An Appeal to My Colleagues

I have a million other things I need to be doing right now, but this is one of those moments where if I don’t stop and purge these thoughts from my mind into print, they will torment and distract me until I do, so the sooner I finish this post, the sooner I can get back to work without continued torment and distraction. I wasn’t intending to post, right now, because my caseload is blowing up and my other endeavor, The Learn & Grow Educational Series, is starting to require more of my attention lately as it continues to experience its own growth and expansion. My plate is full, but it’s the reasons why it’s full that prompt me to stop what I’m doing and post this today.

In the course of analyzing the incoming bombardment of data that is my life, I’m seeing the connections between the specific issues I’ve chosen to take on with my professional skills and the turmoil being experienced by the world at large, right now. I’m seeing common allies and culprits across issues, and recurring themes and trends that can be generalized from the work I specifically do to the work that needs to be done overall to cure the defects of reparable systems, and overhaul and replace systems that no longer serve us.

Today’s post is an appeal to my colleagues to think beyond the bubbles and silos in which you may exist as professionals and recognize the need for your respective skills to contribute to much larger solutions on a much simpler scale. Capable, ethical, and responsible people each making what contributions they can along they way, just in the course of doing what they were already going to do, can reshape society into a healthier version of itself. We need to see our everyday activities as substantial contributions to the world that exists around us and appreciate that every little decision we make really does matter. If enough of us are thinking right and making the smart, ethical, and responsible decisions, we can help influence those around us who are less capable, thereby loving our neighbors as ourselves and being our brothers’ keepers when necessary.

We each help make the world we live in be what it is through our individual actions with each other. Those actions and their outcomes become woven together into complex relationships that evolve into established systems supported by nothing but learned behaviors. We don’t do them because that’s the way things work; the reason why that’s the way things work is because that’s the way we do them. That being the case, we have every reason in the world to believe that enough smart, ethical, altruistic people can facilitate healing throughout society to a more powerful degree than a minority of fear-based thinking, hate-mongering cowards can try to destroy it. It comes down to mindfulness and living a life of purpose that serves the common good while also serving oneself and one’s immediate loved ones in healthy and constructive ways.

One of my favorite theorists from human development research is Urie Bronfenbrenner. The lame graphic below is one I created in graduate school so as to avoid a copyright infringement by grabbing someone’s more professional graphic off the internet, but it illustrates the model. Follow the above link for more information about Bronfenbrenner’s model, if you’re not already familiar with it or need to brush up on it. It’s quite sobering in light of current world events.

Bronfenbrenner realized that, while nature had a certain degree of influence on the raw materials with which each person started out in life, it was the environment in which that person was raised relative to those raw materials that dictated the unique development of that individual person. No two people who have ever existed, exist now, or will exist in the future will ever be entirely identical to each other because, regardless of genetics, actual life experiences that shape people through learning are never identical from one person to the next.

Genetics provide for a whole lot of variability, but they’re still technically finite in spite of their vastness. Environments are ever-changing; they must be adapted-to in the moment via individuals’ behaviors and over time via genetic mutation of the species.

For those of you among my colleagues in special education and related fields who are expected to individualize programming according to the unique needs of each constituent served, this shouldn’t be a leap of logic for you. For people unfamiliar with what it takes to truly individualize something for another person, particularly another person with diminished capacity to communicate their needs, it might as well be alchemy or voodoo.

The bottom line is that everybody thinks differently and has relative strengths and weaknesses. You can’t assume that just because it’s obvious to you, it’s obvious to everyone else. But, you also can’t assume that just because it doesn’t make sense to you, it doesn’t make sense to anyone else, either. The sword of understanding cuts both ways for each of us.

We’re each good at some things and not so good at others; that’s normal. Some people, however, are not so good at recognizing when they’re not so good at something. This goes to another body of psychological science, the Dunning-Kruger Effect, but that’s a whole discussion unto itself that I’ll link to but not delve into, right now. One lay person’s less-than-kind distillation of it, once it was explained to them, was, “So, basically, dumb people are too dumb to know that they’re dumb.”

The point is that those of us who get it have to carry the weight of those who don’t and/or can’t. It’s the opposite of authoritarianism, which demands the compliance of coerced individuals; what is called for, here, is the responsible stewardship of public service agencies to actually serve the public according to their mandates in conformity with the professional ethical standards of their involved professional disciplines.

For those of us supporting the needs of individuals with disabilities, we understand that the situation sometimes requires helping people exercise their informed choices as independently as possible. Other times, our responsibilities require us to protect the rights of those who are incapable of making fully informed choices without our help and are otherwise helpless and vulnerable to exploitation. We understand this better than most people and we need to recognize that we are collectively unique as a result. It’s not that big of a stretch between the issues of conservatorship abuse and voter suppression and nullification laws.

A whole lot of science in the areas of psychology, sociology, communication, behavior, instruction, organizational planning, leadership, and related disciplines has been conducted over the last 100 years. Many of us have access to that research but don’t make the time to follow it. I encourage every one of my professional colleagues to create a saved search for a specific body of peer-reviewed research and, whenever you are able to grab a free moment, take the time to run the search and read something new from the science that tells you something you didn’t already know, then think about ways to incorporate it into what you are doing in your work and follow through on applying them.

What small change in a routine task can you make that applies the knowledge you’ve gained for the better? Over time, how much better will things incrementally get with each little new thing you tweak after reading from your saved search? Is it a relevant authority to something you are currently writing? Does it help you better understand how to individualize a particular constituent’s goals and services? Is there another colleague who you think might benefit from the information with whom you can share it? Can you share your thoughts about it on LinkedIn and/or other professional online platforms in a constructive way?

Nothing exists in a vacuum. The more we recognize and honor the logical connections among our respective professions and how the science applies to out constituents and their service needs, the more we realize that Bronfenbrenner was right.

J. V. Wertsch, who worked with Bronfenbrenner, states in his 2005 review of Bronfenbrenner’s book, Making Human Beings Human,”Starting with the assumption that ‘to a greater extent than for any other species, human beings create the environments that shape the course of human development’ (p. xxvii), Urie has argued that it is incumbent on all of us to create decent, nurturing environments for human development.” [Emphasis added.] In my opinion, that’s something we have yet as a species to do; ants do a far better job of this than we do.

Unfortunately, because we still are not proactively applying Bronfenbrenner’s science as an ongoing element of how our society functions, we still do not love our neighbors just as we love ourselves and we are not our brothers’ keepers when our brothers go astray. We blame and punish people for having weak minds rather than remediate the effects of their shortcomings. As a species, humans generally treat their abilities as unfair advantages and use them to exploit others. They should be humbled by the responsibilities that come with their gifts and use them prudently with good intent, but in the absence of informed, deliberate planning, what has naturally been allowed to come to fruition is a society that rewards abuses of the rules more richly than compliance with them.

Those of us trying to facilitate functional independence among our most vulnerable children and adults know all too well that there aren’t enough of us with the necessary expertise to change the maladaptive behaviors in every bad situation that is collectively poisoning society, right now. The most we can do is the most we can do in our respective situations. We have to hope people will start copying our strategies that work when they see our successes. We need to start generalizing our successes into other areas where the same degree of expertise is not available, just as a matter of making sure our democracy thrives and functions as it should according to what can be proven true and responsibly effective for everybody.

Further, we as a society have historically regarded those individuals on the cusp between “can’t” and “could with learning” as an acceptable shade of gray on the spectrum of social involvement, but now they have become an outspoken and increasingly violent minority of individuals who cannot successfully function with independence in the quickly evolving world. They don’t know how to adapt but they can still wreak havoc on their way down the tubes.

The only difference between “can’t” and “could with learning” is the provision of instruction. The outcomes of both are the same if no instruction is made available; there has to be the “with learning” part in order for the choices of the person who can learn to differ from the choices of the person who can’t.

The problems we are seeing in the world today from misinformation being spread on the internet goes to the degree to which many internet users have no idea how search engines and social media algorithms indulge subjective biases and feed them whatever will increase their engagement without regard for how those choices impact the individual user or society on the whole. When all of our individual choices put together collectively shape the fabric of society, an artificial intelligence that only reinforces user engagement with neutral disregard for the quality or nature of that engagement will, by design, radicalize the most violent of the weakest minds into acts of terrorism. It weaponizes a previously harmless sub-population by turning them against us in irrational, violent ways and selling them the products to do it.

At the end of the day, humans are again proven to be part of nature and not something separate from it. The natural consequences of poor choices eventually catch up to people, one way or another. Sometimes other, innocent people become collateral damage along the way, and its in the interest of minimizing those numbers now and ultimately eliminating them as soon as possible that those of us who already work in professions helping people with disabilities need to generalize our skills into other aspects of human need where possible. What those of us working with individuals challenged by mental health issues already know can be imperative to addressing domestic terrorism.

As an example of generalizing one’s skills beyond one’s professional area of focus, while I still represent students with disabilities and consult with their parents as a lay advocate, provide paralegal support to attorneys representing students with disabilities in various legal proceedings, and design and implement compensatory programs for individuals with disabilities who were wrongfully denied services by publicly funded agencies, I also created something else using my knowledge and skills.

I created the Learn & Grow Educational Series to address food insecurity and sustainable living issues. The science of instruction is also the science of marketing, and social media can be used just as effectively to push learning as it can be used to push sales. In many cases, content creators push both, with the sales funding the instructional content and the instructional content driving the sales in a synergistic way; if it were organic, it would be considered symbiotic. The science I rely upon to determine appropriate educational goals and services for my learners with special needs is the same science I rely upon each time I create a new Learn & Grow learning experience for my online and in-person learners.

Through Learn & Grow, I’m able to teach people everywhere how to grow their own fresh fruits and vegetables anywhere using free and/or inexpensive materials, even if they have no open ground for growing. I use evidence-based instructional practices to teach them how to make self-watering containers from buckets for patio, balcony, fire escape, and rooftop gardening.

These containers are water conservative, using as little as one-tenth the amount of water of in-ground growing, and self-regulating, meaning the soil is never too wet or too dry so long as the reservoir beneath it doesn’t run dry. These containers are portable, meaning renters can take their gardens with them when they move. I’ve moved my own garden five times since I first started it in June of 2013, and the goji berry thicket I started from seeds when I first started the garden is still going strong in its original container, giving me two crops of berries per year.

The design of these containers is totally open-source, public domain knowledge. What is unique to Learn & Grow is the body of evidence-based instruction and project ideas using this gardening method that I provide in person and which lives online through Learn & Grow’s website, Facebook page, Instagram account, and video channels on YouTube: Food for Thought and Learn & Grow with Emmalyn. This is where I was able to apply my skills normally used in special education and disability resources to address other types of challenges the world is currently facing, specifically food insecurity and climate change. In October 2020, I expanded the Learn & Grow curriculum to include sustainable living methods, starting with alternative energy sources and gray water recapturing.

I’ve most recently started conducting online Meetups using Zoom and Prezi for urban gardeners in the greater Los Angeles area who can benefit from Learn & Grow’s instruction regarding self-watering bucket gardens. Without any marketing, my online classes are getting bookings and my Meetup group continues to grow in membership. Once I start marketing it, I expect to reach a larger number of learners who want to be able to grow their own food in their apartments, condos, mobile home parks, and other limited growing environments. This is an adaptation to their environments I can help them make, a lá Bronfenbrenner, to create a greater quality of life using sustainable means in a very healthy way. If they get their buckets used from local restaurants or bakeries, they keep that plastic out of landfills and reuse it for something entirely purposeful.

For me, achieving increased food security, recycling, water conservation, and portability with a single solution is too good of a thing not to share. It’s not directly related to publicly funded services for individuals with disabilities, but it relies upon the same sciences to be successful. I can generalize what I already know from what I’ve been doing professionally for the last 30 years to tackle an entirely different area of need, and it’s not that hard. It’s not any harder than representing a child with special needs in a federal complaint or supporting a child’s attorney in due process, and I can do those things.

Plus, I’m taking advantage of online tools to automate as much of my Learn & Grow content as possible, so the planning phase is followed by the scheduling phase which is then followed by an automated implementation stage that frees me up for months to years at a time to focus on other things, like the individuals on my caseload. I can drip instruction just as easily as I can drip marketing messages using the same online tools.

I also recently rejoined my local Kiwanis club, which is a community service organization. I’m helping the club use Learn & Grow to provide self-watering bucket gardens to community-based programs, like adult day cares and preschools, as well food insecure individuals through local food pantries, hunger relief programs, and shelters. I’m able to address food insecurity through a more direct means by partnering with my local Kiwanis club, which has ample volunteers and existing trusted business partners willing to invest in the right community service projects with their donations. This is a win-win-win for all involved, and it only happened because I went outside of my normal professional duties to tackle another social issue in ways that only someone with my unique skill set could.

All of us have skills and expertise that can be generalized to another problem in the world other than the one about which you spend most of your time thinking. I promise you that finding some other way to express yourself and apply your skills to something hugely constructive towards making the world a better place will open your mind in ways that makes you a better thinker back on your regular job and give you a healthier outlook on life.

Food shortages and economic collapse were the unknowns I most feared back when I started Learn & Grow in 2013. That was only made more real when Learn & Grow was discovered by panicked Venezuelans in 2016 when their country’s economy collapsed and their government subsidized food supply collapsed along with it, leaving them with no food in their stores and no more coming any time soon. I’m not afraid of that, now. My garden has grown to sixty-one self-watering containers and I have four laying hens who give me eggs throughout the year. Come what may, I’ll be okay for food.

The shortages in the stores at the start of the pandemic and the supply chain shortages happening right now have only been slight inconveniences compared to what could happen if the whole supply chain were to collapse altogether. Most people have become dependent upon it, and that’s dangerously unhealthy. If the commercialized food supply collapsed tomorrow, what situation would you be in?

As much as I live and breath special education and disability resource science and law, I can’t have figured out a way to dodge the bullet of a collapse of our commercialized food supply, have the ability to teach people according to their individual capacities to learn, and not use my skills to teach other people what I’ve figured out to survive a very dire time of food insecurity in this country. And, I know I can’t be the only one.

I know there are others of you out there who see issues with social justice, public health, climate change, domestic terrorism, and/or the ongoing threats to our democracy that would benefit from your unique perspectives and skills. Something horrible happening in the world today has factors in common with a problem you’ve already solved. Your solution translates into something that can be generalized to solve other serious world problems. Don’t keep it to yourself.

I’m not special; I’m just specialized in my knowledge and skills, and they can be applied to more than one context. That doesn’t make me unique; it makes me a member of a unique sub-population of individuals with relevant skills.

You, my professional colleagues, can do something about society’s ills today without it being political. Helping people everywhere grow their own food doesn’t take sides in anything. Everybody needs to eat. Food is a basic survival need no matter what somebody chooses to believe. Individual food security is a highly personal and universal topic with which every person can relate. So is access to clean drinking water, safety from violence, affordable housing, and a host of other issues begging for your expertise.

Most cultural disputes are about access to resources, and the United States is experiencing a cultural civil war, right now. It is fueled by misinformation meant to tear our country apart being published online by bad actors exploiting the capable hands of people with weaknesses of the mind who fear losing what they have to imaginary threats they believe to be real. People who can’t or won’t face their real problems will imagine things to be their absolute worst without confirming whether they actually are. They catastrophize things. It’s a symptom; it’s not healthy. It’s a feature of anxiety, which is always about lacking predictability. They cling to the familiar because they can’t predict anything else and their fear of the unknown is greater than any discomfort they may feel, if any, in their predictable routines.

People who can’t actually understand what is really going on have no sense of predictability about what is about to come. They will pin their expectations to what they want to happen next as opposed to what the facts dictate will happen next. They can’t follow an evidence-based thought process, so they substitute it with wishful thinking, but unrealistic expectations are just preconceived resentments. When things don’t turn out according to their wishes, they get mad at reality and insist that it bend to fit their fantasies rather than adjust their expectations according to what actually is. They don’t understand everything going on, so they can’t adjust their thinking according to all the relevant facts.

How can you, as a professional, interact with people who exist in this state without demeaning or condescending to them? Can you interact with them fully understanding that, like many of the individuals with disabilities we serve, these people are doing the best they can with what they have and they need our loving, responsible guidance to find their ways to the right side of things? If we just help them address their needs in more pro-social ways, they won’t feel compelled to attempt to meet them in anti-social ways. It’s basic ABA.

I’m asking my professional colleagues to please strongly consider using your knowledge and skills to address any of the many nonpartisan issues that are currently challenging the human species, right now, that are outside of your normal area of practice. See if there is a Kiwanis club in your local area that could use your help. Identify an unmet need in your local community and find out what is needed to address it, then find other people who have the necessary skills that you lack and start your own thing. Just find a way to contribute, even in a small way, to a nonpartisan issue in your community that isn’t currently getting enough attention.

The technology available to us today is a tool, but, like a hammer, it can build or kill depending on how it is used. I’m with Urie Bronfenbrenner on this one; we should use our knowledge and resources to make the world a place that meets everyone’s needs, rather than a place that meets the needs and wants of those who know how to exploit and take advantage of those who don’t. The tools now available for people to collaborate and get things done remotely, thanks in no small part to the necessities that arose with the pandemic, are phenomenally powerful and easy to use. The tools to create online content decrease in cost and become increasingly rich in features over time, and most people only need a few good features to make stellar content. Learn more about the ways you can participate in your citizenship in nonpartisan ways by studying the research on servant leadership.

If you find yourself in an environment in which acting in the short-term for immediate gain comes at the cost of considering the long-term consequences, and you can’t be a positive influence for more responsible thinking and planning, get out. You’re wasting your precious gifts on people who will never appreciate them and would use them to harmful ends if you let them. There are other places you can go where your gifts will be appreciated and put to proper use, where you can earn a decent living and live with yourself in peace. You just have to take the time to find it or create it. That’s not always easy, but it’s always worth it.

There is no way to memorize a script for every possible thing that could happen in the future in order to be prepared for if/when it happens. Nobody can remember that many scripts, much less predict every possible future in advance and develop a script for it before everything changes and new scripts are needed. Living a life that follows the same specific script in order to keep it predictable is a symptom, not an adaptive strategy. That’s not participation; it’s approximation. It’s parallel play.

The only way a collective of people can work together towards a common goal is to act according to common guiding principles. For example, if everyone helping with Learn & Grow agrees with and abides by the guiding principle of, “Make sure everyone can grow enough healthy food to survive, come what may,” whatever decisions they face along the way will come down to whether or not their choices facilitate everyone growing enough food for themselves, come what may. If you have a fixed outcome in mind, it’s the next best thing to having a script for every possible contingency. Having that fixed outcome limits the number of actions you can take, so it whittles down your choices to a more manageable list of alternatives. The more ethical conditions that have to be satisfied by the solution, the narrower the options, meaning the easier it is to decide.

What makes leadership and decision-making so overwhelming for most people is the sheer number of possibilities and figuring out which one makes the most sense. By using a consistent, agreed-to guiding principle as a “North Star” for decision-making, team members can be consistent among each other with their choices and actions towards achieving the common good. We don’t need a savior to swoop in and save us. We just need to be mindful of how our actions throughout the day shape the world around us and consciously choose actions that promote the things in the world we want to see based on what we’ve learned from all of our life experiences, including those most commonly associated with work, even if at only the tiniest level. It all adds up in the end, and every little positive contribution matters.

This is mindfulness meeting purposeful action, and I hope you’re inspired use your gifts to help in impactful, constructive ways that remind everyone you touch that we only get through these terrible times by working together. Because of your professional skills, you’re in a unique position to help humanity survive this time of upheaval and transition and thrive once the worst of it has passed. I look forward to seeing what truths each of you end up speaking to power over the next few years and appreciate the efforts of all of you who choose to contribute in ways you can towards a better tomorrow for everyone.

What About Kids with FAPE Claims that Pre-Date Quarantine?

As much as special education in general is all up in the air in most quarantined school districts, with unlawful conduct being perpetrated by school officials who have never believed in the IDEA seeing this as an opportunity to get rid of its obligations while still collecting federal special education dollars, there is a subpopulation within special education that is even more affected by this than others. That subpopulation is made up of the students whose educational and civil rights were already being violated by their local education agencies (LEAs) prior to the quarantine.

There is huge debate going on right now about Betsy DeVos, the Trump Administration’s appointed Secretary of Education, and the waiver power she does and does not have under the law to exempt school districts from delivering a Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) to students with disabilities. Congress has now asked her to testify as to what parts of the IDEA she thinks needs to be waived and we don’t know how it will vote on the matter.

More and more comes out on this topic each day. The Council of Parent Advocates and Attorneys (COPAA), the national nonprofit professional organization that advocates and, where necessary, litigates on a national level on topics like these has published its own policy statement about the current situation, which can be found on the COPAA website.

Currently, there are no waivers of the IDEA in place. The only exemption right now is that LEAs that are not providing distance learning options to their general education students don’t have to provide education to their special education students, either. Until there are actual Congressionally approved waivers, nothing has changed with respect to implementing the IDEA for those special education students served by LEAs that are currently providing distance learning to their general education students.

Nonetheless, I have four families with students in one particular school district that is currently providing distance learning to its general education students and something half-baked in terms of online options for its special education students. All four of these families received generic Prior Written Notices (PWNs) over this last weekend advising that it’s impossible to implement IEPs under the current circumstances, even though it very often is possible and the administrator sending these things out has a decades-long history of throwing money at lawyers to defend her decisions instead of actual services for students. Three of those families already have due process cases filed or about to be filed.

Just like everything in special education, PWNs are supposed to be individualized to each student, but she sent the same PWN to the families of everybody in her district in special education, telling them all that implementing their IEPs under the circumstances is impossible with no examination of each student’s unique, individual situations. She may have finally dug herself into a hole that she can’t get back out of.

This administrator made unilateral decisions on behalf of her district outside of the IEP process during a time when the IDEA has not been waived in any kind of way, in part or in whole. It’s a systemic violation of the law memorialized in writing on district letterhead to the family of every special education student in her district. She may have well just created a class action lawsuit against her employer.

Children with disabilities from low-income, single parent, immigrant, and non-white households were already getting the short end of the stick when it comes to special education. Being white and affluent doesn’t necessarily protect you, but it does increase your odds of avoiding at least some FAPE violations.

That said, the aforementioned administrator sending out PWNs that break the law on her employer’s behalf worked most of her career for an affluent school district where the only way to get a decent IEP was to sue the crap out of her district. Her department would play to the egos of affluent parents and tell them special education was a welfare service and they would be better off privately paying for services, thereby collecting federal IDEA dollars without actually having to spend them on services.

Now she’s working for a district in an economically depressed community with a largely Latino population and is preying on low-income, non-English speaking, families of color. Maybe she thinks they aren’t going to stand up to her taking advantage of the pandemic to bring in IDEA dollars without having to deliver on IDEA obligations. She’s wrong.

I already had cases that were pending due process on my caseload when this pandemic hit. The students involved in those cases were already being under-served, if served at all, and now they’re sitting at home with even more nothing. One student’s parent has an elderly parent in a nursing home she can’t visit and is working from home (or at least trying to) while her adult autistic child who is still eligible for special education has one meltdown after another because of the sudden disruption in routine and her inability to go out and do anything (trips into the community were being used as reinforcers as part of her behavior program, as well as community-based instructional opportunities, before all of this hit).

This parent is understandably furious. All that she’s gotten so far from her daughter’s teachers is a useless Google classroom link that takes her to a page full of nothing to do with her daughter’s IEP goals. And, while her daughter’s IEP makes clear that she requires “highly trained staff” to meet her goals, all she’s got right now is her frustrated mom and useless downloaded worksheets that her mother doesn’t know how to teach to her and she doesn’t know how to complete. There is no support from the teaching staffs to help this parent engage her daughter in the distance learning option, such as it is, that they’ve been given.

This student is from the same district mentioned above that is sending unlawful F-You letters on PWN forms to its special education families. I have three other students in this district, two of them already with litigation pending for violations that occurred before the quarantine. They were already being denied a FAPE before quarantine, and they sure as hell aren’t getting a FAPE now.

I’ve already written about the impact of the quarantine on special education before to some extent, but I want to hammer a particular point once again: Many special education students are at risk of significant regression, which is the loss of previously learned knowledge and skills, during lengthy breaks from instruction. These students are eligible for Extended School Year (ESY) services for this very reason; summer breaks, and sometimes winter breaks, are just too long for them to go without services or they have to make up for lost ground once they return to school, which makes them unavailable for learning anything new.

The impact of the current situation on these students in particular stands to compound an already egregious denial of FAPE. If they were already being denied a FAPE before this all happened, additional regression on top of that will create deficits that will never be overcome.

As of right now, no IDEA waivers have been permitted. Congress is waiting for Mrs. DeVos to tell it what waivers she wants to push through in response to the pandemic and mass quarantines. There is significant fear that the waivers Mrs. DeVos will request will include exemptions from implementing all or part of the IDEA.

The consequences to students if Mrs. DeVos is successful in getting IDEA waivers are obvious. What is not quite so obvious is what becomes of federal special education dollars to school districts if she manages to get any or all of the IDEA waived. While some school districts may be ready to embrace reduced duty and accountability, do they realize that IDEA dollars are tied to complying with the law? Does Mrs. DeVos intend to use IDEA waivers to not only reduce accountability for the public schools, but to also reduce their special education funding? How many school districts are willing to walk away from special education dollars in order to get out of having to implement IEPs?

Parents of children with disabilities, their extended families, their friends, and any taxpayers who otherwise get it need to act on this right now. You need to reach out to your representatives in Congress to tell them that any IDEA waivers are unacceptable. There is a way to deliver a FAPE to most special education students right now; it just takes cleverness and ingenuity, things most government agencies are not particularly known for. Clever problem-solving is generally unaccepted in institutions built on political corruption.

So, here’s your call to action: Contact your Congressional representatives and tell them that no IDEA waivers are acceptable or necessary. Look up your Senators here, and your Representatives here. You can also use our easy-to-use form letter generator or sign our online petition. If you are listening to this as a podcast rather than reading it as a blog, you can find the links in the text-only portion of this post.

It shouldn’t be necessary to have to fight to keep civil and educational rights in place for our nation’s children, but it is. Many LEAs are pushing compulsory education laws by threatening families with truancy proceedings if they don’t participate in distance learning options, but then are looking for any and all excuses to not actually deliver a real education, particularly to their special education students.

These distance learning options are all about keeping those Average Daily Attendance dollars coming in, I assure you. LEAs can’t live without that money and its based on attendance, which is why they are threatening to criminally prosecute parents who don’t implement their half-assed distance learning options for truancy. But, to actually deliver a real education in exchange for those dollars seems too much to ask, and it’s a thousand times worse for students with special needs.

It may quickly become the case that the only way for families of special education students to protect themselves against unjustified truancy charges, which are tried by local superior court judges who know nothing about how special education is actually supposed to be delivered, is to file for due process and make the record that the education being offered to those special education students during quarantine is inappropriate to their needs and they are unable to access learning as a result.

Parents should not feel forced to make their kids do something that will not help or just make things worse out of fear of being criminally prosecuted for truancy if they don’t. The sad reality, however, is that so long as they log or call in every day to whatever distance learning platform has been made available to them, even if their kids aren’t learning anything, they will not be prosecuted for truancy because those logs will be used as proof of attendance so schools can get their Average Daily Attendance dollars. That still does nothing to ensure their receipt of a FAPE, though.

Now is the time to reach out to advocates and attorneys if your child with special education needs isn’t getting appropriate instruction and related services while sheltering in place. You can find people to help you by searching online for “special education advocates near me” and “special education attorneys near me.”

Just be careful of the con artists out there, though. There are lawyers who will claim to represent families but then cut backroom deals with the attorneys representing the LEAs in which they convince the family to sign settlement agreements that short-changes their kids and eliminates their claims against the LEAs. There are also lay advocates who mean well, but don’t know the applicable science or law.

You should be leery of lawyers who have been in practice for years but have no litigation history. If they could actually litigate, they’d do it. But, if they can’t, they’ll get a few thousands dollars in fees for selling out their clients via backroom deals cut with school district lawyers and administrators. There are sleazy people on both sides, so parents do have to be choosy about who represents them.

Your state should have some kind of online database of due process decisions that you can search by an attorney’s name. If no due process decisions come up with that attorney’s name, and they’ve been in practice for years, that’s a red flag. If you search the decisions by attorney name and the results produce only cases that the attorney has lost, that’s another kind of red flag.

The good lawyers’ caseloads already get impacted by this time of the school year, but this situation just takes it to a whole different level, so parents should find someone fast if they think they even might need the help. One source that helps parents find advocates and attorneys is COPAA. It has guidelines to parents for choosing a special education attorney and/or advocate, as well as a searchable directory of COPAA members by location.

You will note that I am not listed. I am not a COPAA member and with good reason. As much as I appreciate what COPAA does on a national level, particularly with respect to its amicus briefs, it has no membership options for paralegals. This isn’t about bashing COPAA because there are things about it that I genuinely love, but there’s also things about it that I find wholly unacceptable.

I’m speaking to my truth, not disparaging an organization that I am, here, deliberately telling parents they should check out as a valuable resource. My issues with COPAA are mine, but I’m sharing them here for the benefit of those who search the database I’ve referred them to, don’t find me on it, and wonder why.

If I go to the COPAA conferences, I can only attend the workshops for parents and other advocates, where I spend the whole time either biting my tongue or correcting the presenters because they’re disseminating misinformation, and I never learn anything I didn’t already know. I’m not allowed to attend any of the attorney sessions, even though I totally could use the MCLEs for my paralegal status.

I can’t even subscribe to the COPAA listserv for attorneys, even when it contains information that would benefit my supervising attorneys for me to have access to it. My supervising attorneys are not even allowed to share it with me, even if it pertains to a task they are delegating to me. Until COPAA makes a space for me and people who work in the profession as I do, I can’t justify the expense of a COPAA membership or its conferences.

Besides, when I’ve gone to the conferences, I’ve walked through the tables and booths between sessions and, every year, there sits a table set up by a non-public school that broke one of my student’s arms during an unlawful restraint several years ago. When this issue was raised with COPAA the first time I saw this bunch at a conference, they ignored my supervising attorney on that case and continued to take money from these child abusers for the table space each year after that. I’m not okay with that.

Given the poor instruction options available to me at the COPAA conferences, the presence of known child abusers at the conferences, and the overwhelming evidence I’ve observed that far too many people only attend it so they can drink to excess and cheat on their spouses for a week, I don’t find the COPAA conferences worth the thousands of dollars in fees, hotel and travel costs, and lost billable time to be worth it. Plus, they hold it in the middle of the busiest time of the school year, which makes no sense at all. I’ve always got way too much work happening when the conferences are held to attend, anyway.

So, while I don’t have a high opinion of the COPAA conferences, I have a very high opinion of the brilliant legal minds that write COPAA’s amicus briefs and I’ve agreed with every one of them I’ve ever read 100%. Nothing is perfect and COPAA is a good resource for many. The actual work COPAA does, aside from its annual conferences, is stellar and I can look past the conferences for the sake of the bigger picture, which is legally protecting children with disabilities from educational and civil rights violations.

COPAA has taken on the U.S. Department of Education with bold, accurate words in legal proceedings that make my heart want to burst with pride in our profession. That’s what matters to me about what COPAA does. That is, in my opinion, the most important thing COPAA does.

If you are looking for an attorney or advocate, the COPAA membership directory can be a good resource for many parents. Just know that there are a lot of other professionals out there who are really good at their jobs who are not members, there are members who aren’t that good at their jobs, and there a non-members who haven’t signed up because they’re crooked and don’t want to get caught by those of us who are doing this work for the right reasons. Like everything else in life, it’s a mixed bag.

Being on the COPAA membership directory doesn’t automatically mean someone is good and not being on it doesn’t mean someone is bad. It’s just a list of people who work in this field and pay membership fees to COPAA, but it’s the only national directory of advocates and attorneys that I know of and it’s foolish to not regard it as a valuable resource. Just take it for what it is and don’t think that hiring a COPAA member automatically means you don’t have to put much thought into it.

As I stated before, the membership directory page includes links to COPAA’s guidelines for finding a qualified attorney or advocate, which is pretty sound advice. Regardless of whether an advocate or attorney is a COPAA member or not, COPAA’s guidance as to how to vet attorneys and advocates is still good.

If you are the parent of a child with special needs who is not receiving a FAPE while in quarantine and your LEA is providing alternative learning options to its general education students, as of the time of this writing, there are no waivers of any part of the IDEA and it is still fully in force. This isn’t about kicking your LEA while it’s down; this is about protecting your child from being kicked by his/her LEA while your child is down. LEAs have millions apiece of taxpayer dollars intended to pay for the education of our children and that damn sure better be what it’s spent on, regardless of the situation.

Students who were already being denied a FAPE before the pandemic are now further compromised. How this is going to play out in litigation remains to be seen. If the rule of law is followed, there are no exceptions to providing a FAPE right now. Any FAPE violations that were already going on before quarantine have not been made better by it and families in those situations very likely need to consult with a qualified special education attorney sooner rather than later, if they haven’t already.

This is a difficult time for everyone, but the true measure of a society’s health is how well it takes care of its most vulnerable members during times of crisis. While some fascist LEA administrators may see this as an opportunity to finally carry out their bigoted agendas and terminate special education like they’ve been wanting to since 1975, those of us who still prefer democracy to fascism have to stand up and enforce the laws that have been part of the fabric of our country for the last 45 years.

As soon as one civil rights law falls, all the rest of them fall, the tenuous thread that our democracy is holding onto right now will snap, and we will find ourselves suddenly living in a real oligarchic regime. The moment it becomes okay to violate the civil and educational rights of children with disabilities, it will become okay to violate everyone else’s rights, too. Every protected class – women, minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals, low-income families, single-parent households, etc. – will lose rights one by one thereafter until no one has freedom anymore, except the wealthy oligarchs.

While I am focused on the individual needs of the children and families involved, I can’t help but appreciate the over-arching ramifications for democracy at large. We protect everyone’s rights, or we protect no one’s. True democracy means everyone is equal, including special education students.

And, regardless of whether IDEA waivers get approved, no one is contemplating waivers of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act or the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). If the IDEA is no longer enforceable, those laws still are and Betsy DeVos has no control over them. So, if she manages to get IDEA waivers passed by Congress, families will still have recourse under 504 and the ADA, which can have harsher ramifications than the IDEA on LEAs.

The IDEA diminishes “equal access to education” but expects no expense to be spared in the pursuit of that watered down version of equal access; the ADA says “equal access” must be 100% equal, unless it creates an undue burden on the responsible party, which it has to prove. We’ve not had civil rights litigation under 504 or the ADA since either of them passed that sets a precedent for what we’re dealing with right now, but I can promise you that what special education students are getting at home during quarantine doesn’t come close to equal access to education as that being given to their non-disabled peers.

These are uncharted waters and only time will tell how this is going to play out, but it’s up to those of us who do this work and the families we serve to do everything we can to protect our children with special needs. Please contact your Senators and Representatives, tell them that no IDEA waivers should be granted, and let’s all keep the pressure on until we have an answer. In the meantime, nothing has changed and the law is still enforceable, so we need to enforce it.

While many courts have moved to a work-from-home model (I recently watched a federal court trial in which Google was accused of aiding and abetting the Taliban that allowed me to see into the homes of three federal court judges and the Plaintiffs’ attorney), some state special education hearing offices have closed down, ceased operations except to issue continuances and stays, and are accruing a backlog during quarantine that is going to explode with new cases from all the FAPE claims arising from school district misconduct currently going on. Parents may need to use this time to find an attorney, start organizing their evidence, and file to preserve their timelines, even if they aren’t going to get in front of a judge right away.

For families that were already facing due process before the quarantine, if their states are operating their complaints and due process hearings according to a work-from-home model, which Texas is doing, then there should be some kind of mitigation in place to prevent that huge of a backlog. If three federal court judges on a panel can hold a trial to determine if Google was complicit in the Taliban’s use of its technologies to engage in acts of terrorism from their homes, special education due process cases can be tried the same way.

If you have a due process case that was pending before the quarantine, then you’ve likely already been communicating with your attorney about what is going on. If you haven’t, yet, do it now. You need your attorney looking into what due process mechanisms remain intact in your state and what the procedures currently are. Any competent attorney will have already done this, but may be so overwhelmed by the sudden explosion of casework that is starting to happen that they haven’t had a chance to talk with you about it, yet. Don’t overwhelm them by stalker dialing ever 5 minutes, but do reach out and make an appointment to discuss how all of this impacts your case.

There is never a good time to participate in litigation. For most parents, “litigation” and “good time” generally don’t go together. But, this is definitely a worse time to be pursuing due process in a system that was already glutted with cases. The sooner you act, the better.

IEP Goals Determine Services & Placement

If you’ve read or listened to our past posts and podcasts, or have otherwise been educating yourself on the special education process, hopefully by now you understand that special education is supposed to follow a particular procedural flow. This is not only the method supported by best practices, but also the method required by federal law.

To recap, assessment data provides the present levels of performance and baselines necessary to formulate educationally appropriate IEP goals for an individual learner. The goals describe what the IEP is supposed to make happen. Once the enormous milestone of developing the IEP goals has been achieved, then it’s time to figure out what services are going to be necessary and where they can be delivered in order for each goal to be met. This is where things can suddenly go off the rails.

It does no good to articulate sensible outcomes in measurable terms if effective services aren’t put into place to actually work on them and make them happen. Goals are just hopes if you don’t have a plan for the services you will need to meet them, and hope is not a strategy. But, this is often where things can get tricky in developing an IEP.

There are two common reasons for why things can go wrong at this stage: 1) everybody means well, but they don’t know what they’re doing; or, 2) something fishy is going on. In the first instance, it’s usually a matter of training. In the second instance, somebody is gaming the system in pursuit of an agenda in which the student is ancillary, but not the point.

In many instances, where this process gets tripped up actually starts with the development of the IEP goals. When the IEP goals are improperly written and/or necessary goals are excluded altogether, determining what services are necessary to deliver appropriately ambitious educational benefits to each student becomes compromised.

I’ve had many parents come to me over the years saying things like, “My kid needs more speech and language. He doesn’t know word meanings, can’t follow instructions, and can’t express himself, but he’s only getting 20 minutes of speech per week.” They look at increasing the service minutes in speech as though that’s going to somehow magically translate into working on all areas of his speech/language needs, when the real issue is that there is only one speech goal in the IEP for articulation and the rest of their child’s speech/language needs have no goals.

Because there are no goals for anything else, the number of speech/language service minutes is limited to how much time is reasonable to pursue the one goal that is there for articulation. 20 minutes per week to work on nothing but articulation isn’t automatically off-base.

What these parents really mean, when they say their kids need more speech and language services, is that the IEP is not targeting all of their speech/language needs. If that’s true, then the IEP team has to go back and look at the data to determine what other areas of speech and/or language should also be targeted by explicit intervention, then write goals to those specific areas of intervention need.

Once those new goals are written, the IEP team can then look at how many service minutes will be necessary to meet each goal. In addition to service minutes, which are expressed in terms of frequency and duration, the location of where the services will be delivered has to be determined.

It isn’t automatic that related services, like speech/language or occupational therapy (OT), get delivered in a pull-out setting. The location of services, like all other parts of an IEP, must be individualized to the unique needs of the student.

Pull-out services require the student to be removed from the classroom, often during instruction, and can interfere with learning. It’s a balancing act to find the right time to pull a student out of the regular class routine to go participate in direct pull-out services.

Push-in services bring the intervention into the student’s classroom and make it part of the classroom experience. Sometimes, this can be small group instruction with a reading specialist when the general education class is broken into small reading groups as a normal matter of instruction. This weaves the special education into the general education situation so that students with reading challenges are facilitated in participating with everyone else.

Embedded services are much like push-in, but they are intertwined with the instruction throughout the entire school day as a matter of instructional design for the classroom. An example of this would be embedded speech/language instruction and Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) in the program design of a school specifically for students with autism who cannot successfully function and learn on an integrated campus.

In this example, because it can be reasonably expected that all of the students in such a special school will need these supports according to the research and evidence-based practices, they are woven into the instructional design of the program. They are part of how the instruction is delivered on a continual basis.

In such cases, the integration of speech/language and ABA have to be used to describe the placement rather than parsed out as individual related service minutes, because they are part of the placement design that makes that particular placement appropriate for certain students. In this instance, they are not discrete services provided outside of or in addition to what is otherwise happening in the classroom.

Which leads into the next phase of the process, which is placement. Placement is the last decision to be made by the IEP team. There’s a really good reason for this. Placement is supposed to be determined by what is the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE) in which the services can be delivered such that the goals are met.

Special education is a service, not a place. The whole point of the IEP is to meet the IEP goals, but it is discrimination on the basis of handicapping condition to automatically remove kids from the general education setting for instruction just because they have disabilities. Unless removal to a more restrictive setting is the only way for the goals to get met, it’s not the LRE.

LRE is relative; what is restrictive for one student may be empowering for another. A student with autism who can nonetheless function in the general education setting with push-in ABA supports, for example, would be inappropriately placed in a school for students with autism.

Sometimes parents mistakenly think a special school is better because it’s focused on the specific types of needs their child has. But, it’s only better if the student cannot otherwise be successful in a less restrictive setting. Restrictiveness of setting is directly related to the severity of the student’s needs and the intensity of instruction necessary to meet the IEP goals.

Sometimes, creating an appropriately hybridized placement offer for a student who needs some pull-out services, but can otherwise participate in general education the rest of the school day, is such a difficult thing to coordinate in a particular school’s pre-existing culture that special ed staffs find it more convenient to put kids in more restrictive settings. This gives special ed staffs more control over the quality of the instruction and allows them to prevent their kids from being harmed by discriminatory general education practices, but it segregates their students on the basis of handicapping condition.

Sheltering students with disabilities from abuse by sequestering them from bigots inadvertently reinforces discriminatory practices that keep people with disabilities from equally accessing the world at large. Preventing the abuse of students with disabilities through diversity appreciation instruction, as well as proactive, research-based Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) on a schoolwide basis, makes far more sense.

The LRE laws exist for this reason. Rather than sequester students with traits in common to prevent them from being bullied by the rest of the students, it is more appropriate to teach all of the students how to get along with each other. Appropriate programming results in general education students looking out for their peers with special needs rather than picking on them and mocking them. It facilitates unity in the school community.

Because LRE is relative to each student, no parent should go into the IEP process demanding a placement because somebody else’s kid got it and they’re doing great there. Somebody else’s kid is not your kid. You don’t base IEP placement decisions for your child off of what somebody else needs or gets; you base it on your own child’s unique, individual learning needs as targeted by the IEP goals.

Most school districts will tell you that the “continuum of placement” for special education is whatever they already have. That’s only partly accurate. What the school district already has is part of the continuum of placement, but if the placement the student needs doesn’t already exist within the district, the placement has to be outsourced or created.

It’s appropriate for the school district to describe the types of placements it already has. These can include, but are not limited to: general education placement with push-in supports; pull-out to a special education class and/or therapies for part of the school day for targeted specialized support, with placement in general education for the rest of the school day; full-time placement in a special education class; and placement for all or part of the day in a non-public school.

But students are not limited to the types of placements already put in place within a school district. Sometimes, the closest appropriate school is so far away that the child and a family member live in a nearby apartment or other local housing arrangement during the week and go home on weekends, with their local school district funding the housing and travel expenses as related transportation services in the student’s IEP. There’s caselaw around this issue in favor of students (see, for example, Ojai vs. Jackson).

There is no master list of all the “types” of placements that can be offered to a special education student. Like every other part of an IEP, placement is supposed to be tailored to the student, only with the LRE requirements relative to what services it will take to meet the goals in mind. Sometimes, IEP teams have to get creative to meet highly unique individual student needs.

Other times, the types of supports a student needs are relatively common such that there are entire classrooms that provide those kinds of supports to all of their students. Resource Specialist Program (RSP) services are the most commonly delivered special education services. These are the least intensive forms of special education services provided.

Most students on IEPs have relatively mild learning disabilities that make RSP support a useful tool in helping them maintain grade-level performance. They are usually mostly in the general education setting with some special education supports and plenty of them go on to college and successful careers.

Many of these students glide through the K-12 system with an IEP that no one knows about but their families and teachers. Most of their peers have no idea and their closest friends realize it’s no big deal and don’t care.

Further, it is becoming less stigmatizing to be on an IEP than it used to be, so students are being more forthcoming with their peers about their special education statuses, just as matters of fact, without judgment entering the picture. If only the adults could follow their lead.

How Parents Can Help Promote the Application of Peer-Reviewed Research to Special Education

Image credit: Elco van Staveren

Special education is heavily regulated to protect the rights of eligible students to individualized educational planning, but complying with the regulations is easier said than done. The operational design of most public schools is over 150 years old and based on the mass production mentality of a factory, having been created during the Industrial Revolution. By contrast, the applicable special education laws were first passed in the 1970s, accounting for only the last 1/3rd of the current American public education system’s history.

Trying to implement the individualized educational planning called for by special education law in an environment created for the purpose of mass instruction is like trying to build a custom piece of furniture on a moving assembly line. In the early days of special education, this meant removing students from the general education setting to special education classes, effectively choosing to build a custom piece of furniture in a specialized workshop rather than on the pre-existing assembly line.

The problem, however, is that pieces of furniture do not have civil rights. It’s one thing to segregate inanimate objects according to how they are constructed. It’s another thing to segregate human beings according to whether they need changes in how they are instructed due to disability.

Because special education students have legal protections against being segregated out of the general education setting simply for having a disability, integrating individualized educational planning into a mass instruction environment becomes that much more complicated for special education students who are educated with their general education peers for all or part of their school days. The complexities of individualizing educational programs for each student are seemingly infinite, given all of the relevant disability-specific considerations plus all of the ecological factors involved in each instructional setting.

However, science – specifically research conducted by educational psychologists and their colleagues – has been attempting to keep up with the demands created by various types of unique student needs, including disabilities of all kinds. While it all hasn’t been figured out for every situation by any stretch of the imagination, there is still a wealth of information from education research that never makes its way into the classroom, much less into individual IEPs.

That’s a problem because Title 34, Code of the Federal Regulations, Section 300.320(a)(4) mandates the application of peer-reviewed research to the design and delivery of special education on an individualized basis, unless it’s not practicable to do so. No one has yet defined what “practicable” actually means, so it’s still up for debate.

The history of how all this science ended up being codified within the implementing regulations of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), has been summarized in our last blog post, “The Fundamental Flow of IEP Creation,” so I won’t repeat it here. You can review the impact of PARC v. Pennsylvania in that post to inform references to it, here.

The point is that the applicable science has always been written into any serious redress to the educational needs of students with disabilities after having been deprived educational benefits by the public school system. In PARC v. Pennsylvania, a psychologist with extensive experience working with children with intellectual disabilities and an attorney committed to representing the interests of children with intellectual disabilities were jointly appointed by the federal court to serve as special masters to oversee the implementation of appropriate interventions to students with intellectual disabilities in Pennsylvania’s public schools as part of the settlement that was negotiated between the parties. The settlement included federal court oversight by way of the court-appointed special masters.

The historical foundations of the requirements for measurable annual goals in IEPs pursuant to 34 CFR Sec. 300.320(a)(2) and the application of the peer-reviewed research to the delivery of special education as mentioned previously can be traced directly back to PARC v. Pennsylvania. There has never been a time when the law did not expect the delivery of special education to be informed by anything other than evidence-based practices developed from the peer-reviewed research.

From the moment the first laws were created to provide special education to all eligible children in the United States, science was built into its design. Federal Supreme Court case law has established that Congress expected procedural compliance with the IDEA to all but guarantee compliance with the substantive requirements of the law when it authored and passed what is now the IDEA. Specifically, the case law states, “…the Act’s emphasis on procedural safeguards demonstrates the legislative conviction that adequate compliance with prescribed procedures will in most cases assure much, if not all, of what Congress wished in the way of substantive content in an IEP.” (Board of Educ. v. Rowley, 458 U.S. 176 (1982))

Congress intended for the applicable science to guide the special education process for a number of good reasons. First, using science means using what everybody can agree actually works under a given set of unique circumstances, to the degree such is known. There is evidence – proof – that under the explicit conditions that were tested, a particular method of intervention works or doesn’t.

Because every special education student presents as a highly unique individual such that their learning needs do not conform to conventional instruction, they require highly individualized instruction that is tailored to each of them, respectively. There is no one-size-fits-all method of intervention proven to work in special education contexts. What is proven to work is writing up a unique program of instruction for each individual student. That is the evidence-based applicable science, that is the bottom line requirement of the applicable federal law, and this has been known and federally regulated since 1975.

This, therefore, begs the question as to why so much of special education is based on subjective opinions, ballpark estimations (often underestimations), and fad theories about learning rather than science. There’s been a lot of research into why the research isn’t being promulgated for use in public education and politics has a lot to do with it.

Applying the research means upgrading facilities, retraining teachers and their support staffs, buying new materials, and paying for more specialists. Further, it’s often necessary to purchase all of the research materials necessary to inform any kind of evidence-based program design and hire someone who knows how to translate the research into a data-driven educational program. For highly paid top agency administrators who get compensated on the basis of how much money they don’t spend rather than how many students they do get educated, applying the research means spending money, and that’s no way to get a raise in that kind of institutional culture.

Another concern of many public education agencies is accountability. When using evidence-based practices in the delivery of special education, one can’t ignore the body of research that supports that the data collection and analysis methods used in Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) are the most reliable methods of data collection and analysis used in any special education context (Drasgow, Yell, & Robinson, 2001; Kimball, 2002; Yell & Drasgow, 2000). The problem for some education agencies is that valid data collection means all their missteps will be captured by the data. If they aren’t actually implementing the IEP as written, the data will reflect that, exposing the agency to legal consequences.

People often mistake ABA for a treatment for autism, but this is not the case. It is true that behavioral interventions using ABA can be effective at addressing behavioral challenges with students who have autism, as well as any other human beings with behavioral challenges, but it can also be used as an instructional methodology and as a tool to determine if learning has occurred and, if so, how much. That is, it is excellent at measuring progress towards a clearly defined outcome, such as a measurable annual IEP goal.

The Antecedent-Behavior-Consequence (ABC) data collection methods used in ABA naturally lend themselves to measuring progress towards IEP goals. This is how it works: a stimulus (Antecedent) is presented to which the student responds with a specific Behavior, which immediately results in an outcome (Consequence) that either increases the likelihood of of the behavior happening again (reinforcement) or it doesn’t (absence of reinforcement or punishment).

Most people in special education are at least familiar somewhat with using this approach to dealing with inappropriate behaviors. You don’t want to deliver a reinforcing consequence when an inappropriate behavior occurs. Instead, you want to reinforce a more appropriate replacement behavior that still meets the student’s needs; the behavior was happening for a reason and you can’t leave its function unaddressed or a new behavior will just develop around it. Treat the cause, not the symptom.

You only resort to punishing the undesired behavior when reinforcing the desired behavior is not sufficient at extinguishing the undesired behavior. Presenting reinforcement for doing what is expected and withholding reinforcement for doing what is not expected is usually a pretty powerful strategy for positive behavioral interventions.

When using ABC data collection and analysis on the fly during instruction, your thought process is a little different. When you’re looking at whether a student is learning from the instruction you are providing, especially when working with students who have significant impairments that limit their expressive communication skills, sometimes it’s the raise of an eyebrow, the turn of a head towards you with eye contact, or the smile or grin that tells you whether or not you’re getting through. There is still an Antecedent (the delivery of your instruction and/or check for understanding), a learning Behavior (the student’s response to your instruction and/or check for understanding, whether verbal or not), and a Consequence (praise for learning or encouragement for trying) that increases the likelihood that the student will remain engaged and continue to participate in the instruction.

When using ABA-based data collection methods to measure for IEP goals, so long as the goals are written as math word problems based purely on observable learning behaviors, it’s pretty straight forward. Take for example this goal, which is purely made up for illustrative purposes: “By [due date], when given 10 calculation problems using multiplication of double digit numbers per trial, [Student] will calculate the 10 problems with at least 80% accuracy per trial in at least 9 of 10 consecutive trails within a semester, as measured by work samples.”

This is easy. There are 10 problems per trial. The student needs to get at least 8 out of 10 problems right per trial (measure of accuracy) in at least 9 out of 10 consecutive trials (measure of consistency) within a semester (measure of time) in order to meet the goal. Nothing is left to guesswork. Everything is represented by an increment of measure.

What ruins a goal out of the gate is basing any part of it on internal thoughts and feelings experienced by the student. Never start a goal with language like, “… when feeling anxious or angry …” or “… when presented with a non-preferred task …” You can’t trigger the onset of measurement based on something you can’t observe. You only know what the student is thinking or feeling once they express it in some way.

There is no way to get in front of the student’s expression of their thoughts or feelings to prompt their behavior in an appropriate direction because there is no way to know what the student is thinking or feeling before they act. Other people’s thoughts and feelings, including those of special education students, cannot be observed or known by other people. No credential in special education imbues special education personnel with clairvoyance. By the time you know what the student is thinking or feeling, it’s too late to influence how they act on those thoughts or feelings; you only know because they’ve already acted.

The same goes for preference. Preference cannot be observed and it can vary from day to day, or even moment to moment, for a lot of special education students. What is preferred at one time will often not be preferred at others. Eventually it is possible to have a good idea of what is not preferred by a student, but then confirmation bias can enter the picture and you see what you expect to see, not realizing you’re prompting it according to your preconceived expectations.

What makes more sense is to write goals that do not target what are referred to in ABA as “private events,” but rather to expected behaviors. For example, a common behavior targeted in the IEPs of students with challenging behaviors is work refusal, which is to say non-compliance with task demands. A teacher will assign a task and, if the student is non-compliant, they will either passively sit there and just not perform the task; do something else passive instead, like doodle or read a book; engage in distracting or disruptive behavior, like play on their phone or talk to their neighbors; or engage in outburst behaviors, possibly accompanied by leaving the room (eloping).

It’s usually pretty easy to figure out if there is a pattern to the types of tasks assigned and when non-compliance occurs such that preference can seem easy to identify. But, trying to rely on that for the purpose of measurement is like trying build a house on shifting sands because someone’s preferences can change so quickly.

The language that I see most commonly used in goals that work around the issue of private events reads more or less like this: “By [due date], when assigned a task, [Student] will either initiate the task, ask for help, or request a 2-minute break within 60 seconds of the task being assigned in at least 8 of 10 consecutive opportunities as measured by data collection.”

This makes things easy. Regardless of whether the student has a personal preference or not for the task being assigned, they will either start the task, ask for help with the task, or take a short break and get it together before they come back to the task.

Some students have processing speed delays that interfere with their ability to get started right away. They need extra time to process the instructions so they understand what you want them to do. Sometimes that extra little break is all they need to get there independently. It just takes them a little longer to think it through and make sense of what you want from them before they know what to do and can start. Other students get emotionally overwhelmed and just need to go get a grip before they tackle the expectations being placed on them. Yet others take longer to stop one activity and transition to another one. That short little break can buy them the time they need to process the mental shift of set and orient themselves to the new demands being placed on them. Other times, students just don’t understand the expectation being placed on them and need clarification.

In any event, if there’s a problem, the goal provides a solution; otherwise, the student just needs to perform the task as assigned. Further, the language of this example goal can be modified for a student to provide for alternative acceptable responses and/or a different response time.

With respect to measurability, there is no guessing about what anybody is thinking or feeling in a goal formatted this way. Measurement is triggered by the delivery of a task demand (the assigned task) and is based on whether any of the described acceptable outcomes occur within 60 seconds. All of the elements of the goal are measurable.

Further, a goal written this way follows the ABC format of ABA. First an Antecedent is presented (the task demand), then one of three acceptable Behaviors (task initiation, request for help, request for break) occurs, then an appropriate Consequence (completion of the task, delivery of help, or receipt of a short break) is immediately forthcoming. Everything that needs to be measured can be observed. The observable criteria are easily represented in increments of measure. It’s black-and-white without making any assumptions about a student’s thoughts, feelings, or preferences.

So, having said all of this, how does this get us to the point of the article, which is how parents can successfully advocate for the application of the peer-reviewed research to the design and implementation of their children’s IEPs? Well, first, I needed to be clear as to what I mean by applying the peer-reviewed research, hence everything I just got through explaining.

Parents first need to understand what they are asking for and how it impacts the design and implementation of their child’s IEP. Further, any professionals reading this for the purpose of further developing their skill set may not have all the background information necessary to make sense of all of this, either.

A foundation first had to be laid. Having now done that, parents need to keep the information I’ve just shared in mind when participating in IEP meetings and reviewing IEP documents for appropriateness.

If you live in a consent state like California, I usually suggest signing only for attendance at the meeting and taking the document home for review before signing agreement to any of it. In California and other states, you can give partial consent to an IEP and the education agency has to implement the consented-to portions without delay while the non-consented-to portions remain subject to IEP team discussion and negotiation.

Anything that can’t be resolved via the IEP process must go to due process for resolution, whether you are in a consent state or not. Just because you are not in a consent state doesn’t mean that an education agency won’t change the language of an IEP at your request. An IEP meeting would likely be called to discuss your concerns and, if you back them up with facts and logic, the education agency isn’t going to have a good reason to say, “No.” Not everyone is outlandishly unreasonable in special education; there are some definite bad apples, but they don’t account for the entire barrel. Due process is your only resort if your efforts to resolve things at the IEP level are not met with success and your child is increasingly compromised because of the unresolved matters.

If you are unfortunate enough to have to rely on due process to see things resolved, the fact that your denied requests were supported by facts and logic will only help your case once you get in front of a hearing officer. Understanding the underlying arguments of what makes something legitimately measurable and the federal requirement that special education be delivered according to what science has already proven works makes you a far more informed IEP participant than at least some of the other people at the table.

As a parent, the more you can support your requests and arguments with peer-reviewed research, the better. Once you frame your requests according to the proven science and make it as black-and-white as possible, you eliminate all kinds of silly arguments. This means not only asking for goals that are truly measurable, though that goes a long way towards solving and preventing a lot of problems, but also understanding the nature of your child’s disability(ies) and what the research says can be done to teach to learners with such needs.

Gathering the necessary research data to inform a request for a particular assessment, service, curriculum, methodology, technology, or placement requires accessing the peer-reviewed literature and understanding what it means. A lot of it is really dry and technical, as well as expensive. This isn’t a burden parents should have to take on, but if it’s one that they can take on, it will only help them become better advocates for their children. Google Scholar can be a good place to start.

In truth, it should be education agency personnel doing this research, but if parents want to see the science applied, they may have to push for it, themselves. Parents can also submit published research articles to their local education agencies that appear to apply to their children’s educational needs and request that the approaches used on those articles be used as part of their children’s special education programs, including being written into their children’s IEPs. If the local education agency declines to honor any request, 34 CFR Sec. 300.503 obligates it to provide Prior Written Notice (PWN) explaining why to the parents.

Conversely, if the education agency proposes a particular approach and the parents are unsure about it, the parents can request an explanation of the peer-reviewed research that underpins the education agency’s offer. Either it honors the request or it provides PWN explaining why it won’t. If it’s the latter, it better be one heck of a good explanation or it will only reveal that the education agency has no research-based explanation for its recommended course of action, giving the parents a good reason to dispute it.

If what you are asking for as the parent is backed up by facts, logic, legitimate measurement, and credible research that all directly apply to your child, and the education agency still says, “No,” then you will either end up with no PWN because the agency doesn’t want to put the denial in writing, which violates the law and only makes your case stronger in hearing, or you will end up with a PWN full of malarkey that won’t stand up in due process. If what you are asking for makes total sense and the education agency won’t do it or something else equally or more appropriate, the education agency will have some explaining to do in hearing.

So long as what you are asking for is necessary for your child to receive an appropriately ambitious amount of educational benefits (meaning as close to grade level or developmental norms as possible), there’s not a lot of good reasons for a public education agency to turn down your request. It’s illegal for the public education system to use fiscal considerations to determine what should be in a special education student’s IEP.

Just be sure to submit all of your requests for changes to your child’s IEP in writing. It is the education agency’s receipt of your written request for changes that triggers the PWN requirement. In the instance of requesting assessments, many states allow for a public education agency to decline to conduct assessments for special education purposes upon parent request, but the agency must provide PWN when doing so. For more information on special education assessments, see our previous post, “The Basics of Special Education Assessments.”

If it doesn’t decline a parent’s written request for assessment, the education agency must provide the parent with an assessment plan to sign that authorizes the agency to conduct the requested assessments. State law regulates the provision of assessment plans; in California, local education agencies have 15 calendar days to get an assessment plan to the parent, regardless of who made the referral for assessment. Submitting the request for assessment in writing is not only important for triggering the PWN requirement if the request is declined, it’s also important in establishing when a state-mandated timeline starts counting down.

You as a parent can encourage the application of science in special education by insisting upon it. If you live in California or another consent state, you can use your authority to withhold your consent to anything that looks sketchy in an IEP being given to you for your signature. You can consent to instruction in the areas targeted by IEP goals but not to using the language of the goals for the purpose of measuring progress if they aren’t actually written in a measurable way. You can consent to everything in an IEP except a change in placement. If you can’t resolve all of the issues you have with an IEP this way, those left unresolved become due process issues.

Even if you are not in a consent state, you can still make the record in writing that you disagree with the sketchy portions of your child’s IEP, explain why using math and science, and request appropriate changes. The local education agency will likely call an IEP meeting and change those things it’s willing to change and give you PWN on those things it is not willing to change. The things left unresolved at that point are due process issues.

Understanding how to use math and science to solve everyday problems is a solid skill to have, but not everybody has it. It’s a skill necessary to developing a sound IEP for any special education student. Parent education can be provided as a related service under a student’s IEP if the purpose of the parent education is to help the parents understand their child’s disability and/or to help them be equal participants of the IEP team. There is absolutely nothing wrong with parents asking to be trained on how to write measurable annual goals and the IEP process in general as part of parent training as a related service under their child’s IEP. Parent training is specifically named as one of many possible related services that can be provided to a student with an IEP by 34 CFR Secs. 300.34(a) and 300.34(c)(8)(i)).

If you’re distrustful of the quality of instruction you might get from parent training through your child’s IEP, you may have to result to self-education by reading everything you can find about your child’s disability, as much of the peer-reviewed research about instructing learners with the types of needs your child has as you can digest, and simplified reports of the research findings in trusted publications from credible sources. You may need to periodically consult with experts for hire, but what you invest in informing yourself you may save many times over by preventing yourself from getting duped.

The bottom line is that parents can protect their children’s right to evidence-based special education planning and implementation the more they understand how to use measurement and evidence in the planning and implementation processes. By knowing what to look for, they know what request when they don’t see it. Informed parents can monitor the situation for education agency compliance.

In those areas where parents have not yet mastered the knowledge necessary to know whether an approach is appropriate for their child or not, they are encouraged to ask questions like, “Can you explain to me how this fits my child?” and “How can we measure whether this works in a meaningful way?” By shifting the burden back onto the education agency to explain how and why its recommendations are supported by the peer-reviewed research and written in an appropriately measurable manner, parents rightly shift the burden of applying the science to the appropriate party.

Parents are not, and should not, be required to become experts in order to participate in the IEP process. But, for the sake of protecting their children’s educational and civil rights, and their own rights to meaningful parent participation in the IEP process, it behooves parents to become as knowledgeable as possible. It’s more difficult to get tricked or misled the more you know, and the more dry and technical you can keep things, the less hysterical drama you’re likely to experience in dealing with your local education agency.

References:

  • Drasgow, E., Yell, M.L., & Robinson, T.R. (2001). Developing legally correct and educationally appropriate IEPs. Remedial and Special Education 22(6), 359-373. doi: 10.1177/074193250102200606
  • Kimball, J. (2002). Behavior-analytic instruction for children with autism: Philosophy matters. Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, 17(2), 66-75. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F10883576020170020101
  • Yell, M. & Drasgow, E. (2000). Litigating a free appropriate public education: The Lovaas hearings and cases. The Journal of Special Education, 33(4), 205-214. doi: 10.1177/002246690003300403


 

The Fundamental Flow of IEP Creation

Image credit: Justin Lincoln

Trying to piece together the actual special education process from the implementing federal regulations of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is a lot like trying to create origami from paper shredder cuttings. However, it’s been done and, when laid out in proper order, the special education process totally makes sense.

When followed as intended, the special education regulations are a marriage of law and science. It is further assumed that procedural compliance with the regulations is likely to result in the provision of the Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) promised to each special education student by the IDEA. The specific language comes from what is known in special education circles as “The Rowley Decision,” which specifically states, “the Act’s emphasis on procedural safeguards demonstrates the legislative conviction that adequate compliance with prescribed procedures will in most cases assure much, if not all, of what Congress wished in the way of substantive content in an IEP. “

In order to understand why the regulations require the things in special education they do, it helps to first understand the history of the language in the regulations. Prior to Congress enacting the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EAHCA) in 1975, which ultimately became the IDEA during a later reauthorization, there were no laws that specifically promised any kind of education to children with special needs.

Prior to the EAHCA, children with disabilities were routinely denied enrollment into the public schools. In the beginning, it was an accomplishment just to get a public school to open its doors to a child with special needs, and there was nothing that made it mandatory to educate the child according to any particular standards once the doors had been opened.

Then, in 1971, disability advocates took the matter of the Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Citizens (PARC) vs. the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to the U.S. District Court. The settlement and resulting consent decree produced much of the language that is now found in the implementing regulations of the IDEA, particularly with respect to FAPE and individualized educational program development.

In PARC v. Pennsylvania, a class of individuals who all had intellectual disabilities (IDs), which at the time were described as “mental retardation,” were being denied access to public school on the basis of their diagnosed “mental retardation.” They were either languishing without any education or receiving privately funded education at their parents’ personal expense. PARC filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of itself and the child members of the class, sued for injunctive relief, settled with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and obtained a consent decree overseen by the U.S. District Court, which it later enforced through the Courts to compel Pennsylvania to enroll children with IDs into its public schools and provide them with appropriate programs.

Quoting page 8 of the May 5, 1972 Opinion, Order and Injunction from PARC v. Pennsylvania, “The lengthy Consent Agreement concludes by stating that ‘[every] retarded person between the ages of six and twenty-one shall be provided access to a free public program of education and training appropriate to his capacities as soon as possible but in no event later than September 1, 1972 …’ To implement the agreed upon relief and assure that it would be extended to all members of this class, Dennis E. Haggerty, Esq., a distinguished member of the Pennsylvania Bar who has devoted much of his energy to the welfare of retarded children, and Dr. Herbert Goldstein, an eminent expert in the education of retarded children who is Professor and Director of the Curriculum Research and Development Center in Mental Retardation at the Ferkaus Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Yeshiva University, were appointed Masters at the expense of the Commonwealth … Next, the Consent Agreement charges defendants with the duty within 30 days, to formulate and submit to the Masters a plan to locate, evaluate and give notice to all members of the plaintiff class … Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Agreement states that: ‘The defendants shall formulate and submit to the Masters for their approval a plan to be effectuated by September 1, 1972, to commence or recommence a free public program of education and training for all mentally retarded persons . . . aged between four and twenty-one years as of the date of this Order, and for all mentally retarded persons of such ages hereafter. The plan shall specify the range of programs of education and training, there [sic] kind and number, necessary to provide an appropriate program of education and training to all mentally retarded children, where they shall be conducted, arrangements for their financing, and, if additional teachers are found to be necessary, the plan shall specify recruitment, hiring, and training arrangements.'” [emphasis added; internal citations omitted]

Here, we see the language of FAPE (34 CFR Sec. 300.17), the marriage of law and science in the creation of the program design, the precursor to the federal “child find” requirements (34 CFR Sec. 300.111), and language that effectively describes creating what amounts to an IEP. PARC v. Pennsylvania laid the foundation for what ultimately became the IDEA, which specifically mandates that the peer-reviewed research be applied to the delivery of special education to the degree it’s practicable to do so (34 CFR Sec. 300.320(a)(4)).

The appointment of the masters in PARC v. Pennsylvania is important to note because it marks from the outset the need to combine the efforts of legal professionals and psychologists to come up with evidence-based approaches to special education instruction that conform with the regulations. While there have been many efforts over the years by those of a particular ilk within the public education system to minimize the science and place undue emphasis on legal maneuvering, they have never been successful at eliminating the science.

Now, we are seeing the courts rely more and more on the dry, neutral facts of science rather than the hysterical budget shielding that typically goes on in special education. As more and more people become more fluent with using math and science in everyday life, the public is increasingly expecting to see science rather than politics in the delivery of public instruction.

It has always been the intent of the applicable law to use the applicable science in the delivery of special education. The arguments for relying on facts and evidence in designing and implementing IEPs are too compelling to be overcome by cronyistic politics altogether. Politically speaking, the science has never carried as much weight in special education as it does now, which is tragic in that it’s taken this long but it’s also inevitable. The truth is the truth and no amount of political spinning changes what a child’s unique learning needs actually are or what research has proven actually works.

So, that being the case, when we look at the logical flow of how an IEP is supposed to go together, it’s important to understand how the law and science become inextricably intertwined as the IEP process goes forward. To start, a child cannot be found eligible for special education without first being assessed. Assessment determines if the child has a qualifying disability and, if so, what to do about it.

Competent special education assessment is a highly scientific process. People with special credentials and licenses are brought in to collect expert data, analyze it, and provide expert opinions to the IEP team as to why a child is struggling in school and what can be done about it. This process can become compromised by internal public education agency politics, however. See our previous blog post, “The Basics of Special Education Assessments,” for more information about this step of the process.

In an ideal world, a child’s initial assessment for special education is thorough and competent. It measures all of the student’s unique learning needs and assesses in all areas of suspected disability. The data it produces is then used with input from teachers and parents to create an IEP, presuming the child is eligible for an IEP. This is where things can get really messy.

There are two ways things can go badly at this stage:

  • The assessments were poorly done and now there isn’t good data to inform the development of the IEP, or
  • The assessment data is fine but the IEP offered to the student doesn’t match what the assessment data says the student needs

Parents need to understand what is supposed to happen at this stage of the process or they can be quickly bamboozled by seasoned bureaucrats with their own agendas. The information gathered by the IEP team about the student’s learning strengths and needs is supposed to result in measurable annual goals that describe what the IEP is supposed to make happen in each area of unique learning need.

Where things often break down is in translating all of the baseline data into measurable annual goals that target appropriate learning outcomes in every single area of unique learning need. That’s a tall order. It’s one thing to measure what already is, but it’s another thing to use that data to project where things should be in a year.

IEP teams often struggle to identify all the areas in which goals are needed, much less write the goals they come up with in a measurable manner. In my experience, the average special education professional would fail the 4th grade under the Common Core if their IEP goal-writing skills were used to measure their abilities to apply math and science to solving everyday problems.

A lot of the guidance given to special education professionals during the 1980s and 1990s about IEP goal-writing was a bunch of preemptive legal defense hooey that was utterly devoid of any kind of valid science or math. These approaches provided teachers with formulas and supposed hacks that they usually didn’t understand and usually used incorrectly in the field.

There was no sincere effort that I ever observed back in the day to teach special education professionals the technical nuts and bolts of goal-writing, and I still assert now that the training being done is grossly inadequate. A half-day workshop for continuing education units is usually about it for most special ed staffs, and most of what such a workshop instructs is usually garbage.

These are the workshops that taught teachers to write the measurement for every goal as “… with 80% accuracy in 4 out of 5 trials …” even if it makes no sense. For example, it’s highly inappropriate when used here: “By [annual due date], [Student] will cross the street safely with 80% accuracy in 4 out of 5 trials as measured by observation.”

First, try to make the math work, which you can’t. Then ask yourself what an 80% accuracy rate of crossing the street safely must look like, however it might be calculated, and whether it could possibly be educationally appropriate. It’s supposed to be a free and appropriate public education and there’s nothing appropriate about being run over in the street like a bug as a result of participating in publicly funded instruction.

My brief advice to school district administrators is to not let your attorneys develop your employee training for any aspect of special education that requires scientific rigor. And, unless you are qualified yourself in the applicable sciences, if you are an administrator, don’t think of developing that training yourself, either. Use actual experts; don’t be a chump.

Doing sound assessments only to toss the science and math out the window when it comes time to write the IEP makes no sense whatsoever. But, there is a political game that sometimes get played with parents in which public education agencies will deliver a decent assessment, but then offer a garbage IEP and act like the garbage IEP is what the data and law say the agency can do for the student. It’s a lie.

In reality, the IEP is based on how much the education agency is willing to spend on the student, but the agency’s administrators can’t admit that, so they try to run a con on the parents in which they use valid assessment data to argue for a garbage IEP. They’re effectively gaslighting the parents because the data doesn’t support the IEP at all, but the parents are usually too confused to understand what is really happening and just let it go, thereby allowing the education agency to get away with shortchanging a kid.

The parents get an assessment report that describes their kid, but then they get offered an IEP that is weak relative to the kid’s actual needs and they figure that’s the most the schools must be able to do for them. In truth, their kid is getting robbed. If the IEP doesn’t match the assessment data, something is really wrong. This can be particularly the case with IEP goals.

The data can make clear what the areas are in which goals are needed, but then only a few goals get put into the IEP by school personnel. This is a problem because the services that are offered to a special education student are supposed to be driven by what is necessary to meet the goals. If you don’t have goals in each area of need, there’s nothing to compel all of the services that are needed. Missing goals mean missing services. Schools that want to prevent spending on services can accomplish this by leaving goals out of IEPs.

Goals describe what the IEP is supposed to make happen. Services describe what it takes to meet the goals. This includes service frequency, duration, and location. For example, a student may receive 30 minutes per week of individual speech/language services to address their communication goals.

Accommodations are tools and strategies that make access to the grade-level content possible for a child with special needs. They are not the same things as modifications. Modifications actually change the learning expectations for the student to something less rigorous than the grade-level standards so that the instruction is accessible to the student.

For example, the accommodation of being able to dictate one’s answers rather than write them down doesn’t change the nature of the material being studied or the questions that have to be answered. The only thing that changes is how the response is produced, but a grade-level response is still expected.

In another example by contrast, a student with developmental delays may participate part of the time in general education math where students are calculating the hypotenuses of triangles, but the work is modified to cutting out different sized triangles for the student with developmental delays. In this example, the instruction has been scaffolded towards the grade-level expectations by modifying it to the student’s level of learning.

Before one can understand what a hypotenuse is, one must first understand what a triangle is, so instruction on triangles in general lays a foundation for the eventual instruction of the calculation of hypotenuses. Scaffolding towards the grade level standards and developmental norms is a critical method used in special education as per the peer-reviewed research to adapt the instruction to learners who cannot perform at grade level because of their disabilities. There still has to be a way to measure their learning and push them as close to grade level as possible.

Once goals, services, and accommodations are identified, the IEP team then determines the student’s educational placement. This is usually not a specific classroom or campus; it’s the type of classroom and/or campus required. Placement is decided at the end of the process because it is impossible to know where is the best place to deliver the services and accommodations such that the goals are met if the goals haven’t been written and services and accommodations haven’t yet been determined.

In addition to these critical steps, an IEP can also include an Individualized Transition Plan (ITP), which is basically a plan within a plan that describes what will be done for a teenager or young adult with an IEP to prepare them for life after high school. Students exit special education either by graduating with a regular diploma or aging out, usually at age 21 or 22, The ITP is supposed to be the driving force of their IEPs from at least age 16 forward, though nothing prevents IEP teams from starting younger.

Another component that an IEP may include is some kind of Behavior Intervention Plan (BIP). They can go by a variety of names, but they’re all basically the same thing, and usually loosely based on Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA). This is another science that gets grossly watered down in special education, sometimes to the point of becoming ineffective if not harmful.

Good ABA is a wonderful thing, but there are way too many programs operating these days that are “ABA-based,” meaning they aren’t fully adhering to the science and only have borrowed those parts from it that they find most easy to use. They take a fluid science, try to turn it into something formulaic, and ruin the whole damn thing. It’s right up there with crossing the street safely with 80% accuracy in 4 out of 5 trials.

To be clear, when I talk about ABA in this blog/podcast, I’m talking about the actual science, not some hokey fly-by-night scam trying to take advantage of the autism community. I have plenty of colleagues who operate completely legitimate, scientifically rigorous ABA programs that save and change lives for the better, and they are just as disgusted as I am by the charlatans ruining the good name of a credible science for the sake of making a buck off of autism. These charlatans who have corrupted the legitimate science are the ones with whom the autism community takes such issue when they complain about ABA.

There is no way to have a conversation about the IEP process and the degree to which science plays a role in it without discussing ABA. ABA is the most reliable method of data collection currently used in special education, even when not done that well. This is because the field is dominated with people teaching their students to cross the street safely with 80% accuracy in 4 out of 5 trials as measured by observation. Even shoddily done ABA-type data collection is usually better than that.

It’s my argument that, if the science has to be applied to the degree it’s practicable to do so, and ABA-type data collection is the most reliable, then IEP goals should be based on ABA-type data collection methods. If IEP goals were actually written according to scientific method like they were supposed to have been from the start, we would naturally default to ABA-type methods of data collection because that’s the only thing that will work.

This becomes particularly important for IEPs with BIPs. Real ABA, not the half-baked version that is peddled by some agencies, should be used to develop measurable annual goals and any BIP in an IEP. This will allow for legitimate measurement of actual progress. Here, it’s not exactly about the instructional approaches of ABA so much as how to accurately measure learning. By using ABA-based teaching and measuring approaches, it’s a lot easier to tell if a student is actually learning anything or not, which is the whole point of measurable annual goals and measurable BIP criteria.

When you understand that there is a logical order to the sequence of the special education process that the law describes from what it has taken from science, the parts of an IEP start to make more sense. An IEP is not an arbitrary document. It’s an enforceable contract that describes what a public education agency is supposed to do to tailor the instruction to a student with special needs. It includes what it includes for logical reasons.

Congress organized how IEPs are supposed to go together based on the advice of attorneys and psychologists who worked very hard to come with with a marriage of law and science that will work so long as the public education system pays equal attention to both the science and the law. There needs to be more training for professionals in the special education community as to the scientific origins of IEP design and the scientific rigor actually necessary to deliver special education according to Congress’ intent.

Parents need to understand the importance of the science, as well. They are the most important members of any IEP team and if they don’t understand what the data means, they can’t give informed consent to anything.

Parent education is a related service that can be added to an IEP to help the parents understand their child’s special needs as well as help them better participate in the IEP process (34 CFR Sec. 300.34(a)). If you feel as a parent like you don’t have enough information to be an equal member of the IEP team, it’s your right to request parent training as a related service so that your rights to meaningful parent participation in the IEP process and informed consent are honored.


 

The Basics of Special Education Assessments

Most people new to special education are quickly blindsided by the processes and procedures that have to be followed. Many parents new to the process don’t exactly understand that customizing school for their children with special needs is what special education is supposed to do. Often they will say that they don’t know what special education will be able to do for their children, in large part because they don’t understand what special education actually is or how it works.

There is a huge need to demystify the special education process for those who don’t fully understand it. The process starts at the very beginning with a referral for assessment, but before I launch into a discussion of special education assessments, I first want to map out the special education process in general so the role that assessments play in that process becomes clear.

Because special education can only be given to students who meet specific eligibility criteria, a process had to be developed to determine who meets those criteria. The basis for a referral for a special education assessment is “suspected disability.” If the parents, teachers, or other involved professionals have a reason to suspect that a disability might be responsible for why a student is struggling in school academically, communicatively, socially, physically, and/or behaviorally, it’s enough to trigger the assessment process.

Sometimes, special education assessments end up ruling out disabilities and identifying other challenges that are interfering with student learning that require solutions other than special education. It is never a bad thing when a child who is struggling in school gets help, regardless of what types of help may be needed.

Federal law mandates that public education agencies conduct a process called “child find” in which they actively seek out and identify those students who can be suspected of possibly needing special education (34 CFR Sec. 300.111). A great many special education lawsuits have been filed over the years on behalf of students who were never identified through “child find,” but should have been.

I have worked as a paralegal on several cases in which there was enough evidence to suspect a disability was responsible for a student’s struggles but it failed to trigger the “child find” process. When students who are eligible for special education are denied eligibility, including from a failure to conduct “child find” that denies them the chance to be found eligible in the first place, they are usually due compensatory education to make up for the education they should have gotten but didn’t. “Child find” failures are no small things, but they occur systematically everywhere.

Very often, children of color, children from households with low incomes, children in single-parent families, and children who have immigrated here from other countries are the ones most often missed by “child find.” In many instances, they are instead blamed for their challenges and end up funneled into the juvenile justice system, thereby greasing the wheels of the School-to-Prison Pipeline.

It often takes a parent referral to see a student properly identified for special education. Struggles over homework, tears shed over grades, disciplinary problems at school, and other obvious signs of trouble will prompt many parents to look into their options for help from their local schools and some will stumble upon some basic information about special education and the referral process. If it makes enough sense to them, they will write a letter requesting that their child be tested for learning problems that might require special education, which triggers the assessment process.

Depending on what State parents are in, the laws vary as to whether their local education agencies are legally obligated to act on their referrals for special education assessment. Some States give parent referrals equal weight to those made by school personnel and other States do not. The federal laws leave it up to the States to decide, by default making it such that education agencies can decline parent referrals for assessment with Prior Written Notice (PWN) explaining why the referral is being declined (34 CFR Sec. 300.503).

California law, however, gives parent referrals equal weight to those made by education agency personnel (EDC 56029) and mandates that an assessment plan be provided to parents for their consent within 15 calendar days of any referral for assessment being made (EDC 56043(a)). States can add protections to the IDEA, they just can’t reduce them to anything below the minimum standards of the IDEA. Not all States provide the same kind of protection of parent referrals that California provides.

Even when a parent referral is accepted, many school districts will still limit assessment in a way the parents don’t realize is happening in order to prevent students from being found eligible for special education and thereby prevent special education expenditures and a host of additional legal obligations. For far too many families, just getting that initial evaluation can become a legal battle, but then the question becomes whether the assessment they got was any good.

I want to focus on what happens once the assessment process actually gets going, though. Eventually, most families of eligible children who are pushing for appropriate services will get an initial assessment that is used by the IEP team to determine whether the student is eligible for special education or not. If the student is found eligible, re-assessments will then occur at least once every three years, or triennially, to update the data available to the IEP team for ongoing IEP development.

The purpose of special education assessment is to determine 1) if the student is eligible for special education and, if so, 2) what the content of the student’s IEP should be. Needless to say that if the data gathered by the assessment is inaccurate, incomplete, or incompetently interpreted, things can go horribly wrong. And, they do. A lot of special education litigation arises over education agency failures to competently assess in all areas of suspected disability.

For example, if a child is verbal but can’t read people’s facial expressions or tone of voice, there still needs to be a speech-language evaluation that looks at not only articulation, receptive language, and expressive language, but also at pragmatic (social) language. Pragmatic language includes the ability to read nonverbal body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice.

Children with autism tend to be very literal with words and miss the nuances that tone of voice, facial expression, and body language can contribute to conveying someone else’s communicative intent, so they may misunderstand sarcasm or idioms and cliches. They can similarly struggle to make their own faces match what they are trying to say in a way that makes sense to most other people. Students with other types of handicapping conditions can also have similar challenges for various reasons related to their disabilities.

This isn’t all people with autism, of course, but pragmatic language deficits are commonly occurring features of autism. It stands to reason that any child assessed for autism should also have a comprehensive speech-language evaluation that includes pragmatics. I’ve lost count of the number of students on the autism spectrum I’ve represented over the last 28+ years who have had huge problems with interpersonal communication but had never had their pragmatic language tested until I asked for it. It’s one of those obvious things that shouldn’t have to be specifically requested, but I often end up having to request it, anyway.

And, this example goes to why it’s important that parents understand the critical nature of assessments and getting them done correctly the first time around, if at all possible. What happens if assessments are bad is that whatever IEPs are produced from them will also be bad. This can include an inappropriate denial of special education eligibility altogether at the initial IEP, as well as students being found eligible but then given weak IEPs that don’t actually address their needs.

Simply giving a student a document that says “IEP” on it does not magically bestow educational benefits upon that student. The contents of the document matter and they should be informed by scientifically valid data in all areas of suspected disability and unique learning need. The IEP is supposed to be the blueprint by which the special education student’s education is delivered according to that student’s unique learning profile, which can only be ascertained through valid and sufficiently rigorous assessments that include teacher and parent input.

What tests should be administered to a given student depends on the student. Just as the special education program developed for each student must be individualized, so must the assessments conducted to inform that program. If a student doesn’t present with any evidence of hearing loss, it makes no sense to test in the area of hearing. However, if a student reports that the words swim on the page when the student attempts to read, an assessment of visual processing is entirely in order.

Similarly, if the primary areas of concern are social and classroom participation but the student’s grades are otherwise fine, you can conduct all the IQ and academic achievement tests in the world, but they will fail to give you relevant data about the actual source of the problem. At best, academic achievement testing may tell you the degree to which the social/behavioral challenges are interfering with classroom participation and work completion, but social/emotional and behavioral assessments are necessary to get to the bottom of social and classroom behavioral challenges, including lack of participation.

It is not uncommon for individuals with autism and/or anxiety disorders who are otherwise verbally and intellectually intact to do well in their academics, at least in the lower grades, but have a truly difficult time being a member of a classroom and/or being socially integrated with the rest of the students. School is supposed to teach more than academics; it’s also supposed to give students the opportunity to learn and rehearse social skills that will ultimately allow them to become gainfully employed and fully functional within society in adulthood.

The thing to understand, here, is that a student does not automatically have to be struggling academically to need special education. A student needs to be struggling in any aspect of school as a result of a disability to such a marked degree that individualizing the student’s educational experiences is necessary in order for the student to have opportunities to learn that are equal to the opportunities given to same-grade peers who do not have disabilities.

Our students with anxiety and depression will often miss a lot of school due to psychosomatic illnesses. This prevents them from accessing education altogether, but is not directly reflective of a specific challenge with academics. Very often, these kids can handle the academics okay, but they can’t handle all the other people at school. That’s a different special education problem to solve than accommodating dyslexia or an auditory processing disorder.

I can tell you that, as an educational psychologist and behavior analyst, there are student-specific lines of inquiry that an individualized assessment of each student should pursue. No two assessments should look exactly alike from one student to the next. The federally mandated requirement placed on schools is to assess in all areas of suspected disability and unique student need on an individualized basis (34 CFR Sec. 300.304).

That means social/emotional functioning, pragmatic language, and behavior are probably going to feature more prominently in an assessment of a student suspected of autism or certain types of social/emotional disorders. Measures of cognition and academic achievement, analysis of classroom work samples, parent and teacher interviews, and classroom observations are going to be more useful in troubleshooting a potential learning disability. Physical therapy, occupational therapy, and adaptive physical education evaluations are going to be important for a student with an orthopedic impairment that impacts how the student navigates the school campus.

There is no “one-size-fits-all” assessment procedure in special education. There should be no “one-size-fits-all” anything in special education. The whole point of it is individualized instruction, which can only be individualized to the student if the IEP is informed by individualized assessment data.

The importance of individualizing assessment cannot be overemphasized, and I have an example from my past to drive that point home: Many years ago, a couple of years or so after I first became a paralegal, I was working a due process case in which, between the testimony of the school psychologist and the district’s director of special education, it became clear that the only reason the school psychologist had used a particular verbal IQ test on our 7-year-old language delayed client with Down’s Syndrome was because the district kept those tests in bulk in the supply closet, and it would take longer than the 60-day assessment timeline to order a more appropriate test through the district’s purchase order process, as overseen by the special education director.

It is my recollection that the administrative law judge who tried the case had his own blistering line of questioning after those facts made it onto the record. He basically eviscerated the special education director for sneaky, underhanded abuses of the system to save a buck at the expense of assessment accuracy. The judge ended up ordering the school district to fund an outside assessment done by an expert who used the right kinds of tests.

The dad had already paid to have the outside expert assessment done, so we had it as evidence of how to do it right in hearing, plus the outside expert testified credibly as to his methods and findings. The district ended up having to reimburse the dad for the outside assessment and there was a huge training initiative throughout that district’s special education department shortly after that hearing decision was published. Heads rolled and policies changed for the better, but it took exposing what was really going on in a hearing to effect significant changes.

The function that assessments serve in the special education process is to set it all in motion and inform all the other steps that will follow. An IEP must include a statement of a student’s present levels of performance at the time the IEP was written, thereby establishing baselines. An IEP must also include annual, measurable goals that target learning outcomes to be achieved in one year’s time from the date the IEP is written that move the student forward from those baseline positions in each area of unique learning need.

There is no way to realistically identify the target outcomes to be met with one year’s worth of work in each area of unique student need without valid assessment data to inform that analysis. How much is realistic for an individual student to learn in a year’s time comes down to a combination of variables that should have all been measured and described by the assessment data.

Goals target the outcomes intended by a student’s IEP. What services are included in an IEP, including the frequency, duration, and location of those services, are determined on the basis of what will be necessary to meet the IEP goals. Placement is the last decision made by an IEP team and is determined by what is the least restrictive setting or combination of settings that allows the services to be delivered such that the goals are met without unnecessarily segregating the student away from the general education population.

You can’t decide where a special education student can be most appropriately educated until you first determine what you’re going to have to do in that setting or combination of settings. What needs to be done is determined by what you want to make happen. You don’t know what to make happen until you understand where things already stand and what you are still missing. You don’t know what is already intact and available, or what is missing, without first doing an assessment.

So, everything in the IEP process depends on the assessments being done right in the first place, or the entire IEP process falls apart from the outset. If an assessment is done badly, there aren’t adequate baseline data to inform an IEP’s present levels of performance or inform decisions about how aggressive each measurable annual goal should be in terms of its targeted outcomes. Further, if it’s done badly, there’s no guarantee there’s enough data to identify all the areas in which goals are actually needed.

“What can the student already do in a given area of need?” and “What is realistic to expect from this student after one year’s worth of work in this given area of need?” are the two key questions that have to be answered by special education assessment reports. That’s because those two very questions have to be answered when crafting a new IEP.

If you can’t get that far with the data from the assessments, you’re off to a really, really bad start. If you can’t lay a proper foundation, your whole construct will fall down. Competent, reasonably thorough assessment is the very foundation of a sound IEP, so it is important for parents to take this step of the IEP process very seriously and hold everyone else on the team to their respective professional standards.

Federal law mandates the application of the peer-reviewed research and the professional standards of any experts involved to the delivery of special education (34 CFR Sec. 300.320(a)(4)). That includes during the special education assessment process. Any standardized tests used must be administered and scored according to the instructions provided by the producers of each test, which must be scientifically valid for the purposes for which they are used (34 CFR Sec. 300.304(c)(1)). The enforceable law does not skirt the applicable science, and there is no legally justifiable reason why any publicly funded education agency and/or any of its contractors should be skirting it.

This can be difficult for many parents who have no background in science or law. However, an interesting phenomenon is starting to occur on a societal level that is worth noting.

Millennials are becoming an increasingly represented generational cohort among parents of children with special needs. They use their smartphones ubiquitously to call BS on a host of issues by looking up the truth, and collaborate with each other to address shared concerns. Special education advocacy today is becoming something entirely different than what it was when I started 28 years ago.

When I was a young, beginning advocate, I represented a number of housewives who could bake some mean cupcakes but would nearly faint at the presentation of a bell curve graph and deferred to their husbands on any big decisions. Now, I’ve got young moms and dads taking their own behavior data, charting it, and presenting it to their kids’ IEP teams with a written list of questions, concerns, and requests, all based on their own common sense with no formal prior exposure to the applicable sciences or law.

Where things get interesting is how school district administrations are currently configured. Many of the old-timers that I’ve been dealing with over the last two decades or more have retired and run off with their pension money before there isn’t any pension money to be had, anymore. Millennials are now starting to take the retired old-timers’ vacant job positions and, where that has happened, I’ve found that I don’t have such an uphill battle when making scientifically research-based requests in conformity with the regulations on behalf of my students and their families.

The biggest challenges I’m seeing now are Millennial parents armed with knowledge attempting to advocate for their children to public education agencies still run by the old-timers. The old-timers run things according to cronyistic politics, by and large, which has no scientific support whatsoever. In fact, cronyistic politics have been supported by a great deal of science as being impediments to the implementation of effective educational programming (Coco, G. & Lagravinese, R. “Cronyism and education performance,” Economic Modeling, Feb 2014, 38 443-450; Shaker, P. & Heilman, E. “The new common sense of education: Advocacy research versus academic authority,” Teachers College Record, Jul 2004, 106:7 1444-1470) and the impetus behind the mishandling of education dollars that take money out of the classroom that could otherwise fund effective instruction and undermine a community’s investments in education (Eicher, T., García-Peñalosa, C., & van Ypersele, T. “Education, corruption, and the distribution of income,” Journal of Economic Growth, Sep 2009 14:3 205-231).

When knowledgeable parents go up against cronyistic old-timers, the old-timers resort to their familiar bag of power-mongering tricks. But, trying to intimidate a mom who was educated under the Common Core to use math and science to solve real-life problems is a world apart from trying to intimidate a housewife whose science and math skills are limited to following recipes in a cookbook and balancing a checkbook.

I’m watching old-timers retire in droves nowadays because their weapons of choice against parents aren’t effective anymore and the courts are increasingly relying on the applicable science to inform how the law applies to each special education student on an individual basis. Law is supposed to be evidence-based, as is science. Education science allows special education law to be as black-and-white as possible. Everything else, particularly in a cronyistic system, is subjective opinion and hearsay. The environment no longer reinforces the old-timers’ behaviors like it used to, and their behaviors are starting to become extinct.

So, parents going forth into special education, especially those of you who know how to use your smartphones to look things up and fact-check, fall back on the science and lean on it hard, starting with the assessment process. When you are first given that assessment plan to sign, don’t sign anything until you understand what it means and the language of it is clear.

Very often, assessment plans will say vague things like “social/emotional evaluation by psychologist,” which can sound a whole lot like a mental health evaluation by a clinician to a lay person. In reality, what it usually means is rating scales filled out by parents, teachers, and sometimes the student that are scored and interpreted by a credentialed school psychologist, not a licensed clinician. Rating scales scored and interpreted by a school psychologist is not the same thing as a mental health evaluation by a licensed clinician.

But, how is a parent unfamiliar with the process supposed to know that? Would any reasonable layperson just assume this language meant a mental health evaluation by a clinician? I’ve seen this happen more than once involving youth with significant mental health issues for which consideration was being requested by the parent of the rest of the IEP team of residential placement via the student’s IEP. The parents would be given an assessment plan that said “social/emotional evaluation by psychologist,” think they were getting an evaluation to explore residential placement, and only find out 60 days later that they had been given the run-around while their child continued to fall apart. Residential placement is the most restrictive placement possible through the special education system, but it is possible for those students whose needs are that dire.

In these cases, the students’ needs were absolutely that dire and the responsible school districts attempted to delay the costs of residential placement by first doing rating scales by their school psychologist as part of a 60-day evaluation process, who then recommended a mental health evaluation, sometimes including a residential placement evaluation but sometimes not, thereby triggering a new 60-day assessment timeline. If a residential placement evaluation was not included with the mental health evaluation, the mental health evaluation could then conclude that the student should be considered for residential placement, triggering yet another new 60-day evaluation timeline.

Or, worse, the mental health evaluation could be silent on the issue of residential placement, leaving it to the parents to know to keep asking for such an evaluation; but, by this point, most parents erroneously conclude that residential placement isn’t an option so they drop it. There are youth in immediate crises who need instant mental health services, and their school districts are stalling the process by adding an unnecessary layer of assessment that gives it another 60 to 120 days before it has to act on the data (i.e., foot the tab for services).

Each of the students from my caseload who have shared this experience, in different school districts mind you, ended up either hospitalized and/or incarcerated at some point before finally getting the help that they needed. In most of those cases, the issue had to be forced with lawsuits that ultimately resulted in confidential settlement agreements. In each instance, the unnecessary delays in receiving immediate help contributed to self-injurious behavior, attempted suicide, and unlawful conduct that could have otherwise been avoided.

In my first case like this, I actually took it to due process myself back in the day when advocates could do that in California, and prevailed. In that case’ decision, the hearing officer made it clear that it defies the entire purpose of the IDEA, which requires that children with qualifying disabilities be identified and served via IEPs in all areas of need as quickly as possible, to subject our most vulnerable children to double or triple the amount of assessment time of a normal special education evaluation before getting the help they need.

I don’t know of any authority that has come out since then that contradicts this interpretation, though it was a long time ago and I’m not an attorney, but I think most people will agree, that it was not likely Congress’ intent to make our most severely impacted students suffer without appropriate supports and services for months longer than it takes other special education students to get what they need. These include, but are not exclusively, students with tendencies towards violence, running away, property destruction, self-injurious behaviors, and other non-social behaviors that require a great deal of expert intervention. These are not the students who should be waiting twice to triple the time to get the services they need to keep themselves and everyone else safe and focused on learning at school.

If it looks like a critical area of need is being excluded from your child’s assessment, don’t sign the assessment plan until the public education agency adds what is missing. If the agency refuses to add it, note on the assessment plan that you are consenting to what is offered, but you still think the assessment is deficient based on what they are excluding, which you should list in your note. That way, the record is clear that you aren’t delaying the other testing by withholding your consent, but you’re also not agreeing it was appropriate to leave out what you requested.

If the matter ever goes to hearing, the fact that you documented your disagreement with the exclusions on the actual assessment plan will become part of the evidence and the agency will have to explain its refusals of your requests to a judge or hearing officer. I’ve seen agencies change their minds after parents have written such feedback on assessment plans because the agencies don’t want to have to explain those documents to judges or hearing officers down the line.

Often, the best way to prevent litigation is to prepare for it. The parents who understand the value of making the record in the right way are the most successful self-advocates out there. But, there are still enough cronyistic old-timers still entrenched in the system who think they can still get away with intimidation tactics, lies, and subterfuge. It’s getting harder and harder for them to get away with these behaviors, and parents who push for the truth from the very beginning, starting with the assessment process, have a greater chance of getting appropriate services for their children than not.


Podcast: Writing IEP Goals for Behavioral Issues

On April 15, 2009, we originally published “Writing IEP Goals for Behavioral Issues”. Throughout this school year, KPS4Parents is recording many of our past text-only articles as podcasts so that busy parents, educators, and interested taxpayers can download them and listen to them at their convenience.

As always, feel free to comment on our content. We appreciate the input of our readers and listeners to bring you the information you seek. You can either comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

Click here to download the podcast “Writing IEP Goals for Behavioral Issues.”

Podcast: Assessing Problem Behaviors in Special Education Students

On March 1, 2009, we originally published “Assessing Problem Behaviors in Special Education Students”. Throughout this school year, KPS4Parents is recording many of our past text-only articles as podcasts so that busy parents, educators, and interested taxpayers can download them and listen to them at their convenience.

As always, feel free to comment on our content. We appreciate the input of our readers and listeners to bring you the information you seek. You can either comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

Click here to download the podcast “Assessing Problem Behaviors in Special Education Students.”

Podcast: Behaviors that Interfere with Learning

On January 19, 2009, we originally published “Behaviors that Interfere with Learning”. Throughout this school year, KPS4Parents is recording many of our past text-only articles as podcasts so that busy parents, educators, and interested taxpayers can download them and listen to them at their convenience.

As always, feel free to comment on our content. We appreciate the input of our readers and listeners to bring you the information you seek. You can either comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

Click here to download the podcast “Behaviors that Interfere with Learning”.

The History of Special Ed by Brent Daigle, PhD