Wake Up Maggie I Think I've Got Something to Say To You ...

"Perhaps more than any other adviser, Ms. Spellings helped shape the Bush education philosophy: a strict emphasis on standards and accountability, intended to close the “achievement gap” between black and white, rich and poor. While other Republicans talked of dismantling the federal Department of Education, Mr. Bush cast education as a civil rights issue, challenging “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

- taken from a recent article written by Sheryl Gay Stolberg in the New York Times


Even though Margaret Spellings, NCLB czarina, is far from admitting it, No Child Left Behind legislation is a disaster in Ohio. All it did was create an illusion that academic standards and graduation goals were being met by hiding the failures in charter schools, grossly manipulated statistics, and "certificates of completion."

In Ohio, we learned that kids who cannot pass proficiency were warehoused in for-profit charter or contracted school environments operating as for profit.  There at the warehouse, the kids are not required to take the proficiency tests so they are entirely missing from the statistics suggesting Ohio students are doing better. Instead they learned how to organize their time, learn about manners, and learn how to play basketball. To make the "drop out" rate go down,  kids who are not eligible to receive a diploma are given a "certificates of completion" which qualifies them for one thing -- to serve in the armed forces.

In many school districts right now,  contracts that guarantee testing success are offered to schools that are designed to help students "prepare" for the tests. In every school in Ohio, teachers take a detour from their regular classroom responsibilities so kids can log onto computer programs for a few weeks that give similar "test questions" so the kids will know the answers beforehand.

There are still no real statistics that support No Child Left Behind is actually narrowing the disparity between "black and white" and the "rich and poor." The only thing it has done is create an illusion of statistics that were easily manipulated to hide the disparity.  We can't put an education template over a large population of children with varying learning styles and preferences.

If you look at the number of kids who are homeschooled or enrolled in public or private school vs. the number of kids who are school age, there's a whole bunch of kids missing in Ohio! Kind of ironic, isn't it?

Special Education News Updates

Click here to keep updated about NCLB, IDEA, FAPE, and other legislatives that prevent or promote special education opportunities for your child.

Because You Made It So ...

"If you wish to believe [that memory and imagination are components of history], do so with the knowledge that nothing is absolutely true nor is it untrue until someone has made it so." Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

In Memory of Harriet McBryde Johnson

"... because you made it so..."




One February a few years back, Harriet McBryde Johnson wrote an article, "Unspeakable Conversations," about our need to educate each other how disability labels devalue "existence" for our children who are tagged with one. She defended our child's right to be who they are, with or without a disability.

As I was re-reading through her article today, I remember that it was also the same February I was writing about my own frustration with being unable to articulate my concern for my daughter's future. The "advocate" label was wearing thin on me. I was losing hope. I asked, what kind of world was I leaving her to?

I feared I was leaving her to a world that still sees her as an object of pity if they see anything at all. A world that continues to see her "being" as only an afterthought. A world where she must wait for people who don't even acknowledge her existence until it's time to fill out the paperwork or change her diaper or feed her.

I had hoped to send a universal message of appreciation and thanks that February to anyone out there who had ever helped another person connect to their own humanity. To anyone who ever gave damn about our children's "being."

I'm glad that Harriet got the message.


Ms. McBryde Johnson's article "Unspeakable Conversations" is linked by clicking HERE.

Voluntary Self-Commitment

I caught this editorial this morning and was saddened to hear that Harriet McBryde Johnson passed away June 4, 2008. She was a woman who wrote extensively about the parallel worlds created by the abled for those who are labeled disabled.

Harriet's words provided inspiration for me when I was feeling gloomy about the future prospects for my daughter. I would re-read her articles and book for strength and inspiration to refocus on whatever the issue was at hand.

Most of the time, it was her words I would cling to when I felt I was losing my grip on reality over the changes in legislation and how it would impact my daughter's future. Or how it wouldn't affect her at all.

If you click on the title above, you'll be linked to the "Disability Gulag" article she wrote advocating for home health care instead of institutionalizing people through "voluntary self-commitment" which is the catch 22 of all time.

Here is the editorial as it was printed in the New York Times today:


A Life of Quality


By LAWRENCE DOWNES
Published: June 12, 2008

In “Parting the Waters,” his history of the early civil-rights movement, Taylor Branch recounts how a teacher of Gandhian resistance, James Lawson, would tell his students not to curl passively into fetal balls when segregationists came to beat them up. It only made them more brutal.

“This was a way to get livers kicked in and backs broken, he said, recommending that resisters try to maintain eye contact with those beating them.”

I thought of that when I learned of the death of Harriet McBryde Johnson, who looked at the world with an unflinching, sometimes withering, gaze. What many saw when they looked at her was a scrawny woman with a twisted spine who got around with a power wheelchair and lots of help. What she saw was a world that refused to make room for the severely disabled, one that looked at people like her — if it looked at them at all — with horror, hostility, condescension and pity, a sentiment she hated.

Ms. Johnson, a lawyer who was 50, died on June 4. She was an eloquent defender of the rights of the disabled. She came to wide attention through The New York Times Magazine, in essays she wrote about her confrontations with the philosopher Peter Singer over his defense of killing disabled infants at birth.

Ms. Johnson, an atheist, was unmoved by religious appeals to life’s sanctity. Instead, her rebuttal boiled down to a simple: How dare you? How dare you decide that certain people with limitations are nonpersons with no right to exist? How dare you presume to define “quality of life,” for me or anyone else, to set the value of a disabled life lower than yours, or to conclude that such a life lacks the potential for happiness and dignity because you cannot imagine how it could?

The disabled certainly suffer. But everyone does, Ms. Johnson argued, and if the disabled face extra hassles and indignities in life, well, remedies for those things are all possible, and should be provided. Instead, the world is run by and for the nondisabled, and those who don’t measure up are infantilized, ignored and stockpiled in institutions that Ms. Johnson called “the disability gulag.” She feared being sent to it in her later years.

Ms. Johnson was enraged by injustice, but not susceptible to hatred or despair. To her, Mr. Singer was a monster, but she realized that the unenlightened also included many of her own friends, colleagues and relatives. She decided that “it’s not in my heart to deny every single one of them, categorically, my affection and my love.”