THE BILLY PROJECT
The History and Qualifiers
"So back in 1984 when they passed the special ed law the federal government was supposed to fund the whole thing. They didn't do it. Even today, they only fund about eight or 9% of special education services. The rest of it is left to the state. So part of the problem, number one, it always comes back, comes back to money. It's a funding issue. Then what happens is the way the law was set up, it wasn't set up to provide extra help for kids who are failing. It was set up to provide extra help for kids who had a disability. And it provided specific criteria to determine that. So the first thing is if a student is blind, if they're deaf, if they're physically handicapped, those are pretty easy things to see and pretty easy things to qualify for. So there's a list of disabling conditions.
Some of them are easier to qualify for because they're really obvious, right? The hardest one to qualify for is a learning disability and or an emotional or behavioral disability. Let's take the learning disability first. In order to decide if a child has a learning disability, there's no test. You can't have a doctor take a blood test and say, “Oh, they're learning disabled.” It doesn't work that way. It is a diagnosis of exclusion. That means you rule out all the other things that it could be. And if all those other things are ruled out, it must be a disability.
What does that mean? Well, does the kid need glasses, if they need glasses and they've needed glasses for several years and they haven't learned because they can't see, it's not a learning disability. If they're hearing somewhat impaired, they're not deaf but they aren't hearing really well because they've had a lot of ear infections and that's the reason they're not learning. It's not a learning disability. They need their hearing checked. They might need some amplification but it's not a learning disability. Have they been to school? We have one particular kid I'm thinking about that was in your mom's class last year. There was no way I could refer to her for special education because she has missed so much school that they can't rule out that it's a learning disability cause she's absent all the time.
We can't say it's a learning disability. We can't rule out cause she's never in school. And that also applies to kids who've been homeschooled. There's no record of schooling. They've been homeschooled. We don't know if it's because they're not getting taught. They have to have a track record of schooling for a while to show that we've ruled that out. The last thing, and this is the thing that really drives a lot of teachers at Fisher crazy, is language. Do they speak a different language at home? Are they an English language learner? And that one is a really hard thing to rule out because a label of disabled can also be discriminatory. Certain special education labels, if kids get them, some of them are not allowed to go into the military. Some of them are never allowed to apply for FBI service, no secret service, no security clearances.
So there are certain things that happen when you label a child with a disability that can prevent them later on in their lives from accessing certain employment and certain types of things. It's not a label that you want to give to people Willy nilly, but you do want to give it to students if they are disabled and they deserve the help. So you have to weigh all the factors. The next thing is they use a discrepancy model. What does that mean?
Okay, so intelligence is a bell curve right down the middle of the bell curve is a hundred that is considered average IQ. Each standard deviation is 15 points. So between a hundred the first standard deviation is 115 the second standard deviation is 130. Between a hundred to 115 is considered average IQ.
Normal above 115 115 to 130 is considered above average. You're pretty smart. That's where your attorneys are. Your doctor’s. 130 and above is considered gifted. That's 2% of the population. A hundred to 85 low average, but you're still considered average. 70 to 85 you're still considered low, but it's still within. It's not normal, but it's still low average. You don't qualify as cognitively disabled in order to be cognitively disabled. Mildly. 69 two 55 it's cognitively mildly disabled. 55 to 40 is moderate, and then 25 to 40 in that range is profound. Severely below 25 is profound. Students below 25 don't walk. They don't talk. These are kids with some really severe syndrome, rice syndrome, those kinds of things.
Okay, let's go back to the kids. 85 to a hundred. Those kids are going to struggle. The kids, 70 to 85 those kids are really going to struggle. A lot of those kids are kids that have been dropped out of school. Those are the kids who used to be farm workers. They went to eighth grade, they dropped out and they went to work on their uncle's farm. They did a lot of the manual labor things, brick layers, things like that. Manual jobs. The problem is those jobs don't exist anymore. We'll have those jobs anymore. Our society has left those kids behind. Here's the problem with special ed.
If you test them and their achievement scores or close to where their IQ score is, they're performing about where, what you would expect their IQ score. They're not disabled. They're just low. If they have a normal IQ of a hundred and they're performing at about a 70 level, they're disabled. There's a discrepancy between where they should be performing and where they are, but if their IQ is low and that's all they can do, they're not disabled. It's not a disability. It's just they're doing the best they can with what they have. That's why you have two students who might be performing at the same level and one is disabled and one is not and one gets services and one doesn't and that is a hard thing for teachers to understand and it seems like it's hugely inequitable and I agree it is. The problem is those tests and that system was developed by the military to decide who was an officer candidate and who was a grunt in the military, the frontline grunts.
That's the way I Q systems were originally developed and that's the way the whole public school system was developed. It was on a military model and it doesn't work anymore. It doesn't work in the 21st century with technology and it's hard for teachers to understand because there are laws that require this is how you qualify and this is how you get services and it's extremely frustrating for teachers because they don't see any difference between those two. Those are my kids. They both deserve help.
That's where I come in as a title person. How can I provide as an interventionist, how can I provide help to that kid who doesn't qualify? How can I get them services? And that's what makes it really hard right now is that those are the kids who are not getting served, at all, because I can't provide services to them. I'm not there. I run around like crazy in the building when I'm there doing the little small groups, pulling them out when we're in school. But I can't do that right now and I don't know what's going to happen when school starts again.
It's an outdated system and it doesn't work. It's in the way it's funded, doesn't work. It doesn't work for kids and it doesn't work for teachers, but it's the system I have to operate within and I understand how it works and I understand why and understand why teachers are frustrated and I do try to explain it to them. I think they get mad at me sometimes, you know, but it's not my fault."
-Amy Miller, Intervention Specialist
"So part of the problem, number one, it always comes back, comes back to money. It's a funding issue."
In order to spend money, there must be evidence. That is how disability accommodations work. So when it comes to behavioral and emotional issues, the system in place creates a story of resistance. If a child does not fit the "story", they do not qualify.
Numbers and charts can't always tell the whole story. But that is the story the institution that is funding accommodations wants to hear. There is a disconnect between the institution's expectations and the struggling student's story.
Test scores don't tell the stories of the kids who watch their fathers abuse their mothers and threaten to stab other students with pencils.
Blood tests don't tell the stories of the kids who cant make it to school on the day the test is because their mother is hiding them in a closet, fearing the world outside.
Bell curves don't tell the stories of kids who's parents fear deportation daily, work inhumane hours and oldest children who skip school to raise their youngest children.
"You can't have a doctor take a blood test and say, “Oh, they're learning disabled.” It doesn't work that way. It is a diagnosis of exclusion."
This is the type of story that the state is looking for. Their language is not words, it is number. The system is set up for non-physical disabilities, not mental or behavioral.
"There are certain things that happen when you label a child with a disability that can prevent them later on in their lives from accessing certain employment"
Qualifying legally is no-turning-back decision. Once a child has been determined disabled, that is their story. A story that is a lingering label. A title that was made to increase support, opportunity and accessibility, but later in life can become a restriction.
"The problem is those tests and that system was developed by the military to decide who was an officer candidate and who was a grunt in the military, the front line grunts."
Times have changed. Our world has changed. Our economy has changed. The jobs the exist now are so different than the jobs that were available when the IQ test was created.
Our world has changed. But the qualifying system has not.
The way that a disability is qualified is through a test that does not fit into our 21st century world. The test separates our stories. It divides the "intelligent" from the "less intelligent". It doesn't exist to assist those who are not performing as well as other. It exists to categorize and marginalize individuals into the grunt working and creating/deciding occupations. It does not exist to help those who are falling behind. Actually, it originally functioned to keep people in their intelligence-based, hierarchical place.
This system requires a change. A balancing. As the story of our world has changed, this system has remained stagnant, creating an imbalance.