Joanne M. Friedman, MEd
In 1975 the federal government under the guidance of then-president Gerald Ford passed into law the original Individuals With Disabilities Act (IDEA), giving birth to special education as we know it today. Prior to that time, the only students considered special enough to warrant some effort to ensure their education despite their obvious handicaps were the blind, the deaf, the profoundly retarded, and the severely physically impairedÑparaplegics, children suffering brain damage or chronic, incurable illness, and those with severe birth defects. There was no "learning disabled" category prior to 1975.
With the advent of IDEA, the approach to learning problems encountered a major paradigm shift. Students who had previously been relegated to the wood shop or who were on a fast track to drop-out status were given a second look. In many cases there were signs of something going on besides a lack of motivation or hanging out with "the wrong crowd". The concept of brains unable to learn because of some inherent neural deficit was novel, and was embraced slowly by the general public and the educational system.
The purpose of the lawÑwhich was, in fact, a civil rights law, not an education lawÑwas to ensure that handicapped students would not be excluded from school as they had been in the past. The retarded child hidden from polite company wasn't that far in the past, and parents were anxious to take those children from the shadows to the forefront and see to it that they were afforded the best that public education could offer.
As will happen, particularly in connection with the federal government, the letter of the law was eventually overshadowed by interpretations and applications far from the original intent. The spirit of the law became not the assurance that students with learning difficulties would not be excluded, but the guarantee that they would be accommodated to the maximum extent possible. In many cases the students lost their identities as individuals and became their impairments.
The password in the special education community became remediation. To Webster, remediation is synonymous with cure. The educational system was charged with the curing of learning disabilities ranging from retardation, through all levels of brain damage, into the results of fetal exposure to alcohol and other addictive substances, all the way to the vague "specific learning disability", whose definition is as elusive as its diagnostic shape.
In 2004 the IDEA was reauthorized under the title "Individuals With Disabilities Education Improvement Act", and some of the onus was taken off the schools for curing something academically that medical science has not been able to tackle successfully. But still the focus on remediation is unmistakable.
Can learning disabilities be cured? In a word, no. Though the jury is still out on many of the varieties of learning problems, overall it's safe to say that the research has afforded educators a wide variety of suggestions for helping students cope with their learning problems, giving them skills to work around the problem, and offering reasonably well-founded plans for overcoming the immediate symptoms of the disability. A student with retention issues is recommended to over-learnÑpractice till it comes as second natureÑacademic skills. Students with reading comprehension problems are taught cues to look for and methods for interpreting the written word successfully. The list goes on.
But can any of this be called "remediation"? Is there a cure lurking in the special ed teacher's bag of tricks that will forever relieve the student of the problem? Will it ever entirely go away? No. No, no, and no.
In the current atmosphere of No Child Left Behind's high-stakes tests (ie: standardized tests on the results of which graduation or some other landmark are based), and the portion of that law that requires special education students to perform at grade level, it is more imperative than ever that parents be alert, wary, and educated. If learning disabilities were curable, they'd be confined diagnostically and remedially to the first grades of elementary school. Why would anyoneÑeven public educatorsÑwaste time playing with accommodations and special methods if the problem could simply be cured?
Perhaps, you might argue, it takes longer than elementary school to cure autism or dyslexia. You would be right. It takes, literally, forever. Acceptance of your child's disability does not equate with bad parenting, spoiling, or any other negative imagery you might be harboring. Until disability is accepted and the impossibility of cure (remediation) along with it, frustration will be your biggest enemy. Avoid punishing your child for not measuring up, and find a better stick by which to measure him. Teaching your child coping skillsÑmnemonics to help with memory problems, the use of special tools for spelling, calculators and PDA's for math and organizational skillsÑmay not be as romantic as the image of thrusting your child into the special education system and retrieving him at some later date fully cured and ready to function within the vague realm of "normal", but it will work far better.
Joanne M. Friedman received her undergraduate degree in psychology from Clark University and her MEd in special education from the University of Hartford. A past member of the Council for Exceptional Children, she has spent twenty-five years teaching special education at all levels, elementary through high school to learning disabled, emotionally disturbed, physically handicapped and developmentally disabled children and served on the Learning Disabilities Advisory Board at Sussex County College for six years. Joanne Friedman is a freelance writer living in Sussex County, New Jersey.
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