Conflating Disabilities with Parent Preferences About How Schools Should Run Is Dangerous
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses how some parents use disability frameworks to impose their personal educational philosophy on schools.
Key Takeaways
- Disability services aren't a vehicle for parental ideology - IEPs should address genuine disabilities, not parents' opinions about school management
- This dilutes services for students who need them - When the system is used to accommodate preferences rather than needs, resources are spread too thin
- Professional boundaries must hold - Educators need to distinguish between legitimate disability accommodations and parental demands disguised as disability concerns
Transcript
Disabilities are different from parenting vibes and we can accommodate disabilities.
We can have specially designed instruction and individualized education plans to meet the needs of students with disabilities but we cannot run schools on the basis of parenting vibes that use those specific disabilities as excuses for everything or as generalizations that apply to everything because they don't.
And probably the worst offender in this field is the UK psychologist Naomi Fisher who is promoting one of her courses today talking about pathological demand avoidance is the name of the syndrome.
It's kind of a proposed disability, maybe on the autism spectrum.
And I get that that's a real thing.
I get that there are students who we need to accommodate because they do not do what they're told.
It's just in their brains to resist doing what they are told.
And we have to approach the education and the parenting of students with that disability differently.
And I think there's probably a lot to learn from the science in that field.
But what that science does not tell us is what everybody else needs, because this is a disability.
The conflation of disabilities with parenting vibes I think is really dangerous because if you look at the advice that people like Naomi Fisher have for schools, it's get rid of school rules, don't have consequences, don't have high expectations.
It's all this stuff that if you do it for everybody, it is a terrible idea.
If you do it for the students who really need it, it's an accommodation, it's specially designed instruction, and I think it's very reasonable.
But it matters whether the individual student actually has that disability because treating a student who does not have a disability with the accommodations in the SDI for a student who does have that disability is probably some form of malpractice, right?
If you have low expectations for a student who does not need you to have low expectations for some very specific reason in some specific area, well, that's malpractice as an educator.
We need to have high expectations for our students.
And the exceptions are exceptions, right?
The thing about special education is it's special.
We make exceptions for good reasons.
And it's not intended to just validate the vibes of parents who are like kind of hippie when it comes to rules.
And they don't like...
you know, the oppressive feeling of schools, or they call schools factories, or they just think having rules is a bummer.
Like, please, get over yourself, get over your vibes, and recognize that what we do for students with disabilities is not a justification of your ill-informed attitudes about how school should work.
And I think that goes for everybody who is not an educator who thinks they know how schools should be run.
Let me know what you think.