Failing our kids

The more time I spend in special education, the more I see just how badly we are failing our kids.

For every leftist romanticizing the wonders of socialism, special education should be an important corrective.

At many levels, special education has become one long excuse for why children and adults have failed. And built into the assumptions of the field is that noone will ever take responsibility for that fact.

Failure is a part of life. What is not a part of life is being protected from our failure. Because being protected from our failure undermines our ability to be honest about failing and correcting the situation to make things better.

It is very sad, to me, that adults - parents, teachers, administrators, etc. - would rather send the clear message to kids that they are incapable of succeeding in school than to face the much clearer and inevitable failures kids will experience in school and the failures of so many adults - especially those in the political world that feed off of this ideological commitment to their weakness and failure rather than to promote self-respect, self-discipline, self-determination and independent learning for all students, and all of the benefits that come from that learning, independent thought, self-respect, self-discipline, and self-determination.

Surely, this is not all we have to offer our kids. Excuses for why they have failed and why we have failed them. Surely there is something better that we have to offer children that, I believe, those same adults do genuinely care about.

There is only one fundamentally sound way out of this mess and to promote greater responsibility and more serious, successful learning on the part of students, parents, teachers, administrators, and everyone who is responsible for schools: giving them the freedom and the choice to identify schools they believe will help them succeed and to choose to do whatever it will take to succeed in those schools.

Everything else is one more excuse for failure.

I am tired of watching kids and adults make excuses for their failure. It does not serve them. It does not serve any of us.

It is time that we expected something better.