is about making things and the importance of skilled hands. He gives a list of the things that craftsmen know:

1. How to negotiate between autonomy and authority, as must be done in any workshop.This is also a classic special education issue- the authority of the law and the autonomy of school districts not to follow it because they know there is no one there to enforce it.
2. How to work not against resistant forces but with them. There is no working with the resistant forces in special education anymore. So this one does not apply.
3. How to complete their tasks by using minimum force. Ah, yes, I remember it well. It used to be that we could do this in special education but no more. Commonly, anything a parent requests will be met with “We’ll take you to due process.” So in special education today it is either no force or maximum force, but nothing in between.
4. How to meet people and things with sympathetic imagination- the glass blower staying ahead of the molten glass. Don’t you love the term “sympathetic imagination”? I observe the child study team in this present case and my sympathetic imagination creates visions of slow torture wrought upon all of them. I wish them a disabled child educated in their own district and the same things done to them that they have done to this family and so many others.
5. How to play. The hope is that when this case is over the family will not have forgotten how to play.

The Magazine section featured “The Girl I was at Sugar Beach” by Helene Cooper. It was about a little 8-year old girl growing up in Liberia in the 1970s. Civil war was about to explode. Cooper says, “When I look back now at 1979, the last tragic year of the Congo regime in Liberia, I wonder at how I could have been so clueless as to miss all the signs around me that screamed that the world as I knew it was about to end.” When there is a critical mass of dissatisfaction and fury, there will be political upheaval. All the signs that special education has come to an end as we knew it, the procedural safeguards as we knew it have been there to see for a decade. But the enormity of what we have lost, however, cannot be felt until one goes into the arena of a due process hearing today. Children in general don’t matter. Disabled children in particular are an annoyance. And we know this because, in the heat of battle, there are almost no lawyers who will defend them and their families.

Children and a long, hot summer await us. Everything and everyone on the planet is in a state of change. Those of us who care about special education must realize that the system that exists in IDEA is also a fiction, morphing into pounds of paper with no meaning and board attorneys eager to get another due process hearing. We must reinvent the entire process and in so doing figure out how to infuse the most basic constitutional principles of justice into the way schools treat children with disabilities and their parents. We need to rebuild our system with the craftsman’s credo, creating a work of beauty to replace the growing malignancy that has metastasized throughout the system.