29 Marbles

Quite a while back I posed the (mostly) rhetorical question, “Why doesn’t every child have an IEP?”

I was brought back to this train of thought recently by a passage in Roy Richard Grinker’s Unstrange Minds (emphasis is mine):

To be sure, debate is brewing about whether some of the these higher-functioning children should be classified as autistic or even disabled. Some disability experts contend that the problems encountered in educating children with Asperger’s Disorder lie less with the individual child than with the educational system. The U.S. educational system, they suggest, has disseminated Asperger’s Disorder as a category because it is useful to its attempt to make the student body as homogeneous as possible. The paradox they identify is that a child who doesn’t fit in has to be seen as somehow impaired in order to justify an effort to normalize him.

This trend toward ‘homogenized education,’ an attempt to make sure that everyone* learns the same thing in the same way, reminds me of many – mostly misguided – attempts to do something similar in business. If you’ve ever heard the term Business Process Engineering, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

The fallacy in this approach, of course, is that education and learning are not processes that lend themselves to efficiency. Not perfect efficiency, anyway. That’s not to say that their aren’t things that can be done to improve the process.

But identifying a process and then trying to make everyone adhere to, and excel in, that process just won’t work in education (just like it doesn’t work in business).

* An exception to this are the “gifted” children, which I wrote about here.

In our local paper a couple of weeks ago was the article Parents, students fear for future of gifted programs. In a nutshell, gifted students and their parents are asking for exactly what many parents of autistic kids are trying to avoid- segregation from the regular classroom:

The resolution notes that gifted students have educational and developmental needs that differ from school populations as a whole, and the board believes gifted students “require programs or services beyond the level ordinarily provided through the regular school program.”

“I moved to Rockwood due to the gifted programs, which I hope we can keep at their current level,” parent Karen Smith said. “The way gifted children learn is so different that they need stimulation and different types of (teaching).”

Parent Julie Loos said the gifted program “prepares my children for real-world solutions.”

Replace “gifted” with “autistic” and I think the statements are just as valid. Why, then, do so many parents of autistic kids want to simply put their kids in the mix with the ‘normal,’ instead of demanding the “stimulation and different types of teaching” that their learning style and abilities demand?

At the same time, programs for the gifted are facing many of the same challenges as ‘regular’ special education:

[They] favor guidelines including a means to monitor qualifications of teachers hired by districts to teach in gifted programs; continuation of certification requirements for gifted teachers; maintaining state guidelines for identifying gifted students; a means to monitor and report the number of students identified by districts as gifted; requiring districts to annually report to the state concerning whether they provide gifted programming and its nature; providing information on gifted programs on districts’ annual report cards; and enhancing the Missouri School Improvement Program standard for gifted programs, so they become more important to the overall accreditation process.

Let the battle for the buck$ begin.

Update (21 Feb 08): Marla has posted a good discussion of this topic from a more personal perspective.
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tagged as: Autism, Gifted, Education, Parenting, Missouri, Special Education