On Friday, February 7, 2025, I participated in an Instagram Live event with Ege Cakaloz of Talkido to discuss how I’m using their screen-free technology to teach emotional vocabulary and social/emotional concepts to a young man with a seizure disorder, intellectual disability, autism, and vision loss. Learn how I am using Talkido’s technology to increase my client’s functional communication skills and independence by watching the recorded event, here.
Individualized Interventions Using Talkido
I have a student who I’ve been working for and/or with since 2010 who has highly unique learning needs. He has a seizure disorder, intellectual disabilities, autism, speech-language impairments, and vision loss that makes him functionally blind.
Were it not for his vision loss, I’d be using visual schedules and visual icon-based alternative methods of communication, but I can’t use those tools with him. This requires me to rely on his remaining sensory modalities to achieve similar outcomes as would be achieved if he was sighted with visual schedules and icons.
Tools are only as useful to us as our creativity allows them to be, but not everyone knows how to come up with highly individualized programs of intervention. It’s a skill that has to be explicitly taught, and not everyone’s strengths lend themselves to it. I feel very fortunate that individualized program development falls within my personal wheelhouse of skills, and appreciate all the other people with whom I collaborate, who each have their own unique strengths different from mine.
I’m excited to now have the opportunity to partner with the creative and talented folks at Talkido, whose products I am using with my uniquely challenged student as an integral part of his individualized program of intervention. The Talkido products are powerful tools when used in an individualized manner.
Let’s start with the Talkido Mio, which is a screen-free device with a microphone, speaker, Bluetooth, and digital sensors. In addition the device, there is the Talkido smartphone app for iPhone or Android that also includes recording abilities and syncs with the Talkido Mio device. Additionally, there are Talkido sticker tags and cards, each with its own unique smart chip that syncs to both the Talkido app and the Talkido Mio device.
The Talkido sticker tags and cards are used with the app and device to create unique audio labels. When the Talkido Mio device comes close to a Talkido sticker tag or card, whatever pre-recorded audio label is associated with that tag or card will automatically play from the Talkido Mio’s speaker.
In my student’s particular case, I’m currently working with him to build his emotional vocabulary so that he can use language to express his feelings and advocate for himself rather than engage in behavioral outbursts. The biggest safety risk he’s facing right now is getting upset about something he can’t explain while being transported in his day program’s van, which puts everyone in the van and nearby vehicles at risk of an accident while he is in transit. This transportation-related behavioral concern is just a magnified consequence of him not being able to express himself in general, which goes to his overall quality of life.
So, here is what I’ve done for this particular student: I purchased a cookie jar shaped like a snowman because my student loves anything to do with Christmas and the winter holidays. We call it the “Snowman Jar of Feelings.” Inside it are four tactile icons, each representing an emotional vocabulary term. There is a knitted pouch full of cotton balls for “calm,” a knitted pouch full of marbles for “worried,” a curly gift ribbon for “excited,” and a hard, abrasive scrubbing sponge for “irritated.”
The cookie jar and the items in it are all labeled with Talkido sticker tags. The tag on the cookie jar identifies it as the “Snowman Jar of Feelings,” and each of the tactile icons is tagged with their respective emotional vocabulary terms. My student holds the Talkido Mio close to any of these items and it tells him what it is. See the video, here:
I also created a lapel pin for him that is synced to a self-calming script. He likes to hold the Talkido Mio device to his ear like a phone and listen to the recording, which is automatically triggered by the lapel pin when it is attached to his collar. See the video, which doesn’t include the entire script, but still gives you the general idea, here:
You can tell from these examples the flexibility needed to individualize these tools to fit a specific student’s unique needs. In addition to using the Talkido products to support this student, I also took social scripts that use the emotional vocabulary terms represented by the tactile icons in the Snowman Jar of Feelings and used AI to set them to music. He memorizes words and scripts better if they come from a song.
See my previous post about using the AI-generated music as a teaching tool, here: https://kps4parents.org/using-ai-generated-music-to-teach-social-scripts.
I’m in the process of creating a set of tactile icons using novelty keychains on a ring, each representing a different one of the eight songs I’ve created for him using AI. I will tag each tactile icon with a Talkido sticker that corresponds to the song it represents. Once this set of tagged tactile icons has been created, he will be able to choose a song and listen to it on his Talkido Mio. The songs I created for him are available for purchase and download from our online store for use with others for whom they would be useful. We encourage you to explore creating your own custom social script songs using AI. as well.
Using the Talkido products to label emotional vocabulary terms, individual items, and song choices gives him increased independence. Once he becomes proficient at using the Talkido Mio to access these items, he will not need another person providing hand-over-hand support or other forms of direct assistance to self-advocate and exercise his choices when it comes to expressing his feelings and accessing music with lyrics that promote his self-esteem, functional communication skills, and independent living skills.
This increased independence is expected to increase his social/emotional well-being, as well. During my most recent session with him, he turned to me with a big smile and said, “You get me. What a laugh!” This is coming from an individual who rarely uses spontaneous speech and largely relies on scripted speech to communicate. Not only are these tools helping to build up his scripted speech with more effective scripts, using them is also prompting increased spontaneous speech from him.
For assistive technology specialists, vision impairment specialists, speech-language pathologists, and special education teachers, creating individualized interventions using the Talkido products can become a powerful tool in your toolbox for serving your students or clients. The screen-free nature of it also means that sighted students who tend to perseverate or otherwise get distracted by all the other apps and icons on a screen-based tool will not have the opportunity to do so.
For parents looking to supplement school-based programs of intervention or who are homeschooling their children with language acquisition needs, particularly those with vision impairments, Talkido can open new doors of opportunity to make home, school, and community more accessible.
For educators, specialists, and parents who need technical support with creating individualized interventions, I offer my consulting services through KPS4Parents. Contact us with your questions about our individualized consulting services or otherwise schedule a free initial consultation to discuss your individualized instructional needs at https://calendly.com/makingspecialedactuallywork/general-phone-call-w-anne.
To learn more about Talkido products, visit our online shop!
Post-Election Strategies for Parents of Children with Disabilities Needing Special Education or 504 Accommodations and Supports
As the dust starts to settle, to the degree it can following the 2024 election cycle, parents of children with disabilities who need special education or 504 accommodations and supports are now searching for answers as to how the promised changes to public education in the United States will affect their children. Many of these parents had no idea prior to the election what the fallout for public education and students with disabilities would be, and are only now starting to realize the magnitude of the changes on the horizon.
This is not the first time the disabled community has had to deal with seismic shifts in the legal landscape as it relates to disability rights laws, and I’d like to quiet the worried minds of those parents who are on the verge of freaking out, right now, to tell you that “This too shall pass.” This isn’t my first rodeo and I’ve gotten really good at dealing with the ineptitude, stupidity, apathy, and egocentricity of the types of tiny minds responsible for discriminatory practices against the most vulnerable members of our communities.
I don’t say this to minimize what’s coming. We are about to enter into some very trying times in the special education community following the inauguration of the 47th President of the United States and the installation of his cabinet in January 2025. Number 47 has already promised to shut down the U.S. Department of Education without any regard for how this will affect the millions of children with disabilities who rely on federal civil rights protections being implemented and enforced by the U.S. Department of Education, including those who receive federally funded special education programming.
This is causing widespread panic among families of children with special needs and public-school employees who are employed to service this population of learners. The concern is entirely justified, but the panic is not, at least not for now, and I need everyone to calm down and let me explain why that is.
Regardless of Number 47’s inclinations and intentions, the United States still is not a dictatorship, at least not yet. It certainly won’t instantly become a dictatorship the second Number 47 is sworn in. There are laws in place that control how our federal agencies are organized, the duties they are required by law to perform, and their respective enforcement authorities.
No presidential administration has the authority to simply put an end to our laws. It will take more than Number 47’s four years in office to fight Congress, the courts, and the will of the American people to shut down the U.S. Department of Education and all the laws it is responsible for implementing and enforcing. We have to remember that he tried to do this once before with Betsy DeVos when he was Number 45.
DeVos actually shut down the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) upon assuming office. It took 18 months of litigation to get it reopened, but it was still reopened because it exists to carry out specific legally mandated duties that could not be performed if it no longer existed. It was the existing laws on the books that mandated OCR’s existence, and those laws remain on the books now. Further, the legal precedent for preserving OCR is now also on the books, so Number 47’s new Secretary of Education is already prevented from repeating that approach by existing caselaw, and OCR is operated by a bunch of lawyers who are likely going to rely on that existing caselaw to resist any future efforts to shut down OCR.
We also have to consider who Number 47 wants to name as the secretary of education, which is an absolute weirdo from the world of professional wrestling with no background in education science or law and a questionable relationship with lawful conduct. I’m willing to believe that her absolute ineptitude and lack of understanding of how anything in public education actually works will eat up enough time that by the time she figures much out, we’ll be at the 2026 midterms where we can beef up Congress in such a way as to legislate our ways out of this mess in spite of the pressure coming from the executive branch.
The way I’m looking at the next four years is that the incoming administration is headed by Dr. Evil, Number 2, and Frau Farbissina, but they’re going to be too preoccupied with fem-bots and sharks with lasers to really get that far with things that matter to the rest of us. They will still do a lot of damage and people will still likely die unnecessarily again from their policies, just like when COVID first broke out. I still remember the refrigerator trucks full of dead bodies from when COVID first hit because our morgues were filled to capacity.
But I also remember that, as Number 45, he who is now Number 47 was going to build a huge wall between the United States and Mexico, and make Mexico pay for it, which never happened, and that his last attempt to shut down the U.S. Department of Education failed in such spectacular fashion that caselaw was created against future attempts to do the same thing. Further, because Number 47 is now attempting to surround himself with loyalists willing to act on every sharks-with-lasers idea he may have, because they are also bone-heads, whatever acts of corruption they intend to carry out will be flawed, inept, and ultimately doomed to failure.
These morons leave evidence trails behind them a hundred miles wide for which we will have all new charges that we can press against them and finally hold them accountable, in spite of what they’ve managed to get away with from their last shot at power. All they need now is for their version of Scott to sit at the table and make fun of them every time they fail and the Austin Powers comparison will be complete.
There’s a really good chance that getting away with as much as they did last time around is going to make them feel untouchable enough to not even try to conceal what they are doing, which is going to make the future prosecutions and lawsuits against them much easier to win. Further, even if their past crimes from the 45th administration become moot in the face of statutes of limitations, those past crimes are still historically relevant to any violations they commit over the next four years and can be used to establish a pattern of behavior. If they are continuing violations that started during the 45th administration that are still happening during the 47th administration, the statute of limitations would not necessarily limit the look-back period for enforcement; it’s possible that violations during the 45th administration would still be live for adjudication if they are continued into the 47th administration.
Furthermore, in California, where we are headquartered, the governor has already ponied up the legal resources to sue the living bejeezus out of the federal government in every instance in which the 47th administration tries to pull an unlawful stunt that would hurt the people of California. This includes public education and our students with special needs. California has the resources to stand alone as its own country if it ever needs to. It’s the 5th largest economy in the world and it financially supports the red states, which can’t support themselves without our money. It will be at the forefront of the fight to preserve everyone’s legal protections, including those afforded to students with disabilities, so our families here in the State have less to worry about than our families in other states, particularly the red states that were tricked into voting against their own interests.
It’s important to remember why public education in general is so important, and the degree to which public education failures have led us to where we are now. Without belaboring points I’ve repeatedly made in previous posts/podcasts, let me sum it up by saying that the measure of how civilized a society is goes to how well it takes care of its most vulnerable members. I’ve spent the last 34+ years defending the educational and civil rights of some of our society’s most vulnerable members, children and young adults with disabilities.
These individuals’ cases have been the canaries in the coal mine for American democracy this entire time, but when I first started out my career, I was considered a hyperbolic “Don Quixote” tilting at windmills whenever I squawked about public education failures. Now, here we are 34+ years into my career, and most people are now worried about what’s going to become of their own civil rights and those of the people they love, even if none of them have disabilities. For those of you who have lived your lives dealing with racism, homophobia, and/or other forms of discrimination, you know what I’m talking about, too. I’m extremely concerned for the children with special needs who were born here in the United States to undocumented parents, who are citizens under the 14th Amendment but who could still end up in deportation concentration camps if Number 47’s sharks-with-lasers fantasies with respect to immigration are nonetheless realized.
I realize that, at this point, irony is dead, but I have to take a moment to acknowledge the profound mental illness that will pervade the 47th presidency and lead to so much damage to people with disabilities. What makes sociopathy combined with personality disorders so dangerous is that these are the people who refuse to acknowledge that they are themselves disabled carrying out their mentally ill motivations at the expense of the rest of us, simply because it is their hands on the wheel right now, not ours. What makes it even more tragic are the number of equally impaired individuals who were convinced to vote for this shitshow and who are now going to pay for those mistakes along with all the rest of us who will simply be unwilling collateral damage.
Evidently, humankind needs to experience these kinds of hardships in order to connect the consequences with specific behaviors, but most of us saw this coming from a far way off, tried to warn everybody, and not enough people listened to us to change their behaviors. These are the people who only learn the hard way if they ever learn at all, and they constitute almost half the population, which is frightening until you realize that, up until the modern age, they were the majority. We are only now as a species at the tipping point where more people are educated and literate than not, and only barely.
Only an intelligent, educated population can maintain a free society. Ignorance through book bans and other forms censorship are the tools of oppression, not protection. People don’t need to be protected from making informed decisions. Learning about opposing views is not the same thing as adopting opposing views, and the only way to know if your own views are accurate is to compare them against the views of others, which you can’t do in a society that practices censorship and book bans.
Pre-Civil War slave owners deliberately prevented their slaves from learning to read for fear of them gaining the knowledge and power to rise up against the slave owners. For the least educated and mentally stable among us to be manipulated into voting against their own self-interests, much less the interests of society on the whole, goes to the degree to which the mental health crisis in this country is being exploited by severely mentally ill people with power looking to prevent everyone else from holding them accountable for their own deranged behaviors in a way that prevents us from meeting the needs of our mentally ill with any degree of ethical responsibility.
The inmates are literally running the asylum, and it’s going to get worse after January 2025 before it gets better. This is one hell of an Extinction Burst that humanity is trying to survive. It’s going to take a lot of work by people who truly understand the dangerous situation we now find ourselves in and the mechanisms by which we can save ourselves, going forward.
I fully expect that some people who are smart enough to understand but weren’t particularly paying attention during the last election cycle will be filled with remorse and seek solutions once reality hits them. I’m not going to turn those people away when they come to us seeking help to protect their children with special needs.
I know I’ve already got at least one family on my caseload upon whom the consequences of their choices are only now starting to dawn on them. I went to an IEP meeting for one of their children a few weeks ago and, afterwards promised the mom that, no matter what happens after Number 47 gets sworn in, we’ll have her back. She seemed confused until I told her what Number 47 intends to do to public education, of which she clearly had not been aware, and I could tell by the look of horror spreading across her face that she and her uneducated, blue-collar husband had been duped into voting against their own interests.
As soon as I told her what was up, she began protesting with, “But it will cost so much more to support them with services as adults if they don’t get special ed.” I had to explain that the whole point of Number 47’s agenda is to not spend any money on anybody who isn’t already rich, period. If these people get their way, not only will there be no public education to speak of, much less special education, but there will be no services or supports for disabled adults, either.
These tax-fattened jackals will reduce the rest of us to a level of impoverishment on par with Oliver Twist if they have their ways with our government. Remember that individuals with developmental disabilities were tossed into the gas chambers with the Jews during Hitler’s reign of terror, and many of the incoming administration, including Number 47, regard those efforts at ethnic cleansing as appropriate and desirable.
Understand that what is happening right now are a bunch of spoiled rich people with no adult-level problem solving skills attempting to take over a free democratic government that, if properly administered, would have the whole sorry lot of them jailed and impoverished as consequences to their own behaviors, and they’re not about to start assuming any accountability for their behaviors, now. They have no interest in governing; they’re only interested in not being governed.
This is a hostile takeover with only short-term objectives of consequence avoidance and get-rich-quick schemes in mind that cannot be indefinitely maintained. The people behind it are too inept to keep it going long-term, though they will do a whole lot of harm while they try to the best of their limited abilities to maintain control of what they’ve started. The other thing to keep in mind is that all of the people involved in undermining the rights of the rest of us are so self-centered and greedy that they regard each other as enemies, as well. As soon as they collectively enjoy some kind of win, they immediately turn on each other to fight over the spoils, which waters down the benefits that any one of them may actually receive in the end.
We can expect juvenile antics and backstabbing at the federal level for the next four years from the incoming administration, and the rest of us are going to be left picking up the pieces for decades to come, but we have to stand firm against the forces that want to put an end to publicly funded special education and the laws that control how it is delivered. There’s nothing wrong with amending the laws to protect our kids with special needs in the face of inevitable change, but our kids with special needs and their families should never experience a reduction in their protected rights. If it’s okay to violate their rights, it’s okay to violate yours, as well.
So, strategically, what should parents of kids with special needs do right now to prepare for what could come? It’s impossible to plan for every possible scenario, but thankfully you don’t have to. There are some basic guidelines that apply to every advocacy situation, regardless of what is happening politically, and all of it relies on facts you can prove through evidence.
Here are the basics:
- Document everything
- Request everything in writing
- Respond to everything in writing
- Limit your written communications to things you can support with other things in writing
- Assessment reports
- Medical records
- Old IEPs
- Outside agency records
- Mental health
- Developmental services
- Vocational rehabilitation
- Do your research
- The science applicable to your child’s known condition(s)
- The laws that currently apply to your child’s 504 plan or IEP
- Implementing regulations of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act: 34 CFR Sec. 104
- Implementing regulations of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA): 34 CFR Sec. 300
- Your State’s laws regarding how its schools are supposed to implement 504 and the IDEA (varies by state and could change on the fly, so you’ll need to do some internet searching as time goes on)
- Maintain your own running records like you are your child’s case manager
- Old-school: 3-ring binders full of paper copies
- Modern age: Cloud-based archival with built-in search features (you’ll need a scanner or a scanner app on your phone for converting paper records into digital formats)
- Keep everything in chronological order – it’s tempting to group things into categories like all the assessment reports, all the IEPs, all the correspondence, etc., but this just makes it harder to piece together related events over time
- Use the following format to name your digital records so they automatically display in chronological order when you sort the folder by file name: “[Year] [Month] [Day] [Document Description]” – For example:
- “2024 12 14 Assessment Plan”
- “2022 03 06 IEP”
As you will note, almost everything I’ve said above involves documents, but it can also apply to other types of records, such as audio recordings of IEP meetings. The laws vary from state to state as to when parents are allowed to audio record IEP meetings. In California, parents simply have to give at least 24-hour written notice that they intend to audio record an IEP meeting and their local education agency can’t say, “No.” The local education agency, however, becomes obligated to make its own recording when parents audio record their IEP meetings. Cloud-based storage solutions usually work best when having to save records with such large file sizes, but parents should keep copies of everything on their own hardware, as well, just in case they lose access to the cloud for any reason.
With respect to how to conduct yourself in 504 or IEP meetings going forward, the same guidance applies now that we’ve always given: Don’t be the person in the meeting acting like an asshole. If the school people are going to do it, you have no control over their personal choices, but you do have control over how you respond. Meet the dumbfuckery with professionalism and fact-based communications. Don’t stoop to their level. Always take the higher road and let them make the record acting foolish, not you. If you can’t get them to act right in the moment, collect evidence to use to hold them accountable after the fact.
Stand firm with the facts and the applicable rules of law. Don’t get sucked into emotional exchanges or rely on emotional appeals. How you feel about what they are doing is irrelevant to what the law requires them to do for your child. Stick to the rules and facts. Save your feelings for your civil rights lawsuit against them for pain and suffering if they’ve actually put you through it. The more you try to appeal to them to stop hurting you, the more they know they are being successful at hurting you. These are abusive people and confirming that they are being successful at abusing you just rewards their behaviors. You telling them that they are hurting your child and family will only be perceived by them as “owning the libs,” even if you aren’t actually a liberal.
These kinds of abusive, self-centered people consider your suffering to be their success, so don’t give them the satisfaction. Just kick their asses with facts and law and let them stew in the juices of the consequences they will eventually incur when it finally happens. How they suffer as a result of being held accountable to your child and family isn’t your problem, it’s theirs, and Karma can be a real bitch.
Using AI-Generated Music to Teach Social Scripts
I have to say from the start that this is not a paid endorsement, and endorsing specific products is not something I normally do, but I’ve discovered a tool that has been a game-changer for how I work with one of my direct services clients as his counselor. That solution is using AI to create songs that are individualized to a specific person with lyrics based on therapeutically appropriate social scripts tailored to the person.
I discovered this solution in the course of looking for ways to embed peer-reviewed music therapy elements into my counseling sessions with this client because he is highly responsive to music, and seems to remember lyrics set to music better than spoken words. Given that he’s lost his eyesight, we’ve got to rely on his other senses.
I was looking for an easy way to generate songs he would take seriously as legitimate musical productions that contained the social scripts, such as “safe hands,” “inside voice,” and “be patient,” with which he was already familiar in order to expand his understanding and application of these concepts in his day-to-day life. I’m still shocked at how easy it was with the AI.
These individualized songs are also serving as a stepping-off point to teach my client new, more sophisticated social/emotional skills and scripts, going forward, once he’s incorporated them into his music listening routines and we work with them in our sessions. As time goes on, I’ll be adding new songs that tackle more sophisticated concerns than those that I’ve initially created to get him started.
My counseling client is in his late 20s and lives in a group home with 2 other men who have developmental disabilities. My client is blind, autistic, and intellectually disabled. He struggles to produce spontaneous speech and relies largely on scripted speech to communicate verbally with others.
Since 2010, I’ve been this young man’s lay advocate, his attorney’s paralegal, his compensatory education services provider. He and I have gotten to know each other well and have instant rapport with each other, even after not seeing each other in person for a couple of years.
Given the friendship and rapport I share with my client, I guess I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was at how quickly he took to the songs I created for him using AI, but I was actually flabbergasted. It was during my last session with him, in which I was collecting the last of the baseline data I needed to inform my program goals for him over the next 10 months, when I introduced the songs to him.
The moment I started playing the songs, the stimming decreased to nearly none and he sat listening, turning his head so his ears faced the music, and orienting to me as if looking me in the face to repeat familiar scripts he was hearing in the lyrics with a grin on his face. He was fully engaged and it took next to no effort from me. I was floored. I was sure that I was going to have to work to sell him on the idea, but he took to it like a fish to water.
This has left me inspired, because I know he can’t be the only one who would benefit from this. I was in an online IEP meeting for one of my other students a few days ago, and mentioned this experience to the other professionals who were already logged into the meeting, while we were waiting for the parent and a few other professionals to log in. When I told my colleagues about what I’d done using the AI with social scripts to create highly individualized music for therapeutic purposes, they got all excited about it.
So, based on the feedback I’ve gotten so far, I’m stopping what I’m doing right now to bust out this short post/podcast to share this information with anyone else who might benefit from it so that I can let it go and move on with the rest of my day. This is going to keep bugging me until I share it, and it’s preventing me from finishing anything else until it’s off my plate. Call me perseverative if you want; it is what it is. Thankfully, this can be fairly brief.
The music-generating AI website I stumbled upon after 30 whole seconds of Googling is MakeBestMusic (https://makebestmusic.com/app/create-music). Again, this is not a paid endorsement.
I didn’t compare this AI against any other. It was the first one I tried and it instantly gave me what I was looking for in just the free demo. I copied and pasted the list of social scripts that I wanted incorporated into a song, selected some genre-specific tags, and hit the “go” button, then a minute or so later, I had two new songs using the words I’d provided as lyrics and one of them was absolutely perfect. I repeated the process for three more sets of social scripts and ended up with a total of four songs.
For the sake of illustrating my point, I’m playing one of them, titled “Ask for Help,” here:
Listen to the lyrics and you’ll hear that they are clearly about social behaviors, but it’s sounds like a real song and not lame like something I’d make up if I had to do it myself. The robots do it better than me, and for these limited purposes, that’s okay.
I’m not trying to earn an award for high quality music. I’m trying to teach my client how to act right around other people and still live a happy life for himself. For those of us who could never afford to outsource this kind of work to a professional songwriter, AI is a sufficient tool for this type of job.
Given that a less than professional job can serve a valid therapeutic purpose using AI at a much lower cost, using AI-generated music to embed music therapy elements into a program of social/emotional counseling with individuals who have developmental disabilities can be an affordable and powerful tool in a counselor’s arsenal of solutions. I encourage my colleagues who work with individuals with needs similar to those of my counseling client to play around with this type of technology and see what kinds of solutions you can create.
If you’re the parent, you probably have even more ideas about how you could use this around your home with your own family members. Seriously think about setting the step-by-step instructions on how to perform certain chores to music to play when you have your kids helping you around the house. Once the song gets stuck in their heads, so are the instructions on how to perform those chores.
I think AI-generated music holds a lot of currently untapped potential for parenting, teaching, and therapeutic interventions, and I’m curious to see how other people use it in these kinds of ways as time goes on. What instructional, parental, and/or therapeutic outcomes can you pursue using AI-generated music?
Online Trolls, Mental Health, & Social Justice
For the benefit of the majority of Americans who are capable of understanding what I’m about to say, I appreciate the opportunity to share some insights with you that might help you better frame how you think about current events and other people’s behaviors. For those of you who struggle to understand what I’m about to say, just know that the point is to find a way for you to still be included in the public discourse with as much understanding as can be achieved. We want everyone making thoughtful, informed decisions and not just reacting emotionally to things they don’t understand, which requires patience and understanding on everyone’s part.
Recent events have inspired this post/podcast, and they arose around other online content I’d already published and then promoted through Facebook Ads, which was probably just asking for it. Facebook has become a toxic environment in which conspiracy theories abound as they are passed around among our least informed and/or least emotionally stable members of society and boosted by Facebook’s algorithms.
Even though our content was supposed to be targeted to pro-democracy users, enough people on Facebook are apparently hate-searching the same hashtags as those used by pro-democracy activists and then posting hateful messages full of misinformation, which likely feeds the algorithm information about their user habits that increases their ability to engage with pro-democracy content without regard for how they are actually interacting. The algorithm is looking at the frequency and duration of a user’s involvement with content, not the qualitative nature of what that involvement looks like.
Hateful comments are just comments to the algorithm. Clicks are just clicks, regardless of the beliefs or intentions of the users doing the clicking. These algorithms are configured to increase the exposure of frequently clicked- and commented-on content based on its popularity with users, regardless of why it’s becoming popular.
This is how social media has been weaponized by bad actors to feed lies and misinformation to unsophisticated users who have no idea that their behaviors are being reinforced for all the wrong reasons, which effectively manipulates them into behaving in hateful ways with increasing intensity over time. My working theory about what reinforces trolling behaviors is that it’s automatically reinforcing because there is an internal adrenaline rush that users get when their posts and comments gain popularity and get shared, which gives them emotional validation. It’s a protest behavior that gets reinforced and maintained by attention from others.
It is only people who are starved for emotionally validating attention from others who seek it out online and fall into the deep well of online trolling behaviors to get it. If that’s the only source of validation and feeling “successful” in their lives, they’re going to do it. The solution is to give them a more appropriate functionally equivalent replacement behavior that still allows them to express their wants and needs such that they are validated with attention, but more importantly, that are met with more powerful reinforcers than the ones they receive by trolling. We’ve got to give them something more rewarding than what they get from spewing hatred while still giving a voice to their wants and needs, as well as access to appropriate solutions.
These are not our brightest problem-solvers. These are the people with arrested emotional development and limited coping skills who resort to name-calling and hostile behavior because that’s the best they’ve got. They feel trapped in a life they can’t handle where their wants and needs go unmet and they don’t know how to appropriately advocate for themselves. Emotionally speaking, they are simply very old children.
Thankfully, only a handful of trolls found our online content. All of them were adult males, mostly middle-aged or older and white, based on their Facebook profiles. All of them were triggered by a single word in the title of the program being promoted, which is our Social Justice group on Meetup, in which I conduct live events and share content with group members who are interested in learning how to participate in the advocacy processes of publicly funded programs to enforce their rights as program beneficiaries or the rights of other eligible beneficiaries who need help advocating for themselves.
In our Meetup group, I take my experiences working in special education, regional center, rehabilitation, and other publicly-funded programs for people with disabilities and generalize them to the same processes and procedures that exist within other publicly-funded programs that exist to benefit citizens with other other types of need than disability. Many of these other programs address social welfare issues, like housing, food, and healthcare.
Americans pay into these programs so that they are there for them if and when they need them. If we’re going to pay taxes to pool our resources as the Public to achieve economies of scale and efficiencies that we otherwise wouldn’t have on our own as individuals, then those resources and economies of scale better provide for us when we need them.
There is nothing un-American about expecting the American government to work and being worried and angry when it doesn’t. What is un-American is failing to abide by the rules already in place and making excuses instead of improvements as a public servant or a voter. If the existing rules create more problems than they solve, then responsible leaders in local publicly funded agencies raise these issues with their legislators and don’t stop making noise until the problems get fixed. They don’t go, “Oh, well. That’s just the way it is in the ‘real world,'” and fail to solve the problems.
I’ve made this point before and I’ll make it again, here, that Project 2025, which articulates the literal plan for a white “Christian” nationalist take-over of all the bureaucratic mechanisms of government, is nothing new. It’s what I’ve been up against since I first started working as a lay advocate in 1991. It’s what I was up against when I participated in the most litigation of my career in the mid-2000s through 2012 as a paralegal, supporting attorneys in special education mediations and due process hearings, as well as court trials in venues ranging from state superior courts to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal. It’s why I went back and got my master’s degree in educational psychology in 2013; I knew I needed to come at these issues from a more informed, expert position to be more effective.
The anti-everything-not-like-themselves by some of the least competent members of society who, through privilege and cronyism, have managed to acquire power, is nothing new to me. There is nothing more reckless than giving someone with low intelligence and emotional instability access to a whole lot of money. I’d have to go through the whole origin story of the public education system and how other public programs were modeled after its administrative design to explain how we got here, and that’s enough information to create an entire college course titled, “The History of American Public Education.”
Let me just cut to the chase and say it’s been a political shit-show from the beginning and that all of the laws that prohibit discrimination in the public sector are there because these knuckle heads have been in there undermining and sabotaging the system from within all along. They have been doing this so that they and their like-minded collaborators can point to the failures of the system they caused as “proof” that this system of government is a failure and should be replaced with something different, like giving them total control with no accountability.
These are the people who want to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and make it so that only wealthy elites can afford to educate their children, while depriving the general public of access to information and learning that will allow them to participate with understanding in our representative democratic government. There is a reason that the pre-Civil War slave owners didn’t want their slaves to learn how to read; a literate, intelligent, and informed group of slaves was capable of planning and executing an escape or even an overthrow of their masters.
By depriving the American public of a sound, responsible public education system these hostile elites would hoard all the knowledge and only use that of it which would give them an even greater unfair advantage over everyone else, while ignoring anything that potentially highlighted any errors in their thinking. This would prevent the public from knowing how to take back its own power, live freely, and thrive for its own benefit rather than only for the benefit of the elites, while elites choosing to only acknowledge the facts that suit their purposes run everything into the ground by failing to abide by reality.
It is the least educated and/or least emotionally stable among us who become the most useful idiot minions of the anti-American elements in this country, which are fueled by money from self-serving domestic billionaires and foreign enemies, and facilitated by domestic and foreign influencers using online propaganda to exploit social media algorithms, radicalize these people, and turn them loose on the rest of us like ticking timebombs. Our current-day lone shooters are our domestic version of the suicide bombers of the 9/11 era.
Statistically speaking, a certain percentage of the human population has disordered thought to such a marked degree that their participation with social media brings on the worst manifestations of their symptoms possible. In the special education arena, I’ve got one student on my caseload who is so screen-addicted that she engages in property destruction with full-on screaming rages at home if she’s expected to put down her device and go do something with her mother in the real world. I’ve got another student who impulsively, without fail, will immediately gravitate to any social media app that has a chat feature and start trolling strangers because she thinks she’s being funny and she’s cracking herself up, but then they come back at her with equal venom and she has a mental health crisis that can escalate to actual self-harm or attempted suicide.
These are real issues that I’m dealing with right now in the real world, and these two students are hardly the only ones. These are just the only two cases on my caseload right now with these issues, but this has become an ever-increasing issue for a lot of students who I’ve represented over the last 15 years as internet use has become more ubiquitous throughout public education. For the student with the chat app issues, the school district hired a cyber security expert to figure out how to block any of the kinds of content that she might misuse on her district-issued devices, while still giving her access to the online content necessary for her classes and without a human being having to actively monitor her device usage throughout each school day.
All of that is great for understanding the nature of the behaviors and the challenges faced by those who engage in them, but what does one do about it? For me, that’s still a work in progress, but I can tell you how I’ve handled it so far and whether I think it’s working or not. It’s early days with me and the fascist trolls, and there have only been a handful, but I’m already seeing trends in the data emerging, not the least of which is the older white male observation I mentioned previously.
I’m totally using Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) to inform my responses to the trolls, as well as legal strategies I’ve learned from lawyers and judges over the years that can be generalized to other situations and contexts that align with the principles of ABA. One of those strategies is what I like to call “Jedi Mind-Trick Jujitsu,” in which I take control of the narrative by using their own language to defeat their own points, then redirect everyone’s attention to what my originally posted content is actually about and encourage people to join our group and participate in our live events.
In Jujitsu, there is a move whereby the enemy throws a punch, but you lean to one side, grab their arm at the wrist just below their fist, and pull them forward and down to the ground, using the inertia of their own punch and their own momentum against them while side-stepping the punch altogether. In “Jedi Mind-Trick Jujitsu,” with these trolls, I’m taking the energy of the insult or slur, mocking the ridiculousness of it as politely as possible by pointing out the truth in a friendly manner, providing immediate forgiveness to the offending party, following it with an analysis of why this person is engaging in this behavior and why everyone else should feel bad for the offending party rather than revengeful, and promising to pray for the offending party’s poor tortured soul or otherwise blessing their heart.
None of the trolls have replied back and no new hate posts have come in since I replied to the last one, though that could change. I’ve posted my replies to each troll’s posts almost immediately after they were made. None of my replies took their bait. They were looking to pick a fight with people who are just as emotionally dysfunctional as they are, and they’re not going to find that here. Engage in maladaptive behavior like that in front of us, much less in writing with a hot link to your profile, and we’re going to offer personalized forgiveness and explain why, then redirect readers back to the original point of our posted content.
We work with mental and emotional health issues and challenging behaviors every day. Trolls aren’t scary to us; they’re pitiful. They are victims of our country’s mental health crisis. They warrant our pity because they are so terribly troubled and broken and they deserve our effort because we need to keep them from becoming unsafe to themselves or others.
Trolls are mean to strangers online because that’s the best they’ve got. That’s a tragic way to live, and it’s not hard to see how people from this segment of society are easily radicalized into acts of violence over things that make no sense, particularly when the information they receive is manipulated to limit their understanding and provoke their anger through their strongest connection to the world: the internet.
The other data point that emerged from how the trolls responded to our posted content about our Social Justice group on Meetup, was, as I stated above, a single word. That word was “Social.” The tiniest minds think that this automatically means “socialism,” which they then equate with “communism,” the definitions of neither being known to them, which explains why one of them referred to me as “comrade” in his disparagement of our post.
Here’s the thing: The point of the post was to promote our pro-democracy group and teach people how to participate in the mechanisms of democracy at the local level, all in the pursuit of a just society in conformity with the Constitution of the United States. None of them actually read about what we were doing. They saw the word “Social” in the title and were immediately triggered. The irony was totally lost on them that they were using “social” media to spew their moronic hatred towards our use of the word “social” in the title of our online events.
For people who think anything that uses the word “social” automatically means “socialism,” and you oppose socialism, then you need to get off of “social” media! And, God forbid you attend the Sunday Ice Cream “Social” at church after service, or the commies will start kicking in the front door of your house before you even get home. It’s a freakin’ word with multiple uses, depending on context. The title of our group is also a play on words with a “social” justice education initiative being carried out using “social” media and online meetings to interact in a “social” way to talk about how to uphold democracy at the local level. Tinier, fragile minds didn’t get the pun or the point.
Those of us who are not so badly compromised as that have a responsibility to take care of those of us who are, not ignore or exploit them. We are our brothers’ keepers and it takes a village. Humans are social animals by nature, so we need to figure out better ways to socialize with each other than what we’ve got going on right now. We have plenty of existing psychological, sociological, anthropological, and historical information to make wise, informed decisions as a populous, but that information is not equally available to everyone and educational equity is necessary for the survival of our species.
We can’t figure out how to work together if we’re too busy being pitted against each other by those in leadership for their own selfish purposes. Looking out for each other and collaborating for the mutual benefit of everyone is consistent with the teachings of every great religious leader the world has ever remembered, and none of them preached hatred or violence. These same values are also consistent with the rules of our democracy.
One piece of advice that I can give to sane, rational people dealing with trolls is to not look at what they post as an overture to start an actual conversation and engage in any kind of legitimate debate. Don’t take their bait; they’re just looking for someone to disagree with them and call them names back. That’s their idea of two-way conversation and social engagement, but it’s all one-sided and they’re too impaired to see it for what it really is. They approximate and mimic conversational behavior, but they can’t actually hold a real conversation, at least not while they are triggered and escalated. The adrenaline rush of a heated exchange is often as close to getting emotionally engaged with other people as they can get.
Troll posting is a ritualized behavior that includes scripted speech, which is not the same thing as a two-way conversation. Two-way conversations require both parties to listen with comprehension and think about how what each person says relates to what the other person says, and negotiate in some kind of way to reach a mutually agreed-to conclusion about whatever is being discussed. Troll posts are nothing like that. Troll posts are one-sided cries for help from mentally and emotionally anguishing people.
What has made all the difference for me when I encounter these kinds of behaviors in any social context is to recognize that this isn’t a conversation, it’s a ritualized behavior that includes words, at which point I can’t take whatever is being said seriously because it’s only function is to get an emotional rise out of me and engage me in a dispute. I’m only interested in a real conversation. I have no reason to reinforce that behavior by giving the person what they were looking for and engaging in a heated dispute with them.
That would give them my sustained attention in the form of an attempt to convince them they are wrong, which they would never do, which would make them feel powerful and leave me drained and exhausted with time I’ll never get back wasted on the whole endeavor. If I took the bait and wasted time I can’t spare to argue with a troll, then I’d be kicking myself afterwards for letting myself go there, and the troll is still living rent-free in my head. Hell, no!
By understanding that the function of the behavior is automatic reinforcement by way of making the troll feel powerful when they bully someone into submission, you can redirect them to a more functionally appropriate way to feel powerful without acting like an asshole. If I took the bait, it would be an open invitation for them to visit their wrath upon me, so I’m not taking the bait. However, I will take the opportunity to reclaim the narrative and redirect other people’s attention back to what actually matters. I can turn a troll post into a marketing opportunity for my event by using their drama to get other reader’s eyes on the back and forth, and further pique their curiosity about our live online Meetup events.
One of the motivating ideas behind trolling behavior is to come on strong so as to presumably present as a strong person. But, truly strong people don’t actually act like that. Truly strong people don’t give a shit whether people are impressed by them or not; it takes too much energy to care and there are far too many other more important things to worry about in life than that. Truly strong people just take care of their business and don’t have a need to come on strong when they disagree with other people.
These trolls are weak people acting how they think strong people act, as seen through their eyes as people who are regularly ignored or exploited by others who are stronger than them. They can’t actually conceptualize what stronger people must be thinking or feeling; they can only observe the outward presentations made by stronger people and attempt to emulate what they think they are seeing.
People who are lacking in competencies have historically found themselves on the receiving end of a tongue-lashing more than once in their lives for making mistakes that a more competent person would never make. From their perspective, it may seem that yelling at people and accusing them of being deficient is what being in charge is all about. Therefore, according to their logic, if they go around yelling at people and accusing them of doing bad things, they should be put in charge.
This strategy sometimes actually works for them in the short-term, but their actual lack of skills dooms them to ultimate failure. They can’t actually handle the responsibilities that come with the power they manage to acquire and their efforts to fake it until they make it blow up in their faces because they are literally faking it and have no idea what they are doing. Dressing for success is pointless if you don’t have actual job skills.
A good public-facing example of this is Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who is being investigated for financial improprieties with public funds and who, with each new investigation or investigative finding being reported in the media, passes new statewide executive orders that violate the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States by banning the use of certain “woke” terms like “Latinx” or “pregnant people” in State documents. She’s apparently getting all the “mam-maws” and “pap-paws” riled up over nothing so they don’t notice her robbing them blind.
It has been alleged that some of the taxpayers’ money in Arkansas was used to send Governor Huckabee Sanders to Paris, France with her girlfriends to party and charged off to the State as a credit card purchase in an amount just shy of the $20K reporting limit on State employee credit card purchases as an allegedly fraudulent purchase of a customized speaker’s lectern that has yet to make a public appearance or ever be used to anyone’s knowledge. This alleged “Lectern-gate” matter is still being investigated, given that over $19K was spent by the Governor on a lectern with no actual lectern to show for it, the Governor allegedly bought it from a company owned by one of her girlfriends who went with her on the Paris trip, and said friend’s business does not sell lecterns as part of its normal course of business.
The abuses of authority alongside Arkansas’ long-standing low performance statistics as a state, such as with poverty, healthcare, crime, and education, reveal an entirely dysfunctional state government that is dependent upon other, better managed states that produce more tax revenues than they need to supplement Arkansas’ own tax revenues in order for Arkansas to function in any capacity at all. By contrast, for example, California has the 5th largest economy in the world and could function as a self-funded nation-state, if it had to. If Arkansas were cut off from the tax revenue it gets from states like California, there wouldn’t be enough money in the till for the Governor to steal.
Broken people may briefly attain power, but they usually don’t have the skills to hold onto it for very long. It takes a fleet of broken people working together from positions of power to do serious harm over extended periods. We generally regard these kinds of folks as being part of a conspiracy when they collaborate with each other to achieve dysfunctional ends on a large scale. But, as with “Lectern-gate,” these folks really aren’t all that good at covering their tracks and tend to leave a wake of destruction that serves as a mile-wide evidence trail. We’re seeing it happen right now with all kinds of folks from what’s left of the Republican Party, a great many of them being attorneys.
They’re banking on the rest of us being too exhausted to deal with their bullshit and just letting them go do whatever so we can stop and rest for a minute. Those are the moments they seize to do real harm. They wear us down to create exactly those kinds of exploitable moments. It’s like an emotionally abusive partner who always picks a fight right before bedtime that goes on for hours into the night, night after night, leaving the other person too exhausted from sleep deprivation to make rational decisions. A sleep-deprived person is inclined to cave in on everything just to keep the peace and impaired beyond thinking clearly about getting out of the relationship. This is also how unethical employers trap people in high-stress, physically demanding, low-paying jobs for decades on end.
Abusive people tend to do poorly in unstructured situations. The more the environment is configured to discourage abusive behavior by imposing structure, the easier it is to keep people busy doing things that are productive and healthy. One doesn’t have the time or motivation to go rob a bank if one is happily employed and well paid, for example. Not everyone handles unstructured time well and, when given too much freedom and left to their own devices, some people use their employer’s credit cards to go party in foreign cities with their friends.
The bottom-line take-away from this post/podcast is that everyone deserves to live in a just society that treats them fairly, no matter who they are, and not everybody is healthy enough to appreciate what that means. We can’t take it personally when someone else doesn’t have the ability to get it, and we serve ourselves by looking out for that person and helping them meet their needs instead of shunning them and cutting them off. We need to take a serious look at the wants and needs of the people who pose the biggest threats to our democracy and then figure out the most appropriate ways to see their needs met so that they aren’t feeling “othered,” ostracized, and vindictive towards the rest of us.
Trolls’ behaviors seek attention for a reason and we’ve got to give them more appropriate ways of calling attention to their wants and needs without causing harm. I suggest we start by responding to the hateful comments left by trolls in the most loving ways possible, without being afraid to poke fun at how silly they are making themselves look with their hateful comments. React the same way you would to a 4-year-old who didn’t get what they wanted for lunch, and now they’re packing a bag in their bedroom while crying and threatening to run away.
Acknowledge their suffering because they’re upset, but be willing to chuckle at how silly it is to be running away from home over cucumber slices. You’re laughing at the behavior, not the underlying reason why it happened. It’s okay to hate the behavior, but try not to hate the person. You need to mentally separate the person from the behavior because they are two different things. They’re totally related to each other, but they aren’t one in the same. If trolls were better equipped to deal with life, their behavior wouldn’t be so bad. Nobody is awful on purpose just to inconvenience you. No matter how much Hell they visit upon you, it’s infinitely worse for them living in their skin. You can get away from them, but they are stuck with themselves forever.
Trolls only come on strongly because they are lacking the amount of strength they are attempting to project; it’s a lie and they are actually cowards. Standing up to them with logic and facts generally shuts them down. Your alternatives are either ignoring their comments and leaving them to poison your posts, or getting baited into a heated, emotional exchange intended to exhaust you and wear you down. Shutting them down quickly with logic and facts appears to achieve a respectable degree of damage control and refocuses other people on the actual messages that you’re trying to convey.
That isn’t to say that an entirely deranged hothead won’t resort to stalking someone who dares to shut them down online, but these kind of people aren’t the majority of the people spewing hatred online and even the stalkers usually leave an evidence trail a mile wide. Most of the online haters are cowards who will never show themselves offline to the same degree they expose themselves online. Name-calling and profanities are the best they’ve got.
I’ll save my name-calling and profanities for my private conversations with clients and colleagues, as well as occasional comedic bits in my online content, about the characters in public office we encounter who are obstructing the legitimate functions of our democratic government every day. We all need to vent and there is a time and a place for everything, including venting.
What you will never see us do is go out on the internet and post hateful comments on other people’s content. We may disagree and provide our reasons for disagreeing if we come across something that jumps out at us, and we may point out the potential adverse consequences of acting according to another party’s online advice if we think that advice is bad, but that’s not the same thing as name-calling and hate speech. There’s polite, informed dissent and there’s raving like a lunatic.
I hope this has helped you organize your own thoughts around how to work with people who don’t quite get it with a little more compassion, which has greater chances of helping you achieve healthy outcomes for everyone involved than ignoring them or attempting to argue with them about the flaws in their logic. Proactively, going forward, I encourage you to frame things with “I-statements” when presenting an opposing point of view, such as, “I hear what you’re saying, but I’ve always understood it to be the case that XYZ, and what you’re telling me doesn’t really explain that. Why do you think that is? What am I not understanding?”
When you put a single unaccounted-for variable in front of them and ask them to account for it, whatever faulty logic they were trying to assert falls apart and they realize they’ve left something out of the equation. When you see that they’ve realized they don’t know how to resolve what you’ve pointed out, that’s your chance to continue with your logical explanation for XYZ with language like, “Aw man! So, what I’ve been thinking this whole time is that, because ABC and 123, XYZ happens. Does that make sense? Am I missing something? I thought I had it figured out, but maybe I’m wrong. Am I wrong?”
At that point, you take ownership of the doubt they are unwilling to let themselves feel about their own perceptions of things, and the troubled troll starts to put things together logically in their own mind based on the simple explanation you’ve given in an effort to remain the voice of authority by giving you an answer. This allows them to arrive at the correct conclusion on their own by thinking it through without being told they are wrong and getting emotionally triggered.
If you impose structure on the thought process by identifying only the variables that matter and leaving out the extraneous fluff in an emotionally neutral way that shifts the element of doubt onto you, then ask for their opinion of what you’ve just said, you’re just asking for feedback on what you understand to be the case and correction where you’re wrong. There’s no reason for them to feel threatened by that and a lot of times it actually buys trust because then they’re able to say, “Well, when you put it that way, you’ve got a point,” or “I hadn’t thought about that, but now that you mention it …” and a rational conversation is more likely to happen.
One of the trolls who posted on my content asserted that it isn’t justice if it’s prefaced by an adjective like “social,” there’s only justice. That made absolutely no sense, but I was willing to entertain the idea, so I replied with, “Fascinating perspective! What evidence supports that argument?” and never heard back. That’s not a hostile response, but I’m also pretty sure there’s no actual evidence to support that argument. I’m willing to be wrong on that, but I guess only time will tell if he’s going to come back and educate me with some real evidence that proves me wrong.
In the meantime, I hope you are able to cope with trolls better after reading this, whether they show up in your life online or in person. All of this can be generalized to dealing with nasty people everywhere, but for our families who rely on us for advice about special education and disability resources, generalize it to every nasty person who stood in your way when you tried to get appropriate services and supports for your loved-one with special needs.
Ronald Reagan is given credit for saying, “Trust, but verify,” when it came to dealing with other heads of state and government officials. I think using that approach whenever anyone attempts to convince you of something. particularly if they are emotionally passionate about it, is always a best-practices way of dealing with them.
Ask for evidence in support of arguments that seem unlikely. Ask for their advice as to how to weigh contradictory information against what they’ve just told you. Don’t accuse them of anything or call them names. Treat your exchanges like dignified conversations, set the behavioral example, ask pointed questions about their assertions, and sincerely express interest in understanding their point of view. They do have a communicative intent to express an unmet want or need, but it can be difficult getting to the actual underlying message through all the behavioral chaos and word salad.
One of the parents I used to represent called the scripted speech from her daughter’s emotional outbursts “throw-up words” because they were just verbal barf that came with all the other out-of-control behaviors, not a real conversation. In the moment, she didn’t know what the Hell she was saying, and she usually felt terrible about it afterwards. The moment you can discern “throw-up words” from real conversation and stop caring about what is being said and then focus on why it’s being said, that is the moment you regain control of the conversation. The words are the symptoms and you need to treat the underlying disease, metaphorically speaking.
Express caring for their welfare and forgiveness for their crude behaviors. Forgiveness means they aren’t living rent-free in your head once you’re done responding to them; it’s for your benefit, not theirs. Let them stew in their own juices if that’s what they really want to do, but that shouldn’t affect the quality of your life.
Sometimes, all you can do is say, “Bless your heart, you poor tragic creature,” and move on to your own bliss without carrying the dead weight of their opinions or the living with the consequences of their behaviors. There’s no reason to feel bad about that. Love is doing what’s in the best interests of everyone involved, including yourself. And, so, on that note, thank you for hearing me out and, until next time, peace be with you.
Locus of Control in the Classroom & the World at Large
I watch the news and read up on a lot of court cases and pending legislation these days because all of it is related in some way with the work I do in special education as an advocate, paralegal, consultant, and direct services provider. Congressional spending, public policy changes, new litigation, and all kinds of other world events have direct bearing on special education and the individuals I assist and protect. Similarly, how the powers that be respond to the legally protected needs of the individuals I serve speaks volumes to the state of our democracy at the local level and the degree to which State and federal oversight is effective or not.
The concept of locus of control is not widely known or understood, but it should be. It’s a fairly simple developmental concept to understand for adult-level problem-solvers. It’s one of those things that, if the majority of intact adults understood it, it would contribute to what could effectively be psychological herd immunity against the fringe ass-hattery that is taking up way too much political and cultural space right now in our modern day societies, and help us restore and repair things to a more equitable equilibrium.
Locus of control describes a person’s understanding of the degree to which they have agency over their own lives. A person with mostly an external locus of control believes that life is something that happens to them and some other external force beyond their control is responsible. Having an external locus of control is normal for babies, but dangerous for adults. Conversely, a person with mostly an internal locus of control will assume responsibility for everything that happens around them, engaging in controlling behaviors as well as delusional thought, often to a narcissistic degree.
Living at either extreme of the locus of control spectrum is unhealthy. At one extreme is the willing victim and the other is the predator. As with most of these kinds of things in psychology, what is considered “normal” when it comes to locus of control can be expressed through statistics using normal distributions. Here, “normal” means the majority of people who fall along the locus of control spectrum between the two far extremes, with some mix of both internal and external loci of control depending on the unique circumstances relative to the individual developmental maturity of each person.
I don’t want to focus on the statistical outliers on that spectrum here. I want to focus on the majority of us who fall along the locus of control spectrum between those two extremes and how the relative ratio of internal versus external plays out in each of us such that it affects our behavior and how we raise our children to become intelligent, empathetic, responsible independent thinkers or not.
In order for us to apply the science successfully to the classroom and beyond, we have to first apply it to ourselves. We need to understand our own perceptions of locus of control before we can start thinking about other people’s individual perceptions of it and how that affects their behaviors and relationships.
A healthy concept of locus of control is somewhere in the middle between fully external and fully internal. The reality is that some parts of life are beyond our immediate control and other parts of life are entirely within our control. Rather than applying the concept of the locus of control spectrum to the person as a uniform monolith, one’s standing is better understood by applying this spectrum to a specific situation and asking, “How much of this immediate situation is actually within my control?”, and “How many things are actually within my control that can change this situation for the better?”
There is a commonly used prayer among Christians called the Serenity Prayer, which goes: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” This is the essence of the locus of control self-assessment in day-to-day life. I can think of no better tradition that captures how reality works with such scientific simplicity than this. Science doesn’t compete with religion, it measures the truth of Creation. When used responsibly, it reveals miracles that can teach us a great deal.
Sometimes the miracles are more magnificent than previously realized and only known once more data comes in, such as when Galileo asserted that the Earth revolved around the Sun rather than vice versa, which contradicted the teachings of the Church at the time. Unfortunately for him, he was found guilty of heresy and had to choose between 1) pleading innocent totally knowing that he would be found guilty and would have to spend the rest of his life in prison, or 2) taking a plea deal and spending the rest of his life on house arrest, even though he was totally right. The miracle is actually greater than what the Church was teaching, but it was afraid of losing the trust of its followers if it admitted that it had been wrong about the Earth being the center of Creation with everything in the Heavens revolving around it, so Galileo died a convicted criminal for asserting the truth of God’s actual Creation.
We’re seeing the same kind of thinking right now when it comes to climate change. The miracle is bigger and more magnificent than previously realized. Sadly, our abuse of the knowledge we’ve gathered as a species thus far has been to the detriment of the environment all around us. The harm we’ve done is now proving to us how things are supposed to work and what we’ve misunderstood in the past. The Creator speaks to us through our errors and lets us know when we’re failing to abide by the terms of Creation. We have invited harm upon ourselves through our own behaviors and now we have to change our behaviors to save ourselves. This goes directly to every person’s unique concept of their own respective individual locus of control.
There are now corporations whose very existence depend on us believing we need them. They don’t want to lose our dollars, so they can’t afford for us to lose faith in their businesses and they’re attempting to conceal the fact that what they are doing contradicts the larger miracles that have been revealed by science. I’m thinking of processed foods, farming-related dust bowls, and fossil fuels, here, and the amount of money spent on marketing and lobbying by these industries to influence how they are perceived by the public versus what they are actually doing.
These industries abuse the science to manipulate the masses with specific messages targeted to specific audiences, using algorithms to spread their messages online, and relying on normal human word-of-mouth discourse to take it from there. These are the same tactics used by political propogandists, and there can be a blurry line between corporate marketers and political propogandists. An informed public recognizes the attempts at manipulation for what they are and rejects them outright; an uniformed public becomes more easily radicalized and brand-loyal.
All of that goes to how locus of control operates on the larger scale. Understanding that, the next question here is, “How can that knowledge be applied in the classroom?” My response is that it depends on the ages and developmental levels of the students involved.
If you’re talking about young children or older students with developmental delays, these concepts need to be explicitly taught and the students need to be given clear, succinct, easy-to-understand descriptions of what they have the power to do for themselves and what requires the authority of others. Visuals, including classroom artwork and graphics, should be placed where students can see them during the school day to reinforce the messaging from the explicit instruction.
Honestly, if School House Rock were to make a new video teaching kids about locus of control, that would be amazing. Until then, it’s up to parents and teachers to learn about it and incorporate it into their parenting and classroom management practices, respectively.
With our older kids, my go-to is always Project-Based Learning (PBL). If the project is to assemble an Ikea cabinet using the instructions as a small group of three or four students, then it’s a great way to teach locus of control concepts. The students can’t change the physical features of the cabinet being built, the parts that come with it, or the instructions provided. That’s beyond their control. What they can control is their own behavior in response to these uncontrollable facts. How they go about putting together the cabinet is a choice. What they are putting together is not. This is a balance of external and internal locus of control to fit the situation.
It doesn’t have to be Ikea furniture. It could be anything. In our sister program, the Learn & Grow Educational Series, I’ve embedded this locus of control instruction into PBL lesson plans that require students to create self-watering gardening containers from 5-gallon buckets and use them to grow food. Anything that is project-based will come with fixed parameters that go to an external locus of control, and students will have to make choices and act upon them, which goes to internal locus of control, to achieve the intended outcome. For most people, having at least a little bit of external imposed structure helps them organize their thoughts and get things done.
Products that provide at least part of the solution by their very nature will impose some structure on the situation that limits the number of choices a person has to make to get the job finished. For example, simply having shopping carts available by the front door of the supermarket immediately solves a problem for shoppers that makes gathering what they need to buy without a huge hassle more accessible to them than if they had to figure out how to carry around their stuff while shopping on their own.
This can be equally applied in the classroom. A teacher can use a desktop office tray for papers and folders, perhaps several stacked upon each other. Each tray could serve a specific purposes, such as one for turning in completed work, one turning in notes from home and permission slips, and one for suggestions for making the classroom better, for example. The system could be designed to support the teacher’s classroom management strategy and impose some external structure on students’ classroom behaviors.
Simple organizational strategies that set the stage are often enough externally imposed features for our typically developing learners to develop effective and efficient learning practices, particularly if these practices are modeled by the teacher in the beginning and by other students once they adopt these practices as the school year progresses and these strategies are being regularly used. These strategies eventually become part of the routine because they work, freeing up mental energy that can then be invested in troubleshooting more complex concerns.
Routines are convenient because they relieve us from having to think too hard about what we need to do in the moment, which allows us to then think ahead about what else we can take on now. When we have a lot of actual thinking to do about other things, reducing the things we always have to do in the moment to simple, thoughtless routines is an efficient use of time. Routines that can be memorized using music can become some of the most relied upon routines in a person’s life, because music seems to amplify the strength of the routine -for most people when they are paired together. This has implications for day-to-day life, as well as classroom practices. It’s just a good strategy for life for most people, though everyone processes information differently and not all strategies will work for all people.
It appears that, generally speaking, it is normal for humans to strive for some kind of equilibrium that strikes a balance between external and internal locus of control. In general, we want enough external controls to limit the number of choices we have to make in a given situation, but not so many limits that the only options for us to choose from are bad ones. Too many choices and we can’t decide what to do. With somewhat limited choices, even if its the lesser of all evils, at least you can make the best of what you’re given to work with. With extremely limited choices, it really doesn’t matter what you decide because you’re screwed no matter what.
Creating a safe and nurturing classroom that fosters functional independence among its students requires the same kind of thought and planning as does creating a safe and nurturing society that encourages individual freedoms. An understanding of locus of control can go a long way towards improving both, and I’m encouraging you to invest the time to learn more about it, contemplate your own perceptions regarding your own locus of control, and consider how other people’s choices are influenced by their own perceptions of locus of control. It gives you a new dimension by which to consider other people’s behaviors, but it only makes sense once you’ve learned to understand it about yourself.
From there, you can begin to think about what someone else’s concept of locus of control might be. You must have a relatively healthy self-concept of your own locus of control in order to be able to conceptualize and empathize with someone else’s. You basically have to walk a thousand miles in your own moccasins before you’re able to walk a mile in someone else’s with understanding.
All of this goes, then, into a larger analysis of the function of a person’s behavior, which requires a behavior analytic approach. When you’re trying to figure out where another person is coming from, whether as a parent trying to understand your child or as an IEP team member trying to understand another member of the team, having a fairly accurate understanding of that person’s sense of locus of control about whatever is being discussed goes a long way towards understanding whether that person is going to seek solutions or make excuses for a problem you need solved.
In applied behavioral analysis, the function of the behavior is ascertained by determining what antecedents triggered the behavior and what consequences rewarded its use. Ecological factors are examined to further determine if anything specific in the environment, such as a specific noise or person, and/or any other specific circumstantial factors, such as time of day or disruption in routine, increased the likelihood of the behavior occurring in the presence of the antecedent. These exacerbating factors are referred to as “setting events” or “motivating operations.” Many professionals use the term “M.O.s” to refer to these exacerbating factors.
Some antecedents arise from internal body and/or mental states experienced by the individual that no one else can observe, which are referred to as “private events.” In other instances, the antecedent may be an externally observable factor, but there are private event M.O.s involved. Locus of control is an internal, private event, that often influences how a person responds to antecedents in their immediate environments, and it can often be deduced by observing the person’s behaviors. How someone reacts to external stimuli can reveal a great deal about how much control that person believes they have in a given situation.
Whether you’re talking about working with learners or participating in important meetings, understanding where another person is coming from in that regard can be an eye-opening experience that better informs how you need to respond to their efforts to work with or against you. It also tells you just how much of the situation is within your control and how much of it isn’t, so you can choose your actions wisely. It helps you discern that which you can control from that which you can’t so that you can exercise the courage necessary to achieve what is actually realistically within your reach, making as much positive progress as you are able and creating opportunities to create even greater improvements later on in time.
As much as I hope you are able to use this information to create and implement good IEPs, I equally hope you can incorporate it into your understanding of yourself and others and you progress along your own journey of self-discovery and growth as a person. The more we understand each other, the easier it becomes to relate with each other and work more collaboratively than competitively. I believe it is the responsibility of those of us who study these sciences to explain what we know about healthy human development so as to help humanity develop in healthy ways as time goes on. We need to be getting better as these kinds of things over time, and that can’t be achieved by withholding the professional knowledge from the general public.
I’m happy to democratize that knowledge to the degree that I am able, and I encourage you to do your own additional research into the science around locus of control and related psychological concepts. I hope this helps you develop a healthier understanding of yourself and others, and contributes towards your successful efforts to make the world a better place. I think this is critical knowledge for any and all parents participating in the IEP or 504 process for their children in the public schools. It’s relevant to understanding your child’s individual needs, as well as where everyone else on the team with you is coming from and how to respond to them in ways that are most likely to protect your child.
From an advocacy standpoint, it is important as a parent in one of these meetings to know if you’re being shut down by a bureaucrat agency loyalist enforcing an internal policy that violates the law because they believe they lack the authority to buck the unlawful policy, and are thus acting according to an external locus of control. Someone like this is incapable of legitimate problem-solving and it’s a waste of time arguing with them. This is when you, as a parent, may find it necessary to file a compliance complaint with your state’s education department, a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), a due process complaint with your state’s special education hearing office, or some other legal action.
In a situation like this, once they’ve said, “No,” and blamed agency policy in spite of the language of the law, go straight to accountability. You’re wasting time trying to convince them they are breaking the law once you’ve made the record about it the first time. You may still end up resolving things through a confidential settlement agreement, but the offending agency may not be willing to make things right by you until you file something that gives it the opportunity to settle with you in secret. Sometimes, a governing board of a public agency will not authorize the costs of resolution unless it gets rid of a legal action; as a policy, they will not do the right thing unless/until they are forced to by a legal action of some kind taken by the parents.
When you’re talking about locus of control, such “leadership” starts out by laying heavy on the internal locus of control by choosing not to comply with the law, but shifts to external locus of control once a parent actually takes some kind of formal, legal action to resolve the matter. The only way the agency can regain and restore internal locus of control to the point of functional equilibrium at that point is usually to settle the matter by way of some kind of confidential agreement by which it gives up all kinds of considerations to the family but admits no fault on the part of the offending agency.
When you can understand the power dynamics that revolve around locus of control, it makes you a more savvy and practical negotiator. It makes you better at assessing other people’s credibility, as well. Most importantly, as a parent, it makes you a more compassionate teacher and cheerleader for your children as you help them navigate all of the situations and relationships they will experience throughout childhood in your care. You are better to yourself and everyone else being as whole as you can be. I wish you nothing but the best as you become increasingly healthy and whole throughout your journey through this life, and thank you for the support you provide to my efforts to bring this kind of information to you. Peace be with you, my friends.
Trauma-Informed Special Education Evaluations & Programming
Attention is finally being given to the effects of childhood trauma on childhood development and learning, but it’s still not fully incorporated into the mainstream as common knowledge. Only when trauma-informed education becomes the norm can childhood trauma be prevented and responded-to with greater efficacy.
Because trauma often begets mental health issues, not the least of which being Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and can also result in permanent physical disabilities, depending on the nature of the trauma, individuals with such impairments can become eligible for protections under disability-related laws. This includes Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (504), the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
For this reason, one would think that the special education community is conducting trauma-informed assessments and considering the trauma-related needs of its students with IEPs. One would be thinking incorrectly, however. I’ve lost count of the number of special education assessments I’ve seen that are entirely silent regarding the unique traumatizing events of a student’s past, like they just didn’t happen or are entirely irrelevant to the assessment process, including in mental health evaluations.
I’m dealing with one of those, right now, as a matter of fact. The very signs of trauma and the historical events that likely contributed to them were described in detail to the mental health assessor, and none of those details appeared anywhere in her report. So, basically, what I took from the situation was that some ding-dong baby doll who fell out of the lap of luxury and into a master’s degree in social work was dispatched to assess a student with some pretty significant symptoms who had previously lived for 11 months with her mother in their car and who had also witnessed her mother getting mowed down in the street by a car while they were crossing the street together at a protected cross-walk, leaving this student as a young child to scream for help in the middle of the street. None of these past traumatic events were discussed in the assessment report, nor were any of the symptoms that had been brought to the assessor’s attention. She interviewed the student once via Zoom and noted that the student wasn’t very forthcoming, and relied on classroom observations conducted by a school psychologist, who is not a mental health clinician.
Thankfully, once it was brought to his attention, the involved school district’s special education director was just as taken aback as I was and immediately agreed to fund an Independent Educational Evaluation (IEE) in mental health at public expense, which is basically a second opinion conducted by an outside, uninvolved provider, that is funded by the District. We’re in the process of finding an outside assessor to conduct it, but we expect the situation for this student to be resolved once it’s done. However, this was just the latest of several cases we’ve worked in this same District over the last 15 years in which trauma and mental health issues are not being properly considered, and it’s a problem that is not unique to this particular district. It seems to be a fairly systemic problem in cases we encounter from around the country.
So, I want to focus on what trauma-informed special education assessments and programming look like in actual practice, and how the applicable science and law come together around trauma-related special needs that require 504/ADA accommodations and/or IEPs. I first want to direct you to the peer-reviewed research, starting with the article, “Considerations for Incorporating Trauma-Informed Care Content within Special Education Teacher Preparation and Professional Development Programs,” which appeared in Vol. 1 No. 2 (2021) of the Journal of Special Education Preparation, the full text of which is available for free online.
I think this article does a good job of explaining what it means to incorporate Trauma-Informed Care (TIC) into special education, so I’m not going to do a lot of rehashing, here. One of the things I like about this article is that it doesn’t just speak to special education as a stand-alone entity; it discusses the application of trauma-informed care within an evidence-based Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS), such as that found with Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), which are meant to catch students before they fall too far behind and provide them with whatever types of supports they need to be successful, whether through special or general education. This naturally lends it to speak to the related “child find” issues.
This article cites other researchers by saying: “… adverse childhood experiences (ACEs; Felitti et al., 1998) … are all common experiences for students with emotional/behavioral disorders (Cavanaugh, 2016).” Certainly, one way to identify children who may need special education as per “child find” is to look at those already known to have experienced ACEs to determine if they are showing any signs of emotional and/or behavioral disorders. The moment it is known that a general education student has survived a traumatic event, a special education assessment referral should be made and it should include sufficiently comprehensive mental health evaluations to accurately capture any impact the traumatic event has had on the child’s ability to access and participate in education. Even if the child ultimately does not qualify for special education, Section 504 relies on the special education process to gather its own assessment data to inform appropriate 504/ADA accommodations for children with disabilities who do not require special education.
If the child is unavailable for learning due to extreme trauma, then the interventions have to restore the child to the point of being available for learning again, unless the child is medically incapacitated. If medical interventions are first necessary, those obviously come before any special education or 504/ADA accommodations. A child has to be physically medically stabilized before they are available to participate in education and anyone can know what to do for them at school. New assessments will have to be done to determine the student’s new baselines once physical medical stability is achieved.
If the child is psychiatrically incapacitated, it may be necessary for that child to be placed in a residential psychiatric treatment facility with an onsite school in order for the child to become available for learning. I’m not a huge fan of residential placement, but there’s a time and a place for everything. I’ve had a number of students benefit tremendously from a special education residential placement for these kinds of severe mental health needs, though I’ve also had students on my caseload molested and assaulted in some of the residential programs, so this model of intervention is hardly a monolith or panacea.
The above-cited article makes the following recommendations: “Considerations for special education professional development includes teachers undergoing an extensive training that addresses the following components:
- Understanding Trauma and ACEs (Dong et al., 2003)
- Challenging current thought processes vs. TIC attributions (Hoskins et al., 2018)
- Identifying ways educators may be trauma informed (Plumb et al., 2016)
- Direct overview of MTSS (August et al., 2018)”
Understanding Trauma and ACEs: School site staff who do not have a professional understanding of what trauma is, what ACEs are, and how they affect student performance are at a gross disadvantage when it comes to actually serving the public good. The pervasiveness of trauma in everyday life, anymore, is something we all have to consider when dealing with each other. We should certainly be able to expect our professionals who encounter it in the field daily to have an intelligent plan of action for how to respond to it appropriately in their professional capacities. We shouldn’t be ending up with privileged ding-dongs with fancy degrees who can’t recognize what they’re looking at when they encounter childhood trauma in the field.
Challenging current thought processes vs. TIC attributions: Long-entrenched policies and practices that fail to meet the needs of certain populations are effectively institutionalized biases against them. In professional settings in which no policies and procedures exist to appropriately respond to the needs of students who have experienced ACEs and trauma, there is no institutionalized response to proactively address the situation, which becomes an institutionalized proactive effort to ignore it. When people feel powerless to help someone being hurt by something, it’s a natural psychological defense mechanism for them to blame the victim for deserving mistreatment rather than live with feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, cowardice, or whatever else feels bad that goes along with not helping. Victim-blaming is meant to offset feelings of guilt for not helping.
Too often, adults in the public school setting become angry at children for manifesting the symptoms of trauma and ACEs, punishing them instead of helping them and making a bad situation worse. There is no excuse for this kind of conduct in a professional educational setting, and certainly not in this day and age when there is plenty of peer-reviewed research capturing strategies and approaches that actually work. As I’ve said in other posts, however, there are no real mechanisms in place in public education at this time for the consistent promulgation of the peer-reviewed research among the educators to equip them with the resources to translate the research into actual, practical classroom applications.
Where parents really need to get vocal at their school board meetings is in advocating for the application of the peer-reviewed research to the design and delivery of public education. It’s not like we don’t have evidence of what works. Education research continues to compile and accrue over time into an ever-enriching body of knowledge that can be used to solve so many of the world’s ills that it should be a crime that it’s not already being actively applied by competent professionals throughout the public education system on the regular.
Identifying ways educators may be trauma-informed: It seems that using logic models has been the most effective way to communicate concepts around identifying ways that educators can become trauma-informed. The School District of Philadelphia has created a logic model that serves as a useful example, which is illustrated below.
You can look at this logic model more closely by clicking on the images or the link in this post. What you can see once you look at it is that the District’s MTSS incorporates TIC into its design. I can’t speak to the fidelity with which The School District of Philadelphia actually abides by this design or the degree to which it works. I can only show it to you as an example of how to create this kind of a design, which requires staff to be trained on how to implement it in order for it to actually work. By creating this kind of operational framework and training everyone within the school site on how to carry it out, staff become informed on what to look for and what to do when they see it, when it comes to trauma and its potential for undermining student learning.
Direct overview of MTSS: The above example shows how TICs are woven into an existing MTSS. Very often, special education personnel don’t understand where they fit into the overall tiers of intervention, and usually because the rest of their co-workers and superiors have no idea, either. None of these MTSS designs will work if staff don’t recognize themselves in all of the pieces of the design for which they are each actually responsible. It’s not enough to create a pretty logic model on paper. The logic model has to actually be executed according to its design or it’s worthless. To that end, it is imperative that both general and special education staff understand where the lines are drawn between their two universes and a child needs to be referred for special education assessment.
I actually have a case from my past that I can refer to as an example. In this case, the district had some kind of MTSS but it had failed to work in special education and the “child find” process in any kind of meaningful way. As such, staff didn’t know their roles when it came to “child find” and made mistakes all over the place. This was a case of multiple ding-dongs who had no idea what they were doing, trying to fake their ways through the MTSS design process and botching it royally. What’s worse is that the involved student in this example was being raised by his grandmother, who had been a teacher for this same school district for over 30 years at the time of this hearing, and her daughter, the student’s mother, had gone on to become a teacher of the same district, as well. The employees of this district were doing this to each other’s families, and purely out of ignorance and a grotesque leadership failure.
When done correctly, a school- or district-wide MTSS that incorporates TIC will naturally lend itself to helping those children who need special education mental health supports for any reason. Investing in developing a high-quality MTSS that incorporates TIC will appropriately funnel the children who need special education mental health services into the appropriate levels of intervention relative to their unique, individual needs.
That said, it’s not enough to simply refer children suffering from mental health issues related to trauma for assessment. The quality of the assessments conducted matter and leaving out critical information about the trauma a child has already experienced and how it is affecting that child’s learning is a fatal flaw that compromises the validity of the assessment and gives the parents a legitimate reason to disagree and request IEEs at public expense.
Administrators looking to cut corners will often try to minimize costs by having school psychologists do some basic social/emotional assessments instead of having proper mental health evaluations done by licensed mental health providers. This is no place to be cutting corners. First, it saves no money in the long run. Pretending the problem isn’t as bad as it actually is will blow up in your face, eventually. The longer the problem goes untreated, the harder and more costly it will become to address later on. Secondly, it’s heinously unethical. What kind of a person do you have to be to deny necessary mental health services because you don’t want to spend the money? Any school district administrators who think their budgets are more important than the lives of their students shouldn’t be employed in public education. The budget exists for the benefit of the students, not the administration. For that matter, school district administrators exist for the benefit of students; students do not exist for the purpose of lining administrators’ pockets with unearned tax dollars.
I know the technical issues of how to integrate TIC into a schoolwide system of successful interventions is a topic worthy of a full-day workshop and I’m not doing justice to the entire issue, here. But, I’m hoping that I’ve given you enough to think about TIC in special education and some pointers towards some resources that can help you as a parent, educator, and/or concerned taxpayer to address these kinds of challenges. We need to appreciate the degree to which special education can be a tool to protect our local communities and national security from unstable individuals responding to their personal traumas in ways that can hurt many other people in addition to themselves. In this day and age of mass shootings by people suffering from significant mental health issues, we can’t neglect to preempt these behaviors where we can by intervening in the lives of children who experience trauma and/or have mental and emotional health needs that affect their access to learning and behaviors. It takes a village to raise a child, and this is how it’s done when the child has experienced trauma.
Legitimate Parent Advocacy vs. Conspiratorial Movements
As much as the work we do at KPS4Parents focuses on social justice issues that include parents’ legal rights in the special education process and related areas of public agency regulation, I’ve been hesitant until now to say anything about what has been charading as a parents’ advocacy movement, lately. This is mainly because of the most recent developments involving the leadership of one such faux parent advocacy organization, Moms for Liberty, which pretty much speak for themselves and eliminate the need for me to work that hard at supporting my arguments with evidence.
I’m busy. I don’t have time for deep dives into the world of politics when I’m already doing deep dives into the peer-reviewed research and case law during the regular school year. I see every bit of stupidity and ineptitude in local government as we see in Congress on the daily. Idiot politicians are the reason why lay advocates and civil rights attorneys are needed in a democracy. Mark Twain is quoted as saying, “In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then He made school boards.” It’s not like any of this is new.
I’ve got over 20 students on my lay advocacy caseload, at least two of those cases are going to due process, several of those cases have outstanding remedies due to them from a federal investigation of their local school district that have not yet been negotiated, and others are requiring me to work with families at the local agency level to hopefully resolve their concerns, all the while also making the record just in case formal complaints or litigation become unavoidable. I’m not going to stop all of that to write a blog post/podcast episode unless the moment is right, and it’s now right.
I’m won’t rehash the Moms for Liberty scandal, here. You can read up on that on your own time, if you don’t already know about it. What I’m focusing on here are the social and psychological sciences as they interact with the rule of law in our democratic republic, and what that means for this country to have a government that is “of the people, for the people, and by the people” with respect to legitimate parent advocacy.
We’re meant to have a representative government and it isn’t representative of most of “the people” when a tiny minority of whack-job conspiracy theorists and con artists with prefrontal cortices made of cottage cheese or something close to it, are put into positions of authority, or otherwise have influence over those with authority, and have access to taxpayer resources with no effective systems of oversight or accountability. Once in power, people like these then attempt to bend reality to fit their whacko notions of how things should be, regardless of what the majority of their constituents want or need or the actual facts of the situation, usually for their own financial gain and without regard for any harm done to others. Berkeley Breathed referred to such an individual as a “tax-fattened hyena,” in one of his old Bloom County cartoons. I find the term eternally apt.
I find that these are “the people” employed within the public sector who are the most opposed to any kind of data collection that could be used as an audit trail and enforcement tool, which is why the backend business automation of most publicly funded agencies at the local level is such garbage. It’s really hard to misappropriate public funds when you’re leaving digital footprints right back to yourself in the process. Effective office automation on par with what has been happening in the private sector for decades has been limited in the public sector for supposed budgetary reasons, but the reality is that the ROI on a good system would make the upgrade pay for itself in no time. It’s not costs that are being avoided, it’s audit trails.
Because “the people” are expected to hold their government accountable according to the rule of law, it is necessary for “the people” to know how to do so and be given access to public agency information through various client’s rights, freedom of information, and public records laws. Because of our laws regarding public access to public agency information and the mechanisms of accountability that are built into the regulations that describe how our public agencies are supposed to operate, our democracy equips us with powerful tools that allow us to advocate for appropriate outcomes as regular members of society, including as parents for our children in programs for which we pay taxes to serve their needs as a matter of law.
Keeping parents in the dark about their rights and the proper paths for recourse and distracting them with pointless displays of anger and hostility are all parts of a strategy to undermine legitimate parent advocacy, not support it. It drains parents’ energy, time, and resources to pursue legitimate remedies by wasting it all on displays of emotion that rarely change policies and create more problems than they solve. The actual processes and procedures afforded to parents as per their lawful parent rights in the public education setting are the only mechanisms of democracy that are designed to address meritorious parental concerns.
No matter how many fits at a school board meeting a parent may throw, until they file a formal complaint of some kind, there’s not much anyone can do. When parents bring their legitimate concerns to a school board meeting, the proper response is for someone from the school board to help the parent exercise their rights, including helping them file a formal complaint. When parents attempt to argue for things outside the scope of what their public schools can legally do, the schools are obligated to explain how the rules actually apply and what can legitimately be done to address such parental concerns.
In the case of special education, this is specifically regulated at 34 CFR Sec. 300.503, which mandates the provision of Prior Written Notice (PWN) to parents whenever a change to a child’s special education program is proposed or denied by the public education agency. If the public education agency’s explanation doesn’t make sense for why it is proposing changes or refusing changes requested by parents, parents have a right to use whatever cockamamie excuse they’ve been given in their PWNs as evidence against their public education agencies in regulatory complaints or legal proceedings. Our democracy protects parents with rules like these, but knowing how to use them and enforce them isn’t something most parents know how to do.
One of the methods of depriving people of their rights is to deprive them of any knowledge of past successful efforts to secure the rights of citizens, such as with the litigation and legislative history of special education law, and the processes and procedures by which everyday people can now assert their rights under the law because of how past cases were successfully argued and won and how legislators have responded to the relevant scientific and legal developments over time. This is why these organizations are so strongly opposed to any curriculum that accurately describe the effects of slavery on American society and governance, and don’t want to acknowledge the growing body of science that better explains gender and sexual orientation than what the science of the past was able to tell us because it challenges behaviors that have been learned and practiced over generations according to religious and political beliefs that don’t always abide by observable reality.
For example, during the 1600s, the astronomer Galileo died under house arrest for heresy after daring to assert that the Earth rotates around the sun based on his observations using telescopes and calculating the movements of the stars and planets, because this contradicted the Church’s position at that time that the Earth was the center of the Universe and everything in the skies rotated around the Earth. Galileo was right, of course. He witnessed the actuality of God’s miracle, but rather than revel in its realization, the Church rejected it because it contradicted a long-standing myth that was being knowingly perpetuated by the Church so that it was not contradicted in the eyes of the people, lest it lose their trust and obedience. The Church did not acknowledge that Galileo was right and absolve him of heresy until more than 300 years later during the 20th century.
A fact-based discovery that contradicted the Church in such a significant way would have cost the Church a great deal of credibility among its believers if acknowledged as true, or at least that’s what the Church apparently feared, so it tried Galileo for heresy and gave him the choice of being found guilty and thrown in prison for the rest of his life or accepting a plea deal and spending the rest of his life under house arrest. He took the plea deal.
Whether you’re religious or not, the Universe functions according to set rules that can be measured, analyzed, and understood with enough time and resources. There may be a difference of opinion as to why that is and who or what caused it to happen, but what has actually happened with respect to Creation is an observable fact that simply has to be studied in order for the design’s function and purpose to be understood.
For example, humankind just spent seven years flying a space craft to an asteroid that is due to smack into the Earth in about 150 years so that we can start figuring out now a way to prevent it from hitting us by the time it gets here. We just flew this thing over millions of miles of space, right up to this asteroid, punched the asteroid using a mechanical arm, captured chunks of debris and dust that flew up off the surface of the asteroid from getting punched, then flew the debris and dust all the way back to Earth so we can analyze it and figure out what the asteroid is made of, which will help us figure out how to prevent it from hitting us. You cannot tell me that our species is capable of doing that and yet we can’t apply science to improve the quality of life for every human on our planet without destroying the world around us.
I help everyday families of learners with disabilities acquire the necessary knowledge about the processes and procedures that apply to their disability-related needs and rights so they can successfully advocate for their loved ones according to the applicable science and the rule of law. I understand the regulated processes and procedures that give my clients access to what the law promises them. I use the applicable sciences to identify each learner’s unique needs so as to inform the requests I make of publicly funded agencies and programs on their behalf. I understand what it means to facilitate “the people’s” participation in democracy at the local level, including participation in state and federal investigations, as well as due process hearings and disability-related litigation in local, state, and federal courts.
I understand that the only way to uphold democracy is to participate in it according to its rules and regulations. Anything that undermines the democratic process by violating a student’s constitutional rights, down to a shoddy triennial evaluation or a garbage IEP, is fair game for citizens knowledgeable enough to understand what they are looking at and the remedies available to them to fix anything wrong. Keeping people ignorant of what has worked in the past is a deliberate attempt to undermine people’s advocacy for themselves, their loved ones, and their communities in the present. People who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it, thus learning their lessons the hard way from trial-and-error rather than from the example set by those who came before them, which wastes time and slows down the rate at which society becomes smarter.
The first step of preventing people from advocating for themselves is preventing them from knowing about past efforts of advocacy that were successful, hence the book bans, altering curriculum standards to promote misinformation and omit important accurate information, protesting community-based pro-literacy and historical accuracy efforts spearheaded by minority groups, and attempting to control any other literary outlet that could expose children to facts that make these individuals uncomfortable. Keeping people ignorant is a powerful tool of oppression. That’s why American slaves generally weren’t taught to read. A literate oppressed class can communicate and collaborate more effectively to rise up against their oppressors.
People forget that America went through upheavals similar to what we are experiencing right now, back in the 1980s and 90s with some people freaking out over mandatory seat belt and motorcycle helmet laws and “no smoking” laws in restaurants and bars the same way some people freaked out about vaccines and masks during the worst of COVID. Back then, the Cold War had all the doomsayers expecting everyone to die in an unavoidable nuclear holocaust. Tipper Gore was coming for everybody’s rock music lyrics and Larry Flint, who once ran for president on the Republican ticket, was defending his first amendment right to show exploitative photos of consenting models to consenting purchasers of his published works, thereby effectively defending the first amendment rights of all pornography publishers.
Ironically, many of the men who I remember from back then supporting Larry Flint’s first amendment rights have since taken considerable issue with Colin Kaepernick’s first amendment rights when he peacefully protested murderous police violence against people of color and other minorities, as well as racial inequalities in America in general, by silently kneeling during the national anthem before the start of professional football games. Games! Grown men running around in matching outfits chasing balls and each other, like that’s somehow more important that the fact that we have a national epidemic of people on our local police forces terrorizing and murdering certain groups of people at will and getting away with it. It rather makes clear that they were willing to defend democracy when it meant they could look at pictures of sexually exploited models, but when it comes to protesting homicidal abuses of police authority against people of color and other minorities, as well as racial inequality in general, that is “a horse of another color,” which is disgusting.
My point is that the whacko minority has always been around, hypocritically asserting itself when it sees the opportunity to cite the law in support of its own agenda while denying the same protections to others with whom they disagree, before retreating into the corners and staying silent for a while until circumstances provoke them into coming out of the woodwork again. With each periodic re-entry into the mainstream, the whackos, at least temporarily, recruit others to their cause until their actual motives and sheer stupidity become evident to their recruits, who then abandon them as they begin to recede back into the woodwork. It’s a predictable cycle and now people are living long enough to see it repeat in their lifetimes.
When you realize it’s a predictable cycle, each new “Groundhog Day” moment leaves you better prepared for when the cycle repeats itself again. The benefit of learning from history is not having to waste time repeating past mistakes through trial and error to eventually arrive at the same conclusions. It’s Vygotskian scaffolding realness. It allows you to step into the problem-solving at a much later stage in the process, building upon the knowledge that was gathered by those who came before you, instead of starting from the beginning with nothing.
Here’s what I can tell you about having to interact with the crackpots that have infiltrated the public sector or otherwise raise pointless hell that interferes with the legitimate functions of government at the local level, as well as my childhood growing up in the middle of the still butt-hurt losers of the Civil War who have just been waiting for as long as I can remember for Dixie to rise again so they can get a re-do of the Civil War: I’m not kidding when I say their prefrontal cortices are made of cottage cheese, or the neurological equivalent thereto.
I’m entirely willing to believe that this is due to environmental deprivation of developmental learning opportunities throughout childhood and being raised by uneducated, usually deeply religious, authoritarian parents who supported slavery or descended from people who did, remained bitter and deeply chagrined about losing the Civil War, and relied on corporal punishment as their primary parenting method. I don’t think most of them were necessarily born without intact cognitive hardware to begin with. I think an awful lot of perfectly normal humans born into that culture have been deprived of developmentally appropriate environments during childhood that prevented the full development of their brains due to cultural beliefs that strictly controlled their lifestyles and environments.
There is a famous case study of a poor woman named Genie who was grotesquely neglected and abused by her family, and then subsequently exploited by the scientific community to study the effects on her development of spending the first 13 years of her life either strapped to her bed on her back or strapped into a toilet chair, always alone in her room with almost no human interactions. She spent most of the first 13 years of her life alone in that bare room with no toys, no language, and no intellectual stimulation. As a result, her brain failed to develop and she will always be intellectually, communicatively, and physically disabled and require constant care.
There were a lot of ethical concerns around how the research community handled Genie once she was rescued from her family. That said, her situation provided tremendous insight into what can happen to the brain of a developing child when necessary environmental stimuli are not present to trigger the brain to grow and develop. Play is learning, and formal education only adds to the learning that a child is naturally inclined to pursue independently in a developmentally appropriate environment. When children are deprived of developmentally appropriate environmental stimuli, the parts of their brains that are most ripe for learning are given nothing to learn and will atrophy from lack of use.
Genie’s uniquely terrible situation made clear that, once developmental milestones were lost due to environmental deprivations during childhood, they could not be recovered. This has since informed a great deal of science designed to understand how environments that contain some developmentally appropriate stimuli but not others affect human development across the lifespan, starting in childhood. In attempting to understand why the whackos are acting so whacky, it helps to understand that a fair number of them can’t help it.
This is how we’ve come to understand how It is entirely possible for a person to get just enough input from their childhood and adult environments to learn how to do accounting, cook dinner, and fly a plane, but still have failed to developed in other areas necessary to functioning as a fully capable member of society. Intellectually capable people with under-developed social/emotional functioning can pose a danger to themselves or others, particularly with respect to domestic violence and disgruntled employees.
What we are now starting to understand about the effects of children being raised in environmentally deprived environments explains a lot in hindsight, but creates a whole new set of challenges about how to ethically address this as a threat to domestic tranquility going forward. Our current societal problems with mass shootings are strikingly similar to the suicide bombers of the 9/11 era. Radicalization is a lot easier to achieve with people who have “holes” in their development from inborn disabilities and/or being raised in developmentally deprived environments. Parents who were raised as children in developmentally deprived environments are more likely to perpetuate the deprivation with their own children because they don’t know that something is missing, much less what it is, so they don’t know to add it to their children’s environments.
Education that includes developing critical thinking skills, such as those promoted by the Common Core, is necessary to create a public that is educated enough to participate in our government “of the people, for the people, and by the people,” with any success. So, when these groups start coming for our public education system to remove content and control what facts our students are allowed to be taught and which facts will be withheld from them, that’s censorship, not first amendment freedom of speech or evidence-based instruction. It’s entirely unconstitutional, and it violates best practices.
That is not legitimate parent advocacy. That is an organized effort to undermine our democracy by groups of radicals looking to cloak themselves in the language and superficial appearance of a cause people can support – here, parents’ rights in the public schools – so they can infiltrate, undermine, and profit from running our public systems in a broken way. As someone who does the job for real, I resent getting lumped in with these kooks by public education agency officials and their representatives when I attempt to help a family avail itself of the actual rules and regulations as a legitimate function of democracy. I deal with enough “Karens” employed within the public schools; I don’t need to also be associated with the “Karens” high-jacking the legitimate cause of parents’ rights and using it as a dishonest cover to pursue undemocratic ends.
In the special education context, which serves as a good example of the kinds of regulated mechanisms of democracy that exist at the local level, parents have federally protected rights to, 1) informed consent, meaning they fully understand any special education-related documents to which they are asked to sign their consent, and 2) meaningful parent participation in the IEP process, including a voice in educational placement decisions. This means that a parent’s input has to be seriously considered by all the other members of the IEP team, and it’s understood that the parent is automatically a member of the IEP team as a matter of federal law. The public schools are not permitted to unilaterally decide what goes into a student’s IEP without parental input and parents have recourse if they ever disagree with the public schools about what their students with disabilities require.
There are all kinds of rules and regulations that describe how parents of children with disabilities can avail themselves of the rule of law and enforce their children’s educational and civil rights. The problem is that the rules and regulations are complicated, the science that applies to their children’s unique educational needs is complicated, the processes and procedures take way too long for comfort, and there are usually at least some unrecoverable economic costs to the families that take time to pursue appropriate remedies from the public sector for their loved ones with disabilities. It’s not fair to the person with the disabilities when the people responsible for advocating for them, usually family members, know less than the people from whom they must make these requests.
The power imbalance is significant and is only further complicated by the reality that the public sector employees have millions of taxpayer dollars to tap into to pay lawyers to keep them out of trouble. Think: “pre-conviction Michael Cohen.” These are often high-priced fixers paid by tax-fattened would-be oligarchs who view their publicly funded agencies as their own little personal fiefdoms, and their consumers as just a means to their own personal financial ends, as though public program beneficiaries solely exist to justify the publicly funded paychecks of public agency administrators.
Every state has adopted standards by which all of its public schools must abide for the purposes of providing America’s K-12 students with what each state considers appropriate for students to have learned by each grade level across all core subject areas. These whacko book-banning conspiracy theorists and their dog-and-pony road shows at school board meetings, public libraries, and community-based literary events are taking their arguments to the wrong venues if they don’t like what is being taught in their states.
Most of these folks tend to favor the idea of reduced federal government and increased state rights, so I don’t understand what their argument is, here. They have an existing state right to establish their curriculum standards at the state level, and if they don’t like those standards, they can put forth proposed state legislation or a bring a lawsuit against their state that proposes to change their state’s standards, but their local school districts are still responsible for satisfying their state’s then-current standards until such time as they are changed, as a matter of law because this is a democracy, and that’s how you change the rules if you don’t like them in a democracy. If attempts to change the curriculum at the state level fail, one’s recourse could include filing a lawsuit or running for public office to effect policies directly, not book bans and death threats.
This brings me to the actual strategy that is at play here, which is something I call the “Anger & Fear Engine.” This goes to something that most people understand, which is the fight/flight/freeze mechanism. For many years, people only thought of the fight and flight aspects of it, and I suspect that’s because they rhyme and it’s easy to remember, but in all actuality, when an organism is threatened, it will actually either run away, fight to defend itself, or freeze and get either ignored or attacked. Plenty of people know what it’s like to automatically freeze in a moment of surprise, especially if it’s scary. The fight/flight/freeze mechanism is a very primitive neurological response that is normal in human development, and something humans share in common with almost all other living creatures.
Anger is generally a secondary response that puts one on the offensive after something has initially put one on the defensive. One gets mad when made to feel afraid, vulnerable, betrayed, insulted, offended, disrespected, rejected, inferior, etc. All of those things instantly make people feel bad about themselves, at least until they’re done processing what is going on, at which point the fight/flight/freeze mechanism kicks in. Anger occurs along with the adrenaline rush that hits when that “switch” is “flipped” from feeling compromised to going on the offensive.
If you opt for fight, you’ve taken that defensiveness and flipped it to going on the offensive. If you opt to flee or freeze, the problem is likely to remain unresolved, at least temporarily. Sometimes you need to retreat and regroup before you know how to most effectively go on the offensive and fight back. Flight can serve a constructive purpose if it buys you the time to figure out what you need to do and what tools you will need to fight back and win. This is the primary reason why most of my clients do not sign agreement to any important documents when they are presented; we take our time to review them outside of any meetings when we have time to sit and focus on what they actually say before responding to them in writing with any signatures. Freezing may buy time if it doesn’t result in getting attacked; if anything, it can buy time until an opportunity to either fight or retreat presents itself.
Dr. Martin Luther King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Those words entirely capture the amount of time it takes to do a good job of gathering the necessary data and documents to inform an appropriate program of instruction for a student with disabilities, much less engage in any enforcement mechanisms that might also be necessary to make that happen.
British film producer Peter Brook is quoted as saying, “Violence is the ultimate laziness.” His point was that negotiations and adult-level problem-solving require a lot of serious thought that is based on a comprehensive-enough understanding of the underlying facts, which can take a long time, but bashing people over the head can take just a few seconds and you don’t have to think that hard to do it. Violence is lazy because it doesn’t include all the hard thought and collaboration that is required for peace. Have you noticed that the people who do the most complaining rarely have a workable plan to fix whatever they’re complaining about? They exist to grieve, not resolve.
Fear can become anger very quickly, and becoming angry can instill fear in others, which can prompt them to become angry as well, hence the “Anger & Fear Engine.” It’s a common psychological response to threats, but uncontained anger and violence towards societies or specific members of society are the methods of barbarians. They are the methods of the lazy or incapable. Successful strategists can manipulate environmental factors according to best practices and the rule of law such that other people’s behaviors are shaped and changed into something more conducive to a healthy, thriving community without any fighting at all, such as when policies and practices actually meet the needs of the people. Sun Tzu asserted in The Art of War that the most successful war is the war you prevent and never have to fight.
The problem, however, is that the dangerously large minority of people whose prefrontal cortices are something akin to cottage cheese literally lack the neurological hardware to understand how to participate in the adult-level problem-solving necessary to seriously address society’s challenges. Legitimate parent advocacy requires a lot of research and writing according to science and law, not screaming in school board meetings, blocking the entrances of public libraries, or disrupting community-based literacy programs. Any organization that purports to engage in standing up for parents’ rights should be actually participating in activities that involve the actual mechanisms of democracy, or they are just fundraising off the backs of people in need without offering real solutions and telling them the only solutions are harassment and/or violence. They are selling the lazy alternative to people who don’t know how to engage in the real solution.
Moms for Liberty and organizations like it are not legitimate parent advocacy organizations. They do not assist parents in participating in the legitimate democratic processes and procedures that already exist to help parents uphold and enforce their rights. If anything, there is an effort by these groups to obstruct and/or subvert democracy at the local level by passing bigoted, unconstitutional local school board policies and aggressively attempting to uphold and enforce them, even if they are unlawful and unethical. The legitimate complaint and due process mechanisms available to parents are not utilized by groups like these, very often because they would not be successful on their merits for the types of undemocratic culture-war claims they want to assert.
It is so very important for parents to make sure that any outside providers they turn to for support are acting according to best practices and the rule of law, and are legitimately taking the needs of client families into account. Parents should be asking a lot of “how” and “why” questions as they learn how to exercise their rights under the law. The first question any parent should ask when embarking upon an effort to exercise their rights is, “May I please have a copy of my parent rights?” Start there and keep digging for more information if something doesn’t make sense. Call your state’s department of education and ask for explanations of things you don’t understand about the rules and how you can legitimately participate.
If you think your local education agency needs better board leadership, run for school board yourself or support candidates who agree with you about compliance issues that affect your children and local community. The only way to preserve democracy is to participate in it, which means voting, running for office, and availing yourself of complaint and due process procedures as appropriate to each circumstance to create the changes in the world you want to see. Throwing a fit and demanding that everybody else force reality to bend to your will isn’t democracy at all.
Technology and the Intersectionality of Larry P.
Based on the professional peer-reviewed research, intersectionality can be understood as the phenomenon in which an individual person’s social position relative to more than one socially defining characteristic, such as race, language, gender, disability, socioeconomic status, etc., come together to simultaneously impact a person’s status in and access to society at large. Where a person fits into the world is a matter of multidimensional considerations.
When looking at the question of whether the current mechanisms of our system of government, and the behavioral rewards inherently built into them, truly serve the good of the people according to the will of the people and the rule of law, the importance of intersectionality to the accuracy of our analyses cannot be overstated. There is no “silver bullet” that will eliminate all of our social challenges with a single shot. Solving our complex, interconnected problems takes complex planning and execution.
Society is a complex system of inextricably intertwined considerations that all have to be accounted for in order for everyone’s needs and rights to be equally met. There are no cutting corners, and we now have the computing power to stitch together effective systems of equity for all into the ways our government functions, if the technology is just used the right way. The fail-safes that can be built in and the audit trails that would be automatically created would prevent and capture any attempts at abuse just as a matter of normal functioning.
We aren’t there yet, but the application of enterprise-class computing technologies to the delivery of publicly funded services is inevitable, and it will streamline a lot of inter- and intra-agency operations, trimming the administrative fat within a lot of State and local publicly funded programs. Eliminating human error and dishonesty from a public agency’s administrative processes prevents episodes of noncompliance that puts the agency in legal jeopardy.
I’ve told the story in past posts of the case in which one of my students went for months without a needed piece of equipment ordered by his Occupational Therapist (OT) as an accommodation for his sensory needs in the classroom, which meant he was up and out of his seat disrupting the instruction, because of an interpersonal feud between two mean old ladies who hated each other in administration. One of the mean old ladies worked at the student’s local school site in the office, processing purchase requisitions and submitting them to the school district’s main office to be processed into purchase orders.
Now, this was back in the day and all of this was done using paper and the district’s own internal courier service, commonly referred to as “brown mail,” because most things came in those big brown manila envelopes. There was no email. If things needed to move faster than brown mail, it was done via fax. So, context.
The other mean old lady in this situation worked in the accounting office at the district offices. I’m not exactly clear on the details of why they hated each other so much, but I do recall that it had something to do with either a green bean casserole or a three-bean salad – I can’t remember which – at some kind of district holiday party. Like, maybe both of them brought the same thing and it turned into a feud over whose was better, or something? I don’t entirely recall the details, I just remember it was something to do with beans and a holiday party and that it was totally dumb.
The mean old lady at the district offices would sit on the purchase requisitions submitted by the mean old lady at the school site just out of spite, without any regard for the people who had submitted the requisitions to the mean old lady at the school site or any students who may have been impacted by her behaviors. The mean old lady at the school site wasn’t willing to call over to the mean old lady at the district offices to find out what had happened to her requisitions, so she’d become hostile with the school site staff who would ask her where their stuff was. They became afraid to ask her where their stuff was, and just took it as a given that the average purchase would take at least 60 to 90 days before it came in.
Computers don’t do any of that! As many concerns as we have about computers processing things correctly, that comes down to how they are coded. They aren’t going to fight with each other over three-bean salads at a Christmas party and then undermine each other professionally to the detriment of the constituents they are being paid by the taxpayers to serve.
So, knowing that the implementation of the technology is inevitable, our job as informed voters and taxpayers is to understand what that technology needs to be able to do in order to truly perform according to the principles of democracy and the rule of law. That technology must account for how intersectionality impacts every person, whether staff, vendor, or constituent, who must participate in the execution of the government’s responsibilities to the people.
This brings me to a very specific issue within special education in the State of California that has affected way too many families in a detrimental way, which is the intersectionality of the African-American experience with special education in the public schools. This is an under-researched and poorly regulated aspect of our current modern society, here in California, and as the State seeks to shore up democracy in spite of the many forces presently working to undermine it, I believe this specific instance of intersectionality particularly deserves the State’s attention.
I’m speaking specifically of the long-outdated and now inappropriate Larry P. requirement. To quote the State:
“The Larry P. Case“
In 1972 in the Larry P. case, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California found that African American students in the San Francisco Unified School District were being placed into classes for “Educably Mentally Retarded (EMR)” students in disproportionate numbers, based on criteria that relied primarily on the results of intelligence quotient (IQ) tests that were racially and/or culturally discriminatory and not validated for the purposes for which they were being used1. In 1979, the court permanently enjoined LEAs throughout California from using standardized intelligence tests2 for (1) the identification of African American students as EMR or its substantial equivalent or (2) placement of African American students into EMR classes or classes serving substantially the same functions3.
The court held that court approval would be required for the use of any standardized intelligence tests for African American students for the above purposes. The court laid out a state process for this.
The EMR category no longer exists. The court has never held hearings to determine the “substantial equivalent” of the EMR identification or placement, or whether IQ tests are appropriate for assessing African American students for identifications or placements other than the substantial equivalent of EMR. The state process to seek approval has not been invoked.
Although the law on assessment has evolved, as described above, the Larry P. injunction remains in place, and the court retains jurisdiction over its enforcement. The Larry P. injunction does not apply to tests that are not considered standardized intelligence tests.
Footnotes
1 Larry P. v. Riles, 343 F. Supp. 1306, 1315 (N.D. Cal. 1972).
2 The court defined a standardized intelligence test as one that result in a score purporting to measure intelligence, often described as “general intellectual functioning.” Larry P., 495 F. Supp. 926, 931 n. 1 (N.D. Cal. 1979), affirmed in part, reversed in part, 793 F.2d 969 (9th Cir. 1986).
3 Larry P., 495 F. Supp. at 989.
Here’s what everybody needs to get, and which way too many school psychologists and other special education assessors in California’s school districts do not: Larry P. only applies to norm-referenced intelligence quotient (IQ) tests that result in a full-scale IQ (FSIQ) score. It doesn’t apply to the Southern California Ordinal Scales of Development (SCOSD) Cognition subtest. It doesn’t apply to any standardized speech/language assessment measures. It has nothing to do with OT. It has nothing to do with measuring academic achievement using standardized assessment tools.
Unless the assessment measure is designed to produce an IQ score, Larry P. does not apply. But, I’ve now handled a half-dozen cases in the last couple of years in which the whole reason why the students’ IEPs were poorly developed was because they’d been poorly assessed by people who didn’t score any standardized measures for fear of violating Larry P. because they didn’t actually understand the Larry P. rules. The professional development on this issue throughout the State is atrocious.
More to the point, the State needs to invoke its process to seek approval to now use the current, modern, unbiased IQ tests in the special education process, because the assessment failures caused by poorly trained cowards who don’t have the sense to go onto Google and look up the rules themselves and/or push back against administrative supervisors steering them in a non-compliant direction are causing a cataclysm of disastrous consequences at the intersection of the African-American experience and childhood disability in the State’s public schools. This just feeds these kids into the gaping maw of the School-to-Prison Pipeline.
I want to take it one more step further than that, though. I want to encourage more representation of the African-American community in special education assessment. I want to see more college students of color going into school psychology, speech/language pathology, OT, assistive technology, etc., so that they can be there to advocate from an informed, expert perspective within the system for the children from their own community who are at risk of being otherwise misunderstood by people who lack the perspective necessary to appreciate the long-lasting impacts of their assessment errors.
People who don’t actually understand the rules can over-interpret them in an over-abundance of caution. They will not do more than what’s actually been prohibited for fear of doing something they aren’t supposed to, to the point that they’re not doing what they are supposed to be doing. They go from one extreme to the other. In an effort to avoid committing a State-level Larry P. violation, they commit a violation of federal law by failing to appropriately assess in all areas of suspected disability according to the applicable professional standards and the instructions of the producers of the standardized measures used.
It’s currently a “from-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire” situation for the State that is wrecking lives and creating special education violations left and right. The State is setting up its public schools to fail at this particularly significant intersection of social factors, at the same time that the State is seriously considering reparations to the African-American community here in the State.
I promise you that none of the assessors I’ve encountered in the last few years who have been committing these Larry P. violations are actually trying to be hurtful. None of them know what they’re supposed to be doing and they’re making dumb errors in judgment, often under pressure from authoritarian administrators who don’t know an IQ test from a roll of toilet paper.
I’m advocating, here, for both the development and implementation of enterprise-class computing technologies that will automate as much of the public sector’s administrative functions as possible according to the applicable regulations, including mandated timelines, as well as for the State to request the court to reverse Larry P. so that schools are no longer enjoined against using current, valid, appropriately normed IQ tests in the assessment of African-American children in California for special education purposes. These two things matter to each other.
Larry P. is no longer a solution, it’s a problem. It’s not that assessors couldn’t work around it; it’s that they don’t know how to work around it and they commit more errors trying to than anything that could possibly go wrong actually using an IQ test on an African-American student in this modern day and age. Further, the specific ecological factors that contribute to the success of students who are impacted by the intersectionality of their disabilities with other traits that can affect their social standing, such as ethnicity, need to be understood as specific data points worthy of intense administrative and policy-making examination.
As a matter of civil rights and monitoring its own internal compliance with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, one would hope that a public education agency would want to know if particular classes of students are somehow being under-served and need more attention from the adult decision-makers involved in their educational experiences. Who is monitoring each school district’s compliance with Larry P., right now? Is that the job of each district’s 504 Coordinator? How is Larry P. compliance in the field such an issue, still, after all of these years and, more to the point, why is it even still a requirement after all of these years?
Analyzing data from an enterprise-class computing solution regarding intersectionality among special education students would help public education agencies recognize trends of noncompliance and programming failures. This would include rampant Larry P. violations producing shoddy assessments that result in poorly crafted Individualized Educational Programs (IEPs) that fail to deliver appropriately ambitious educational benefits according to the current Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) standard pursuant to the 2017 Endrew F. Supreme Court decision.
Issues of intersectionality can be captured by competent data analysis, which can be greatly facilitated by properly coded enterprise-class computing technologies, and used to ensure that all students, pursuant to Endrew F., receive an IEP appropriately ambitious in light of their unique, individual circumstances. A properly configured system would be spitting out reports detailing the instances of noncompliance to the inboxes of the key decision-makers so they could respond as quickly as possible.
Had such a system already been implemented, the Larry P. violations I’ve encountered all over the State over the last couple of years would have been caught among all the others I haven’t encountered and either rectified or prevented altogether by the State realizing what a colossal disaster Larry P. has become in the field and executing the process outlined by the Court to put an end to it. Were the State monitoring the right data points, it would have realized that Larry P. needed to be ended a long time ago and that it causes infinitely more problems than it solves because it forces assessors to assess African-American students differently than everyone else, which is not equal access.
Frankly, this lack of equal access is more discriminatory than using an IQ test could ever possibly be and becomes even more so when the quality of the assessments are compromised because the assessors don’t know how to comply with Larry P. and they jack up their entire evaluations in the process. Jacked up evaluations lead to jacked up IEPs, which lead to the denial of educational benefits and all the consequences that these children will experience over their lifetimes as a result of being deprived of a FAPE.
The people who make these kinds of errors will be among the first to engage in victim-blaming once these students end up in the justice system, acting like it was unavoidable and inevitable, because they can’t recognize or accept the degree to which they had a hand in making it happen. The people who do it on purpose hide among the people who don’t know what else to do, fueling the victim-blaming, which becomes part of our current, exhausting, ridiculous, ongoing culture wars.
I would rather see Larry P. ended so that it’s no longer creating confusion among assessors in the field and technology implemented that will identify when things like this are going on so they can be stopped early on. I would much rather monitor digital data as a compliance watchdog as I get older than have to go in, one kid at a time, to hold the public education system accountable to its mandates under our democracy’s rule of law. So long as there is transparency in how the system operates and all the real-time data, other than anything personally identifying, is accessible to the public to be analyzed for compliance failures, technology stands to enhance the functions of democracy. But, it all comes down to how its coded.
I expect that watchdogs and advocates in the future will spend more time analyzing system-generated data than necessarily representing individual students, and that a healthier partnership between the public sector and the citizenry can evolve in which the user feedback shared with system developers and operators can be used to enhance its functions and allow each agency to serve its mandated purposes in a compliant manner that is both cost-effective and substantively effective.
The more that social and behavioral science is integrated into the policies, procedures, and applied technologies in the public sector, the more effective and efficient they will be. The more integrated the technologies among all of the public agency stakeholders, the more cohesive the communications and execution of time-sensitive tasks. I see a future in which systemic violations, such as rampant Larry P. failures, will trigger an examination of the intersectionality of disability and other social factors, such as ethnicity, on compliance and help identify when something like getting rid of Larry P. needs to happen sooner rather than later.
I see this Larry P. mess as yet another compelling argument for the implementation of enterprise-class computing technologies within public education administration. I hope the State is listening.
OCR Complaint Results in District-wide Compensatory Education
I’m long overdue to post new content to the KPS4Parents blog, podcast, and social media, but it’s been a busy school year. The continuing fallout from COVID-related school closures that disrupted the educations of most children, and had even more profound effects on our learners with disabilities, has kept me busy.
It’s one of these COVID-related cases that brings me back to the blog and podcast today, because after over two years of waiting for a complaint investigation to get done that was only supposed to take 180 days, the United States Department of Education (USDOE), through its Office for Civil Rights (OCR), finally concluded an investigation of Oxnard Union High School District (OUHSD) and how it handled its students with disabilities during COVID-related school closures. To say I and the student’s family now feel vindicated is an understatement.
You can read OCR’s findings and the resolution agreement that OUHSD entered into with OCR to resolve its violations by clicking here. I’m not going to belabor every little thing in those documents because they speak for themselves and you can read them at your own convenience, but I will summarize them, here. In short, not only did OCR find that the District violated my client’s civil rights, it likely violated the rights of its other students with special needs by refusing, as policy, to provide any in-person disability-related supports and services during campus closures, even if they were necessary in order for the student to access learning.
At the beginning of the pandemic, when the schools were first closed down here in California, the Governor’s office understood immediately that our special needs students were going to be disproportionately affected by the school closures. With the new budget during the summer of 2020, the Governor committed $1B to cover compensatory education costs for students with disabilities who lost educational benefits during the school closures because they couldn’t access the disability-related supports they needed in order to learn.
Back in the Spring of 2020, right after the pandemic hit and the schools shut down, both the Governor and USDOE reminded the public education system that its legal obligations to its students with special needs had not changed in spite of the pandemic and that local education agencies should do everything possible to continue implementing services and supports to students with disabilities during campus closures. But, there was also that extra money set aside by the Governor to compensate students for learning they lost due to unavoidable losses of educational benefits and, presumably, if their local education agencies otherwise botched their pandemic response to the detriment of their kids with special needs.
I’ve been negotiating Informal Dispute Resolutions (IDRs) to claims like these ever since in-person learning resumed, and I’m still dealing with the residual effects of the school closures across my caseload. Which brings me back to this most recent OCR investigation outcome.
What OCR and OUHSD are now doing is working together to repair the harm done to all of the OUHSD students with disabilities at the time of the COVID-related school closures who did not get the services and supports they needed such that they are now owed compensatory education. This is a very big deal!
According to the Resolution Agreement entered into by the District with OCR, OUHSD must send letters to every potentially impacted student and offer a meeting to determine if any compensatory education is owed to them and, if so, document how it will be provided. OUHSD is not being left to its own devices to determine whether it has met each affected student’s needs; OCR will be overseeing OUHSD’s implementation of these remedies to make sure they’re done correctly. OCR will provide the technical assistance to OUHSD to help it clean up this mess and set things straight.
In theory, my work here is done, other than to work with the family of the student for whom I’d filed the complaint to make sure she gets the compensatory education that she is now due. But, for all of the other OUHSD students and former students impacted by this outcome, I still have concerns.
None of the other affected students and their families knew about this complaint. They’re going to get a letter in the mail that they weren’t expecting with an offer to meet with the District to determine if their kids are owed any back-due educational services and not necessarily understand what it is, why they are getting it, or how important it is.
Today’s post is about making sure that the other students who are impacted by this outcome get what they need and are due. I know that OCR will be working with the District to make sure that the families who avail themselves of the offer to meet regarding their possible compensatory education claims have a fair shot at getting the right stuff. I’m not as worried about those families.
The families I’m most worried about are the ones who don’t understand English and/or their rights. We have a fair number of households in the District in which the parents may not be educated sufficiently to understand what any of this is about. Unless they actually take the meeting with the District to learn more, OCR is not in a position to help make sure their kids actually get what they need.
So, my goal with today’s post is to make sure that all the affected OUHSD families are fully aware of what that letter inviting them to meet with the District to discuss compensatory education really means and that they take those meetings and get the remedies that are due to their children. We have to remember that we already paid taxes so these kids could get these services, and then that money was never spent on serving them appropriately during campus closures.
This is about belatedly delivering the services that had been previously purchased by the taxpayers but never actually delivered to their intended recipients. The only part of this that brings new costs into the picture is all of the extra work that will now have to be done to help these kids recoup lost learning and catch back up after having been deprived of what had already been paid for in the first place.
After all of the OUHSD students who were impacted by this outcome, my next concern after that is all of the other students throughout the County whose school districts also refused to provide in-person services during the COVID-related campus closures who were not similarly held accountable by their regulators. The California Department of Education (CDE) has done a shoddy job, in my experience, of addressing these exact same concerns in other area school districts.
None of the school districts in Ventura County, to my knowledge, provided in-person services to any students with disabilities during the campus closures. In fact, I fought tooth-and-nail throughout the period of campus closures with a number of school districts throughout the State to address these same concerns. This instant OCR complaint was just one of many efforts I made to protect my kiddos during campus closures.
One family was able to use their health insurance to get in-home ABA services so their child had 1:1 behavioral supports during distance learning, which was the only reason he was successful, but that was an isolated incident. Another family was able to negotiate a settlement agreement with their district to reimburse the parents for paying for a private aide to come to their house to support their child during distance learning, but that was, again, an isolated incident. Most of my students sat at home with their moms as their 1:1 aides, which either worked or didn’t, depending on the student.
If you look back through the content I created for KPS4Parents during the COVID-related campus closures, you’ll see a lot of what I published back then had to do with the mandates that special education and other disability-related services were required to continue without reductions in services and supports. It’s nice to know that the United States of America has our students’ backs on that point, but they can’t investigate the case of every student with disabilities in America. It took over two years to investigate just this one, although systemic violations were uncovered in the course of it doing so.
I sincerely hope that the outcome of this investigation benefits not only the students of OUHSD who failed to receive appropriately ambitious educational benefits because of the COVID-related campus closures, but also similarly impacted students in all the other school districts that used the pandemic as an excuse to cut corners and not pay for services that were so seriously needed by so many students with disabilities. This outcome needs to impact more students with special needs than just those within the OUHSD attendance area. It needs to set an example.
I find myself frequently telling people that the measure of whether a society is civilized or not goes to how well it takes care of its most vulnerable members, and that special education law is the canary in the coalmine of American democracy. If we can’t respect the civil rights of our children with disabilities, what does that say for the civil rights of the rest of us?
School districts are not for-profit private businesses; they are government agencies funded to execute the functions of our society for the benefit of the public. We should be able to trust our local government agencies, including our local school districts, to abide by the rule of law.
KPS4Parents is currently reaching out to various stakeholders in Ventura County to make sure that the other families affected by this outcome understand exactly what this is, how they are affected, and how to make sure their kids get what they actually need. If you are part of an affected family and need assistance with this process, KPS4Parents will do everything we can to support you, including putting you in touch with other advocates and attorneys if necessary to handle the sheer volume of families who may need this level of assistance.
If you are part of another organization or agency that also serves students with special needs in Ventura County and/or their families, and would like to help area families navigate this process, please contact us and we’ll get back to you as soon as we possibly can. It’s exciting to be part of the solution, but the work is just getting started and our agency can’t do it all alone.
We’re part of the larger community of loving, democracy-minded people who advocate for social justice issues. We need the help of our social justice partners to make sure all of these affected families are properly supported and served, and to help us generalize these remedies to benefit other similarly affected students in other communities. It takes a village, so I’m asking for the rest of the village to step up and help me help all of these other affected families, and for the families who are already experienced with this kind of stuff to help other families who might not be so savvy.
This is an exciting time for systemic change, and I want families of children with special needs to feel empowered by this and set the example on how to participate in our democracy at the local level in a meaningful and impactful way. Bottom line, screaming at school board meetings about their personal beliefs and feelings gets parents nowhere, but regulatory complaints filed to enforce the rule of law can be everything.