True Participation

You may be interested in reading John W. Lloyd's Beyond Access: Improving Success where he says:

On the educational front, one of the factors to which many disability rights organizations regularly point is the poor outcomes for students with disabilities after graduation from high school. The litany of unfavorable comparisons between students with disabilities and their not-disabled peers is familiar to many: higher unemployment, less frequent enrollment in post-secondary schools, more frequent contact with and incarceration by law-enforcement officials, etc. These are clearly outcomes that we would not only like to see improved, but also they are improvements that would auger well for our society (e.g., emphasizing the abilities of individuals) and economy (e.g., lower unemployment).

He goes on to advocate for special education to address success, not mere access to participation in the adult world. I agree that this is the critical issue: Just building the bridges doesn't mean that people will know how to use them. In my own reflections on my past encounters with Michigan Rehabilitation Services, this has been a difficult concept to communicate. I find it puzzling that we (K-12 special educators) often offer accommodations to students with Learning Disabilities without planning instruction on how to use these accommodations to successfully level the playing field.

Picture of Alpha Smart Dana on Renaissance Learning Website

I remember when students with writing problems were offered AlphaSmarts to compensate for poor handwriting, poor spelling, note-taking, a lack of word-processing equipment at home, slow writing production, a lack of written composition skills and so on. Our local county chapter of the LDA held a meeting about tools and accommodations, and one family member told me that her grandchild had been given one of those, but no one at the school had any idea how to download and print what she had written on it. What a total waste of resources!! The student got very little benefit out of the AlphaSmart, even though she'd put the time in on her assignments. But, the staff at her school didn't have the training or information to make this a useful and powerful tool for her.

Around the same time, I had borrowed an AlphaSmart from the county Assistive Technology Consultant and, after playing with it for an hour or so, figured out how to upload files onto my computer, and how to print directly from my dot-matrix printer. I also learned how to spell-check, change fonts and line spacing, and cut and paste text. Here I was, thinking how useful this tool was, while at the same time, a whole school had convinced parents that the AlphaSmart was an anachronism, and chose not to use it (or anything else) that might address the problems of access and successful accommodation.

In the interim, the AT Consultant continued to recommend the AlphaSmart to other students at the same school, resulting in a great deal of acrimony between her and the staff at the school, without any resolution. What started as a small problem of poor communication blossomed into a full-blown bickering match between the school staff, parents, and the county consultant. No gains were made for the kids for whom this could have been most helpful. Most of the students waited until they were in high school to access computers in their computer lab, purchase a low-end computer for home use. The most fortunate of these students were given used laptops that their parents bought for them. This, of course, violates one of the primary tenets of FAPE--that the supports and services provided in a public school would be FREE and appropriate. If, in order to have full-time access to the necessary supports and services, a student has to purchase a laptop, or a calculator, or any other tool: how is that "free"? If special education under IDEA ends upon graduation from high school, how have we fulfilled our obligation to the student to maximize access and participation, if we never show students how to independently use the tools and accommodations we recommend? It's a little like someone throwing a kid into a swimming pool and telling them, "Okay, I provided the water, it's your job to learn how to swim in it!"

Technology seems to progress at the speed of light. Now, an AlphaSmart is truly an anachronism. Tablets such as the iPad2 and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, with touchscreens, and lightweight, with more bells and whistles than anyone could imagine, make it so much easier for us to get intuitive technology into the hands of young people so that their playing fields are more level now, than ever before.  But, if we only hand them the tools, without showing them what they can do, we might as well just hand them a rock and a stick.