Bayard Rustin on the importance of class size

Bayard Rustin (1912 –1987) was an American civil rights activist, important largely behind the scenes in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and earlier. He is credited as the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. (from Wikipedia)

Rustin also gave a renowned speech in 1964 in Santa Barbara, entitled "Negro revolution in 1965." The whole speech is worth listening to, but one of the topics he spoke about was class size in NYC public schools. He thus is one of many brilliant individuals who realized the importance of this issue, along with Maimonides, John Dewey, and Kurt Vonnegut. Here is an excerpt:

The school system of this country is a bad school system for many reasons, but one of the reasons in our large cities, take Harlem for an example, teachers teach three sessions within the regular period. They become cops, they become babysitters, they become nursemaids.

And yet we look at the unemployed Negroes and we say they are without skills. Well, I am here to say that some of the most skillful people in the world are unemployed Negroes. Because they have reared their own children, they have reared two or three generations of white children. And they are skilled with love and affection for children.

Let us, therefore, elevate them to assistant teachers, the state gives them $4,000 a year, they go into the school, and they take from the teacher all of this police work and babysitting work. And the teacher is, then, if we can get many more schools built, if we can get smaller classrooms, I mean a smaller number of children in classrooms, these people can play a very vital role.

Removing "Mental Retardation" from Federal statutes

The U.S. House of Representatives has approved a bill (unanimously!) to strike the words "mental retardation" and "mentally retarded" from many Federal statutes, replacing those terms with the words "intellectual disability" and "individual with an intellectual disability." Read the full text of the bill here.

Within the context of special education laws, the bill will mean that wherever "mental retardation" is referred to (for example, when discussing eligibility categories), that term will be stricken and replaced with "intellectual disability." The same applies to section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.

The law is called "Rosa's law" and is named for a child with Down Syndrome from Maryland. You can read about Rosa's story, including the inspirational testimony of her brother Nick in a hearing before representatives of the Maryland General Assembly, in this press release from Senator Barbara Mikulski's office, or in ABC News' story about the law and the family that inspired it.

This is only one step, albeit an important one, among many that will be needed to stop the R word. Changing the designation in laws may not stop the use of the R word as a derogatory slang or insult, but it is certainly a step in the right direction in terms of societal awareness.

Stop the R word

Here's a little disclaimer / warning about this post before you proceed with reading it. First off, it is about a topic of controversy, and portrays some events that may be upsetting. Secondly, this post is from a much more personal standpoint than the posts on this cite normally are, and it is based primarily on my opinion about this topic and the reasons for that opinion.

I want to share a story that I recently encountered, told to me by someone very close to me who witnessed this happen. It is a story many people will familiarize with.

This person lives in a small town, where he works in a retail store. He happens to have an adult brother with Autism who also has co-existing cognitive delay. He was at work one afternoon when a well-known local came walking in exclaiming:

"You better lock up the store, there's a bunch of retards coming this way!"

He continued to talk in this manner, very loudly, warning the staff to close up shop to prevent these "retards" from coming in. Minutes later, the group of individuals he was referring to came into the store. My friend, the retail sales associate, saw that it was a group of students from the local high school out for a shopping trip as part of their community-based instruction. Many of those students were teenagers he knew from his work with a youth group at a local church.

What was amazing to me was that this one single retail employee in that establishment was the sole person who had seemed to be upset by the comment. Maybe it is because he grew up with a brother with a developmental disability, and so has greater sensitivity, but I would have hoped that a larger slice of society would react negatively to someone actually stating that a store's doors should be closed to a group of citizens because they happen to have disabilities.

Replace the R-word with the N-word in this story, and think it over again. Replace it with "fags" or "queers." Consider the point from that perspective - Anytime you label a group of people in a derogatory manner based on their race, disability, sexual orientation, etc, and actually proclaim that this group of people should be barred from entrance to a public business establishment, that is truly offensive no matter what the identifying "characteristic" (for lack of a better term) of the group is.

The "R-word" has become a term of insult in our society. Through use, derogatory words become part of the vernacular of our everyday language. Our "native language" within our society is developed through use. The vernacular is changing continuously as words are added through their common use. Think of how many times you may have heard the phrase "that's so retarded" or "you're such a retard" in context of something that has nothing to do with actually having an intellectual disability. Such phrases are used to insult someone, by drawing an disparaging comparison to a person who is considered "less than" because of an intellectual disability. This implies that to be "retarded" or "a retard" is something unpleasant, bad, appalling; something to be shunned. Through this use, the "R-word" becomes an insult. It becomes, or has become, a "bad word."

Words really do have power. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" may have been drilled into us as kids, as a mantra to ward off the affects of verbal bullies, but it never seemed to me to have much truth. Words do have power, and words have the ability to hurt. Name calling, derogatory comments, racial remarks, insults, etc can all humiliate a person or cause emotional trauma.

Not only does an insult hurt the person you are insulting, but when the words used are derogatory to a larger group of people, based on their race, disability, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, etc, words perpetuate hate. We use the "R-word" to mean something bad, even despicable, and then when we refer to the actual group of people that the word "retarded" was intended to include, it is now associated with hate, with shunning those people from society.

Here's what I think is the best way to explain this:

Words/speech are the first rung of the "ladder of prejudice," leading to a cycle of hate that perpetuates further and further discrimination. In the first phase, or "rung," people in society engage in derogatory speech against a group of people based on their race, disability, religion, etc. As discussed above, through use this hate speech becomes a part of the accepted vernacular of that society. The next step, and natural progression if you really think about the link here, is avoidance. The words we've used have become derogatory; they carry the connotations of something bad or even dirty. So we as a society avoid the people that these words describe. The third rung is more overt discriminatory acts. At this phase, we have as a society developed the accepted behavior of avoiding certain people, so it is natural that society would accept actual segregation. This is the "not in my backyard" phase. Let's just put "those people" somewhere else; institutions, segregated neighborhoods (concentration camps?). The fourth rung is violence, and here we hope it is no longer behavior that is acceptable to the community at large, but yes, society as a whole has a part in this phase. Violence and physical attack may be engaged in by a small minority of people, but it happens because of the "no one cares anyway" attitude. If society has labeled, insulted, shunned, and segregated certain people, who would believe those people to be protected? The final rung, the extreme, is "extermination." And before you jump to exclaiming that would never happen here, in the U.S., consider the broader meaning and applicability. We aren't just talking about genocide (although that certainly is caused by prejudice and discrimination). Consider the practice of sterilization. Historically, here in the U.S., involuntary sterilization of women with intellectual and developmental disabilities was actually considered acceptable at one time, partly in order to prevent such persons from reproducing more disabled persons.

These theories are commonly discussed in Sociology articles, textbooks and classrooms. You can read another explanation of the "Ladder of Prejudice" or the "Cycle of Hate" on the Stop the R-Word Campaign website, or in this excerpt of a Sociology textbook.

So when I heard about the situation I started this post with, the incident my friend witnessed and experienced, I thought back to these concepts from my college Sociology classes and from law school discussions about equal protection. I thought about what we learn from elementary school onward about how segregation, discrimination, etc is not acceptable. We're "taught" that, but we have so far to go before it is reality. This "incident" is a perfect example of the cycle of hate, in my opinion. Here was a person using a derogatory word to try to insult and make fun of persons with disabilities, in order to marginalize them and shun them from society. He even went so far as to assert that the doors of a public establishment should be shut to them. Sounds like all of the first three "rungs" to me - speech, avoidance, segregation. Degrade people, shun them, separate them from society.

At the end of this, I am writing this because I believe that this isn't just about being overly politically correct, or about anyone being overly sensitive. It is about real prejudice and real hate speech that goes on every day in our society. Maybe for people who don't see, as I do, first hand examples of how non-inclusive our world still can be for people with disabilities, it doesn't seem like a big deal. But I think everyday of a little boy I once knew whose father fought everyday for one simple goal that was never realized, which was for the child to be able to go to his neighborhood school. And I know that discrimination, even segregation, still happens.

So I pledge that I will not use the words "retard" or "retarded" to mean "stupid." I will be careful with my words, and I will try to remember to pay attention when other people use these words, and to ask them to stop.

(Note: the original "R-Word Pledge" can be found here. I hope you will take it too.)

Senator Kennedy's Inspiration and Call to Action for Advocates

Last year, I was volunteering for the Obama Presidential Campaign as a Precinct Captain in my neighborhood, and also with the national call team. I was pretty fired up about the election as a whole, and watched and read the news every day avidly. Among all of the great moments, two moments at the top of my list of "important moments" both involved Ted Kennedy. The first was the day of the announcement during the primaries that Kennedy was endorsing Obama. The second was the speech given by Kennedy at the convention.

I guess, for me, those two moments were inspiring because I have always been such an admirer of Senator Kennedy, especially (as a student of rhetoric) in terms of his skill as an orator. I remember hearing that he was endorsing Obama and feeling so proud that I was involved in something he too believed in. I remember listening to the speech and comparing it to all of those I had read and heard from the earlier days in his career, and thinking about how admirable it is to see a person who is so consistent with his passion, devotion and message throughout his life.

I studied Speech Communications in my undergraduate studies at the University of Georgia. We studied various forms of rhetoric, reading speeches given in the context of social movements, from the Woman's Suffrage Movement to the Civil Rights Movement and beyond, orations given during political campaigns, and in moments of national crisis or disaster. Ted Kennedy was one of the great orators of our time. Now we can debate as to what was the greatest speech of his life, which speech was most moving, inspiring, or most important. There are many to choose from; the most notable perhaps being "The Dream Never Dies" speech from the 1980 DNC, in which Kennedy talked about all of the issues he had championed throughout his career, and ended with the rousing words "the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die." Then of course, there is the emotional and inspirational speech given at Bobby Kennedy's funeral, when he spoke of the hopes of his brother for a better world, saying the moving words "Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world."

If you study the speeches and interviews of Ted Kennedy, it is statements like these that sum him up so well. These statements speak to the hope that he envisioned for America, the dreams and causes he believed in and fought for, and the endurance of those hopes.

For me, one of the speeches I love is not from a great moment like a funeral or a convention. It was an interview in the early 1970's in which Kennedy talked about why he believed Health Care Reform was necessary. He spoke frankly about his families struggles with medical issues, and talked about the fact that they were fortunate to have access to quality health care when they needed it. He talked about Health Care as being a right, not a privilege, and about his vision for an America in which any family would have access to the medical care they needed.

This is why I admired Ted Kennedy as a Senator, a leader. He saw issues that affect us at our most fundamental levels and looked for ways to make the world a better place. He championed the causes of the disadvantaged, and inspired others to do so likewise.

As a disability advocate, I owe much to this inspiration, and his work. Senator Kennedy introduced the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, prohibiting discrimination against persons with disabilities in the workplace, and requiring reasonable accommodations and accessibility which literally opened the doors to people with disabilities in places like theaters, shops, museums, hotels and restaurants. He was instrumental in the Family Opportunity Act, opening up access to Medicaid for families of disabled children, even if they were not in the "low income" status; the Help America Vote Act, requiring polling places to provide a machine that ensured access and privacy for voters with disabilities; and the Mental Health Parity Bill, which required mental health and substance abuse coverage to be on par with other coverage. Other important disability legislation included the Fair Housing Act Amendments, the Air Carriers Access Act, the Civil Rights Commission Amendments, the Comprehensive Services and Developmental Disabilities Amendments, the Crime Victims and Disabilities Awareness Act, the Employment Opportunities for Disabled Americans Act and countless others.

And of course, as an advocate in the special education field, I must be eternally grateful for Senator Kennedy's work on the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and No Child Left Behind. He passionately believed, in his own words, that "all children deserve a quality education." He was an original co-sponsor of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975, which later became the IDEA, recognizing the fundamental importance of ensuring that students with disabilities were given the right to a free appropriate public education. He was also an original co-sponsor of the Handicapped Children's Protection Act, allowing for prevailing parents to recover attorneys fees, which was an important early step in ensuring a level playing field. Senator Kennedy remained committed to the cause of special education, sponsoring and negotiating the re-authorizations of the IDEA throughout the years, and he continued even through the last year to push for legislation that would promote a fair and level playing field and hearing process to protect the rights of children with disabilities.

A lifetime of work on these important issues does not come to a halt now. Now the burden is on us, the advocates and attorneys, the parents and loved ones of persons affected by disabilities, the teachers and educators, the law makers, and the community as a whole. Perhaps none of us can live up to what he has accomplished on behalf of persons with disabilities. But we must now strive to ensure that the cause goes on, and that the dream doesn't die.

Fast Fact Friday: Nonacademic Services and Extracurricular Activities

What are Nonacademic Services and Extracurricular Activities?
IDEA specifies that these services / activities may include "counseling services, athletics, transportation, health services, recreational activities, special interest groups or clubs sponsored by the public agency, referrals to agencies that provide assistance to individuals with disabilities and employment of students, including both employment by the public agency and assistance in making outside employment available." 34 C.F.R. 300.107(b).

Extracurricular activities are basically those activities that school age kids participate in beyond the classroom setting, like sports, clubs, etc.

Mandate for Equal Opportunity:
IDEA 2004 states that "each public agency must take steps, including the provision of supplementary aids and services determined appropriate and necessary by the child's IEP Team, to provide nonacademic and extracurricular services and activities in the manner necessary to afford children with disabilities an equal opportunity for participation in those services and activities." 34 C.F.R. 300.107(a).

Under Section 504, Districts are required to provide nonacademic services and athletics in the manner necessary so as to afford students with disabilities an equal opportunity for participation in such services and activities. 34 C.F.R. 104.37(a)(1). Failure to ensure equal opportunity could give rise to a claim of discrimination under this Act.

What should the IEP team do?
IDEA 2004 broadened the definition of supplementary supports and services by specifying that such aids, supports and services are provided not only in the regular classroom setting and other education-related settings, but also within extracurricular and non-academic settings. 34 C.F.R. 300.42. This means that the IEP team must consider what supports may be necessary to ensure that the child has the ability to participate in the same extracurricular activities as are available to his/her non-disabled peers. For example, the student may need 1:1 assistance and support to attend club meetings or other activities; or require accommodations / modifications within the program.

Civil Rights in Education

Today is the 45th Anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act. Title VI prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin in programs receiving federal financial assistance, including public schools. Ten years prior, in 1954, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education, finding that "racially segregated schools are inherently unequal."

Education has been called the civil rights issue of our generation. Although we have come a long way since Brown, the Civil Rights Act, the subsequent Education of the Handicapped Act, and other legislation, there are still disparities in education that affect minorities, children living in poverty or homelessness, and children with disabilities.

Disability advocates should always be aware of the civil rights movement as the foundation for what we now do. Following Brown vs. Board of Education, courts began to recognize that other types of segregation and seclusion also existed, and the issue of access to education became an issue for persons with disabilities. Parents began raising equal education opportunity as a right that existed for their children, who had been prevented from even attending schools because of their disabilities. In 1972, a consent order was entered in a case involving the Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children, requiring the public school system to ensure a free public program of education and training to children with "exceptional" needs. In the same year, Mills v. Board of Education was decided in the District Court for the District of Columbia, and found that exclusion from publicly supported instruction was unconstitutional. The Mills case established a substantive entitlement to a free and suitable publicly supported education. These two cases were based upon the principle that if a public education agency undertook to educate all of the children in its area, it could not then exclude children with exceptional needs simply because they require greater resources to educate. Within these foundational cases was also established the idea of a "preference" for placement within a regular, public school placement.

Today, inclusion in a regular public school placement is still an issue of contention for many students with disabilities. The right to placement in the "least restrictive environment" is a contentious issue in many cases. Separate public schools exist where students with disabilities are placed separately from their non-disabled peers, which some argue is tantamount to segregation. On the other hand, because publicly supported education must be appropriate for the unique needs of the individual students, sometimes a separate specialized setting is required.
In the extreme, some students are still denied access to school because of the severity of their disabilities. In my own career, I have known a child whose parents' only wish was for him to be able to attend his neighborhood school, and he was never allowed to do so.

The right to equal educational opportunity and access has come a long way since 1954 for the groups of persons who have historically been denied that access. Unfortunately, on a daily basis I am reminded how far we still have to go as a society to reach the point where exclusion, discrimination, and the denial of meaningful educational benefit, be it on the basis of race, disability, or poverty, no longer exists in our schools. Only when we eliminate discrimination in schools and ensure truly equal access to a meaningful education will society as a whole move towards greater inclusion of all persons.

Foster Care and Kids with Disabilities: My Journey to Special Education Law

May is National Foster Care Month, which is intended to provide an opportunity to focus attention on the year-round needs of children and youth in foster care in America. Foster Care Month focuses not only on promoting awareness and community education about issues related to foster care, but also acknowledges the work and commitment of the people involved in the lives of foster care youth - foster parents, social workers, and organizations.

As I have been reading information on the website for this campaign (www.fostercaremonth.org), I am struck by the relationship between issues facing foster care youth and those facing kids with disabilities, and I'm reminded of how I got involved in special education law in the first place.

I always knew I wanted to go to law school, and that I wanted to focus my career on being an advocate for people who were disadvantaged, vulnerable, and needed a voice. During both of the summers while I was in law school, I went back to my home state of Georgia and worked in the Office of the Child Advocate as a legal intern. The OCA is a state government agency that acts as an "oversight" to the Department of Family and Children's Services offices throughout the state of Georgia. As an intern, I was involved in investigations of cases in which an individual alleged that the system had failed to follow procedures for child protective services cases or foster care cases. In this capacity, I worked on many cases in which the child involved was an older foster care youth, and I started to notice a pattern: many of these kids had disabilities, including learning disabilities, behavioral disorders, developmental disabilities, etc. Many more were probably experiencing disabilities, but were labelled as "behavior problems" or "defiant" instead. I knew nothing about IEPs or what the school districts were legally obligated to provide, and it wasn't my job to look into that. But I started to realize that these kids were being failed by multiple systems; sometimes their family system, the child welfare agency, unfortunately sometimes their foster care placements, and even the school system. They "disrupted" their placements (both school and home) again and again because their needs were not being met.

I'll never forget one situation in particular. The youth in this case was a teenager who had a diagnosis of Bi-Polar disorder. She had been in and out of various foster homes, and returned many times to her parents' home only to then be removed a few months later. The department had been investigating allegations of abuse and neglect, and meanwhile she was in and out of attending school, switching schools, often truant, and failing. The school was aware of her disability (there was a psychoeducational evaluation in her file from her school district). When I spoke with someone who was involved in her foster care case, that individual opined that there was not "abuse" happening in the house because it was just a "volitile relationship." Then later, when I was trying to get information from her school, and asked what was being done to support her, I was given the same opinion - this is just a "volitile student," what can we do. This was a huge shock and wake up call to me. I wanted to scream - but she has a DISABILITY, she's Bi-Polar and not being treated by a doctor for that, or recieving therapy, she has no services or supports at school, of course she is truant and failing and disrupting her foster placements.

It was then I realized the vulnerability of students with disabilities and the need to advocate for services within the school system. My third year in law school, I discovered that Pepperdine was offering a special education law clinic, and I signed up right away. The clinic and the special education law class provided me with the knowledge and understanding about the rights of students with disabilities that I had not previously been exposed to. I learned that students were entilted to Individualized Education Plans, and that students, like many of those I had previously dealt with who had behavior difficulties, had legal protections. I went to IEP meetings with families, and started learning about various disabilities, about the assessment process, and about interventions and services that were available.

Eight years after I worked on those foster care cases, I'm now representing students with disabilities and assisting parents in obtaining appropriate services and supports from their school districts. Although my job does not currently entail representation of foster care youth, I never forget what I experienced and learned those two summers. I found special education law because I was looking for a way to help affect change in one of the systems that is supposed to be supporting these students. Kids with disabilities are some of the most vulnerable people in our society, and to have that overlap with being in the foster care system or the child welfare system increases that vulnerability thousands-fold. This Foster Care Month, I hope that advocates and attorneys for children all over the country - whether they directly represent kids in foster care or not - promote awareness about all of these issues so that as a whole, our community can learn and affect change.

A Conversation with Advocates, Attorneys, and a school district board member

This morning, Elizabeth and I attended a breakfast and tour at Aviva High School, a non-public school here in the LA area. As part of the morning's activities, Aviva had invited Marlene Cantor, LAUSD board member, to be a guest speaker. The audience included advocates and attorneys who represent special needs kids. I can't speak for everyone, but I found Marlene's comments to be very insightful. The conversation focused on issues related to the relationship between parents and school districts. While this is a big, important conversation beyond the scope of an hour-long talk, I appreicated hearing Marlene's thoughts on these issues, which were exactly on point to what we all need to be doing to take steps in the right direction towards collaboration. So, I wanted to briefly summarize in our blog:

1) Bring the focus of the conversation back to the child! Too often we focus on the actions of the other side, how rights have been violated, or (on the part of the district) what has to be done to meet technical compliance. This isn't what it is about. The conversations related to special education programs have to be focused on the kid, not on adult feelings and issues. What Marlene said about this that I found particularly insightful was that we all have to remember to take responsibility for how we engage in these conversations, and we as adults need to focus not on our own feelings or opinions, but on the needs of the child and that child's best interest.

2) Come to the table with compassion and understanding! Parents of kids with disabilities obviously already have a lot to deal with emotionally. As Marlene put it, the last thing they need is to come to the school looking for help and get stuck in some "compliance driven process" rather than being able to focus on helping their child. Teachers and administrators need to remember this, and they need to approach conversations with parents with true compassion for what those parents are experiencing.

3) Relationships are the key! Marlene talked to us about the importance of starting out by building a relationship. This applies to parents, teachers, administrators, advocates and attorneys, to people on both sides of the issue. We all need to work on building relationships when possible, so that we can be collaborative when the situation calls for it, and effective in our advocacy when we need to be more zealous.

Overall, I enjoyed hearing a presentation from a very balanced viewpoint on the issue of special education. I think we can all recognize, no matter what "side" of this we are on, that the community as a whole, including advocates, attorneys and folks on the school district side, could be doing a lot better in terms of collaborating to meet the needs of these students.

These discussions were certainly thought-provoking to all of us there. You can look forward to future blog topics related to the issues of relationships between parents and school districts, as we believe there is a lot to discuss on that subject!