Teach Effectively!

As the new year approaches, with the hope engendered by a change in US government, here’s a salute to organizations—Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities, Justice for All, and the World Institute on Disability, among others— that advocate for individuals with disabilities. These organizations and their siblings have done a great deal to secure health care, civil justice, employment, protection from violence, and many otherwise taken-for-granted features of daily life that are too often denied to individuals with disabilities. Now’s a good time to accomplish more.

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).

Among many advocates for individuals with disabilities, a (if not the) critical concern for public policy is ensuring access to situations to which those without disabilities routinely have access. Access may range from curb cuts that permit safer road crossings to computers that “read” printed text. Without elaborating further here, suffice it to say that the range of applications is far greater than this simple dimension, and information about possible means of ensuring or providing access abounds on the Internet.

As important as access is, it is insufficient for many with disabilities in educational settings. To be sure, in schools access will be helpful for those individuals with disabilities who are prevented from participating solely by physical or sensory disabilities. Access to the curriculum for these individuals—whether mediated by signing, ramps, audio recorders, and so forth—is critically important, but those individuals do not comprise the majority of students with disabilities. More than half of the students in the US who are identified as having disabilities have problems with learning basic skills, and many of them already have access to the general education setting.

The majority of students with disabilities need cognitive access to the curriculum. They will benefit only a little, if at all, from talking books and other similar accommodations. Only some of them will have greater outcomes in secondary coursework when they have extra time or a reader on tests. Receiving notes from classmates will be of minimal help if the individual with a disability can’t read (as in decode) the notes. Having a scribe will not make an essay answer have a compelling organization. Providing a computer will not help them to determine that a class of objects (say, Golden Delicious apples) is a subclass and therefore a smaller class of other objects (e.g., apples). They will benefit only modestly from simple access. These and other means of providing access are, quite simply, insufficient.

Educators need to teach these individuals how to read accurately and fluently, how to extract concepts from printed content, how to reason through misleading advertising, how to compute and identify the relevant parts of “number stories” so that the students can compare alternatives, and etc. Such instruction usually requires special education, in the sense that Naomi Zigmond described special education: “It is carefully planned. It is intensive, urgent, relentless, and goal directed. It is empirically supported practice, drawn from research” (1997, p. 385).

Absent Professor Zigmond’s special education focused on the goals I have illustrated in this post, it is unlikely that the majority of students with disabilities will have the competencies to pursue employment, higher education, informed consumption, and etc. It would be cruel irony if a focus on access prevented students with disabilities from obtaining the special education that they may need to have a legitimate opportunity to pursue access to better social outcomes.

I commend these organizations (among others) for their substantial, persistent, and successful work on behalf of people with disabilities, and I hope they will take up the case of effective teaching in schools for students with disabilities. The time is ripe to pursue the success of students with disabilities.

• The Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities (Web site: C-C-D) “is a coalition of approximately 100 national disability organizations working together to advocate for national public policy that ensures the self determination, independence, empowerment, integration and inclusion of children and adults with disabilities in all aspects of society”;
• Justice for All of the American Association for People with Disabilities is “dedicated to ensuring economic self-sufficiency and political empowerment for the more than 50 million Americans with disabilities”; and
• The World Institute on Disability is an influential organization that “works to strengthen the disability movement through research, training, advocacy and public education to help people with disabilities throughout the world enjoy increased opportunities to live independently.”

Zigmond, N. (1997). Educating students with disabilities: The future of special education. In J. W. Lloyd, E. J. Kameenui, & D. Chard (Eds.), Issues in educating students with disabilities (pp. 377-390). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.