December 19, 2009

Flying Babies with No Safety Net - Special Education in 2010

There are two movies out about people who fly. One is a reissue of “Wings of Desire”, a 1987 German film about an angel who falls in love with a trapeze artist. It is about an angel’s eye looking at reality, with a story haunted by the past and dreaming about the future. The central issue is about time and how to make a transition from eternity to reality through the eyes of an angel who became mortal and explains the joys of being human. Some say is may be an Oscar contender. Then there is “Ricky”, a French film by Francois Ozon. It’s about working class parents who have a baby who sprouts wings. Like a moth it is drawn involuntarily to light. This is not a Disney movie, but a gritty story about a different kind of child in a family who can barely handle everyday life. The baby bumps into walls, hurls himself at windows and is in continuous peril ("Imagine Child Proofing for a Winged Baby", Stephen Holder, The New York Times, 12/16/09).
It cannot be accidental that both movies are out during the holiday season, yet neither they nor their movie reviews make any reference to it. It is as though the most pressing issue we face on the planet is how to survive, and perhaps find happiness, as we stand on the precipice of tomorrow. There is little time to celebrate Christmas or Chanukah, not enough energy or money or hope that we can do anything but go through the motions of life. When combining the two movie themes, I think the message is clearer. We can be idealists, looking down from the abstract notion of what should be, and moaning about how terrible it all looks. We feel helpless in understanding the oddities of our children, who sometimes seem Hell-bent on destroying themselves and us along with them as they hurl themselves through each developmental stage in a continuing state of jeopardy. But if we look hard and examine what we have that is human, we may fall in love. We may find that there is beauty in our lives and that we are not powerless to intervene- that we can learn to fly on the trapeze in order to keep our winged baby company and perhaps teach him about windows and walls so that he does not get hurt. It is a matter of vision, of resilience, and of determination to do more than survive. This is what it means to raise a child with disabilities, while not forgetting the warmth of the sun, the smell of honeysuckle, and the certainty that all things change.

Here you see the most current U.S. Department of Education Organization Chart as of November 16, 2009. Looking down from on high (the chair in front of the computer is your trapeze for the moment, as an angel debates falling in love with you), it looks pretty grim. Alexa Posny is both Assistant Secretary of OSERS and Acting Director of OSEP. Patricia (Patty) Guard was Acting Director of OSEP until recently and is now Deputy Director. Alexa Posny worked in the Bush administration in OSERS and was formerly the State Director of Special Education in Kansas. The Senate confirmed her on 10/15/09. Then there is Patty. I sat with her in an auditorium in Teachers College in the 1980s, when, if I remember correctly, she was yet again Acting Director of OSEP. She was a petite lady, polite, and every inch of her a bureaucrat. I was considered to be a terror in those days and she was clearly uncomfortable during our conversation. But she was responsive and did not avoid questions. Guard is in the esteemed position of “knowing where the bodies are buried” because she has been there so long under both Republican and Democratic administrations. But she has done nothing to improve special education. She is simply at the end of a pay check. Posny appears to be the same. If an angel looked at this organizational chart from a low floating cloud, every child in the county appears controlled by three people: Alexa Posny, Patricia Guard, and Bill Wolf. Special education is the only piece of the U.S. Department of Education that hangs alone, unconnected to any other division of the agency in this gritty recession, without anyone paying it any attention. Why is that? Must be too many flying babies hurtling into windows and walls. Whatever happened to IDEA reauthorization? It was to have been started after Obama was elected since the last statute was passed in 2004 and is required to be reauthored every five years. Nothing. Nothing. For all of the talk about disabilities and reform- nothing! It is catastrophically quiet in special education nationally. Nothing appears in Education Week. Websites continue to have the same things on them regarding issues and training- when all of us know that everybody is only going through the motions and that the system is too broken to work. That is confirmed by a look at the flow chart. Special education is gutted, a dinosaur in the education museum, with no support either going to or from it. So where is the warmth of a human hand, where is the promise of making things better? You won’t find it on this chart. You will find it in the mirror. You will find it by understanding that we must start special education all over again. For it is better to have nothing, than something that is not enforceable.

What are we to do? The reality is that there are answers but they are tough answers. There are people, many people, with the skills to help build a new system. But we must be willing to look, to invite them, to learn from them, to understand that ours is an area of specialty that makes others uncomfortable when they are around us. They are afraid of our flying babies and of the noise and the mess when they crash into windows and walls, when they break a wing, when a feather falls and blood drips in rose-colored rain. We must have the courage to fall in love enough to take the risk to engage the ground below. It is all about time, about being haunted by the disillusionment of the past, and motivated by the fallen angels who have found beauty in the daily rituals of mortality.