Disability Justice

20.01.11 Disability Justice Hour.wav

SM Sarah McConnell

AS Audio Sample

RO Ruth Osorio

JD Julia DeLancey

LA Liz Altieri

DM Darren Minarik

00:00:00

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SM It's fall 2017. The Republican Congress is pushing to repeal the ACA and cut Medicaid expansion. Across the country, disability rights activists ramp up their resistance.

AS [protestors chanting] No cuts to Medicade! No cuts to Medicade! No cuts to Medicade! No cuts to Medicade! No cuts to Medicade!

SM The images from these protests, led in particular by a group called ADAPT, are striking.

AS [protestors chanting No cuts to Medicade! No cuts to Medicade!

SM Protesters in wheelchair filling the halls of Congress before being arrested, wheeled away or removed by police. It was a powerful political move.

AS [protestors chanting No cuts to Medicade! No cuts to Medicade!

SM From Virginia Humanities, this is With Good Reason. I'm Sarah McConnell. Today on the show, a look at the power of disability activists. The longest nonviolent occupation of a federal building happened in 1977. And you probably never heard of it.

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SM Ruth Osario is an English and women's studies professor at Old Dominion University. She studies the strategies disability rights activists have used throughout American history. From that 1977 occupation to Twitter and Actually Autistic. So in 1973, there was a section that, for the very first time wrote into law in the U.S. that it was against the law to discriminate against people with disabilities. How did that language get into the law in 1973?

RO Do you want to know what's wild?

SM Yeah.

RO Nobody knows. It's this one sentence - this one sentence that just appears and has a really groundbreaking impact on the way that our country thinks about disabilities. It was passed as part of the Rehabilitation Act. This is something that's passed every single year. And Section 504, it's this one sentence - said exactly what you said. It bars discrimination against people with disabilities from any institution that accepts federal funding. Before then, there was no federal legislation that did similar work.

SM So if in 73, this this amazing language goes through that says it's against the law to discriminate against disabled people. What happened after that? Yay! Nobody discriminates?

RO What happens after that, is that people in the disability community become aware of this and they're excited and they're hopeful. But again, no one knows who to report infractions to. No one knows, if my employer discriminates against me, if I can't enter a post office, no one knows who to actually send those complaints to. No one knows how to enact or regulate this legislation.

SM But there was a big protest that changed all this in 1977 in San Francisco. What sparked that?

RO Well, what sparked that was, again, this building frustration. There is this network of disability activists, across the country in 10 different cities that had these health, education and welfare offices. This is the office that is now referred to as Health and Human Services. And this was the office that was likely going to be the one to enforce Section 504. So April 5th, 1977 comes and hundreds of disabled people and their caregivers and friends and children, they enter these buildings in 10 different cities across the United States. And one by one, they are removed in various ways. They're kicked out or some just don't have the resources to continue except for in one city. And that is San Francisco, which I think is - makes a lot of sense, because San Francisco at the time was the home of in 1977, a lot of different activist groups. And they camp out in this federal building and essentially shut it down for 25 days.

SM Who were the groups that allied with them to help them out?

RO Most notably, the Black Panther Party. They showed out and supported this group. And the activists, one of the people with disabilities that was in the room, in the occupation, Brad Lomax, he's a member of the Black Panther Party and so was his caregiver. And he called them up and said, hey, I'm Black and I'm disabled, and this is important to me. And they showed up every single day with hot food for the protesters and many of the protesters afterwards, Corbett OíToole talks about how this sit-in would not have been possible without the support of the Black Panthers. So every single day they had food for them, local unions allowed the protesters to use their fax machines and copy machines, local gay men's rights groups - they snuck in walkie talkies. Glide Memorial Church showed up there to make sure that people were treated well and had the basic resources. So a lot of different groups came together. Cesar Chavez sent a note of support, acknowledging that disability rights were civil rights. It was the first time that disability rights were talked about as a political issue on a national stage, as a civil rights issue.

SM I read that at one point the FBI cut off the telephone lines so the protesters couldn't communicate with others inside and outside of the building.

RO Yes, but the protesters were prepared for that because what law enforcement was not prepared for and they weren't totally ignorant about was American Sign Language. And so they would have a protester who would speak American Sign Language or ASL at the window and sign information about what was going on inside the building to people outside the building. There are always people outside the building, as well. You know, maintaining a public presence. And so then people outside the building would then also communicate news and updates to people inside again, through American Sign Language. So the very things that, you know, people think of as weaknesses when it comes to disability were actually the assets. And what made this protest so successful. The knowledge and wisdom that was gained navigating an ablest world as disabled people, they harness that and were able to then overcome law enforcement's efforts to prevent this protest from continuing.

SM So how long did the takeover of the federal building in San Francisco and these other cities last?

RO Well, the other cities, they didn't last very long. They lasted maybe a day or two. San Francisco ñ it lasted for over 25 days. And the only reason it ended was because they were successful. So Joseph Califano said, OK, OK, OK. And assign these regulations. We're going to enact this law. And it is to this day the longest nonviolent occupation of a federal building. And I think what's so exceptional about that is, people didn't see disabled people as people who are capable of launching a protest or a movement. And so in some of the oral histories from that, people were saying how disabled people from all over the country would wake up and look at the news and say, wow, they're still there.

SM And so since the ADA was passed in 1990 and now what has risen to be the next arena for disabled activism?

RO So I'm really excited about this movement for disability justice that's emerged, not surprisingly, from the San Francisco Bay Area. And it's a group of people who are queer, trans Black, Indigenous and other People of Color with disabilities. And what these groups have - these groups have done have looked at the history of disability activism and especially the mainstream disability rights movement and noticed how - how white it has been historically and how we often - when we think about disability, we think about it in isolation of race and gender. But if you are a black deaf woman, if you are a Latina, queer trans person with a disability or with a chronic illness, your experience of access and disability are so different. And so groups like Sins Invalid, activists like Alice Wong, Sandy Ho, Mia Mingus, have - Patty Berne, have done a lot of work to really bring attention to the fact that race and gender and disability intersect in really powerful ways. And in doing so, they've argued that to move forward, we have to think about access and accessibility beyond legal minimums. It's great if I can enter a building, but if I enter a building and I'm afraid that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is going to be there, that's not accessible for me. So thinking about - and think about access in terms of if I enter a building, but I don't feel safe because I'm the only Person of Color in that building. So really pushing us to expand how we think about access so that we really do include everyone and really value the different kinds of bodies and minds that are in this world and the knowledge and stories and creativity and art that come from them.

SM How are disability activists using the Internet now, to sort of add fuel to the movement?

RO I'm very excited about hashtag activism. #metoo, #BlackLivesMatter. And those are not disability specific. But to give you a sense. And these online spaces have been critically important for disabled people because a lot of people with disabilities grow up without maybe meeting someone who has their disability. There's an autistic scholar, Melanie Yergeau, and she talks about how she didn't meet another openly autistic person until she was in college. And so there's a real sense of isolation. It's different than maybe other identities, like as a woman, I grew up among women. So there were always women around that I could connect with and talk about that identity with. But with disabilities, it's sometimes harder to find someone that has your specific disability and has your identity. So the Internet became this really ripe space for people to connect. Also, people that maybe aren't able to leave the house. Maybe people who physically cannot march. People who cannot march because it's difficult to move, but also the sensory overload of these loud, crowded spaces. The Internet becomes a space where people can connect. One hashtag that's been really active right now is # CripTheVote created by Alice Wong.

SM Crip The Vote?

RO Crip the vote. C.R.I.P. the vote.

SM What does it stand for?

RO Well, so there has been a move in the disability community to reclaim the word ëcripí, which is shorthand for Cripple and the hash ñ as, as kind of a pos - like as a reclamation similar in the way that like queer has been reclaimed by many people. And so Crip the Vote is doing really important work in talking about disability in terms of political elections. So disability is so rarely talked about in debates. We see this right now with a Democratic primary. Disability is usually only discussed when it comes to health care. But disability is an important conversation with employment. It's an important conversation with housing. When Elizabeth Warren talked about disability in relation to housing and making sure people had the rights to live independently and in the community, the disabled folks online were just thrilled, because they get to hear people talk about themselves and their lives and their issues in important political ways that impact their everyday life.

SM What are some others in addition to Crip the vote?

RO So another one is #ActuallyAutistic. And this hashtag emerged because the hashtag, the tag #autism was largely populated by people who are not autistic. Parents of autistic children, educators, doctors, scientists, but not autistic people. And so if autistic people wanted to have a conversation about their experiences of autism, their experiences of navigating through the world as autistic people, they really couldn't have it in these spaces because there were lot of people talking about how hard it was to have an autistic child, which was really painful for a lot of autistic people. So #ActuallyAutistic emerged, and it's this really exciting, fascinating hashtag to me because it has these multiple facets. And one of it is just talking about the everyday lives of autistic people and embracing things, autistic ways of talking and expressing themselves as normal, as valuable, as poetic. So, for instance, people with the hashtag might talk about how they Stim, which is these kind of repetitive movements that oftentimes autistic children are told to stop doing that, they're ñ theyíre sometimes even physically forced and prevented from flapping when they're happy and moving their hands and their bodies in ways that are not considered normal ways of communicating. So in this hashtag, these autistic movements and expressions are not seen as something that is bad. Instead, these movements are poetic, they're artistic. They communicate so much. And the problem isn't that isn't the stimming or isn't the flapping. The problem is the fact that neurotypical non-autistic people just don't understand what they're trying to say. And so this virtual space count - becomes a place where people can talk about their lives as autistic people in positive ways. And that's not all just like, yay, everything's great to be autistic, because they also use that space to say and look at the ways that ableism - the discrimination against, you know, people with disabilities and specifically anti-autistic ableism hurts them. So how have doctors and teachers been cruel to them because of their autism? Discussions of how these sorts of therapies for autistic children that might use actual physical force to prevent these ways of communicating have been really harmful for them. And so the conversation that they have in this hashtag actually autistic, it shifts the conversation. Autism isn't bad, ableism is.

SM How did you get interested in this? Why did you study disability activism?

RO Well, you know, I was introduced to disabilities studies when I was in my master's program, and it was so exciting to me. I have loved ones and family members who are disabled, who have been sick. I myself have had temporary disabilities and disabilities studies as a framework really helped me understand that the ways that the people I loved, the ways that they moved through the world were not invalid. They were not inherently bad or weak. They were just different. And they were beautiful in their own ways. Sometimes a lot of people think that, well, I'm not disabled, disability doesn't matter to me. But, you know, disability studies scholars like Rosemary Gollan Thompson, she says that if we live long enough, all of us will be disabled. And so I find disability studies to be a really useful way of thinking through how we move through the world in different ways. Everyone benefits from access. Everyone benefits from elevators that work, because even if you don't need it today, you might need it tomorrow, even if you never have a disability. You might have a stroller with a baby in it. Everyone benefits and we build worlds that are built under the assumption that every kind of body and every kind of mind is valuable and valid and can contribute meaningful wisdom to all of us.

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SM Well, Ruth Osorio, this is fascinating. Thank you for talking with me on With Good Reason.

RO Thank you so much, Sarah. This has been a real delight.

SM Ruth Ossorio is an English and women's studies professor at Old Dominion University. Coming up next, the Guild-like groups of Early Venice that help protect people with disabilities.

00:17:05

SM What defines a person with a disability? Who decides what counts as disabled and what doesn't? Julia DeLancey, an art history professor at the University of Mary Washington, says a look at early modern Venetians shows how disability isnít a set category. It's cultural.

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SM Julia, you've studied the Italian city of Venice in the 16th century, when wealthy people were funding great works of art. But you decided at one point to also look at the lives and art of a different group of people, people with disabilities. How did that come about?

JD There's a variety of different reasons, but I think really that kind of ëahaí moment came when I was on a walk with a friend of mine who's a historian, who also at that time worked on disability studies. And we, you know, as people often do, we're talking about our work and talking about what we work on. And she was telling me that she worked on disability. And I was asking her a little bit more about that. And she was talking about the fact that in ancient Greece, blindness was not necessarily seen as a disability. So I had said to her, you know, how can how can blindness not be a disability? Doesn't everyone agree that that's a disability? And she simply looked at me and said, why? And so I had this moment where I thought, well. Why? And - and it completely took something that I'd taken for granted, this category of disability and the idea that there are these certain things that absolutely have to be, say, disabling and turned it absolutely on its head.

JD Was that her saying why, or was she saying the Greeks really saw it differently?

JD She was saying the Greeks saw it really differently. So in other words, one of the - one of the central things in disability studies is the idea that the category of disability is socially constructed. So in other words, it's - it's not something that's absolute in any way, that different cultures see disability differently. So the ancient Greeks might see it one way, 19th century people in Japan might see it another way, 21st century Americans might see it a different way, and that there's not necessarily anything absolute in that category.

SM So at some point, you decide to look at this area of expertise for you, which is 16th century Venice, and look at the disabled population.

JD Yeah. So part of what happened is this friend, we had this conversation and I started thinking about, well, what do we understand for the early modern of the Renaissance period, 16th century, about disability? And I started looking and I realized that there was nothing, not only the lives of people with disabilities, but also how they thought of themselves and how the culture that they lived in might have thought of them.

SM So what documents for this period of Venice did you find evidence of the disabled population?

JD Yeah, I had a conversation with a friend of mine and I was saying, you know, I'm here to look at topics related to disability and I'm trying to figure out where to look. And he'd just sort of casually said, oh, you should look at the guilds. I think there was a guild for confraternity for people with visual impairments and one for people with mobility impairments. And it turned out that there were probably hundreds of pages of documentation to work with.

SM And what sort of guilds were these? So, a guild for people with visual impairment. What did that mean back then?

JD Yeah, if you think of them as sort of spiritual clubs for lay people, so you might think of it like Kiwanis or Rotary or the Elks, only with a spiritual bend. And they're not for monks they're not for priests, they're for regular people out working in the streets. And in Venice during this time period, there were two different kinds of these groups. There were very, very large ones that were for elite members of the society, people at the kind of top of the social - social ladder. And they did a lot of charity work, philanthropic work. They commissioned major, massive works of art. They had their own buildings that had huge commissions of works of art by some of the biggest names in art history. But then there was also a second level of we might think of them as more kind of popular groups. So not necessarily for the elite, although some were some of these would be the more traditional trade guilds. So for people who made shoes or people who made things out of iron. But then there were also at another end, groups for people who wanted to beg. And these are the groups that I'm looking at. These are groups where they had very little money and they essentially formed because they wanted to beg in the streets. And the Venetian government said, you can't just be wandering around begging on your own. You have to have some kind of official approval. And they did that through saying you need to form one of these groups. And there were two in Venice that we know of at least, one for people with visual impairments, and then one for people with mobility impairments.

SM And did they do more than get approval to beg in the streets? Did they participate in Venice society and through the groups?

JD Yes. So so we know some about that. They certainly, as one of these groups would have been involved, say, in processions in the cities. So if they're having a big commemorative procession, they would bring out all of the confraternities and have them process in the streets. And so they might have been part of that. They had certainly some work to do in terms of taking care of each other, so they would have a fund that might pay for the dowry of a member's daughter who was wanting to get married. They would also have religious services. And we know that they had a space as well. They would have kind of a little space in the church, where they could conduct their religious services, but also their meetings. So they had meetings to kind of keep organized and keep their work moving forward. Both the begging work but also the organizational work.

SM What are some of the gems that you came across that just delighted you?

JD So there's this wonderful moment in the records of the group for people with visual impairments. They refer to themselves as the Guild of the Blind. And there's a moment where they're - they're getting worried about staying on the right side of the state. So they - they want to make sure that they keep their permission from the state and they want to stay on the right side of that. And so, there's a point where they start getting worried about who's joining up. And so, thereís a point where they start getting worried about who is joining up. And so the start saying well, you can only be a member, if you're blind per natura, or by natural causes, by - by nature. And what they start doing is saying, well, if you've been blinded as a punishment, then you can't be part of the guild. So they're drawing these really interesting lines in terms of who's in and who's out.

SM What did you also learn about the other guild? The guild for the people who had mobility issues?

JD Yeah. Part of what's interesting with them, is they like the Guild of the Blind, the group for people with visual impairments, they also had arguments about who could and couldn't be part of the group. And one of the things that became clear with them is that they were concerned about whether you just walked with a limp or whether you actually had lost a limb. And I haven't been able to figure out what's going on there quite yet. I don't know if it has to do with sort of bodily integrity, if you will, or if it had to do with how people moved. It's - that part's not clear, but it's clear that they're really wanting to draw those lines very, very sharply.

SM Or decrees by the government as to who was really disabled?

JD Yeah. And that - that may come into it. So one of the things that's interesting about the 16th and 17th century Venetian ideas about this category that we might now call disability, is that the term that they used was infirm, the Italian word is infermita. And you were, in fact, considered infirm if you couldn't work to take care of your own needs. So if you were a war veteran and you had had a leg amputated, but you were still able to work, to take care of your own needs, you wouldn't be considered infirm. By the same token, if you were a single mother who had maybe five children and all under the age of, say, seven, and they weren't able to take care of themselves, you might be considered infirm because you weren't able to work outside of the home. And so that may well be part of it. The idea that you're thinking of with the mobility impairment, that what they were looking at is, were you able to actually work to take care of your own needs and - and the needs of people dependent on you?

SM Have you found anything that's akin to what your friends said about how the Greeks don't see blindness as necessarily an infirmity? That the Venetians had different views of limitations?

JD Yes. So, there's a couple of things that I would say there. One of those would be this -the example that I gave of this category of infermita and that it doesn't necessarily map onto what we think of as disabilities. So, if you were - had a visual impairment but still could work that then you wouldn't be considered disabled. If we think of disabled and infirm as - as the same thing. I think the other thing is that, one of the kind of key principles out of disability studies is the idea of ënothing about us without usí. So the idea that it's important to try to maintain in the work that you're doing, the voices of the population that you're writing about, and that's been one of the hardest things about doing scholarly research on disability studies, is getting the voices of people with disabilities. And so that's partly why these documents about people with visual impairments and mobility impairments have been so interesting, is that they record what people were saying because they - they weren't court cases. And so we get kind of verbatim the voices of people testifying and they don't really ever refer to themselves as lesser-than. They'll sometimes talk about themselves as we poor blind people, poverty, checky. But they don't really seem to have a sense of, oh, we're less than other people. And in fact, a lot of the cases are them fighting very, very hard for rights and attention and those sorts of things.

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JD And so that's been an interesting piece that their sense of group identity and sense of wanting to be visible is really, really, really clear. And the fact that they're working together as a group is really clear.

SM Julia, this is wonderful. Thank you for sharing your insights on With Good Reason.

JD Thank you so much. It was pleasure talking with you.

SM Julia DeLancey is an art history professor at the University of Mary Washington. This is With Good Reason. We'll be right back.

00:28:00

SM Welcome back to With Good Reason from Virginia Humanities, I'm Sarah McConnell. Even as the number of students in special education increases, special-ed teachers are getting harder and harder to find. And so schools are falling short of a promise to educate all students. Liz Altieri and Darren Minarik are education professors at Radford University. They're working on a big project to help schools better serve students with disabilities.

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SM Listen, Darren, you say the move to include more students with disabilities in the regular classroom is social justice. What do you mean by that? How is it social justice?

DM Well, when I when I think about the word social justice, really what comes to mind is equality and having thinking about people with disabilities, students with disabilities and how important it is for them to be fully included with their peers. And that's what I really think about.

LA You know, you go all the way back to 1954 and there was a Supreme Court case, Brown vs. the Board of Education, that basically said for Black students, separate is not equal. And it's really this same issue, that not only is separate not equal, but the opportunity to participate in the life of the school is not present when kids are pulled out and pulled away and in separate places.

SM What kinds of disabilities do these children typically have?

LA Today, many kids with milder disabilities, such as learning disabilities and attention deficit disorders, those students have been included. But really, our main focus is those students who have what's called developmental disabilities. And these are students with autism, students with intellectual disabilities, with physical disabilities such as cerebral palsy, individuals who have difficulties with things like communication. Those are the hardest kids, or at least people perceive them as hard to include.

SM Aren't you just talking about mainstreaming of children with disabilities into the regular classroom? And don't we already have that?

DM Well mainstreaming as kind of an older term that was used. Really the idea of mainstreaming is kind of taking students that were separated, putting them into his classroom setting, but not really thinking about how important it is to fully include them, not just academically, but socially, emotionally and physically. And mainstreaming really focused on those disability groups that we mentioned, that are learning disabilities and students with attention deficit. It really wasn't thinking about these students with developmental disabilities and how to fully include them in the classroom.

LA I have this image that I like people to think about. So mainstreaming is this idea where you have a teacher and she's swimming along in the river and she's coaching these kids and saying, come on, come on. And we throw this kid with a disability into the river and they have to keep up. And what happens is they can't. And so they end up coming to the side again and needing these special supports. When we're talking about inclusive practice and inclusion, we're really talking about a pond where you have a variety of people working with small groups of kids. You have kids who can swim fast. Kids who are learning to dive. Kids who are learning to hand off things to their peers while they're sitting in that lovely, cushy, floaty chair. It's a - it's a very different way of thinking about schooling.

SM Don't we already have special-ed teachers who come to the classroom and spend a portion of the day focusing exclusively on these children in the main class?

LA Co-teaching is a very popular movement right now. One of the things we're seeing, though, is that the research-based practice that goes with it, isn't often in place. So, the teacher comes in, the special-ed teacher comes in and kind of functions as a helper and they're just working with these kids with disabilities. One of the things that we are, in the schools that we work with, as well as the - the students that we're preparing to be teachers, we're teaching them to use small groups, to use parallel groups, to use stations, to use the kinds of strategies where you are merging the expertise of both that special educator and that general educator. And the reality is, it's not just those kids with disabilities that are being helped. Everybody in the class has the opportunity for individualization and extension. So it helps kids who are gifted as well as kids with disabilities, English language learners.

SM How does it help the gifted child?

LA So if I have three people in the classroom instead of one, I might have the reading specialist there, I might have the special educator and the general educator. We can divide those kids into three groups of kids and really individualize for each group and provide them the instruction that they need in that small group.

SM And we're not already doing that?

DM So what we're seeing right now in the classrooms is special education teachers might be in there and there might be some collaboration taking place. We might be seeing students who are receiving special education services in the general education classroom. But it's a seat in the classroom and they're not really being included the way we would like to see.

LA I would give you an example. The other thing is that we're talking about kids with more significant disabilities. It takes a fair amount of creativity to figure out, how can this student be part of this instruction, say, on Jamestown settlement or on, you know, the - the Declaration of Independence. And it takes the expertise of both individuals to figure out how do we adapt materials; how do we have a variety of things for kids to read? Those who are gifted might be reading something at - at the high school level. Someone else might be primarily working with pictures to learn about it. That's an example of what we're talking about. Those kids with more significant disabilities, people still believe that they are better off if they're in a separate place with instruction, that is, I'm going to say, quote unquote, just for them.

SM So are you only saying that, yes, let's do differentiated learning, let's mainstream children with disabilities into the main classroom. And instead of having special ed teacher pull them out of the class for specialized instruction, let's have the special ed teacher do it in the class. Or are you saying more than that?

DM It can be both ways. You can have a special education teacher pull-out a student for more intensive types of supports in order to help the student be more successful. But for a school to be truly inclusive, we need to be able to then take what that student is learning and that pulled out setting and then they need to be applying that back in the main educational setting with their peers. And a good analogy to think about in terms of a truly inclusive school is to imagine that the child is attached to a bungee cord. And where's that bungee cord connected? So in an inclusive school setting, the child's bungee cord is connected to the general education classroom, and so when the child goes out to get services, the tension is pulling the child back in with his or her peers in the classroom. In those schools that do pull-out that are not very inclusive, the child feels like the tension is pulling them more to be separated from their peers. And so that's what we're trying to change with the culture in the school.

LA I think also, schools are going to have to change really how they structure education and teaching. And this is not just about kids with disabilities. When we're talking about inclusive practice, we're talking about all those kids that feel on the outside. You know, folks are very concerned with those kids who feel like they're outsiders. And - and the tendency to be bullied or to be violent. This addresses all kids who are on the outside. And it requires that we think about how we schedule. So, for example, we have core times when everybody in the classroom is working and learning. And then we have these times that are for enrichment or intervention for small groups of kids. And then if you need speech, you get speech. If you need some gifted, accelerated learning, you get that. If you need some mental health counseling, you get that, if you need special education intervention. But it requires us to rethink sort of that structure of the school day that is really still very much stuck in the 19th century. You know, you do math at this time and reading it this time, and everybody goes along in lockstep. What happens is that kids with disabilities especially get pulled out of core academic instruction in order to receive those specialized services. So, they get the specialized services, let's say they're getting very specialized reading instruction. But you know what? They've just missed the rest of language arts, which is focusing on book study and focusing on writing and focusing on maybe a theme that they're working on. So that's why pull-out instruction is so hard. It's not that the intervention that they're getting isn't good. It's that they're missing that core academic instruction that happens to the whole class.

SM And our attitude primarily has been. But aren't they lucky to be getting that pull-out instruction? Good enough.

DM Yeah, and I - it's important to get that instruction, but it doesn't help if then they're not able to utilize it with the core subject areas that they're learning.

LA I want to go back to that ëgood enoughí piece. One of the things we've learned over about 50 years now, really, of providing special education services is that we have to have really high expectations. And when we have low expectations, we're okay with good enough. And some of the very early court cases that were in place, basically said special education only needs to do the minimal, not the optimal. But what we've learned, and research really provides this is, for example, kids who we used to believe would never read - let's say, kids with intellectual disability. We now have the knowledge and the skills; we know how to teach those kids to read. And they learn how to read. When I first was teaching, we didn't even have any books in our school because that was all for kids with moderate and significant disabilities and the assumption was they would never learn to read. So we have to do more than good enough. We have to have high expectations for all our kids.

00:39:49

DM We teach are our students in our pre-service program that they need to presume competence in every child that walks into the classroom and - and then go from there, create the best educational opportunity for them that you can.

SM So your program would do what? What would be the major difference in terms of who you instruct and how?

LA So in one of our schools, they've got a fifth grade, fourth grade in the third grade that they've studied. In the fifth grade, the special educator and the fifth-grade classroom teacher are working together to provide mathematics instruction. They're doing that within a co-teaching arrangement. But they also have been given time to co-plan to really think through and analyze their instruction together and what strategies they're using, and are they working? In the fourth grade, there's a special educator and the classroom teacher who are co-teaching. But they don't have a set aside time to go plan. In the third grade, they're not they don't have a co-teaching arrangement. They have that typical sort of thing where the special educator pulls the kid out - kids out for some instruction or drops by. They analyzed their testing results and they found out that in the fifth grade, a hundred percent of the kids passed those mathematics assessments - 100 percent. All the kids with disabilities statewide, by the way, less than 50 percent of kids are successful in mathematics. In the fourth-grade class, they had about 80%, I want to say. So there still wasn't quite working for 20 percent of the kids. And then in the third grade, they were barely meeting the benchmarks that - that had - have to be met. So what they saw for themselves was here's the things we put in place. And here's the things that worked. And it was this co-teaching, but also co-planning, the differentiation strategies, the adaptations and - and really being systematic about how they looked at their instruction and provided it.

DM And the beauty of that is, it's - it's not us telling them that this is the best way to go about doing it. They're seeing it themselves through their own data and their own practices. So we don't we don't have to just go in and teach them, this is the right way or this is the best way - the best practice. This is something that they're learning as they're going along and they're seeing it and they're seeing the results and their students.

SM I see the two of you remarkably piloting this program and two different very interesting schools that are very typical. What's more important, going around the country and persuading all the schools to do this or going around to the education schools and teaching all the new teachers to do this?

DM We have to choose?

SM Right, right.

LA We do both. We do both. We have what we like to think of as a model for teacher preparation. We take our elementary student teachers, not all of them, a couple cohorts. We take our elementary student teachers and our special-ed student teachers, and we co-place them in the classroom together for their field experience where they learn how to co-plan, co-teach, co-evaluate and be a part of a team.

SM That's really neat.

LA Thank you. You can't just read about collaboration. Which many schools across the country, they teach their teachers about collaboration. They teach them the co-teaching models. But unless you get to practice it within a supported - a very supported setting, you're not really going to understand how to do it when you get out. So we have that model for teacher preparation. And we think it's essential. We think that separate teacher preparation is, in fact, maintaining separate schooling.

DM I think to, you mentioned schools of education and how they can change things or schools and how we could go in and do and make change there with maybe the teachers. And I think about the students, the students that when we're creating these co-teaching relationships or we're teaching our future pre-service teachers how to - to work in the schools. Part of what we're trying to teach them to do to, is to empower the students that they're working with. We often talk about a term called self-determination, which is giving students the capacity to understand their own disability and to be able to advocate for themselves and to be more independent and to be able to communicate their needs and their wants and their dreams for their future. And our students, we're trying to prepare them - and I think we do a really good job of that - trying to prepare them to educate the students to be able to have that empowerment. And that's really what's going to change schools. I don't - I think adults, we - we've been trying it for years and we're not doing always the best job of doing that, because we forget that the most important part that we need to include are the kids.

SM Who objects the most to this? Is that the parents of the children in the classroom? Is at the parents with disabilities? Is that the teachers in the classroom?

DM Any type of change process has resistance in it. And a lot of times the communication pieces what you need in order to figure out where that resistance is, what's causing that resistance - it's all of the above. There are going to be parents that don't want it for one reason or another, or children for one reason or another, or teachers for one reason or another. But usually it's a misunderstanding of what we're talking about when we're talking about inclusive practice. It's not that we're saying that you have to drop those things that you think are working really well for your child, if you're the parent who is resistant to that. What we're saying is we want to make sure that what your child is learning in that more self-contained setting, is then something that they can replicate and use for their entire life and that they can be around their peers and experience inclusion, which is what society is. If we're separating them in schools and then we're asking them to live independently once they graduate, they're not going to be prepared for that situation.

LA And I want to speak to the parent piece, because we know there are parents who say, I want one-on-one and I want it to be in this very safe setting. I want my child to have everything, the best possible. The reality is that just putting a child in the general education classroom is really resulted in some very poor outcomes for kids who needed some very specialized sports. Parents know those stories. They're fearful that their child is going to be frustrated. Parents share their stories, actually, of their child being frustrated. Kids who have communication problems, they tend to respond through their behavior when things aren't working well for them. So the reality is that without good, inclusive practice, that involves many of those things we've been talking about, the co-teaching the co-planning, the differentiation strategies, the adaptations, universal design for learning, lots of visual supports. If those things aren't in place, there could be poor outcomes and there have been poor outcomes and teachers have seen it and - and parents have seen it, and kids themselves have seen it. So there is that that group of folks who - who say, I don't want this for my child. And it's a bit frustrating to have been in the field and to see for 35 years that we know how to do this, so why hasnít it become practice?

SM They don't trust their local people to implement it the right way.

LA Well, that's..

DM Because theyíre not seen it being implemented the right way. And - and that's not the fault of the school divisions. The school divisions oftentimes don't have the professional development and the support and the coaching in order to implement that. The resources are already there, you have the general education teachers, you have the special education teachers, you have the support staff in place. But the question then is, how do those teachers, how do those faculty members work together in order to make successful outcomes for students with disabilities?

SM So we do need more money for training of the existing personnel?

DM That may be the only area where I would say it comes into play. But again, going back to teacher preparation programs, if we're doing a really good job in teacher preparation with helping future teachers, that's actually a money saver for school divisions, because then they're bringing in professionals who already have that. But then you also need then a coaching piece. You need those who have that institutional knowledge of inclusive practice to be able to share it with others in a way that's - that allows others to accept it and - and be able to use it effectively with their peers.

LA And that's one of the things that our project is able to do. We are funded through a Virginia Board with People with Disabilities Grant for two years, which ends actually in September of 2020. So we've been able to work with these two school divisions and - and provide some resources to - to provide a stipend to some of these coaches and - and to provide some training. But in the big scheme of things, it's not a big expense. And I think there's some pressure on school divisions right now because in spite of everything we've put in place for Virginia, less than 50 percent of kids with disabilities are being academically successful. It's a wakeup call. It tells us that the way we've been doing this is just not working. Schools are really still struggling with these children.

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SM Liz and Darren, it's exciting to hear you talk about this. Good luck.

LA Thank you.

DM Thank you.

SM Liz Altieri and Darren Minarik are education professors at Radford University. Major support for With Good Reason is provided by the law firm of McGuire Woods and by the University of Virginia Health System, connecting doctors and patients through telemedicine to deliver high quality care throughout Virginia, the U.S. and the world, UVAHealth.com. With Good Reason is produced in Charlottesville by Virginia Humanities. Our production team is Allison Quantz, Cass Adair, and Matt Darroch. Production help was provided by Georgianna Reid. Special thanks this week to Todd Washburn of WHRV. Some of the music for the episode is by Blue Dot Sessions. For the podcast go to withgoodreasonradio.org. I'm Sarah McConnell, thanks for listening.