[Ohiogift] Special Education and g/t

[Margaret DeLacy]

HI, Mark:

At 01:41 PM 9/8/2013 -0400, you wrote:
So how did the advocates for the "special ed" kids do it back in the 60's - 80's?
How did they successfully "FIGHT" for what their students needed?
Was it letters and phone calls that finally won a mandate for service?
Or was it something else....... something more....?
Is it time to embrace whatever strategies they used so successfully?

Mark Bohland

I am not in Ohio, but I have some thoughts about the question you ask. 

First of all, SpecEd parents were extremely persistent.  They expected to be supporting their children for a lifetime and they were willing to spend many years fighting for services for them.  They weren't going to go away after one or two setbacks. For many of them, their kids were their jobs.  I often hear from TAG parents that they appreciate my efforts, but they have so many other obligations.....
 
Second, much more money was involved--both for the parents who felt that they had to send their children to extremely expensive special schools and for society, which would have to pay to support these children for the rest of their lives if they never became employable.  TAG parents may feel their children are wasting their time in school, but they still mostly expect their children to survive the experience (even if this is unduly optimistic).   If they become completely frustrated, they expect to be able to home-school.  Our political system hasn't yet figured out that homeschool, however, successful it is for the students, is an expensive option for families and society when it takes a working adult out of the workforce.

 Third, advocating for Special Ed. children did not involve the same social penalty.  A TAG parent soon learns that owning up to having gifted children is a fast way to lose friends and alienate neighbors.  Even worse is the effect it may have on the childrens' teachers. TAG parents often apologize before admitting their child is gifted.  Often they don't want to be outed and they even more don't want their children to be outed.  Special ed. kids usually couldn't hide their issues.  TAG kids can't either, but often people think they can or should. 

 Fourth, the Special Education movement was more politically palatable.  It promised to help the underdog or, to put it in modern terms, it promised to increase "equity" and close the achievement gap.  Gifted ed. threatens to increase inequity.  It also took place in a period when the public was perhaps feeling a bit more generous with public service expenditures. Large corporations that rely on intellectual capital figure they can buy it on the world market--they don't have to fund public school services in their home towns. Their officers see gifted education as a political minefield (as opposed to simply and meaninglessly supporting "rigor for all" without paying for it). There doesn't seem to be any profit motive that would drive corporations to spend on public school gifted programs--or to persuade the government to finance them. 

But finally, and I think most important, the Special Ed community itself was organized differently.  It was a set of national advocacy organizations, not a smallish group of academic researchers. Some of those organizations had, and still have, pretty sizeable resources.  The NAGC is simply not an organization by and for irate parents, as the kerfuffle over the new "definition" of giftedness shows.  
        
We really need more effective national leadership.  Fighting this battle state by state and district by district is simply not working.  High quality information in itself is not enough.  We have some foundations that are doing an excellent job of helping a relatively small group of gifted individuals, but no one is putting real money behind a serious political campaign that would help gifted children as a group.  There aren't any celebrity spokesmen or corporate sponsors or a large stable of lobbyists. 

 This would be a very different conversation if the Federal Government was willing to put some muscle behind seeing that these students got an education.  

Margaret

At 01:41 PM 9/8/2013 -0400, you wrote:
>So how did the advocates for the "special ed" kids do it back in the 60's - 80's?
>
>How did they successfully "FIGHT" for what their students needed?
>Was it letters and phone calls that finally won a mandate for service?
>Or was it something else....... something more....?
>Is it time to embrace whatever strategies they used so successfully?
>
> 
>Mark Bohland
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