Striking Similarities Between Special Education In Prison and Outside

The harsh reality is that a large number of adults in prison are failed special education students.  What schools frequently fail to recognize is that the stakes for students who receive special education runs the gamut from a meaningful life to a life behind bars.  The following story puts a human face on the experience of one teacher working in a juvenile prison school in Georgia.

Most of the students are functionally illiterate, have limited access to computers, and textbooks are left to mold on loading docks. Children are "manacled to chairs for hours."   The students see no meaning in their school work except for the student "newspaper" which gives voice to their stories.  The student's stories appear to be one of the few rays of  joy in an otherwise dismal school experience.

Teacher advocacy for educational materials is met with more than indifference, it is met with threats of violence from the prison authorities:

"For my role in pushing to have the books replaced, an administrator threatened to take me out in the parking lot and beat me up for not going through proper channels. It's unbelievable. A past union representative, I have a newfound appreciation for the importance of good representation and solidarity. "

The next time one of your children's teachers complains about lack of administrative support, refer them to the above anecdote.

In both public and prison school settings, lack of books has been documented, as in Washington D.C. schools and elsewhere with some degree of regularity.  Excessive use of restraint and even violence, albeit not normally manacles, is an all too common violation.  Limited access to computers and software is a regular issues for many students with special needs, and is an issue I confront almost every day.  The teacher's description of the culture of his prison school is eerily familiar:

"The obsession with command and control concerns all who find themselves behind the walls of Georgia's children's prisons. Employees are afraid to act, because they could lose their jobs for blowing the whistle on bad practices. "

Teachers being stifled in their efforts to reveal "bad practices," is topic that has been previously  discussed in this blog. Systematic  lack of quality services, such as in Baltimore,  has been shown to be an issue in both settings. While there are obvious difference between these students and this school and the average special education program, the similarities are quite striking.  Considering the draconian environment of prison schools, it is remarkable the degree to which there is an analogy to special education programs on the outside.

Comments

[Daunna Minnich]

Attitude. It's all about attitude. Georgia sees its youth offenders as society's garbage and turns its back on them—after manacling them to desks in classrooms where there is no expectation that they will learn because, after all, they are just garbage. Why spend money on books for throw-away kids? The only investment Georgia seems to be making is to make certain these kids learn their lesson: "You are garbage." What a worthless investment, designed to ensure that when the "garbage" is released back into society, it will live by the lessons it has learned and foul society even more. Georgia will need to build more dumps.

Something is rotten in Georgia, all right: it's their attitude toward youth offenders. Georgia could get a real whiff of fresh air by visiting Missouri. Missouri has its share of kids who have fouled society, but Missouri doesn't see them as garbage to be dumped, but more as "recyclables" who can be reshaped and remade into worthwhile human "products" and put back into society where they can do something useful, for themselves and their community. The "recycling," or rehabilitation, involves small homelike living facilities, lots of therapy, educational services based on assessment and need, well-educated, well-trained personnel—and no manacles.  Doing right by these youth offenders costs far less than the "garbage" approach, and the recidivism rate gives Missouri bragging rights. Three cheers for Missouri: what an attitude!

(Learn about Missouri's "Culture of Caring" at http://www.connectforkids.org/node/3381.  My harsh words aren't intended as Georgia-bashing. My own state of California thinks the "I" in IEP means locking students in individual cages—actually, any individual can have one and save the trouble of evaluating for an IEP.  Teachers are so scarce or demoralized that California's 180-day school year is ignored by the Youth Authority.)