Schools accused of criminalizing disability

The Houston Chronicle reports on another one of those exceptions in public education that prove the rule that I wrote about a few weeks ago:

Ordover said many school districts are unwilling to treat disabled children's behavior differently from that of normal children.

After 1997, she said, "You saw schools starting to invoke the power of the justice system as a way of getting kids out of their school."

Karen Snead, director of education for the ARC of Houston, a group that advocates for the disabled, said school officials sometimes find it easier to call police than to follow specialized and sometimes expensive programs required by federal and state law for each disabled student.

Even though school districts try to portray such instances as isolated and rare, the reality is that they reveal the awful truth about public schools. That is, embedded in the institutional structure of education is the supreme imperative to enforce conformity and obedience: the individual education plans (or IEPs in education-speak) that schools are required by law to implement for disabled students often strain that supreme imperative. Behavior-oriented disabilities, by their very nature, defy any sense of orderliness or compliance. Thus, "educators" are caught in a philosophical paradox--the institution demands uniform discipline, but oftentimes disabled students in the classroom challenge that uniformity in unpredictable ways; the one-size-fits-all approach drilled into teachers' heads is inadequate for the situation. Even teachers who manage to follow each and every IEP for their disabled students have a tough time pulling it off--in addition to the potential for classroom chaos, it's a lot of extra work; I don't think I personally do a good job of it myself.

At least I haven't called the cops on any of my screwed up kids. Yet.

The point is that all kids, disabled and fully abled, have special educational needs: the public schools are ill equipped, by design, to meet such needs. It only becomes obvious with these "isolated" instances: clearly, the schools are far more about order and discipline than they are about learning.

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