Can We Prevent Learning Disabilities?

Is it possible to prevent learning disabilities? There’s a policy push to do just that, and it was the main focus of the 2004 revisions to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

My afternoon today was consumed with meetings. When I worked at the college level we used to joke that meetings were the logical alternative to work. But today’s meetings were less frivolous…

Normally I spend my afternoon working through some very scripted reading interventions with small groups of students that I pull out of their classrooms – some fifth graders, some fourth graders, and a mixed group of first and second graders. Today those students stayed in their classrooms, and my afternoon was instead spent in a series of IEP meetings.

If you’re not familiar with IEP meetings, let me introduce the concept. The acronym stands for Individualized Education Program. Students who have been determined to have an educational disability under IDEA have an IEP, a document that describes how their school is accommodating that disability at the moment.

The meetings were chaired by my principal and they took place in her office. A specialist for the central office was present today. Obviously I was in the meetings. The classroom teacher that has the child also sat in on each meeting and contributed to the discussions that took place. And when we’re lucky, the child’s parent comes to the meeting. At this school, we’re generally lucky in that way; but today we didn't have parents in most of meeting - although we'd talked to them about what was going to happen in the meetings.

Five of the six meetings today were routine, almost formalities. We had meetings to discuss whether a particular student needed to continue seeing this or that specialist for a particular problem. We had two meetings to discuss the status of a child’s disability; a requirement that comes around every three years.

One of the meetings was not particularly routine. It was a meeting to decide whether a particular student had a disability – whether, under IDEA 2004, they were eligible for services as a special education student. For obvious reasons of confidentiality, I can’t say much about the child or the meeting. But I can tell you that the process of identifying some disabilities is vague and slippery.

Emotional disturbance (some states call them behavior disorders) are very real. But federal law is so vague that they are almost impossible to legally define. Children with emotional disturbances make up only a very small portion of those who qualify to be served under IDEA. But students who have learning disabilities make up a much larger portion of the special education population.

Until 2004 we had a pretty clear definition of learning disabilities. It wasn’t a very good one. We called it the discrepancy model. It was clear as a bell – a mathematical definition of a disability. Unfortunately, it was a time consuming definition to satisfy and it often meant allowing a child to fail a grade as proof that they needed help. For years we did this to kids…

IDEA 2004 came up with an entirely new definition of learning disabilities. Conceptually, it’s rather clear. A learning disability is evidenced by the failure of a child to respond to academic interventions designed to bring his or her achievement up to grade level. Those are my words, not a technical quote. The difficulty now is that we are grappling with just what those interventions should be, and what level of response is sufficient to avoid the determination that a child does in fact have a disability. And as a result, there’s not nearly as much certainty in the process as there once was.

If you are an idealistic optimist you will say that one of the main goals of the new law is to use intervention to prevent a child’s problems from ever developing into a disability. If you are a cynic you will scoff that the new law’s goal is just as I phrased it above - to avoid the determination that a child has a disability, even if they really do. But either way, you are begging the question of what actually constitutes a learning disability. It's a question I expect to keep begging for a few years.

So I go back to my original question: Is it possible to prevent learning disabilities?

The irony of the new law is that a breakthrough in medical research that occurred at about the time the new law was passed challenges some of its assumptions. Somewhere between two-thirds and four-fifths of children classified as having learning disabilities are thought to be dyslexic. And about the time the President signed the new law on educational disabilities, a medical researcher published findings that showed that a dyslexia gene exists. A year later, two more genes connected to dyslexia were discussed at a meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics.

The question of whether we can prevent learning disabilities may now be largely a question of whether or not we can prevent a genetic condition. And as for identifying them, a cheek swab or simple blood test at birth may soon accomplish that.

I suspect that the policy makers will all have to rethink learning disabilities again soon – maybe before the 2004 revisions to IDEA even get fully implemented in most states…

Greg Cruey, Guest Blogger

Comments

[a. woody delauder]

1.

There is no doubt that many students have learning disabilities. However, I would like to pose a question. How many of these learning disabilities are a product of the students environment (home or school)?
I have the belief that a large number of these students can't relate to the dry uneventful school day that has become the norm. When I stroll through school, I see students sitting at a desk, worksheet in front of them, bored out of their mind. How can we tell as an educator whether these disabilities are caused by environment? 3-4 years of absolute boredom will make any child resent the education system. I see students come into my science classroom that have IEP's. I would never be able to tell if I didn't have a piece of paper with accomodations for that student. These students are begging to be challenged and engaged. I think we need to spend more time looking at our own teaching practices rather than labeling students

[Greg]

2.

Hi Woody, First let me propose a distinction between children who have a genuine disability (however difficult that is to define at the moment) and kids who don't perform well on academic tasks for some other reason. Of course, the problem with my proposal is that until recently it was unquantifiable.

There are three genes that have been associated with dyslexia. Dyslexia is generally regarded as a neurological disorder. One of those genes affects phonemic awareness and kids with this gene have difficulty associating sounds with letters because they evidently don't think of sounds the way non-dyslexics do. Another of the genes affects the ability of some dyslexics to understand sequential tasks. And a third gene impacts spatial perception.

For the students that are bored because they can't read the worksheet (because they never learned to read because they're dyslexic), the issue in environmental only to the extent that we failed to recognize the nature of their disability and implement some reasonable solution for it (like an Orton-Gillingham approach to reading instruction). I think that's well over half of the kids that actually end up being placed as learning disabled.

When you see "students sitting at a desk, worksheet in front of them, bored out of their mind" day after day, I'd say they have a teacher who's better suited to a career as a professional greeter at Wal-Mart. Of course, we don't get rid of such teachers - partly because we can't replace them. But that's a different subject.

I don't know why you think that looking at our teaching practices as opposed to "labeling students" is a binary choice. I'd suggest that we need to do both. We need to look closely at our teaching practices AND we need to get better at identifying real disabilities.

Are learning disabilities environmental? If we're discussing the most common form of learning disability, dyslexia, I think the verdict is in and the answer on that is "no," it's hereditary. I think environment plays a much greater role in mental impairment, in the form of fetal alcohol syndrome, prenatal nutrition in impoverished communities, environmental toxins, etc.

Any principal who runs a school these days where kids can spend three or four years bored, with a worksheet in front of them, deserves some profound punishment that includes loss of licensure.

You're right when you say that most special education students are looking for a challenge.

I would like to see us get past the idea that poor performance implies a learning disability. I'd like to see us develop more meaningful ways to identify real disabilities. I hope we're not far from that...

[Howard]

3.

I like the basic idea of avoiding disability. My dissertation was in this area and defined disability as a gap between a person’s capabilities and societal expectations. Anything that closes this gap (i.e. intervention to increase capability or changing expectations) is an accommodation and avoids disability. Impairment like a dyslexia gene is part of the person, but disability is not. It is only in society interacting with the person.
So much of how school personnel interact with students in schools has questionable validity (i.e. how important is this objective to the person's future or how important that they learn it or do it in this particular way). Interventions could help these interactions if it gets away from the one size fits all approach, but only if one really understands the aforementioned performance gap and also avoids the typical situation where interventions descend into meaningless behavioral objectives.

[Greg]

4.

Hi Howard,

I like the basic idea of avoiding disability, too. If you are talking about what people can DO, we're on the same page.

But you turned my noun into an adjective. I'm not talking about disability. I'm talking about disabilities. I'm discussing a civil rights law (and a legal status) for a person how has a neurological disorder that a doctor can now identify.

My question is not, "Can we prevent Billy from falling two years behind his peers in reading?" We can. My question is, "Does Billy having a neurological disorder justify taking some special steps to protect his rights, steps that include documenting his status as having a disorder?"

The legal and ethical issue has become how we measure whether he has a disorder that merits civil rights protection...

[santharaj]

5.

The intervention that you are talking of should not be directed at the individual with dyslexia (for instance) alone. We need to also let society accept certain manisfested behaviors from dyslexics.
Let's say a dyslexic child can only draw curves and cannot draw a straight line. I guess we have to accept that situation and let the dyslexic child experience the world with curves, rather than intervening to enable the child draw straight lines.
For that matter individuals with any impairment have to be free to explore the world with what is natural with the impairment. We seem to be training people with impairment(s) to get into the mainstream, as if that is the chief purpose of being!
We need to let people with impairment(s) as well gravitate towards self-actualization.

[Greg]

6.

Hi Santharaj,

I agree that what we're discussing applies equally to both dyslexics and to students with other problems/disorders that affect learning.

You said that "We seem to be training people with impairment(s) to get into the mainstream." Within the school setting I think it is clear that students with disabilities have a right to be with their peers, in that "mainstream." There are a number of terms that get used in special education that are basically code words for philosophical approaches - mainstreaming and inclusion being the two most obvious. The courts have consistently ruled that children with disabilities have to be educated with their peers whenever that's at all possible. The idea goes all the way back to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the Supreme Court in 1950; a separate education is not an equal education...

It's also pretty clear from the research that children with disabilities benefit academically from being with their peers - even if they can't keep up. And children without disabilities benefit socially from having disabled children with disabilities in the room.

While I'd like to think that I contribute to the growth toward self-actualization in my students, self-actualization is usually and adult attainment (as I understand the concept), and one which most people never achieve. My biggest concern for my students with disabilities is that they leave school with both the social and the academic skills to live a fulfilling life as part of their society. I'd like their exceptional nature to be accepted and appreciated by their peers, too.

But ultimately my point in this piece is that the new law on learning disabilities seems to a) have an inadequate, fuzzy definition of learning disabilities and b) seems to be designed to reduce the number of students that qualify for services, regardless of whether they actually have a disability, whatever a disability is anymore...