Who works the hardest in any school?

I once worked as a school psychologist in a tiny, one building public school district with a odd collection of school directors. This is how I learned the difference between an IQ test and a school board election:

At a monthly public meeting, one board member who believed that the district spent a disproportionate amount of money on students with disabilities proclaimed that he could solve the district's "special education problem" with a shotgun. That was not the bad part. The bad part was that no one stood and opposed his statement. One way he and others might test their beliefs about special education is to substitute the word "Jewish" or "African-American" for the word "special education," in anything they plan to say, and listen to how it sounds.If he had used this test, and substituted the word "Jewish" for "special education" in his phrase "special education problem," he would have become Hitler. Memo to board members everywhere-- anytime you wonder if you will sound like Hitler, stop talking.

In my career, I have heard otherwise intelligent sounding adults utter phrases like, "I can't believe that there is such a thing as "gifted and learning disabled," and "Can you believe a special ed kid won the election for student council president?"

A school superintendent coworker, now mercifully retired, once sent the school maintenance staff to measure the road in front of the house of one child who was complicated, challenging, and expensive to educate -- hoping to discover that the child actually lived one town over.

Ouch.

Kids who receive special education are, without a doubt, the hardest working children in any school. When their behavior is frustrating, when they are having difficulty learning basic literacy and number concepts, when they break rules, when they misjudge social situations, when they need more services, support and adult attention than their peers, then they are struggling the hardest. In psychology, we are trained to think that if we are feeling angry, frustrated, confused, or overwhelmed when sitting with a patient, then we are probably feeling just what our patient is feeling. The same is true for students with disabilities. Whatever we feel when we work with them, they are probably feeling as they work with us -- but as kids, they have fewer psychological resources to cope with emotional distress; so hurts, frustrations, confusion, disappointments and pain are all the more poignant for them.We are called upon to be the grown-ups and cope with them, not the other way around.

If you have a disability that affects your education, then you have a brain disorder. Because education, even in mathematics, is largely verbal, most brain disorders responsible for educational disabilities affect language, and how you process words and ideas in written and oral form. Even children with "emotional disturbance" -- a terrible term for kids with mental health disorders -- frequently needed speech and language instruction as young children, or had other mild signs of early brain dysfunction.

To imagine how much effort a child with a language based disability invests into each school day, imagine yourself attending a school today taught in a language you had a basic understanding of. Imagine though, that while you seem fluent to others, you have trouble when people talk too fast, use idioms or expressions, use humor, or use an alphabet that you are just learning. Imagine how much energy you would need to expend today. Imagine how confused you would feel. Imagine how frustrated you would feel when you had a brilliant idea that you could not get across on paper or out loud. Imagine then, that because you seem fluent, people cannot understand why sometimes you are so thickheaded -- are you rude? Are you passive aggressive? Lazy? Just plain dumb? And then after you imagine how tired you would be when that school day ended, imagine doing the same thing tomorrow. And tomorrow. And tomorrow.

When adults and classmates underestimate, blame, or criticize kids who receive special education, they are struggling with their own confusion. It is difficult to imagine the world as it is lived by someone with an educational disability. It is difficult to understand how someone who can be so "normal" can have so many problems. It is so easy to imagine that if they just tried harder... without understanding that just to do the ordinary, kids with disabilities are making an extraordinary effort.