Episodes
Sunday Feb 16, 2020
Advocate's Insider: Straddling the Line Between Science and Law
Sunday Feb 16, 2020
Sunday Feb 16, 2020
Introduction
Welcome to Advocate's Insider, an online publication of KPS4Parents. KPS4Parents is a non-profit special education and disability resource organization. My name is Anne Zachry, and I'm our organization's CEO, as well as the host of this patron podcast. I have been a special education and disability resource lay advocate since 1991, a paralegal to attorneys representing individuals with disabilities since 2005, and an educational psychologist and behavior analyst since 2013.
Advocate's Insider is a patron-only program intended to assist special education and disability resource advocates around the United States develop their advocacy skills and increase their chances of achieving appropriate outcomes for the individuals with disabilities whose rights they work to protect. The content published on Advocate's Insider is based on my own experiences and those of my colleagues regarding special education and disability resource advocacy in the public sector.
None of the content on Advocate's Insider should be considered as formal legal advice. If you require formal legal advice, please seek the counsel of a qualified attorney.
If you are a parent, educator, or activist looking to improve your knowledge and approaches to advocating for individuals with disabilities from a technical standpoint, then Advocate's Insider is an appropriate resource for you. Professional and volunteer advocates alike can always stand to improve their skills, and we seek to add to the body of resources available in this unique, specialized field.
Patron proceeds generated by Advocate's Insider are used to support our public education efforts via social media. Your patronage is genuinely appreciated and is used to help individuals with disabilities and their families throughout the United States through education and technical assistance.
If you are listening to this podcast, please be aware that there is a text-only transcript on the PodBean post for this podcast that includes hyperlinks to online resources that can serve as additional useful information and to illustrate the points I'm making. Whenever such a resource comes up in the course of the podcast, you'll hear a sound like a bell that cues you to where in the transcript you can find each link.
Today is February 16, 2020
This is Volume 1, Episode 1
The title of today's episode is, "Straddling the Line Between Science and Law."
You would think after as many years as I've been working in special education and disability resource advocacy, people would run out of things that can shock me. You'd think I've seen it all by now, but every school year, somebody in a school district or charter school somewhere does something that just makes my jaw drop before it ultimately makes me hang my head in sorrow and disgust. If you are working in special education and disability resource advocacy, whether professionally or not, the work is the work, and you are likely seeing things that defy belief, as well.
If there is even the slightest silver lining to the current state of the American Presidency, it's that now people don't think I'm making things up when I tell them the things I see coming from publicly funded schools, regional centers, and other agencies when I attempt to achieve appropriate services for people challenged by disabilities. There was a time when only other people who worked in special education and disability rights were experienced enough with these things to believe the people with incredible tales of woe involving various agencies coming to us.
In 2012, I had a student on my caseload whose unresolved issues had gotten to the point that due process was the only way to see them resolved. That never makes me happy, but I'm prepared to go there if I have to. That's why I became a paralegal.
The special education attorney in my student's local area was buried alive in casework. My student wasn't the only one in this Central California county that was getting shafted by his school district, and there were viable due process cases all over the place. The special education attorney recruited his best friend, a criminal defense attorney who was accustomed to addressing issues of disability and behavior when they got really out of control, to take lead on the case with my special education attorney colleague remaining of counsel. I provided paralegal support to my criminal defense colleague, with the hard questions of fact and law being run up the ladder to our colleague acting as of counsel.
Among the three of us, I thought we put on a heck of a case. The problem was that it was pre-Endrew and the judge misinterpreted the meaning of Rowley. The judge determined that because our 19-year-old adult post-secondary student had experienced educational benefits in the area of behavior, the fact that he had been reading at the second grade level since second grade didn't matter because he had received "some educational benefits" that were not "de minimus," which is to say, not trivial. His benefits in behavior were not trivial, that's true. But he received no educational benefits in reading, which was the claim we asserted. The case settled upon appeal, but it was an uphill battle to reach a resolution. My criminal defense colleague decided to never do a special education case again, citing the greater dignity and decorum of the criminal courts.
Our student went on to fulfill a lifelong goal of being in a university marching band, blended in as typical, and developed a self-confidence that nothing else could have possibly given him, propelling his emotional growth and development. These fights are worth it, but they do take their toll on us.
It's been reported that mothers of adult children with autism often have cortisol levels on par with combat veterans returning from active duty. I think those of us who professionally advocate for individuals with disabilities on a regular basis experience something similar.
We may be able to go home at night and not worry about a midnight meltdown that lasts for hours disrupting our sleep, but we've also got multiple cases going at once in which everybody is suffering and no one situation is more worthy of our attention than the others. They're all horrible and they all need immediate help. Juggling that kind of a caseload will keep you up all night with worry, even if there isn't a meltdown going on in the next room over.
There is a saying that I abide by. It's one of several. It came from a book called The Soul: An Owner's Manual. The saying goes something to the effect that, "Making decisions based on emotions is like trying to build a house out of smoke; making decisions based on facts is like building a house out of bricks." The point was to provide a concrete metaphor for an abstract concept.
The author was a psychologist in Ojai, California who also went by the title of "guru," so I took his book to mean he was teaching critical thinking skills to the "woo-woo" people up in Ojai. The way he framed it was actually quite brilliant, which is why it resonated with me so strongly. He was totally right and using that metaphor truly put it into proper context.
Emotions are ethereal and ever-changing; they can't support weight, block the elements, or remain in one place. Bricks are solid, can withstand the tests of time, and stay where they are put. Which one truly makes the better building material? And, why would any responsible adult ever knee-jerk their way through life according to their fluctuating emotions rather than methodical, practical, fact-based decision-making?
It's truly difficult to apply that knowledge to real life. I don't think any of us ever fully succeed, but it's the goal. Aim for perfection and be satisfied with excellence. Don't beat yourself up for getting it wrong; just work that much harder to do it right the next time. The point is to be strategic rather than hysterical.
This issue is one of locus of control. Locus of control goes to the degree to which a person believes they have control over their own lives or think that life is something that just happens to them. Someone with a strong internal locus of control takes ownership of their actions and is capable of goal-driven behaviors. Someone with a primarily external locus of control never sees the connection between their own behaviors and the consequences they experience. It's their perception that everything happens to them, not because of them.
Learned helplessness and victim mentalities arise from having a primarily external locus of control. Fear-based thinking is driven by a primarily external locus of control. Impairments that limit a person's ability to predict what should logically happen next promote thinking governed by an external locus of control. Unpredictable caregiver behaviors undermine childhood development such that children are prevented from developing an internal locus of control.
This translates to so many aspects of the work I do, I don't even know where to begin. One place that's as good to start as any is in the development of Positive Behavior Support Plans (PBIPs). So many of the badly written PBIPs I encounter are heavily weighted on reactive strategies and light on preventative strategies.
This is because so many people in public education still look at student behavior through the lens of the outdated disciplinary models of behavior management that were implemented when the public education system was created during the Industrial Revolution. We still have people in public education just waiting for their opportunity to punish the kids they don't like, most of whom are disabled, because they can't perceive it as anything but willful misconduct and defiance of their authority.
Because these types of school personnel don't understand established scientific concepts, like locus of control, they assume the students involved in every disciplinary action being willfully defiant and understand the consequences of their actions. It doesn't occur to such staffs that their students may be reacting to some external trigger and/or compromised by disability. These staffs can't conceptualize an abstract emotional concept like this because they are functioning at such a reduced social/emotional level, themselves, and such thinking is beyond their ability to understand.
You have to understand that, when you encounter someone like this, this is a person who has likely achieved developmental norms in cognition and communication, but not social/emotional development. They can't mentally conceptualize Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) as a framework because it requires them to step outside of their own egocentric mindsets and see things from someone else's perspective, which they can't do.
Because they have otherwise normal cognition and communication skills, it's easy to assume they must be able to conceptualize these kinds of abstract relationships. It's true that one has to have the cognitive ability to think abstractly at all in order to achieve commensurate social/emotional development, but if one's social/emotional development is impaired, those cognitive abilities are not going to overcome the social/emotional deficit.
That kind of thinking requires fully functional Formal Operations from a Piagetian standpoint, and the social/emotional development of people with these kinds of challenges never get that far. If you encounter someone like this, you may be dealing with someone with an underdeveloped or damaged prefrontal cortex of the brain and/or some kind of personality disorder.
These will be the strongest resisters to PBIS in the public school setting. Because they are egocentric in thought with respect to social/emotional functioning, they take all inappropriate student behaviors as a personal affront to their authority, because they assume everything always has to do with them. These are the adults who end up in positions titled things like, "Dean of Discipline." The title of "Dean of Douchebaggery" would be equally applicable, in most cases.
I once had a high school student on my caseload who was impacted by ADHD and emotional problems. It made him a follower. The other kids would set him up to do something inappropriate while they watched him get in trouble, purely for their own entertainment. He was so desperate to be accepted by his peers because of his emotional problems, and so poor at predicting the consequences of his own behavior because of his ADHD, by time I got involved, his high school was trying to expel him for getting busted by the campus's Resource Officer, a cop, for having cigarettes in his pocket six blocks away from campus.
The school site administration was acting like he was incorrigible and that was just the final straw. They weren't even his cigarettes. He was holding for the kid who was giving him a ride to school. None of his prior "offenses" were for anything violent or destructive.
Getting a citation for being a minor in possession of tobacco was on par with the kinds of things that kept tripping him up. He wasn't supposed to do it and it was dumb, but it wasn't like he was beating up kids for their lunch money. He was a sweet young man who just wanted to be accepted and couldn't judge when he was being played or when a suggestion that he do something was a bad one.
I remember sitting in an IEP meeting with his mom, the special education director from the District's head office, the District program coordinator assigned to his campus, and a table full of scowling mean old ladies from the school site. I articulated the parent's concerns that they were failing to appreciate the degree to which our student's disability was a factor in his behavioral challenges and the fact that the history they had with him was the result of other kids setting him up as an act of bullying. The parent was further concerned that the school site staffs were not using scientifically valid, evidence-based behavioral interventions and, in doing so, were failing to abide by his IEP.
The special education director then explained the District's obligations and dedication to using PBIS in the development and implementation of IEPs for students with behavioral needs. That obviously wasn't happening and she was explaining to the school site staffs that they had no choice. But, then the highest-ranking mean old lady from the school site asked, "But, when do we get to punish him?"
The look of outrage and horror that spread across the special education director's face - the moment she realized that I hadn't been making it up when I had complained to her about this situation and asked her to come to the IEP meeting - was one of those things you just don't forget. When someone who has historically fought you on things suddenly realizes they're on the wrong side of the issue and jumps fence right before your eyes to come to your side of the issue, it gets burned in your memory. The shock on the program coordinator's face was equally impressive.
Clearly, the mean old ladies weren't listening to us and were so wrapped up in their own emotionality that the fact-based logic of what we presented fell on deaf ears. Further, because they were too inexpert to recognize the impact of this kid's disabilities on his social/emotional functioning, they took everything he did to be an affront to their authority rather than evidence of a mental disability worthy of their compassion. They had no compassion. People that egocentric don't. They were incapable of empathy.
After the meeting, the special education director and program coordinator and I discussed the situation further in the high school parking lot. They couldn't apologize enough, and that wasn't usual for them, in my experience. Normally, the three of us had a tense understanding of each other that involved haggling over disagreements, but this was a horse of another color. We bonded in our mutual outrage and it ended up improving our working relationship for the remainder of the time the special education director was still with that district.
The school site staff didn't just disrespect me, they had disrespected the special education director and her office. All the school site staff could see was the District's special education director agreeing with me, the outside agitator, and another instance of some muckety-muck from the District offices coming over to their campus and telling them what to do.
What ultimately became apparent later was that the school site's administration had come to view that campus as their own personal fiefdom and resented "those people from the District" coming over and calling them on the carpet for doing something messed up. This kind of dynamic is evidently not that uncommon in school districts. It can become part of an unhealthy culture that develops within a school district over time and leads to intra-agency turf wars.
What started out with a battle by the family to get appropriate behavioral interventions at school turned into a battle between the District offices and the high school campus administration over who was right and what the school site was required to do. The school site cadre of mean old ladies were mad that the District offices wouldn't cronyistically collude with them to adhere to outdated approaches proven not to work and cover for them, and the District was trying to convince the mean old ladies at the school site to implement PBIS so the District wouldn't get sued.
The school site personnel lost sight of the fact that the campus was just one of many that was part of the District, and if the campus team broke the law, the whole District was in trouble. The District offices had a legal obligation to enforce the regulations at the school site.
The special education department from the District and I were both approaching the matter from the standpoint of fact and law, but the staffs at the high school were coming at it from the standpoint of indignation, offense, and vengeance. I and the special education department were trying to build a house with bricks in a place that only supplied smoke.
34 CFR Sec. 300.320(a)(4) requires the application of the peer-reviewed research to the design and implementation of special education on a per-pupil basis, to the degree that it's practicable to do so. I've gotten to where my strategy of choice to force the issue is to write a request letter on behalf of the client asking for interventions according to specific articles that I will cite, if not attach, and conclude by requesting that, should the school district decline the request, that it please be sure to include in its explanation in its PWN as to why the requested intervention/method is not practicable.
I've never gotten a PWN that explained why what we had requested was not practicable. Nobody knows what that means. I wrote a paper on it in grad school as part of my culminating comprehensive exams. There is no professional standard for what is or is not "practicable," nor is there any regulation or case law that further clarifies its meaning. Perry Zirkle has published on the topic, reaching the same conclusion. I actually cited his research in my grad school paper.
While many school districts have taken "not practicable" to mean, "whatever we don't want to do," I find it powerful to put them on the spot and explain why something isn't practicable, which they evidently can't do. By framing it within the context of a specific request for a specific student according to the peer-reviewed research, which is included to substantiate the request, then asking for an PWN that explains how the application of that science isn't practicable if they decline to honor the request, I find it far more often the case that the request is simply honored.
If I can frame a procedurally compliant request in a scientifically valid manner, there is no credible argument against it. I don't ask for anything that couldn't realistically be done in the first place. It might not be something that has been done before, but it's not impossible to do it. Sometimes, people just balk because you're asking them to change how they do things, not because what you're asking for doesn't make sense.
When you make the folks at the school district stop and think about why they really object, and they realize they can't put that into a PWN without looking like jerks, then they really look at what you're asking for, realize you're spoon-feeding them the solution, and they have no good reason to say, "No." They usually come around after that.
If you can bring yourself to ignore minor inappropriate behaviors on the part of school district personnel when their feathers get ruffled and reinforce them with verbal thanks and praise when they finally do the right thing, you can get your student served with the right services sooner than if you have to fight. This approach is non-emotional and fact-based. I stick to the evidence-based science and the legal framework for the special education process. It's facts and law. Building with bricks, not smoke.
A non-emotional request is more likely to produce a non-emotional response, though not necessarily. Sometimes, pointing to the facts that justify a request also results in putting damning information on the record that makes somebody at the publicly funded agency look bad. Sometimes that person is the one to whom you must submit your request. Sometimes requests built with bricks are met with response of nothing but smoke.
In cases like that, due process may become unavoidable, but at least you will have made the record in a sensible way that will lend itself to supporting your testimony in hearing. I had that happen recently, and it was quite unexpected.
From 2013 to 2017, I assisted a family of a little boy with autism who was non-verbal. He likely has some form of childhood apraxia in addition to his autism. When I first got involved, he was learning more from his in-home ABA program than he was at school. Turns out, his teacher just assumed that his cognition was commensurate with his expressive language and treated him like he was incapable of learning. He was receiving glorified day care, not special education.
The next three years were about new assessments and the development of a data-driven IEP. By the time this student and his family moved to another state in the summer of 2017, he'd had one full year under his belt of an appropriately designed and implemented IEP to inform the development of the IEP that followed him out of state. The 2016-17 IEP was the first real data-driven IEP he had that targeted all of his unique areas of special education and related service need. By the time we reconvened in June 2017 to review it and craft the next annual IEP, we had a rich body of valid data to inform the new IEP's development.
In December 2019, I got a phone call from his mom. They were going to due process against their local school district, which was claiming that the IEP that had followed him from California in 2017 was too aggressive and its present levels described our student as being more capable than he actually was. Not that anyone from the out-of-state school district had attended the June 2017 annual IEP meeting during which that IEP had been created and was in any position to contest its validity, or anything.
I gave the student's attorney access to the audio recording of that IEP meeting and all of the supporting documents. I testified as a percipient and expert witness, certified specifically as an expert in IEP design, as to how the June 2017 IEP came about. The documentation pretty much spoke for itself, but it helped to have me speak to its veracity.
There was no way to say that the present levels of performance in that IEP were made up to appease parents in denial about how impaired their child was, which is what the out-of-state district was basically arguing. There were hard numbers to back up every bit of it. By the time the family moved away, they had a rock solid IEP based on real facts, not opinions. I had advocated relentlessly for three years to get us to that point.
I'd say more about the case, but it's still being tried. All I can speak to is what I already know from the past. The point I want to make is that, if I had not successfully advocated for a technically tight and substantively appropriate IEP based on that child's individual needs, he wouldn't have an example of what has already proven to work for him on record in his due process case, right now.
None of us ever hope that one of our cases will go to hearing, but we do hope that our work product helps the student when it shows up in evidence and that our testimony doesn't undermine the student's chances of getting what they need. I felt very fortunate that this student moved after we had finally gotten his IEP on track and he had something worth implementing to take with him. His last IEP from California will make it a lot easier for the judge to figure out what the school district owes him, presuming he wins.
The marriage of science and law that special education is supposed to be can be traced back to litigation in the early 1970s, with two cases: PARC v. Pennsylvania and Mills v. Board of Education. The outcomes achieved by these two important pieces of litigation ultimately resulted in the requirements in the implementing regulations of the IDEA for measurable annual IEP goals, the application of the peer-reviewed research to the degree practicable to the design and implementation of IEPs, using standardized measures according to their instructions from the producers of the tests, using only properly qualified assessors, and a host of other requirements that are necessary in order for the IEP produced to be technically sound according to evidence-based practices.
The science is written into the law. The problem is that most attorneys are not also education researchers or educational psychologists, and most education researchers and educational psychologists do not also work in special education law. There are few people like me who are trained in both professions who can bridge that gap, and it's up to us to help experts and attorneys understand their respective roles in this nexus where science and law collide. That's what I hope I've done in this episode and will do in the future episodes to come.
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