Easter Seals Ad

Under the headline “Tell President Obama To Help Kids With Disabilities Realize Their Full Potential,” Change.org promoted a petition encouraging support for early intervention for children with disabilities. It’s got to be difficult to sell people on the idea of increasing government expenditures in a time of substantial concern about federal deficits, but the Easter-Seals-sponsored petition is seeking to accomplish just that end. Here’s the pitch.

On the first day of kindergarten this fall, some families had more worries than others.

That’s because their new kindergartener has an undiagnosed disability. On the first day of school their pride and joy is already behind all the other children.

It’s a sad reality for too many parents. Every year, we fail to identify 1.45 million children under the age of 5 who have a disability or are at risk for a developmental delay.

With Easter Seals in their lives, kids get the early treatment and therapy they need to start school on par with their peers, succeed and achieve their dreams. But today, it’s harder than ever for families to access care, and essential programs to treat young children with disabilities are chronically underfunded and in danger of being scaled back even further in 2011.

Tell President Obama: Include $100 million in increased funding for early disability diagnosis and treatment of young children in your FY12 budget request.

Go here to sign the petition at Change.org. Visit and support the Easter Seals organization; it’s been doing a lot of good things for a very long time.

When we first told some of our family members that we decided to seek support and services for our child through the school district’s special education program (and later, after he actually qualified for the special education program), they were shocked. Shocked that Noah — sweet, smart, sociable little Noah with all his invisible labels — qualified in the first place, and that we would actually willingly send our child to public school special ed.

They were not daunted by warnings about taunting, the consequences of labeling, and so forth. They sailed right past the sirens. They discovered that they got individual plans, progress reports, and a happy kid.

Read Ms. Storch’s full column, “Why We’re Not Afraid of Special Education.” Double-flash of the electrons highbeams to Christina Samuels for her note calling my attention to this post.

I have attended many school district budget meetings in which officials blurted to their audience, “We cannot pay for XYZ because of our financial responsibility toward children with special needs: to educate one special needs student can cost the district $100,000 a year.” I also hear about how the district has “an unfunded mandate to educate children with special needs, and how this results into an encroachment to the general fund.”

She then proceeds to provide a clear and powerful dismissal of the canard that special education’s costs harm others. Not only does she show how the costs argument leaks (at least with regard to the local education agencies in her geographic area of the US), but also she explains how beneficial special education has been to society as a whole over the past 35 years. Read it!

I think we’re approaching the end of special education. By analogy, we’re nearing the final scene of a stage play. Special education is, I think, very near its “curtains.” And we’re perilously close to being unable to rewrite the play while it’s in progress.

You may download a full copy of “Curtains for Special Education: An Open Letter to Educators.”

Today, I read something in The Washington Post that prompted me to write this little essay. In an article about Washington, DC school chancellor Michelle Rhee, writer Bill Turque wrote (let’s consider this Exhibit A), “Rhee wants more teachers who share her central belief about education reform: All children can become high academic achievers, regardless of the disadvantages they face outside the classroom” (p. B1).

Read Jim’s comment.

House and Senate negotiators have hammered out a compromise on legislation to require private health insurance plans to cover mental health and addictive disorder services under the same terms and conditions as other types of care. Mental health and addictive disorder advocacy organizations—including groups as disparate as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Mental Health America, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the National Retail Federation, and the Alliance for Children and Families—are pushing for passage of this legislation before Congress adjourns. The parity legislation is based on H.R. 1424 and S. 558, and would go a long way toward reducing the stigma associated with mental health care, and improving access to treatment. Mental illness is the leading cause of primary disability in the U.S.

People who work with individuals with disabilities understand that this is a substantial step forward. It is likely to provide access to services for many families of children with disabilities, services (e.g., intensive behavioral intervention) that are often crucial the children’s success.

As the American Counseling Association (ACA) noted, today is a great day for US residents to call their representatives in the US Congress. Link to the ACA Web site.

The Council for Exceptional Children generated a graphic that allows one to see the relative US federal funding for research in various areas. It’s a pretty clear indication of the importance attached to addressing the improvement of education, no? I’ve linked a larger version of the file to the image at the right. It’s suitable for downloading.

To be sure, there are some funds in the NIH and NSF research budgets that go toward educational research. For example, some of the funds from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development fund research on Autism and Learning Disabilities. I do not know what proportion of those budgets are devoted to such educationally relevant topics, but I bet that it’s a small proportion.

In “Reducing the cost of facilitating peer review,” Peter Suber described and commented on a script that recommends journals that would be suitable outlets for one’s writings. Mr. Suber’s post, which appeared in Nature Network, referred to a Martijn J. Schuemie and Jan A. Kors’ “Jane: Suggesting Journals, Finding Experts” from Bioinformatics. Here’s a snippet from Mr. Steel:

Abstract: With an exponentially growing number of articles being published every year, scientists can use some help in determining which journal is most appropriate for publishing their results, and which other scientists can be called upon to review their work.

Jane (Journal/Author Name Estimator) is a freely available web-based application that, on the basis of a sample text (e.g., the title and abstract of a manuscript), can suggest journals and experts who have published similar articles.

I recall the advice of a writing professor with whom I studied as an undergraduate. He told me I should submit a piece of short fiction to a magazine and then, in preparation for receiving a rejection, address envelopes to other magazine editors where I would hope it would be published and stuff each envelope with a submission letter. I should then stack those envelopes in the order of my estimate of their magazines’ prestige. If it was rejected by one I was simply to put a copy of the ms. in the next envelope in the stack and mail it in the next day’s mail.

I also recall the sage comment of my colleague Mike E., who said something similar. He finished his recommendation with a maxim: “John, for every manuscript, there is a journal.”

More about JANE:
Mr. Schuemie and Mr. Kors’ original. “Jane: Suggesting Journals, Finding Experts”
Mr. Suber’s Reducing the cost of facilitating peer review
Savvy comment from Nature blog by Maxine Clarke (here) and an unsigned note here and >.

They may have other policy differences, but when it comes to special education, Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and Republican John McCain all want the same thing for states–more money.

My colleague Michele McNeil has already written in her lively blog about Clinton’s pledge to “fully-fund” the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

I hope someone is standing up when there are opportunities and asking candidates questions about how US policy on special education will change in the next few years. One of my big fears is that the next round of IDEA will actually see efforts to disenfranchise some students with disabilities. Can we expect any candidate to understand the intricacies of such policies?

Read the entire post here.