Reality Check Woman - Origin Story, Part 2

Quick trip through elementary school in special ed.

You probably haven’t noticed, but I have been easing you into the dark humor of Cripsville. Some things I will say are okay because this is my tribe. Some of it may offend some people—if you are offended, ask yourself, why am I offended? Am I being ableist by being protective or patronizing?

Most Important Aspects of Special Ed for Reality Check Woman/Girl

Segregation

Our school was completely segregated from any other schools. This segregation, I believe, was bad for us, and bad for the non-disabled kids that never had any students with disabilities (that were apparent) in their classes.

I actually went out of my way to make that argument to poor, innocent grad students who were brought to our school to “observe.” It always felt like visiting day at the zoo. I would corner a visiting student on the playground at recess and give them my “integration” speech. I was 11 or 12 at the time.

Fast forward 25 years… During my second summer of law school, my internship was at DREDF—Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund. I got to do research for a case that was applying the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (Public Law 94-142), also known as the EHA, that passed in 1975. In 1990, when this law was reauthorized, it was renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, in a 1990 reauthorization.

As a law clerk, my job was to research the legislative notes from Congress when they were working on passage of the EHA. It was very gratifying to read the comments they made about acknowledging that segregating students with disabilities from non-disabled students contributed to their findings that historically to the present, Americans with disabilities are lagging far behind their non-disabled peers in every aspect of our society, from employment on up.

To paraphase the main mandates of the EHA/IDEA is that:

• students with disabilities should have access to

  • a free and appropriate public education

  • in the least restrictive environment possible (i.e., not segregated unless the services that the student needs cannot be met in the local school district

• all the detailed regulations flow from these ideas, including the obligation of the local school districts to provide processes and procedures to identify students who may have disabilities, and

  • to provide disabled students with appropriate auxiliary services and technologies at no cost to the student’s family (included in the idea of free and appropriate public education)

When Thurgood Marshall was arguing Brown vs. The Board of Education, he was asked by Justice Felix Frankfurter during the argument what he meant by “equal,” Mr. Marshall replied, “Equal means getting the same thing, at the same time, and in the same place.” Brown was about racial segregation, but this definition made a considerable impression on me as applied to segregation based on disability.

No Grades

In Origin Story, Part 1, I mentioned that my special education school didn’t have grades. As far as I can tell, we were divided into classes based partly on academic ability and partly on age or maturity. The decision was made early on to move me to the next advanced class from where I started, partly because I could read and write.

In this new class, a new girl came in, a few weeks after I did. Clare (not her real name) had cerebral palsy and profound hearing loss. Clare read lips; I don’t remember if she knew sign language.

One day, an aide came to get Clare to take her to “Clinic”. An orthopedic doctor came to visit the school several times a year, and did free evaluations to kids who reamedhad been referred to clinic by a physical therapist.

Clare had no idea about why they were trying to get her to leave the class, and was scared to go. I figured out how to mock-up a reflex hammer with a pencil and a big eraser. I pretended to use it on her knee.

As soon as she understood what was happening, Clare went with the aide, no problem. Perhaps this was my first provision of an accommodation. I think I was eight at the time.

Smart Yes, Precocious Maybe

I feel like I need to say that I really was figuring out a lot of stuff at a very early age. I think it was a combination of being smart (”gifted” smart), being with adults a lot of the time, and being bored at school a great deal of the time. I had a lot of time to think.

I remember asking a teacher why it was not okay to separate kids because of the color of their skin, but it was okay to send me to a separate school because of my skin. She was a little stunned at the question—I was nine or ten the time. (Remember, MLK and the Civil Rights movement was tv all the time when I was that age.)

Only in Retrospect

For decades, my drumbeat was that special ed was BAD, at least for me. The pre-secondary education I received in special ed was terrible from an academic standpoint. If, by the luck of the draw, I had been average—instead of really smart—I would have been playing catch-up, academically, for the rest of my life.

About twenty-five years ago, I realized that in comparison to the disabled college students I was encountering, I had had the benefit of disabled peers to learn how to be disabled in an ableist world. The kids who had always been “mainstreamed” didn't always have a realistic sense of the world out of the curated bubble that some of them were in.

On the one hand, many of these kids had a much greater sense ambition and possibility than I had at their age, because at their age (18-20) I had already encountered naked prejudice and ableism in employment arena (post secondary job searches). In higher ed, unlike high school, the school can determine and set up your accommodations, but faculty in college are not uniformly accepting of academic accommodations, and are also not always polite about it.