Beyond Inclusion

"My grandmother wanted me to have an education so she kept me out of school."

-Margaret Mead

Is Placement in the "Regular Classroom" an Appropriate Goal for the Asperger's Child? for any child?

When Katie was four years old, I began my self-directed "parent advocate" training. In the process, I became fluent in a whole new language, to which I now refer as "IEP-speak." One of the most commonly used phrases in IEP-speak is "placement in the least restrictive environment," and it means "the closest your disabled child can come to the box in which we house our regular children." Built into the LRE requirement was the assumption that, for disabled children, being placed in the "regular education classroom" of their local public school was the prime indicator of program success. Everyone was supposed to share the goal of "regular class placement."

I didn't. I didn't say it out loud, of course, but the truth is that I never hoped that Katie would someday be "included" with her "same-age peers" in a public school classroom. It wasn't the peers that worried me most, although the notion of my Katie being at the mercy of the "playground jungle" without the tools to comprehend or navigate it certainly played a part. My major concern was the classroom itself.

Education vs. "Schooling"

Education is one thing, but "schooling" is quite another. The American public school system was not designed to educate children but to "school" (Star Trek TNG fans should substitute the term "assimilate" here for "school.") them to serve the needs of government and industry, as they existed between the close of the Civil War and the peak of the Industrial Revolution. Imported from Prussia, our compulsory school system is often referred to as the "Factory Model," and with good reason.

Built on the factory model, mass education taught basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, a bit of history and other subjects. This was the 'overt curriculum.' But beneath it lay an invisible or 'covert curriculum' that was far more basic. It consisted - and still does in most industrial nations - of three courses: one in punctuality, one in obedience, and one in rote, repetitive work. Factory labor demanded workers who showed up on time, especially assembly-line hands. It demanded workers who would take orders from a management hierarchy without questioning. And it demanded men and women prepared to slave away at machines or in offices, performing brutally repetitious operations.

Alvin Toffler
The Third Wave
New York: Bantam Books, 1981, p. 29

The provision of education in the United States is rooted in the "factory model" that emphasized the strengths of the "system' rather than the individual. The individual, whether student or professional, was considered a generic creature that was "treated" by the system in order to meet the goals of the system.

Ronald J. Anson
Systemic Reform: Perspectives on Personalizing Education--September 1994

The current state of national alarm over the failure of the American public school system has been in effect for well over 40 years. Again and again the public has responded to the system's pleas, that it really could do the job of educating our children if we would just send it some more money, and each time the public has been swindled. Efforts labeled "school reform" have produced no reform at all, only more of the same inferior product at a higher cost than before.

First Grade - Aggression and Regression

In first grade, the school district attempted to place Katie in a "regular" classroom, with a teacher who described herself as "just a regular teacher." The school day for Katie quickly degenerated into a continuous stream of minor reprimands, with no learning whatsoever involved. Instead of progress, we saw regression. Meltdowns, the likes of which she had not displayed at home for years, were a daily event in school. At the same time, Katie voluntarily worked with Montessori materials at home, read everything in sight, and asked to go to the library at least once a week. Academically, she was years ahead of her same-age peers, but she was unwilling to sit, mutely, in a chair, waiting for someone else to determine what she learned and how she learned it. Eventually, it became apparent that Katie was driven to become educated, but she would never give in to being "schooled."

Behaviorism - a rose by any other name....

Schools were designed...to be instruments for the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

John Taylor Gatto
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, p. 23

At first, I was worried by Katie's inability to "fit in with the program," especially since she had done very well in the Montessori* environment. Her first attempts to explain her dislike for the "regular" classroom were hampered by her expressive language deficits, but in retrospect her simple comment spoke volumes. She said "there's too much teaching there." Later, when she had learned to communicate more effectively and I had become accustomed to her learning style, I began to see Katie's "problem" for what it really was - a refusal to submit to the same sort of formal compliance training that I had rejected three years before as a primary intervention model for her. It didn't matter whether it was called ABA, discrete trial training, Lovaas, or just plain "schooling." It did not serve her needs.

*The Montessori environment bears little resemblance to the public school classroom, either in its appearance or in its method of instruction. For a comparison of how the Montessori Method differs from the public school format, visit He Says / She Says in our Montessori section.

At its roots, the public school system is not an educational program, but a behavior modification program - a token economy in which performance/compliance is rewarded and "failure"/non-compliance is punished. The idea that "regular" students are given "assignments" and "grades," and autistic students are given "commands" and "reinforcers," represents a difference in terminology, not methodology. The method of instruction remains the same, as does the primary goal (control). Like most Asperger's children, Katie's need for control is considerably greater than that of her typical peers. For them, the "regular" classroom is merely irritating. For Katie, it was intolerable.

In his book, Punished by Rewards, Alfie Kohn comments on the subject of token economies.

Sometimes the controlling nature of rewards is too obvious to miss. Consider the so-called token economy, which is used primarily with captive, dependent populations such as patients in psychiatric hospitals or children in school. The idea - again, explicitly derived from work with laboratory animals - is that when the people in charge notice the patients or children engaging in the "correct" sort of behaviors, chips, or other markers are handed out that can be exchanged later for privileges or treats. Even at the height of their popularity, these programs offended a number of people for a number of reasons. But specific objections aside, it is difficult to imagine a more flagrant example of control than one person's giving another a token redeemable for candy or privileges to reward him for being "cooperative."

We don't need critics of this approach to teach us this, however; the reliance on crude control is a point made more convincingly (albeit unintentionally) by the vocal proponents of token economies. In an article for school psychologists, a pioneer of such plans writes that "children need to be reminded frequently that they are working for reinforcers" and that "a teacher must always keep in mind that the teacher is the manager of the classroom." If a child is sneaky enough to save up tokens rather than feeling driven to keep earning new ones, we are warned that "the child and not the teacher is in control" of her behavior (a prospect evidently regarded as appalling on its face).

Alfie Kohn
Punished by Rewards, p. 27

Second and Third Grades - Education Without "Schooling"

For most of second and all of her third grade years, no suitable placement could be found for Katie and she was placed on what the school district called "homebound instruction." This consisted of having a public school teacher visit her for two hours a day, five days a week. "Homebound Instruction" did not provide Katie with a curriculum matched to her needs and current levels of academic achievement. It functioned mainly as placeholder, so that Katie could continue to receive supplemental services (speech and occupational therapy) from the district. The teacher simply brought in whatever materials she had available. When questioned on the value of quizzing a child on 3rd grade spelling words, when the results of recent standardized testing showed that she had a 12th grade reading level, the teacher replied in protest, "but the public school kids do spelling." It soon became apparent that the only instruction Katie could receive through "homebound instruction" was the all-important "sit in your chair, say nothing, and do nothing until you are told to do something" lesson.

Unbeknownst to the district, a separate curriculum was created for Katie to use at home, consisting primarily of a set of self-directed-learning activities that she could choose to complete in any order. There was no schedule. Trips to museums and visits to the library made learning an active experience, not a passive one. During these two years, when a Montessori placement could not be found for Katie, she was not homeschooled, but "unschooled." The Asperger's Express strongly supports the Unschooling movement and encourages our readers to visit Unschooling.com to learn more.

Fourth and Fifth Grades - Katie Returns to Montessori

In September 2003, Katie was fortunate to be able to return to her original Montessori school, where she had been for preschool and kindergarten. The director was adding 6-9 and 9-12 year groups to her program. Katie made great strides, both academically and socially, during her fourth-grade year. In fifth grade, however, she experienced a significant regression when the strain of her parents' separation and impending divorce was added to the challenges she already faced as a child with learning differences.

Sixth Grade - Back in the Factory

Although Katie could have remained in her Montessori school for another year, her case manager began hinting vaguely at the notion of returning her to the public school system as the summer of 2005 approached. It was not obvious then, as it is now, that there would be no "full continuum of alternate placements," as required by state law, offered to Katie in September. There would be one. Katie would be placed in the district's only "middle school." She would be required to leave the only educational setting in which she had ever been successful and enter an immense, concrete building containing over 1100 children (plus an undetermined number of staff members) on any given day. The original IEP proposed for Katie contained no goals, objectives, accommodations, or supplemental services whatsoever. Even her bi-weekly sessions with her DIR therapist were eliminated in the first draft. The "plan" was the placement. Complicating matters still further was the fact that Katie, now entering puberty, had reached a point where she rightfully resented the notion of being considered "disabled," but still lacked the required sense of self to understand that she was anything of the sort. Katie's abilities, in many areas, far exceed the norm and it is only our society's intolerance of and refusal to accommodate individual differences that causes people like her to be thought of as "not quite right." For now, however, Katie clung stubbornly to the belief that "going to public school" would make her "a regular kid." This naive misconception on Katie's part made it much easier for the district to advance its agenda.

It's All About Us - The District's Proposal

At about the same time as Katie's case manager began to insist that Katie attend the district's middle school, two interesting events occurred.

	The district's proposed budget was defeated by the voters, even after it announced cuts in spending for special education, and
	The middle school was designated as a failing school under the No Child Left Behind Act for the third consecutive year. Two of the three benchmarks in which it failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress (or AYP - part of the new NCLB lingo) were in language and math scores for children with disabilities.

Economic motivations notwithstanding, it is impossible not to question why the district would propose placing Katie in a school that was not only failing, but also failing students with disabilities in particular. Another parent, whose Asperger's daughter is now in high school, expressed the opinion to me that "they want our kids to bring up their test scores." However difficult it may be to believe that the prospect of placing Katie such that she would be more readily available for grooming in the essential (at least to the district) skill of test taking, not to mention saving a few bucks in the process, played a part in the district's insistence that she attend one of its worst schools, the possibility cannot be overlooked. Other than placing Katie in a series of classrooms that might or might not have a special education teacher present in addition to the "regular" teacher, there were no individualized modifications or accommodations to the standard, middle school shuffle mentioned in the initial IEP. Why classify Katie at all, if not to ensure that any standardized test scores she produced would be counted under the heading of students with disabilities?

A lengthy list of justifications for the proposed placement was attached to the initial IEP, most of which had nothing to do with Katie or her needs. One of the most troubling was "Better monitoring of Katie's program would be possible In-District." If there is another interpretation of this statement other than "because it would be easier for us," I would love to hear it. In any case, in September 2005 Katie entered the "mainstream," where she could be properly dumbed down like "normal" children.

The Dumbing Down Process - A Few Examples

After six weeks of instruction in the "regular" classroom, Katie's math class was on page 45 of its textbook (a few of the pages even had more text than pictures on them). The "practice test," which presumably summarized all the new "skills" she had acquired during this time contained the following.

	"Define solution of an equation."
	"Classify each number as even or odd."
	"Solve each equation mentally. 22. d + 9 = 14 23. 18 = 22 - m 24. 27 - h = 18"

In "social studies" (there is no such thing as "history" in the "regular" sixth-grade classroom), the class had progressed to page 154, although only 106 of these pages appeared to hold meaningful content. Dividing 106 pages by six, 5-day weeks yields approximately 3.5 pages per day. In contrast, Katie read all 652 pages of Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince in under 24 hours. Turned loose in the bookstore, she had chosen biographies of George Washington, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Louisa May Alcott, Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Thomas Edison for recreational reading. It became clear why the "regular education" teachers seemed so uneasy when an extra set of books (to keep at home) was added as a provision in Katie's IEP. They exchanged worried looks at meetings and expressed the fear that "she might read ahead."

In science, one of Katie's "vocabulary" words was "map." No, I'm not kidding.

The Brighter Side

Although Katie's new placement could not promote her intellectual growth, her first year in it was not without its bright spots. Armed with the aforementioned motivation to prove herself a "regular kid," Katie applied herself to the task of adapting to this new and vastly different environment with dogged determination, and succeeded in making this major transition faster and better than anyone expected - particularly those of us who remember the child who, not so very long ago, became hysterical if we took a different route to the grocery store, or attempted to put her right shoe on before the left. Her new case manager, academic support teacher, and classroom aide immediately and consistently proved themselves consummate professionals, who understood the difference between supporting a process and delivering a product, and who chose the former every time regardless of how much extra time and effort was involved.

Over the course of the year, Katie also had the opportunity to lend her lovely singing voice to the sixth grade choir, and to perform in the school's production of the musical, Guys and Dolls. While still attending regular rehearsals for the play, including some at night and on weekends, she won the sixth grade spelling bee and later prevailed over the seventh and eighth grade winners to become the district's 2006 Spelling Bee Champion.