Mad Props to Stephanie Lindsley

Stephanie Lindsley wrote the "My Turn" column in Newsweek in the March 9 issue. In the column, titled "Autism and Education," she make a brave move, one that caught me totally off-guard.

She begins by describing her two children:

My son and daughter are happy, active, healthy children who enjoy school and are lucky to have a solid family life. But they are very different. My autistic son tests in the 'severe' range in many subjects. At 8, he reads well but cannot answer basic questions about what he has read. He speaks at a 3-year-old level, adores 'Blue's Clues' and is almost potty-trained.
My daughter, meanwhile, tests in the 95th percentile nationwide on standardized tests. At 12, she shows an amazing ability to process information, taking complex ideas apart and putting them back together to form new thoughts. She reads an entire novel most Sunday afternoons, solves the Sudoku puzzles in the paper and memorizes the entire script - not just her own lines - for the school plays she loves to be in.

In the rest of the article she goes on to argue my mother's favorite point - the strange logic of an educational system that pours so much money, energy, and time into students who struggle (like Lindsley's son) but so little (relatively) to students who are off the charts (like her daughter). (To be honest, it strikes me as a little strange that her daughter is only in the 95th percentile on standardized tests, or that that the threshold for sublime giftedness would have to be that low, but that's a horse of a different color.)

I do not know the specifics of the birth of this disparity but I know that, generally, they are couched in a decision made, I believe, in the 1970's, of parents of so-called "gifted" children to not put their children's lot in with the parents of so-called "handicapped" children who were fighting for their rights. Eventually, they received those rights under a variety of federal guidelines, I believe, and the brightest of the bright were left to fend for their own. This was an oft-repeated narrative in my house as my mother routinely lamented the collective decision made before she became a parent which, as she saw it, caused me so much boredom and frustration during my pre-college years.

Lindsley distorts the numbers a bit in making her point that the federal funding for gifted education ($7.5 million) is dwarfed by the federal funding for "everyone else" to get up to speed - No Child Left Behind and it's ginormous mandate ($24.5 billion). Clearly, all that money from NCLB doesn't go to mentally disabled children.

Lindsley ends her column quite nicely:

It pains me to suggest taking some of the federal money designated for my disabled son and spending it on my overperforming daughter. My son will probably meet minimum standards, but most parents of autistic children describe goals for their kids in much more modest terms: being able to bathe themselves, get a job, or live semi-independently. My daughter has the potential for much more. If she were given even a fraction of the customized education that my son receives, she could learn the skills needed to prevent the next worldwide flu pandemic, or invent a new form of non-polluting transport. Perhaps she could even discover a cure for autism.

A great challenge here, of course, is America's national struggle with elitism (which I previously alluded to in this post), one of the Atwater-Rove Republican Party's greatest frauds. (Check out this horrific piece, where Alex Castellanos, CNN's resident Republican moron, includes this gem in an article criticizing Obama: "Obama is a privileged young man who has not yet made many mistakes in his life. Having a president who belongs to the Harvard elite and the community-organizer streets is not the same as having a president who has lived a long life among middle-class Americans and understands them." Was he referring to the elder Bush, the younger Bush, Reagan, or Nixon in that sentence? Ha.) And the cold, hard facts are that American innovation has persisted, for the most part, in spite of special accommodations for our brightest students (as opposed to, I dunno, the Soviet Union's educational system and its great successes), though I'd counter that with only imagining what could be if we provided the best and brightest (though how would we define that? would Einstein have been included? Gates? Buffet? Jobs?) with more significant support. We are all too aware, however, of what can happen to disabled children who don't get the support they need.

I am, as you likely know and could divine from what I've written above, an unabashed elitist in general and a major fan of providing everyone with the best education we can but being open to tailoring that education, unapolegetically, for intellectual all-stars who can be bored and frustrated in classrooms of all kinds (I attended Jewish, private secular, and public schools). That puts me at odds with a large portion, I think, of the educational world I inhabit, a distinction that has neither been lost on me nor one whose origin and cause I have yet to uncover.