BENDING BACK ON HIGH SCHOOL PROGRAMS FOR YOUTH WITH LEARNING DISABILITIES

"To bend back," ... [to give] careful consideration to important matters and [to be] open to the voices, opinions, and advice of others" (Valli, 1997, pp. 67-68). I am bending back my mind (and often, it seems, my soul) to reflect on high school programs for students with learning disabilities (LD). This is a painful process. My focus on secondary issues did not start until 1980 when I received a grant from the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) to study forms of interagency collaboration (Single Portal Intake Project, 19801983). In our work related to this grant, we found that (a) interagency collaboration was logical when agencies had reason to collaborate; and (b) transition times (when a student moves from one agency to another) were one of the prime opportunities for collaboration. One of the transitions we studied in the early 1980s was the one from the public schools to adult life. The first big question was "what happens to special education youth after they graduate from high school?" This question led to the beginning of the follow-up studies on special education graduates I have conducted, almost yearly, since 1983. These studies have produced data that have raised new questions, including what conditions could improve the post-school status of special education graduates, how can we keep more special education students in high school through graduation, and, finally, what is the purpose of public schools in a democracy? For some these questions might not seem sequential; for me they were a straight line to my present position on schooling and special education. The current condition of schools with regard to youth with LD is worse than it was 20 years ago. This is not because many good, well-intentioned people did not spend oodles of time and energy on the problem. Nor is it because we do not have good, competent people working on the issue today. Indeed, the quality of the people working on these issues today seems superior to those of 20 years ago. The decline in the quality of schooling stems from other factors, factors that are, in my mind, a clear indication of the failure of the P-20 public school system due to the loss of a moral compass of schooling. The post-school outcome data on graduates with LD has remained pretty stable over the past 20 years. Males with LD who graduate from high school are employed at more or less 70-80% levels, similar to males without disabilities (Murray, Goldstein, & Edgar, 1997). Although many of these students plan to go to college, few do (about 25%), and even fewer graduate from some form of postsecondary education program (Murray, Goldstein, Nourse, & Edgar, 2000). Females do less well; their employment rates are 50-60%, primarily due to child bearing without partners (Murray et al., 1997). Additionally, about 40% of students with LD fail to complete schooling (Kortering & Braziel, 2002). For both graduates and dropouts, we have virtually no information on the quality of their lives or evidence of their overall citizenship. This is, sadly, also true of young adults without disabilities. Instead, we measure employment status and college attendance as keys to post-school success, rather than the more difficult analysis of quality of life and productive citizenship. This is, I am afraid, a cop-out to the pressure of the American worldview of free market economy and consumerism as a measure of goodness. It is an embarrassment. There are several major problems facing those of us who care about students labeled as LD. While there are technical problems that we as educators should be able to fix (definition of LD, best instructional practices for students so identified, powerful secondary programs that "hold" students and add value to their lives), these issues, while important, are not nearly as important as the shift of the aim of public schooling away from preparing democratic citizens and offering meaningful opportunities for all students. …