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YOU HAVE TO BE CAREFULLY TAUGHT:

 SPECIAL NEEDS AND FIRST NATIONS EDUCATION

 A Report to the National Indian Education Council, The Assembly

of First Nations, and the Chiefs Council on Education

May, 1999

Roland D. Chrisjohn, Ph. D.

rchrisjo@stthomasu.ca

Acknowledgements

This work would have been impossible without the support of the Assembly of First Nations, and for this opportunity I will remain enduringly grateful. I would especially like to thank Dr. Paulette Tremblay for her encouragement and assistance, and AFN

education staffers Lori, Karen, Iain, and Lisa for putting up with me and rendering assistance, as I needed it.

I also must thank Dr. Vivian Ayoungman, of the Treaty 7 Tribal Council Education Department, for supporting the beginnings of this exercise back in 1994-1995, and Sherri Young for her contribution to the work accomplished at that time.

Finally, I would like to thank my brother Gordon and Harvey McCue for taking the trouble from time to time of discussing portions of this work in progress.

To my mother, L. Shannon Chrisjohn, who taught me everything I ever need to know about education: love learning.

I. INTRODUCTION

It should be as clear as a child’s counting: (1) by virtue of treaty, international law, and precedent, Canada is obliged to provide education to First Nations; (2) there is no provision that this education is to be provided only where it is convenient or cheap, nor may Canada pick and choose who shall be educated, nor may it decide in what manner this should happen, nor may it determine how long education should continue; therefore, (3) a First Nations student with personal attributes which render typical educational practices ineffective is entitled to those modifications of her/his educational circumstances such as will ensure her/him a suitable education. Special education, then, whether concerned with anything ranging from ramps for students in wheelchairs to expert one-on-one teachers for exceptional learners, should be an area of First Nations education where contention is unknown.

In the real world, however, contention resides as easily here as in any aspect of First Nations education. It not only bleeds in from contention rife in other focal concerns (e.g., provincial curricula, local control, post-secondary support, etc.), it is generated in the rusty workings of ancient machines of prejudice, poorly maintained but still functional, and no longer understood by its operators, if ever understood. In coming to grips with special needs in First Nations education it is imperative that we comprehend not only how thinking about it is infiltrated by the way education in general is managed, but that we understand those prejudices which concentrate our attention in some directions while disqualifying alternative viewpoints.

The impetus for this work is derived from long-standing concerns of the Education Secretariat of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), the Chiefs Committee on Education (CCOE), and the National Indian Education Committee (NIEC), reflecting regional and local perceptions that the manner in which Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) operates does not, and has not, made adequate provision for addressing the special needs of First Nations students. Much of the discussion of this inadequacy on the part of INAC solidifies around the notion that what is absent (and therefore what is needed) is an unambiguous INAC statement of policy concerning special needs. This document is to be preliminary to jump-starting a bilateral discussion that may bring about such a policy; it is to establish the parameters (conceptual and empirical) that need to be considered on our (First Nations) part and provide a reference point for internal discussions. Such internal discussions may at best lead to the development of a First Nations statement of what an INAC special education policy must entail, and a consequent development of such a policy through bilateral negotiations. At worst, this document and the discussions that follow can provide a grounding in the issues of special education informing First Nations designates in whatever discussions of special education that may eventually arise with INAC.

The content of this document is based upon a variety of sources of information, including (1) reports from and meetings with INAC, (2) reports from and meetings with First Nations regional authorities and communities, (3) reports from specific provincial special education policies, and (4) an examination of the professional and academic literatures on special education. Specific sources will be referenced as needed, with, however, one important proviso: throughout I will exercise my own judgement concerning the level of detail needed in citation. For one thing, more than a little of the information I have obtained was given in confidence, by people still working in the circumstances to be described. I will not jeopardize their positions by breaking their confidences. For another, much of what I must say superficially will appear critical of what is presently happening in special education for First Nations students. I will not provide information that might allow INAC or other critics of First Nations operations to pick nits with Indian educators or cloud issues about their practices. I have no doubt that Indian educators of all levels are operating to the best of their abilities in trying circumstances to provide Indian children with what the children have been promised but denied: an education.

The manner in which I have chosen to organize my material findings may be less than universally admired. Fundamentally, I found it necessary to address many general issues (conceptual and empirical) before moving on to federal, provincial, regional, and local specific issues, mainly because, as will emerge, a proper understanding of specifics requires the development of a suitable overall context. However, the "general first, specifics after" rule is not a hard and fast one, and I will move back and forth between these levels of discussion as I deem necessary for clarity.

II. A RAZOR’S EDGE

Much of the thinking about special education and First Nations is circumscribed by an intellectual parochialism that undermines any attempt to deal in a serious manner with the issues that must be addressed. This is a harsh judgement, but one that cannot be avoided. Among the failures of vision evident within existing approaches to special needs are:

1. failure to link what is happening in First Nations education with what is happening in Canadian education as a whole;
2. predominance of bureaucratic thinking over educational thinking, and educational thinking over common sense;
3. neglect of political economic thinking;
4. acquiescence to pseudo-technology;
5. insufficiently critical attitude toward initial assumptions framing issues of special education.

This is not an exhaustive list, nor are the items independent (conceptually or empirically) from one another. But each adds a characteristic confusion to the task of sorting out special needs, as elaborated upon briefly here. The exception will be 5., above; discussion of this proposition will be postponed until I have had the opportunity to survey the array of conditions typically grouped together as special needs.

One may read widely in Indian education literature without coming to understand that quality mainstream education (the education denied us during the residential school era; the very education we seek today for our children and for ourselves) is itself under assault and consequent deformation. At best, then, quality education is a moving target. Historically, mainstream public education has never had the "broadening of intellectual horizons" or "the freedom of the mind" as its principal function, even if such depictions have contributed to its public face. Rather, while preaching "education for the development of the mind," "education for true democracy," and "education as promoting opportunity, social justice, and equality," public education was structured (and suitably altered from time-to-time) to promote and maintain the existing power structures (money, class, sex, and race) of Canadian society, a task it continues to this day. Education has always had socialization into a culture as a major (if not principal) function. However, by not linking concerns of First Nations education to what is happening in mainstream education, "Socialization into whose culture?" is never allowed to arise as a question.

One of the upshots of this is that, wherever First Nations have obtained nominal control over elementary and secondary schooling, First Nations educators and parents struggle to assure continuity with provincial educational standards without examining what those standards are and whether they are what they really want for their children. A short answer to the question "What are provincial schools becoming?" immediately raises important issues for First Nations to consider, however. Briefly, provincial school systems (most obviously Alberta’s and Ontario’s, but other provinces are following suit) are becoming training institutes for corporate Canada which inculcate a corporate-friendly mind set in its graduating drones: "Above all, high-tech corporate interest in education reform expects a school system that will utilize sophisticated [sic] performance measures and standards to sort students and to provide a reliable supply of such adaptable, flexible, loyal, mindful, expendable, ‘trainable’ workers for the twenty-first century. This, at bottom, underlies the corporate drive to retool education and retool human capital."

And what kinds of workers? Recent projections of the jobs that will be available in the 21^st century (and therefore the jobs for which our children should be training) include only two relatively "skilled" positions among their top ten: registered nurses and general managers/ executives. The other eight (retail salespersons, cashiers, office clerks, truck drivers, janitors and domestics, nursing aides/orderlies, food-counter workers, and waiters/waitresses) are low-paid, high-turnover moil that demeans what should be the nobility of human labor. Is this the future for our children being struggled for by First Nations parents and educators? I sincerely doubt it. And yet, whether or not First Nations are in nominal control of their children’s education, it is the future that is being insinuated when (as mandated by INAC) the mainstream provincial systems set our educational standards.

Furthermore, does anyone think that the children of MP’s, judges, business executives, and the like attend schools where the experiences of hamburger-flipping and floor-moping are counted as course credits? The transformation of the public school system is leading to two-tier education (much like the assault on health care is bringing about a two-tiered health system), where those who can afford private education (subsidized in part by tax money raided from the crumbling public system) can be assured their children will receive something more like an education, along with an ideological booster that their positions of privilege are natural and well-deserved. Meanwhile, those who cannot afford it send their children off to receive vocationalism and an ideological booster that their marginality and misery are also natural and well deserved.

What has any of this to do with special education? Assume for a moment that wealth and privilege are not natural occurrences, and that knowledge and accomplishment are more the outcomes of opportunity and effort than of native ability and divine right. Then, in a society that purports to be "egalitarian," "non-racist," "non-sexist," "multicultural," "free," and so on, obvious disparities in quality of life (income, housing, longevity, etc.) stand in need of explanation. Most urgently, it is an explanation that must be accepted by those who do not benefit from the disparity and/or who are exploited in order to create the disparity in the first place, that is, those who are systemically denied opportunity and best efforts. Since Have-Nots must outnumber the Haves, the vast majority of people must never come to know what, indeed, they are (or were) capable of, given the proper circumstances.

Such evidence as exists overwhelmingly suggests opportunity and effort, and not native ability and divine right, could be the generators of knowledge and accomplishment, if that is what the society was committed to achieving. Rather than acting on that, however, Canada (or at least, those who are in control of it) has institutionalized an educational system that "weeds out" rather than "nurtures," that denigrates most in order to elevate some, and that inculcates in all the fundamental notion of the Meritocracy, "You have only yourself to blame/praise." And an increasing large proportion of the denigrated weeds find themselves wearing a label reading "special education."

To summarize, mainstream education is engaged, and has been for quite some time, in a process of preparing the larger mass of students to conform, in thought and action, to the requirements of modern international capitalism. Although some will come through this process and live lives of comparative privilege, more will find themselves in competition with one another for a progressively deteriorating way of life; some will be discarded altogether. Regardless of outcome, however, all will get a healthy dose of the myth that they have received what they have deserved (although, thankfully, some will not succumb to the propaganda).

It is into this maelstrom that First Nations students are being cast, carrying baggage (like racism, a history of educational oppression and discrimination, and so on) not necessarily born by others. Focusing on Indian education when that is your responsibility is perfectly logical, but too often it leads to a narrowness of perspective, a belief that the issues, problems, and upheavals observable there are there because that is their provenience. As correct as this undoubtedly is on occasion, it neglects the fact that education is a battleground for conflicting interests and classes in the mainstream itself. We must recognize that often, Indian education is under fire not because the mainstream is shooting at us but because it’s shooting at itself and we’re in the line of fire.

If we do not understand what is happening in education, we do not understand what is happening in Indian education.

One reason why there may be a generalized failure to take the dynamics of mainstream education into account when considering First Nations education is that educators are underrepresented in Indian educational decision making. The federal and provincial contributions to this educational discussion are handled primarily by bureaucrats, guided (at least theoretically) by politicians, neither of which group need have any particular background or expertise in education (although this isn’t ruled out). Of course, governments can and do employ consultants to advise them on technical matters, but without their own competence to fall back upon they are ill-equipped to judge the quality of the advice provided. In practice, as a basis for evaluation governments must depend upon (1) previous experience with specific consultants, (2) consultant reputation, (3) general concordance with report findings and recommendations, and (4) such expertise as may be available and accessible departmentally (that is, bureaucrats aren’t necessarily assigned to their competencies). The result is a mixed bag: some good reports and some bad, and some of them acted upon and some ignored.

In my experience people from an educational background are somewhat more likely to be represented in bureaucracies and governments concerned with education on the First Nations side of such discussions (though I know of no figures). In practice, however, this has made no detectable difference in the quality of results achieved. For one thing, First Nations tend to be limited in educational discussions to reacting to government’s suggestions; positive, proactive suggestions tend to be "back-burnered" (because ignored by mainstream bureaucrats) or reappear in disguised (and altered) form, months or years later, as a federal proposal. For another, even with educational backgrounds, being located within a bureaucracy tends to demand that individuals act and think like bureaucrats. It is a common complaint of educators occupying political or administrative positions (even educationally-relevant ones) that they have little opportunity to do the work most congenial to them and best employing their expertise, and that they are unable to accomplish what they once hoped they would be able to accomplish. An educational bureaucracy is first a bureaucracy, and educational only further along.

The bureaucratic worldview obviously plays a role in obscuring the relation between mainstream and First Nations education noted above. However, bureaucratic thinking does more than that. First, what is a bureaucracy? Weber provided a comprehensive description of bureaucracy, admirably summarized by Morrison:

Weber used this term to denote the development of a modern means of administration… Beyond the formal characteristics of bureaucracy, Weber put forward a theory of bureaucratic development in which he linked the rise of bureaucracy with the emergence of legal domination… A bureaucratic means of administration includes (i) the principle of office hierarchy; (ii) a chain of command based on belief in the authority of the office [as opposed to the man or woman]; (iii) a reliance on procedurally correct decision making which presupposes ‘correct rulings;’ (iv) a reliance on due process; (v) the regulation of offices by impersonal rules; (vi) a form of decision making that is reliant on technical correctness, calculative reasoning, and the ethics of factual consistency; (vii) the tendency to produce the ‘leveling’ of differences in society and to appeal to the broadest possible interpretations of the ‘common interest;’ and (viii) a strict orientation to means and ends. Bureaucratic society represents the dominance of formalistic rationality [decision making through ostensibly quantitative means-ends calculation, ignoring human values because of the inherent difficult of quantifying them] over substantive rationality [decision making where human values are central to the process, including examination of ends to be achieved and the means employed to accomplish them].

Social theorists of all persuasions agree that bureaucracy was an outgrowth of the development of Western capitalism. And, while Weber’s formal description is straightforward, he and other theorists elaborated details, characteristic of bureaucracies, which are implicit within that description:

1. bureaucracies are meritocratic, and therefore also methodologically individualistic. In Young’s satire (see Footnote 14), the meritocracy was established precisely to structure bureaucracies on something other than privilege, and historically (in Canada and the US, and even in ancient China), bureaucracies developed out of dissatisfaction with existing practices of making official appointments (e.g., patronage appointments, leading to wholesale firing and restaffing with inexperienced personnel every time a different party came to power; nepotism; favoritism; etc.). The ideology of the meritocracy (you are where you deserve to be; you have only yourself to blame/praise) is the ideology of the bureaucracy. The contradictions of MI and the meritocracy (again, as discussed in Footnote 14) are the contradictions of bureaucracy.
   
2. related strongly to the first point, bureaucracies create the conceptual space where an individual can be separated into a "private" person and a "public" person. "You salute the uniform, not the man," an old saying from military bureaucracy, illustrates perfectly the public/private distinction being made. As Sayer notes, before the onset of capitalism and its bureaucratic accompanist, such a distinction was impossible. Once accomplished, however, it made it possible, as odd as it might seem, for a person to work against his or her own interests. This is a theme I will give a great deal more attention to later in this work.
   
3. bureaucracies are secretive. The are necessarily so internally, since lower level bureaucrats merely pass their work along to higher-ups, with each level having their own separate evaluation and decision making procedures. They are secretive externally, or to outsiders, for a variety of reasons, including the avoidance of accountability and the protection of trade secrets or practices. A substantive reason for secretiveness is offered by Friedenberg: "[T]he fundamental function of secrecy in Canadian governmental practice is not concealment but the cultivation of docility… [peace, order, and good government] depends, for its success, on a citizenry ready finally to accept Papa’s definition of the situation and Papa’s resolution of it, and persuaded, ultimately, that it has no right to ask questions that probe into matters it has been told are not its concern."
   
4. bureaucracies are conservative, not in a political party sense, but in terms of resistance to change. The ordered hierarchical structure first of all is difficult to navigate quickly, and thus any change instituted must "seep through" the system, even if it is amenable to change. Further, alteration in procedure can be interpreted as criticism of the existing offices, leading to defensiveness, a defensiveness that might have to be overcome at each level of organizational structure. Also, since the stability of a bureaucracy was one of its initial positive features (bureaucracies developed, in part, to avoid the interruption in orderly operation that was associated with wholesale changes in political power), a conscientious bureaucracy must seriously examine anything that might affect that stability. And, since, as I have pointed out earlier, often the experts on technological and scientific matters are not an ongoing part of a bureaucracy but are contracted from outside on an as-needed basis, bureaucracies frequently do not have the resources at hand to conduct an impartial examination of proposed change.
   
5. bureaucracies are capitalistic. This is most easily seen in the hierarchical command structure bureaucracies and businesses share, but the parallels are elsewhere as well. For instance, they share an adherence to formalistic rationality and means-ends calculation, since in business "morality" is subordinated to profit maximization, which is the end to which the means are put. As well, the division of labor explicit in a bureaucracy’s hierarchical structure is merely a version of Taylorism (breaking a job down into distinct parts) and Fordism (assigning different parts of a Taylorized job to different, specializing people), or Modernity, the essence of capitalism. And finally, strongly related to this point;
   
6. bureaucracies are servants of capitalism. To see this, recall that bureaucracies are the operational arms of government. The Minister of Finance, for example, is an elected politician appointed to an already existing system of Deputy Ministers, Assistant Deputy Ministers, and so on down to the people who sweep out the ministry offices every day. If any politician or his/her government undertakes to do something that isn’t already being done a new bureaucracy is created to put the policy into action. Now, for whom does the politician work? While there are undoubtedly programs that function, or at least try to, for the collective benefit of people (libraries, meat inspection, airport operation, and so on), in general "Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business." In Canada this is most readily seen in governmental policies of corporate tax cuts, payouts of public monies to increase corporate profits, and drastic cutbacks in services (primarily health and education). We of the First Nations, of course, are familiar with the role of federal and provincial governments issuing corporations timber permits, mining rights, and oil concession to lands that don’t belong to them. Politicians and their bureaucracies serve Corporate Canada by obscuring who is really pulling the economic strings of society. And since money is needed for politicians to get elected, politicians’ strings are being pulled as well.

While incomplete, this provides enough of an overview for our requirements. With these features in mind, let us now consider what must result from the bureaucratization of First Nations education and special education. Whatever particular form the institutions of education and special education may take, in general (1) education will work for the assimilation of First Nations peoples (and, as I have argued extensively elsewhere, "assimilation" is a euphemism for "genocide") and (2) education will marginalize First Nations concerns, distort our educational issues, and co-opt any move toward local or regional First Nations control. Bureaucracies won’t do these things because they are necessarily evil or arrogant or dim-witted (although particular bureaucrats may be located anywhere along these and other dimensions), for these are characteristics of concrete people, not abstract institutions. Bureaucracies will do these things because that’s what bureaucracies do in capitalist economies.

To see why these are bureaucratic predispositions toward First Nations rather than either specific policies concerning us (e.g., "conspiracies") or just a long run of bad luck, consider: A bureaucracy in Canada, by (vii), above, will operate to "level" differences and appeal to the broadest possible notion of "common interest." Further, it will do this, by 1., 5., and 6., above, in a manner congenial to capitalism, primarily (e.g., financially) and secondarily (e.g., philosophically). Bureaucratic leveling is something we’ve always been familiar with: we are all lumped together as "Indians," for example. Further, the current bureaucratic buzz phrase, "best practice," refers to the notion that "one size fits all," and that finding something useful in one First Nation community (be it education, health service delivery, or what-have-you) should lead "naturally" to its imposition on all First Nations communities.

Indeed, "leveling of differences" may itself be taken as a euphemism for "assimilation" (which itself is a euphemism for "genocide"), since it leads to the general practice that the "differences" to be "leveled out" are precisely the ones that make us Cree, Anishnawbe, Piikuni, etc. That is, it isn’t in the "common interest" to make mainstream Canadians conform to First Nations notions of society, community, language, spirituality, or whatever. Where there is "leveling" to be done it is done to us, in the direction taken for granted by those in charge. The aim and thrust of the Residential School, to "remove the Indian from the Indian to save the Indian from him/herself," is alive and well today, implicit in existing policy if not explicit.

Nor is it in the "common interest" for the Canadian government to meet their obligations under Treaties with First Nations, or even to submit disputes concerning the interpretation of these obligations to truly disinterested Third Party arbitration. Even a cursory examination of Canada’s treaties with First Nations and its obligations under international law (see Footnote 1) show Canada is obliged to provide the resources for education; that education happen in the context of our own communities, languages, and spiritual practices; that it happen under our control, not that of Canada; and that it provide us with equal facility in our own ways and in the ways of the mainstream, should we so desire it. If education like this sounds fair, just, honorable, and proper to you and me, it is outside the true control of mainstream bureaucrats, and therefore inconsistent with Canada’s ideological program for us. (The complaint often sounded to such musings on our part, that it’s too expensive, is, as we shall see below, mere smokescreen.) Since the immorality of unilaterally misinterpreting and misenforcing Canada’s obligations is subtracted out of their decision processes ("formalistic rationality" over "substantive rationality," under (viii), above), they will operate to achieve their end (leveling out our differences) without a moral twinge.

And, speaking of "common interests," is it in the general Canadian interest to pay First Nations for what Canadian businesses, governments, churches, and individual people have stolen from indigenous peoples in the past, or for what is being stolen in the present? Is financial and legal compensation for the wrongs individuals have suffered (and are suffering), by acts of commission as well as omission, under governmental policies in "the general Canadian interest?" The bureaucracies of Canada do not operate as if this were so. Rather, they provide an appearance of due process, temporizing as the educational bureaucracy continues its long-term program of taking the Indian out of the Indian. For when we are Indians no more, we’ll have come to see the "common Canadian interests" as our own and the treaties will become mere scraps of paper, of historic and nostalgic interest, but otherwise insubstantial.

Our concerns are distorted into a "demand," supposedly issuing from us, that we become like any other Canadian citizen, and Indian "control" of education, supposedly an INAC policy in operation since 1973, is a nominal control (that is, no jurisdictional or financial control) over an education system that is mainstream in philosophy, content, and execution, and dictated by INAC. These and similar features of First Nations/Canadian relations are not accidents, nor specific bad programs that will go away once an "evil" government is removed; they are features of a bureaucracy that has some other group’s benefits as their priority, that subtracts right and wrong out of their operational reasoning, and that takes its patron’s ideology as the indisputable truth. If we are willing to be swallowed whole by this system of bureaucracy and it patrons, we will be as welcome as any meal. If we put up a fuss, however, we can be expected to be spit out, only partly chewed, as soon as our lack of taste becomes evident to them.

Elsewhere, I have written that if we achieved full control over Indian education tomorrow, I fear we would end up building an imitation mainstream educational system the day after tomorrow. Empiricism (that is, reference to facts and statistics) tells us that such an imitation wouldn’t be adopted because of the successes of First Nations education as directed by the mainstream. And common sense tells us that the failures of mainstream education couldn’t be the grounds of our emulation. The reason we would, I think, end up reinventing a square wheel is that our own educators are infused with someone else’s notion (i.e., that of Western capitalist civilization) of what education is and should be.

The problem is that, while in matters of specific application, educational thinking has its own concerns (What should a child learn? What is the best way for him/her to learn? How can I know when she/he has grasped the particular idea? …etc.), like all Western institutions it is infused with an unexamined, unstated adherence to the Western ideology of individualism (see Footnote 14) and its more obvious manifestations (e.g., the meritocracy, reductionism, dualism). The differences between education, then, and, say, politics, religion, bureaucracy, and so on, are of content, not conviction, of particular practice, not theory. Education and educators are, by-and-large, as committed to the ideology of individualism as any group in Western civilization you care to mention.

The synonymy between formal education and Western ideology is readily seen in such practices as streaming/tracking (and the differential educational experiences made available within tracks), in the formal structure of the classroom, and in hundreds of other, almost invisible details. However, education’s identity with the ideology of Western individualism is most easily appreciated by surveying, even briefly, the kinds of explanations educators generate for the successes and failures of educational process; overwhelmingly, these are couched in terms of what, supposedly, is happening somewhere inside individual children. Where factors external to individual children are considered, they are usually conceptualized as having some kind of concrete manifestation within individual children (for example, poverty or child abuse are often seen as resulting in deficiencies in emotional or intellective development). And finally, when external factors are investigated in educational studies, the impact of their modification is generally studied in concert with students’ individual differences. The analysis of the results of these investigations is always referenced to what purportedly has happened North of the Necks of individual children. This educational allegiance to individualism is so pervasive that Ryan gave it its own name: Blaming the Victim.

To our detriment, the people charged with carrying out the tasks of First Nations education, whether administratively (i.e., bureaucratically) or practically, whether of First Nations background or not, adopt Western individualism. Again, this isn’t done maliciously; it is the unstated and unexamined assumption of the technical hurdles established by the mainstream and acceded to by First Nations individuals desiring to become educators. To obtain the program admissions, grades, certificates, and experiences necessary to become an educator, it is necessary to demonstrate an understanding and acceptance of the ideology of individualism, as manifested in university coursework, educational practica, and a multitude of other ways. The bureaucracy erected around becoming an educator co-opts the development of a truly indigenous educational system; "education thinking" itself becomes identical in philosophy with "bureaucratic thinking," and any thought of playing outside the limits established by the mainstream is strangled in its cradle.

Were "educational thinking" separate from, and truly to predominate over, "bureaucratic thinking," I believe formal education would be something very different from what it is today. What that might be will be further explored here later. For now, I will merely point out that the convergence of these purportedly different mind-sets leads to obvious affronts to common sense. For example, First Nations parents (as noted on page 2, above) are continually confronted with the "choice" between having an educational system that meets provincial standards versus having a system that reflects and enhances the cultural, linguistic, and/or spiritual well being of the local First Nations groups. However, common sense would demand to know why non-indigenous people aren’t required to make any such choice; that is, it would ask why we can’t have an educational system that meets whatever educational standard we desire by means that reflect and enhance our cultures, languages, and spirituality, when they can? The answer to this question would immediately reveal the hidden assimilationist agenda of the mainstream.

Neglect of Political Economic Thinking

While political economy (or the "dismal science") is as dull as it sounds, it is impossible to understand how capitalist, bureaucratic societies operate unless we "follow the money." So central are political economic concerns that specifying a budget, procuring it, and effectively administering it are the hallmarks of achievement in bureaucracy. As important as political economy is for all aspects of First Nations education, then, it is interesting how our economic concerns are limited to reacting to governments’ economic dictates (that is, arguing for modification of proposed budgetary items, bureaucratically managing a preset budget, and applying for special grants). Indeed, since these activities seem to keep us busier than any sane person would want to be, curiosity concerning what’s going on "behind the curtain" of Canadian political economics might be thought of as a luxury.

Yet it is a curtain that must be penetrated. Recently, a bureaucrat told me for the 1,000,000 time that "you can’t solve a problem by throwing money at it." My reply was twofold: first of all, in a capitalist society, throwing money is exactly how things get done. We were both able to meet because someone was throwing money at our salaries; the room in which we were meeting had heat and electricity because money was thrown at owners, builders, and utility operators; and the cab driver that had transported me to the meeting had not done so out of the goodness of his heart, but because he expect to have some money thrown at him. We no longer live (if anyone ever did) in the Rooney-Garland Era, where a cry of "Hey, let’s put on a show!" seriously can be taken as fiscal strategy. Second, the emphasis on "throwing" made it seem as if it had been government policy to toss bags on money into the air haphazardly, letting various and sundry interested parties jump in and leave with what they could carry. In fact, the money has been and is shaped into very specific missiles, and thrown with a great deal of accuracy into very specific pockets. Are we not supposed to have noticed, for example, that for years First Nations students were moved about in mainstream provincial educational systems so as to provide a windfall, in the form of tuition subsidies, for capital development projects for mainstream schools? Or that this was going on while INAC denied First Nations any funding for capital development projects on reserves? And that no one in the mainstream schools cared what happened to the First Nations students after the nominal role was taken in October? Needless to say, there are countless other examples, from Indian Country and other parts of the Canadian economic polity, of money missiles landing with an accuracy that would put Werner Von Braun to shame.

"Throwing money at the problem" is exactly what the governments and bureaucracies of Canada have done and are supposed to do. The fact that throwing money labeled "For Indian Education" has led to a 70% overall dropout rate is neither here nor there, for First Nations education was not the problem it was actually being thrown at. Thus, when anyone speaks of the failure of First Nations education (or, for that matter, the failure of mainstream education) and cites figures like these, the real successes of Canadian education policy must be counterposed: (1) that much of the "Indian" money made its way into projects benefiting mainstream institutions or individuals, (2) that, as direct results of their experiences in "education," many First Nations people became marginalized, dispirited, and self-blaming, or even worse, accepting of the ideology of the mainstream, (3) that mainstream attitudes about the sub-humanity of indigenous peoples were reinforced and strengthened, while (4) the bureaucracy accomplishing this managed to operate largely without drawing negative attention to itself.

The political economics of First Nations education doesn’t simply come down to fiscal benefits derived; ideological gains are at least as important. Governments and bureaucracies plead penury when (1) they can’t control where the money will land and (2) when they don’t see their ideological position supported. When there’s a favor to be done with a strong enough ideological kick (say, bombing Iraq), there are always a few billion dollars kicking around loose. With special needs programs and funding, like with all aspects of First Nations education, we must ask ourselves: "Who really benefits?" It is naïve to assume it will be only our children; it is naïve in the extreme to assume it will even be our children who benefit.

Acquiescence to Pseudo-Technology

The recent history of First Nations education is replete with instances of acquiescence to preposterous schemes touted as being able dramatically to improve the academic performance of some or all of our students. Some schemes, like painting classrooms "attention-inducing colors," at least were cheap, although useless; others, like "patterning" equipment for brain-damaged students, or "right-brained curricula," went well beyond "useless" by virtue of either their expense, their potential to wreck wholesale destruction on Indian students, or both. It is easy to ridicule the First Nations educators and/or administrators who "fell" for such schemes, but this would be completely inappropriate. To me it indicates just how essentially desperate First Nations people have been and are to make right the wrongs mainstream educational thinking has perpetrated upon us. That some of us have been willing to accept in good faith the promises of a predatory huckster class that can smell "Indian Money" tells us something of our own humanity, and its absence in significant groups of the people surrounding us.

Furthermore, it must be considered that ignorance of the ways to detect sound educational suggestions from unsound ones is a condition cultivated within First Nations groups by the mainstream, because it is a condition cultivated by portions of the mainstream against other mainstream subgroups. That is, withholding information (Cf. bureaucratic secrecy, p. 5 above), or authority, or certification, etc., is a typical strategy used in the mainstream for protecting a group’s position within society. Since we are less likely to pay someone else to do what we can perfectly well do ourselves, it is in the self-interest of service providers to hide, complicate, and/or mystify what it is they actually do. However, under these conditions, it is also perfectly possible to hide, complicate, and/or mystify the fact that the service provider is actually doing nothing.

With these considerations as background, let us have a look at the technology variously called testing, measurement, psychoeducational assessment, evaluation, and so on. Without at least a working knowledge of the issues arising within this disciplinary area it is impossible to understand anything about education as practiced in the late 20^th century in general, or special needs in particular. This is because testing embodies the methodological individualism of Western capitalism: it is held up to everyone as the scientific technology which identifies the individual differences that justify and explain the disparities in quality of life identified earlier in this essay.

Success and failure in life, as supposedly determined in a meritocracy, depends upon the individual characteristics (cognitive and affective) one can bring to bear upon the problems of living, whatever their origin: good characteristics lead to a well-earned good life; bad ones to an equally well-earned bad life. Testing is the technology that purports to tell us the nature of individual people’s endowment of those individual characteristics without having to go through an entire life before deciding whether a specific individual has good or bad characteristics to draw upon. Thus, it is important to understand the political economic justification of assessment as one of its central features: a meritocratic society considers it proper to deny individuals the opportunity even to try and (subsequently) fail at those tasks that, for whatever reason, the person might wish to pursue. Instead, formal assessment procedures are used to "sort out" those who supposedly will be able to from those who supposedly won’t be able to.

With tests and testing as ubiquitous and important as they are in the modern world, it is sometimes astonishing to me just how little people, even "credentialled professionals," know about them. While test applications courses are a standard part of a psychologist’s post-graduate education, test theory courses generally aren’t; and, because of the emphasis on math and statistics in theory courses, they are typically avoided like the plague. This means that, in general, psychologists learn to give, score, and interpret tests without knowing why, how, and if they actually do what they purport to do (which is: give the psychologists a "snapshot" of the internal good and/or bad characteristics of the testee). The same ignorance is inculcated into the post-graduate programs of educators, while those training for classroom teaching may at best get a brief, non-technical exposure to classroom testing. The bottom line is that most of the people who use tests, and almost all of those who have them used upon them, have no intellectual basis for accepting or rejecting (or for bowing down to or challenging) formal testing, the characterizations and conclusions drawn from them, the ideological model of man it presupposes, or the psychosocial decisions tests are used to justify.

Is this really problematic? After all, I have only a most elementary understanding of the lift and drag physical principles that get airplanes into the air, but I trust that somebody knows what’s going on every time I get on an airplane. Unfortunately, the parallel doesn’t hold at all, for flight is a matter of physical principles and physical technology, and psychoeducational assessment is not. The "physical" side of formal assessment is by-and-large uncontroversial: the testing of hearing, sight, mobility, DNA, and so on may from time to time be subject to modification to assure applicability (such as substituting familiar objects of various sized for alphabetic characters in eye-charts for non-European peoples), but the identification of vision or hearing problems and the like is fairly explicit. The "psychoeducational" side of formal assessment can make no similar claim. Indeed, the admission from the very beginning of psychoeducational testing that "we don’t know these tests are testing, but maybe we’ll find out some time in the future" is one, 100 years after Binet, which still must be made.

The survey of testing I undertake here will highlight and then briefly discuss a variety of issues important to formal psychoeducational assessment and their application to First Nations students of all backgrounds.

Tests Have a Long and Sordid History as the Weapon of Plutocracy. The mythology of testing is that tests are, at root, egalitarian: tests permit the identification and subsequent elevation of lower class or underprivileged individuals whom otherwise would never have been "given a chance." A similar fairy tale is told, as Shepard pointed out in her 1980 review, of special needs assessment: testing locates the specific problems a student may have, which are then remediated in specially designed programs, after which the child can be returned, better than ever, back to the classroom from which she/he was banished.

Engaging stories, but both these and variations of them are untrue. For example, as Shepard was able to determine, 70% to 80% of the time, once a child was sent off for an "assessment," a "defect" was duly found, and 70% to 80% of those with an identified defect never made it back to a normal classroom (in those days, inclusion of children with an educational handicap wasn’t a generally accepted strategy. Nowadays the child may never leave the classroom, but he/she will carry the permanent blot of their identified "defect" with them on their school record.).

Tests were originally conceived by men dedicated to proving the genetic immutability of the presumed inferiority of First Nations peoples, women, Irish, Blacks, and a whole host of other peoples they deemed inferior. That this was ideology, and not science, is readily apparent to anyone who wishes to take the trouble to do some reading. Also hidden are testing’s links to corporate capitalism’s hijacking of higher education and the public school system, its manipulation so as to contribute to sexual bias and the oppression of women, its deployment against immigrants and, by extension, against the Jews during the Holocaust, its use as justification for the sterilization of First Nations people in Canada (a story as yet formally untold), and many other similar malignancies. That this is a history that has continued unabated to the present day is also extremely clear.

I suppose a terminal optimist might argue that it isn’t the tests that are bad, but the people of ill will who employ them. Indeed, I am such a terminal optimist. But leaving the analysis at that ignores the fact that it is the people of ill will (or at least, of allegiance, stated or unstated, to an ideology destructive to First Nations forms of life) who are largely in control of the uses to which tests are put, and that the propaganda concerning tests, swallowed whole even by those ostensibly expert in the use of tests, is intentionally misleading of their actual function. Atomic bombs are, in and of themselves, not as much a problem as the people of ill will who might use them, but this is no endorsement of atomic bombs. Nor does the assurance that they will only be used by people of ill will help me sleep at night.

All Tests Are Not Created Equal. Tests of relevance to psychoeducational assessment are designed, it is thought, to assess qualitatively different aspects of the individual characteristics responsible for a person’s place in the meritocracy. Ability tests (for example, the Wechsler intelligence test series or the Stanford-Binet) supposedly measure potential capacity for reasoning; achievement tests (e.g., the Canadian Test of Basic Skills) are supposed to measure the amount of factual information a person has absorbed; aptitude tests (for example, the General Aptitude Test Battery) claim to be able to identify specific skills or knacks, usually of vocational importance; vocational interest tests (say, Jackson’s Vocational Interest Survey) try to evaluate a person’s stated habit preferences in terms of the habit preferences of people already engaged in particular occupations; personality tests (for instance, the California Psychological Inventory) aim to survey a person’s standing with respect to individual ascriptions (e.g., aggressiveness, self-esteem, helpfulness, and so on) people make to account for other people’s daily behavior; and diagnostic tests (for instance, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory or the Connors Abbreviated Teacher’s Questionnaire) supposedly assess signs and/or symptoms of the pathology of an individual personality. (There are additional groupings and sub-groupings of tests, but this list will suffice for our purposes.)

These tests share the characteristic that they reflect the methodological individualistic premise that the internal contents of individual people significantly (if not overwhelmingly) determine what a person thinks and does and that tests are the technology for assessment of those internal contents. Further, they share a family of mathematical and statistical procedures for evaluating the quality of how well a particular test accomplishes the job it was set out to do. However, what is well known by those with a background in those procedures is that all varieties of tests don’t achieve the same quality of results. In general, while there is an extreme unevenness of quality, both within categories of tests and between categories, the so-called cognitive tests (ability, aptitude, and achievement tests) are generally "better" in a psychometric sense than the orectic (personality, psychodiagnosis, interest, "learning style," and attitudinal) ones. These differences arise even if one accepts (1) the fundamental premise of individualism and (2) the universal applicability of the individual differences named in the range of tests used. That is, even if one doesn’t dispute the very-disputable assertion that, say, need for achievement is a universal individual difference partly responsible for how well people do in Canadian society, different methods of assessing it will yield substantially different results, none of which will approach the quality of assessing, for example, IQ (which is not to endorse either concept).

Before leaving this concern, a further consideration, specifically relevant to special needs, was raised back in 1980 by Lorrie Shepard: the tests used to make special needs assessments were uniformly of the lowest psychometric quality. That is, they were the least well-suited tests for determining whether a child had a cognitive and/or affective condition interfering with his/her opportunity to learn. When Shepard’s report circulated there were denouncements of it, personal attacks upon her, and all manners of vilification applied to it; but there were, and have not been, any refutations of her conclusions. In fact, the popularity of tests like the Connors or the Brigance in special needs research and diagnosis suggests strongly that things have not changed in the intervening twenty years.

All tests have technical limits on their ethical use. Since I previously wrote an extensive analysis of the psychometric basis for the ethical guidelines supposedly governing use of psychoeducational tests with indigenous peoples, I won’t repeat it all here. In summary, psychological and educational ethics requires that a test pass through certain procedures (test norming) and exhibit certain logical and statistical properties (validity and reliability) before they be used for selection, diagnosis, evaluation, or theory building. No psychological or educational test, no matter how frequently used with First Nations populations, has ever been subjected to these procedures, nor has any demonstrated the requisite logical and statistical properties! Typically, they are not even subjected to such an analysis, but merely used and interpreted as is, as if psychological measurement was a kind of physical measurement. Every single use of an educational or psychological test with a First Nations individual, whether to make a judgement about individual skill levels, or to assign an IQ, or to make a hiring decision, or to evaluate his/her suitability for parole, or whatever, is in gross, flagrant violation of the endorsed ethical standards for educators and psychologists. This was true for the Ethical Standards as published in 1985, and it will continue to be true when the next edition of the Standards is published in 1999 or 2000.

The willingness of "professionals" to just go ahead, use psychoeducational tests, and then make declarations of the characteristic inferiority, inadequacy, and incapacity of First Nations women, men, and children, in wholesale ignorance of or disregard for their own rules of procedure, is typical of the arrogance and hypocrisy we receive from the hands of those "professionals." Their incompetence and identification with the ideology that constantly assaults our Nations is explicit in the advice given by two "experts" reviewing the misuse of tests with Indian children: "Since all money provided to Natives for their education flows through DIA [Department of Indian Affairs], this authority is formidable and complete. Because of resource dependency, Natives have no alternative but to work within the limitations imposed by DIA." Obviously, we can’t rely on the "professionals" (1) having enough backbone to stand up and call the DIA-imposed policy a parody of measurement, or (2) having enough ethics to refuse the money DIA offers them to do the dirty work of "objectifying" our marginalization. I don’t wonder at all at what such an attitude would have answered to Hitler’s directions during the Holocaust, nor what its defense would have been afterwards: "we were only following orders."

There is no such thing as a culture free or culture fair test. This has been so obvious for such a long time that I hesitate to bring it up once more: tests are inherently an expression of a particular culture’s way of organizing their world, not a function of "carving Nature at her joints." "Sophresene," the subject of an entire dialogue of Plato, was not somehow bred out of European peoples in the last 2,400 years; it is simply an expression of Classical Greek culture that didn’t survive the deterioration of that culture. "Intelligence" and "IQ" are not universal variables that can be detected by scientific methods lurking, in greater or lesser degrees, in the various peoples and animals of the world, but an obsession of a group of Victorian Englishmen trying to assure itself that "Britannia" would always rule the waves. These kinds of examples can be multiplied indefinitely; consequently, the concepts any test is designed to measure are a function of the way a particular society conceptualizes its world. Fortunately, some grasp of this situation seems, finally, to be seeping down into educational and psychological thinking, though not quickly. The notion that Western psychoeducational "science" has been paring down the "reality" of the "universal mental contents" of human being into a comprehensive list that it can access through measurement procedures is arrogant nonsense.

Test theory is itself being subjected to revolutionary revision. When one doesn’t know the basics of one’s discipline one is unlikely to be aware of turmoil at the heart of those basics. Such is the case with psychoeducational assessment, where practitioners blithely go about their daily rounds of passing judgement on the people passing before them without an inkling that criticism serious enough to obliterate their entire enterprise is becoming impossible to deflect.

The most serious criticisms are being raised by Joel Michell and Michael Maraun. Michell is a realist, in that he’s willing to believe in the reality of the concepts measurement is engaged in quantifying. The problem as he sees it is that measurement specialists long ago abandoned the task of establishing whether or not the concepts under investigation are actually quantitative and, assuming that they were, have been engaged in estimating how much of something someone has. Yet, unless the quantitative "nature" of the something has been established, the estimate of how much someone has is logically incoherent. Measurement theory, in his opinion, is dancing in thin air.

Maraun’s criticisms are even more telling. He demonstrates that the possibility of measurement presupposes a measurement practice; that is, a conceptual grasp of "height" includes an understanding of what it means to make measurements of height. Different peoples may use different units and different specific procedures, but the "measurability" of height is specified in the grammar of its common usage in language. The problem for psychology and education, then, is that the concepts they are most interested in measuring (such as "intelligence") do not have usages that adequately specify measurement practices. For both Maraun and Michell, measurement practices such as are common today is the result of failure to appreciate and respond to the philosophical imperatives inherent in the task measurement sets out to accomplish.

Those knowledgeable about the problems of current test theory and practice, and committed to its continuation, are engaged in sophisticated and creative attempts to rescue their discipline; these ingenious attempts are well over the heads of the overwhelming majority of practitioners, who, as I’ve noted, are unaware even that their boat is sinking. In his even-handed assessment of the current situation, Blinkhorn concludes: "It is hard to escape the conclusion that for all the technical advances and theoretical clarifications of the last half-century, test theory has contributed little of enduring value to the understanding of ability, aptitude, and temperament, or to more effective or credible measurement, that was previously unavailable… A more radical view is that current styles of test theory simply have no more of practical value to offer, that the implicit assumptions which have guided research for nearly a hundred years place constraints on what can be achieved which have no more elasticity, and that a new start is needed (p. 183)."

Summing up. Some people might conclude that my inclusion of psychoeducational assessment on a list of pseudo-technologies is uncalled for, but I don’t see what might undermine that judgement. And no, I do not condemn all measurement: later in this essay I shall delineate what I consider to be practical, useful testing procedures which will be of value in addressing issues of First Nations education. However, the existence of specific, useful applications of this technology cannot endorse the technology as a whole, any more than the creation of "Tang" justified the American space program. Testing’s underlying presumption, methodological individualism, is an ideology, not a fact of nature. It has used the possibility that it might admit a trickle of marginalized populations to higher levels of a meritocracy as justification for its function of naturalizing and scientizing the extravagant inequities of mainstream society. Obvious differences in technical adequacy between and within different kinds of tests have led, typically, to employment of the very worst of instruments. No test can reasonably be thought to be applicable across cultural divides. No test has ever been ethically applied to the task of diagnosis, classification, or characterization of any First Nations individual. And finally, test theory as a whole is being subjected to radical revision and searching criticism by its most thoughtful advocates, criticism that includes the strong possibility that tests cannot perform what thousands of psychologists, educators, policy makers, and everyday people believe they can perform.

What psychoeducational assessment might become if and when it mends its way is still open to speculation. What it is now and has been since its inception a hundred years ago or so is "something having no business being applied to First Nations people." And we are not the only group who can make this assertion.

Introduction

I have addressed topics that are often not considered in the field of special education, or at least, not considered by those in the field who take the status quo as more or less given. But special needs education must be an extension of education in general, and will necessarily involve issues of bureaucracy, educational thinking, political economics, and educational technology (pseudo and otherwise) in the development and execution of whatever status quo that happens to come about. At this point in this essay, I will survey many of the conditions and circumstances typically included under the category of special needs, simply to provide an overview of the kinds of problems First Nations must address when approaching special needs. However, this survey will be followed by scrutiny of several of the categories, conducted under the consideration of point 5 back on page 2.

The focus in this section largely will be on the students presumably at the "lower" end of academic achievement. However, considerations of "giftedness" will be brought up from time to time and again, more centrally, later.

The Concept of Special Needs

There isn't some kind of a wall between thinking about special education and thinking about education in general. Whatever are the totalities of concerns underlying the creation of any educational system, we must be aware that ideological concerns are central (though sometimes not obviously so) to their establishment and maintenance. Related to this is the need to be very clear on what it is we, as First Nations people, are talking about when we're talking about educational matters: education is not training, though both are useful, and education and training are both not indoctrination. As implied earlier, bureaucrats and educators aren't necessarily the best people to ask about any of these issues, since they've adopted a particular world view (which includes the meritocracy and the ideology of methodological individualism) that has no claim to being the way things must be. Most importantly, this world view predisposes them to look for certain kinds of (pseudo) explanations (ones internal to the children) while ignoring others. Within this warped frame of reference, merit is conceptualized to be a matter of degree, with the "best and the brightest" at one end (thus "meriting" a good education, and the power and privileges that supposedly flow from it) and progressively inferior people (who "deserve" correspondingly less education, more indoctrination and vocationalism, less power, and fewer privileges) being found the further you move away from the hoi polloi. Finally, I have disputed the notion that the technology used to justify this world view is "scientific," pointing out its limitations and ideological predispositions. Insisting that hidden, internal constituents of individual people determine ability and worth is an ideology, not a scientific argument, and while it is easy enough to concoct "internal engines accounts" for observable actions, to do so is not an act of explanation but of ideology.

Mainstream ideology is central across the range of presumed educational potentials all the way from the "gifted," past middle ranges of educability, to those who fall into special needs categories. Conventional special education merely extends the educability dimension into what is presumed to be even lower levels of academic ability, where achieving even the "training" that is accorded the non-gifted may be too much to hope for: the lowest of the low children may be so academically impaired that minimizing the "burden" they "impose" on those around them (and society at large) may be the legitimate goal of intervention. Of course, the initiative to provide more resources to some of the children (the "very gifted") is an extension of their liberal educational privileges; they will have better student-to-teacher ratios, superior facilities, modern equipment, more freedom to pursue their particular interest, and so on. Thus, along the full range of academic ability, education is created so as to reflect and reinforce the Canadian class society.

How does the mainstream characterize these extremely academically impaired children? Books on special education are notorious for being unable/unwilling to say what they mean by the term, but I’ll attempt to provide a working definition here. In the general rational I start with below I distinguish, with respect to point (5) and (6), the thinking of the special education scientist from the thinking of the special education practitioner. Of course, these views are not really independent of one another, but it makes sense to note their differences in emphases.

Explicitly, mainstream special education is the view that:

1. differences in academic achievement are caused by personal, internal features of individual children.
   
2. these features are not observable, but their existence and effects may be inferred through the application of objective scientific methods.
   
3. these features originate in the genetic material of the child, the environment and learning background of the child, or in some combination of the two.
   
4. difficulties in learning reflect real (but again, not directly observable) defects that reside within individual children.
   
5. for special education science, it is important to (a) find the most reliable and valid ways of diagnosing the full range of defects; (b) provide as complete a characterization of these defects as possible; (c) determine what interventions (medical; nutritional; surgical; environmental; etc.) will alleviate, minimize, or correct the defect; and (d) undertake the study of how to prevent the defects, or examine the effectiveness of early intervention and remediation.
   
6. for special education practitioners, it is important to (a) obtain a valid diagnosis of the child; (b) recommend intervention(s) maximally beneficial to the child, as based upon the child's diagnosis; (c) implement and monitor the intervention(s) [if problems are temporary, the goal is to return the child to full participation in age-appropriate classes as soon as possible; if problems are permanent, it may not be possible to retain the child in such classes, and learning goals should be adjusted accordingly].

You will notice that in Section II I have already taken issue with a great deal of what is presented here. Rather than repeating myself, here I set out the mainstream perspective merely to provide us with a working summary as we begin the examination of what "special needs" are taken to be.

The summary provides a bit more detailed than the definition of special education offered by typical standard texts in the area: for example, in one text special education is "The individually planned and systematically monitored arrangement of physical settings, special equipment and materials, teaching procedures, and other interventions designed to help learners with special needs achieve the greatest possible personal self-sufficiency and success in school and community." Other books, like Bezeau’s, are more thorough, although he tends to focus on the "learning difficulties" end of the spectrum:

Special-needs students are those students who are different enough from the majority of students that the school must make special accommodation for them. These differences are generally handicaps or disabilities which may be physical, medical, sensory, intellectual, attention, learning, speech [all sic], cultural, emotional, or some combination of these. Special-needs students may be called exceptional students, and the educational accommodations made for them result in what is termed special education (p. 311).

In the remainder of this section I will examine in more detail the various particular cases that fall into the category of special education. This is merely survey, and not an endorsement of these putative diagnoses; certain parts of the ideology of the "academically disabled" will need additional critical attention later.

Who Are the Special Needs Students?

While the conceptualization given above are necessarily general in nature, each is supposed to encompass the totality of specific cases, or an array of subtypes of special needs. Below are some of the more common diagnostic groupings. This will not only provide some familiarity with conventional terminology, but should demonstrate how easy it is to become confused by literature in the field.

The list cannot be comprehensive; fashions change, different provinces adopt different terminology, and new diagnoses seem to emerge on a daily basis. In any event, you should easily get the sense of diversity with which special educators deal. I make no comment at this time on the adequacy or clarity of the distinctions being made; however, do not approach this list uncritically. To see why, I start with a "disorder" made up on the spur of the moment by the NBC nightly news a few years back as an "explanation" for bad kids:

Oppositional Defiant Disorder: Diagnosed from (1) child's losing his/her temper; (2) child's defying adults; (3) child's blaming others.

From Heward & Orlansky [see Footnote 70]:

Cerebral Palsy: Motor impairment caused by brain damage, which is usually inflicted during the prenatal period or during the birth process. Can involve a wide variety of symptoms [poor sense of balance and body position and lack of coordination of the voluntary muscles; large, irregular, uncontrollable twisting motions; rigidity; tense, contracted muscles; and tremor] and range from mild to severe. Neither curable nor progressive.

Dyslexia: A disturbance in the ability to read or to learn to read.

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome: A condition sometimes found in the infants of alcoholic mothers; can involve low birth weight, developmental delay, and cardiac, limb, and other physical defects. [note added: they neglect to add that the condition is often associated with central nervous system damage and mental retardation, which lead to academic problems. Fetal Alcohol Effects are often mentioned in the same breath as FAS, as if the two were jointly well established. I will have more to say on this later.]

Low-Incidence Disability: A disability that occurs relatively infrequently in the general population; in particular, used to refer to vision and hearing impairment, severe mental retardation, severe behavior disorders such as autism, and multiple handicaps.

Minimal Brain Dysfunction: A once popular [note added: and still lurking] term used to describe the learning disability of children with no actual (clinical) evidence of brain damage.

From Bezeau [see Footnote 71]:

Attention Deficit Disorder: It is frequently associated with hyperactivity in young children, but the common element in every case is the inability to pay attention for a sustained period of time. Important signs of attention deficit disorder include inattention, impulsivity, hyperactivity, and emotional instability. Pupils with this problem are poorly organized and easily distracted. They often fail to finish even brief assignments. The cause is not well understood but appears to be biochemical in nature and genetic in origin.

Medical Handicaps: Medical handicaps include asthma, diabetes, epilepsy, and heart conditions, among others that impair physical and intellectual performance. Many such conditions can be treated, or at least be controlled, with drugs, some of which may have to be administered at school.

Cultural Handicaps: Culturally or socially handicapped children are handicapped because of their backgrounds rather than because of any organic deficiency. Culturally handicapped children are either culturally different or culturally deprived. Culturally different children include those whose cultural and language background are unfamiliar to the school and therefore handicap the child in the school. Such a child, frequently from an immigrant family, would not be handicapped in his or her own culture. They have been "five- hour retarded" children because their handicaps disappear when they leave school. Children who are denied the cultural and linguistic experiences normally available to preschool children because of inadequate parenting or a generally bad environment are referred to as culturally or socially deprived. The most apparent indication to the school is delayed language development without any organic impairment that would explain it.

From Students with Challenging Needs:

Mildly/Moderately Handicapped Children (MMCH): A mildly or moderately disabled child is one who is assessed as mildly or moderately mentally retarded, visually impaired, learning disabled, emotionally disabled or physically handicapped.

Educable Mentally Handicapped Student (MMHC): The student who is educable mentally handicapped is one who is usually significantly delayed in reading, arithmetic, and other academic subjects as compared to his [sic] same age peers. Upon leaving school, the majority should be able to hold a job, manage their affairs, and otherwise provide for themselves and their family. Any student designated as educable mentally handicapped should have an intelligence quotient (I.Q.) in the range of 50 to 75 + 5 as measured on an individual intelligence test.

Trainable Mentally Handicapped Student (MMHC): The student who is trainable mentally handicapped is one who is very unlikely to make meaningful achievement in the traditional academic subjects, but who is capable of profiting from instruction in living/vocational skills. Any student who is designated as trainable mentally handicapped should: a) have an intelligence quotient (I.Q.) in the range of approximately 30 to 50 + 5 as measured on an individual intelligence test; b) have an adaptive behavior score equivalent to the moderately retarded level on an adaptive behavior scale (e.g., American Association on Mental Deficiency Adaptive Behavior Scale, Progress Assessment Chart, Vineland).

Behavior Disordered (MMHC): Generally described, behavior disorders are the result of conflict between the student and the environment, and occur when students respond to their educational environment in ways which deviate significantly from age-appropriate expectations and interfere with their own learning and/or that of others. Qualitatively described, they can be "Mild," "Moderate," or "Severe" in terms of the extent to which they disrupt the student's educational program. There is no magic formula a teacher or resource person can use to define a behavior disorder, either in terms of whether one exists or, if one does, how severe it is. The definition and identification of a behavior disorder will always be partly objective (what is actually happening that can be verified by more than one person) and partly subjective (what is perceived to be happening by a single observer). [note added: this is a fairly strange way to define these terms.] This depends on the observations as well as the values, mood, and tolerance level of the teacher. One teacher's definition of behavior disorder may be another teacher's definition of a praiseworthy act by the student(s). For example, one teacher may not accept any arguing from students, while another may reinforce students arguing (within reason) to support their point of view. Typically, behavior disorders are characterized by a number of traits: (1) the demonstration of an inability to establish or maintain satisfactory relationships with peers or adults; (2) the demonstration of a general mood of unhappiness or depression; (3) the demonstration of inappropriate behaviors or feelings under ordinary circumstances; (4) the demonstration of continued difficulty in coping with the learning situation in spite of remedial intervention; (5) the demonstration of physical symptoms or fears associated with personal or school problems; (6) the demonstration of difficulties in accepting the realities of personal responsibility and accountability; (7) the demonstration of physical violence toward other persons and/or physical destructiveness toward the environment.

Learning Disabled (MMHC): The term "learning disability" refers to any one of a heterogeneous group of chronic disorders that may have as its basis either an identifiable or inferred central nervous system dysfunction. These disorders may be manifested by difficulties in one or more processes such as attention and planning. This results in demonstrable weaknesses in language arts, mathematics, and/or social acceptance. Learning disabilities may affect anyone. However, if a student is underachieving relative to his or her learning potential and has no sensory impairment, no motor impairment, adequate motivational and learning opportunities, and an adequate learning environment, then learning disabilities are considered to be the primary disabling condition. For the majority of students with learning disabilities, modification of the instructional process and/or the learning environment is required to meet their unique learning needs. In some instances, the use of a specific curriculum, directed to a student's need and abilities, may be required. Students with learning disabilities exhibit one or more of the following characteristics: disorganization; distractibility; weak habits; hyperactivity or hypoactivity; impulsivity; inflexibility; perseveration; weak social relationships. Learning disabilities, also, refers to deficit functioning in one or more learning processes (i.e., auditory and visual receptive channels, and verbal and written expressive channels).

Hearing Impaired -- Hard-of-Hearing (MMHC): Hearing problems which interfere with learning in any way are classified as hearing impairments. A hearing impaired student is one who has a hearing loss which interferes with his or her acquisition of maintenance of auditory skills necessary to develop speech and language. This includes children who are hearing impaired at birth and those who develop hearing problems later...Hard-of-Hearing-Student: The student will have an average hearing loss of 25 decibels or more unaided over the speech range.

Visually Impaired Student (MMHC): The student who is visually impaired is one whose visual condition is such that it interferes with the ability to learn unless educational adaptations are made. Low Vision Student: The student will have a visual acuity of less than 20.70 (6/21 metric) in the better eye after correction but more than 20/200 (6/60 metric).

Language Disorders (MMHC): Language disorders encompass problems in semantics (word meanings), syntax (grammatical patterns), morphology (word order) and certain aspects of phonology (speech sounds).

Severely Handicapping Conditions (SHC), Dependent Mentally Handicapped: Constant supervision and assistance are required in self-care, motor skills, communication, and other aspects of daily living, due to mental disability.

Severely Behaviorally Disordered (SHC): Clinically diagnosed disorders by a psychologist and/or psychiatrist. The child requires constant supervision and exhibits severe maladaptive behavior, such as chronic self-stimulation, dangerous aggressiveness, destructiveness, and/or impulsiveness. Documentation must be on file indicating that a child is receiving ongoing consultation and treatment.

Multi-Handicapped (SHC): Severely handicapped as a result of two or more disabling conditions, the effects of which result in a functioning level as low or lower than that which is associated with a severe primary disability, and which results in a very high level of dependency. (Examples of this category are Visually Impaired-Mentally Handicapped, Visually Impaired-Hearing Impaired.)

Deaf (SHC): An average hearing loss of at least 70 decibels unaided in the better ear over the normal range of speech which precludes hearing as a learning mode.

Once again, this doesn't begin to exhaust the categories of disturbance that fall within the range of special education. Also, although the "gifted" end of the implied academic ability dimension is missing here, it is mentioned in all the resources we have examined. However, since the ideology, methodology, and epistemology are the same wherever we are along the dimension, I have confined the descriptions to the one end of it.

In looking over these specific special needs domains, their sheer range seems overwhelming at times. Some descriptions invoke psychological test results, behavioral observations, subtle or obvious physical signs, and so on; sometimes a supposed cause or overall condition is called forth as descriptive of the particular condition, sometimes not; sometimes the summaries are loaded down with jargon, sometimes they are simple and clear; and sometimes the condition seems undeniable, while at others (e.g., "oppositional defiant disorder") it seems to describe everyone you know, including adults. And yet, simply the sheer weight of the intellectual barrage created by listing and describing the conditions seems enough to convince anyone: there has to be something to all of this. But quantity and quality are not the same things, and merely naming something (for example, "the Golden Mountain") doesn't bring it into existence.

My comments on specific special needs will follow the order in which they were listed above. Again, only a subset of the needs listed will be commented upon.

Oppositional Defiant Disorder. As noted, this "special need category" appears to have been made up on the spot on the NBC Nightly News a few years back (and then incorporated into DSM-IV). Even a glance at the "diagnostic criteria" given suggests that every child on Earth (and a sizable majority of adults) suffers or has suffered from ODD. What is the rationale for designating normal human activity as a species of mental disease? Actually, this illustrates a common manifestation of methodological individualism known as the medical model: that certain behaviors are signs and/or symptoms of distinct underlying medical conditions, that the diagnosis of these conditions is central to understanding and treating the condition, that treatment is best undertaken under the supervision of medical doctors or their designates, and (what may be the most important aspect of all this) that payment for services rendered be authorized under medical/health insurance. The medical model may actually have some validity when the thinking is applied to conditions like diabetes, skin cancer, and so on. But where is the evidence the behaviors included under ODD constitute an underlying medical condition? There is none.

Critics of the medicalization of human behavior are less interested in debating the pros and cons of the medical model than in pointing out the oppressive uses to which the model is put. When the "condition" ostensibly identified is held to impair the judgement of the person suffering from it, long established medical ethical limitations (do no harm; apply treatment only with proper authorization from the patient) go out the window, and "treatment" can be administered against the patient’s will. Thomas Szasz, Peter and Ginger Breggin, Paula Caplan, Louise Armstrong, and many other thoughtful individuals consider such treatment worse than the condition it is meant to address. In many ways, supposed conditions like ODD are signals from the Powers That Be that greater inroads are about to be made into human freedom. Unfortunately, we will find such signals all too frequently in special needs.

Dyslexia. The abbreviated definition provided by Heward & Orlansky gives no indication of the turmoil surrounding this special needs category. More than just the tip of this iceberg is visible from Meyen and Skrtic’s rider: "commonly associated with an injury or dysfunction of the brain (p. 797)."

"Dyslexia," from its inception as an individual disorder, has carried along with it an association with a purported underlying neurological problem. Also from inception, people have been asking for one iota of evidence of some underlying neurological problem, and no evidence has been forthcoming. Gerald Coles, surveying the available literature in the late 70’s, 80’s, and now again in the late 90’s, has once again been led to conclude there are no results substantiating a neurological defect underlying reading problems.

Biological explanations of "reading disabilities," although unsubstantiated, have been employed in the literacy debate to buttress claims about phonological deficits and the need to emphasize skills in beginning readers. Most literacy educators have little expertise in evaluating the claims of the "explanations," which therefore serve as ultimate reinforcers of assumptions among teachers about inevitable "small futures" for the "reading disabled." The persistence of the biological "explanations" further damage the literacy debate by diverting attention from factors and practices that can prevent severe reading problems in children.

I have worked with adults whose problems have been explained as buried in the workings of their brains and whose educational achievement was presented to them as limited by their "defect." I have further seen these adults struggle with despair and feelings of hopelessness sometimes leading to suicidal behavior, and it will therefore be no surprise that I find this inflexible, overdrawn "explanation" especially abhorrent (p. 135).

"Dyslexia" thus has all the features of the bogus "condition" ODD, examined above. The sane alternative to medicalizing the problem is to keep things descriptive ("Person X is having trouble learning to read") and work from there. Spear-Swerling and Sternberg find genetic and physiological "causes" interesting possibilities, but in dealing with actual problem learners they consider them less important than detailed analysis and remediation of specific components of reading problems. They also consider early intervention and prevention a superior strategy to letting reading problems run rampant and trying to fix them later. McGuinness believes "dyslexia" a function of inadequate and rigid teaching practices instead of something inherently wrong with children’s brains, and gives step-by-step instructions to her own approach to reading that parents and teachers can provide to their children. Coles provides a compelling analysis of reading and literacy, employing a political economic perspective in combination with an intervention strategy emphasizing "a meticulous understanding of the individual learner (p. 163)." His work epitomizes, in theory and practice, what we should be doing in First Nations special needs.

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. I have little specifically to say about FAS, except that the focus on the mother’s drinking, to the exclusion of what the father is up to, deserves scrutiny. The real problem I wish to comment upon is the tendency to twin FAS with so-called "fetal alcohol effects" (as in "FAS/FAE") as if no problems were entailed in doing this. In reality, however, FAE is nowhere nearly well established as FAS. FAS has characteristic external stigmata (e.g., lack of philtrum, "simian" grip, diastemic teeth, etc.) that, in principle, could lead to diagnosis by physical examination alone (in actuality, however, the physical stigmata are evaluated against other kinds of evidence). These physical stigmata are completely absent in the supposed FAE. A diagnosis of FAE is made solely on (1) a history of the mother’s drinking during pregnancy and (2) psychoeducational test results indicating intellectual subnormality.

This simply isn’t good enough. Psychoeducational tests have no business being used as the basis for a diagnosis in First Nations populations (and are questionably so employed in mainstream populations, as well). FAS is fairly well established as an effect of an environmental teratogen that induces physical abnormalities and, often, mental retardation. The twinning of FAS with FAE is an attempt to have some of the legitimacy of FAS "rub off." The success of this public relations ploy (not science) in First Nations Country is that a personal, internal, individual "defect" is "proved" to be the reason an otherwise perfectly healthy looking child is doing badly in school; and the "legitimacy" of psychoeducational assessment for doing this is unchallenged.

Minimal Brain Dysfunction. There is no such thing.

Attention Deficit Disorder. This is often held to be the same as, different from, or more-or-less similar to Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, and while confusion about ADD and ADHD is thought to arise from this state of affairs, all the problems with both disorders has a very different source. Here I will treat them as interchangeable.

Where to start? Warnings about bogus science propping up a hidden ideology have been sounded early, frequently, and authoritatively in ADD/ADHD literature:

It is a gradual, subtle and seductive process, but the political and social consequences are enormous. When the impositions come in the name of diagnosis and treatment ("for the benefit of the child"), not in the name of punishment and control, otherwise arbitrary institutional procedures begin to look reasonable and the power to manipulate is immeasurably enhanced. This is science talking, it is the natural order of things; what we are doing to you has nothing to do with the arbitrary decisions of school administrators or cops or the social bias of the community. As a consequence it becomes increasingly hard to resist, increasingly tempting to go along with, and increasingly difficult for the individual – parent or child – even to know exactly what is happening or why. What is certain is that the new ideology and the associated techniques – screens, drugs, behavior modification, special programs – all serve the purpose of legitimizing and enlarging the power of institutions over individuals. In every instance it is argued that for this individual case, the "treatment" is preferable to the alternatives… An entire generation is slowly being conditioned to distrust its own instincts, and to rely on the institutions of the state and on technology to define and engineer its "health."

This warning was sounded nearly a quarter of a century ago, and yet no one "in power" seems to have listened: the slow conditioning warned of has come to pass, the vast majority of educators, psychologists, teachers, parents, and, yes, students, accept the "reality" of ADD/ADHD.

Is critical thinking and scientific analysis dead in special education? Does no one read? Since Schrag & Divoky’s warning in 1975 there has been a constant stream of thoughtful, readable resources, in the popular literature alone, challenging the current state of affairs. This literature has consistently shown the absence of evidence for a presumed neurological base of the condition and the educational irrelevance and the psychological and physical harm of prescribing the treatment "drug of choice," Ritalin. It has consistently revealed a bias of ADD/ ADHD diagnosis and Ritalin treatment in lower class, poorer, and non-European subgroups. Peter Breggin has documented a four- to five-fold increase in the probability of people becoming addicted to cocaine after having been prescribed Ritalin as children, and points out that the US and Canada prescribe more Ritalin than the rest of the world combined (Health Canada admits there has been a 500% increase in the amount of Ritalin prescribed in Canada during the 1990’s). No one thinks to ask, "Why do all the ADD/ADHD people live in North American?" And even those who believe there is something to the restlessness and distractibility that are the supposed hallmarks of ADD/ADHD consider the pace of modern civilization the real culprit, and don’t recommend trying to plaster over the difficulty with mind-altering substances.

The critics of ADD/ADHD have come up with a variety of reasons for the increasing popularity of the diagnosis, none of them related to scientific evidence of its existence or the utility of drug therapy. The propaganda of drug companies bent on profit-making, the prevalence of an ideology of internal, personal causes for social behavior, the cost-effectiveness of drugging students versus providing them with suitable educational experiences, the diversion of attention away from possible sources of behavioral disturbances originating in the family or the classroom: all these and more have a strong relation to the issues raised in parts I and II of this essay. Earlier I stated that the people who are in power don’t seem to have listened. But perhaps they have, and have merely chosen to act, in what is supposed to be an educational arena, in a decidedly non-educational manner.

Cultural Handicaps. I will not spend a lot of time on this. I bring it up merely to highlight that the latest psychiatric diagnostic standard, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (American Psychiatric Association, 1994), has a category, V62.4, Acculturation Problem, that can be used to brand those of us who do not wish to become "good Canadians" as mentally ill. I wonder whether it will be Prozac or Ritalin that will become the drug treatment of choice for those of us suffering from this "medical" condition?

Learning Disabled. In many ways, the category of LD overlaps considerably with ADD/ADHD already discussed. Certainly the literature already cited there is relevant, and the absence of evidence for the presumed neurological basis or for the efficacy of typical drug treatment is identical across areas. Here I will merely state the conclusions of an enormous body of literature taking issue with various aspects of learning disabilities. As was the case with ADD/ADHD, this literature seems to be largely ignored by those in charge of running education.

The existence of learning disabilities is frequently called into question. Rather than accepting a neurological/biological/genetic/medical model of LD, such a notion is widely disputed and environmental/social models developed in their place. The diagnosis of LD is biased on the bases of race, ethnicity, and class. Political economic and ideological considerations are found to be better explanations than is "objective science" for the current dismal state of affairs. Even when using the invalid and unreliable psychoeducational assessment techniques discussed earlier, LD practitioners typically employ improper statistical techniques to judge the results. And finally, the treatments for the supposed problems are of controversial benefit, at best.

Compared to other areas of special needs (e.g., ADD/ADHD), learning disabilities researchers, theorists, journal editors, and practitioners have consistently shown their willingness to entertain opinions divergent from and critical of their orthodox assumption that LD is a focused neurological disorder, best treated by drugs or behavioral modification procedures. It would be well if other areas of special education emulated this admirable disposition. However, even their comparative willingness to foster self-criticism has not led to a sounder overall status for the foundations of conventional LD theory and practice.

Behavior Disorder (Emotional Disorder). We finally reach the last special needs category I will comment upon specifically. The presumed problem here is some form of affective (not cognitive) disturbance that intrudes upon the student’s ability to learn.

This category is not just another worm in the can we have been examining; it is its own, entirely new, can of worms. Because of the West’s philosophical (not empirical) differentiation of emotions from cognition, behavior disorders have their own history, their own attendant problems, and a slightly different (but overlapping) set of critics. Suffice it to say here that (1) the presumptions, ideologies, and technologies associated with the cognitive aspects of human beings are reflected just as completely in the emotional aspects, and (2) because attitudes, conventions, values, activities, and so on are more obviously culturally specific, Behavioral and Emotional Disorders are more likely to be attributable to purely social origins.

Focusing again on the special education literature, BED’s generate several new concerns. First, issues of civil liberties again arise, since the US government has been supporting treatment (mood-altering drugs; psychosurgery) for "problem" children before the problems actually arises. Second, as a category of disturbance BED’s have been found to be biased against non-European racial and ethnic groups. Third, the assumption that BED’s give rise to educational problems is demonstrably victim-blaming ideology: analytically, it makes just as much sense to believe that educational problems give rise to BED’s instead, but assuming that would send investigators in search of the social-political-economic factors creating the educational problem (remember, "cognitive" problems are ruled out a priori in this category).

Finally, across North America Behavioral and Emotional Disorders are taking precedence over all other categories of special needs, accounting for approximately ½ of all children with a diagnosis placing them in a special needs category. The fluidity of the category, the subjectivity of the assessment, the long history of successful misuse of behavioral and emotional grounds in intruding on human freedom, and the ruthlessness of the "treatments" taken for granted as appropriate for individuals with these kinds of "disturbance" make Behavioral and Emotional Disorders the classification of choice when the Powers That Be make up their minds to do as they please. Acquiescence to this diagnosis may be as dangerous a policy as an educator can adopt.

Special Needs Seen from a Distance

In defense of the status quo, mainstream special education distorts, as need be, the messages of its critics. Thomas Armstrong provides a clear statement of the problem, and his response to it:

When parents hear me say that ADD is a myth, they sometimes become very upset. They think I’m saying that their kids aren’t jumpy, distractible, forgetful, impulsive, or disorganized. That’s not what I’m saying at all. It’s quite obvious to me that our nation’s children have probably never been so hyperactive. The question is, what accounts for this? It is a medical disorder called ADD (or ADHD as it’s sometimes called)? I think not. I think instead that what we’ve learned to call ADD is instead a number of things all jumbled up together under this simplistic label… The point is that the ADD label makes it too easy to ignore what might be going on beneath the surface of things. "Oh, he has ADD? Whew! Glad we know what the problem is now." But perhaps we don’t really know at all.

While I don’t agree with everything Armstrong says (in this excerpt or in his other works), his inclination is sound. No critic of ADD/ADHD, LD, BED, or any of the classifications surveyed dismisses the possibility that perhaps a medical condition is involved. In fact, the immediate retreat into a dubious medical condition may interfere with giving due consideration to real medical conditions that could actually be causing the problem. Most critics consider, however, that (1) a presumption of an underlying medical condition is greatly overused in accounting for problem behavior, like school problems, and (2) the people making such a presumption are obliged to demonstrate one; and 60-year-old promissory notes don’t carry much value in real science.

What do the critics believe? Again, the differences between the status quo and its critics do not divide neatly, each side lining up in point-by-point opposition to one another. No single set of alternative interpretations is likely to be endorsed by the full body of researchers and theorists who depart from the mainstream. But here I will try to give a sketch of the sort of alternative world is implied by those who find the status quo objectionable.

Real Problems. Critics do not repudiate every variety of special needs category. Hearing problems, vision problems, cerebral palsy, genetic defects associated with mental retardation, and a host of other problems are, most certainly, medical conditions. The effects of these conditions on the ability of children to learn may be moderated, or even eliminated, with medical treatments like surgery and drug therapy, with technology like hearing aids, wheelchairs, voice-activated computers, etc., with human care and attention, or with a combination of these interventions. However, that some learning problems are medical in nature does not mean all (or even most) learning problems are that way. Trying to reason by analogy is simply logically unsound here.

Physiologizing. Critics do not, in general, deny that biology may be involved in learning difficulties in some way. After all, we are biochemical beings, and unless one subscribes to a mind-body dualism, physiology must be involved somewhere. But while it may be a difficult concept to grasp, the relevant physiology is a precondition of intellectual achievement, not constitutive of it. The problem is that making up or hearing a physical explanation for a problem often stops people dead in their tracks, as if they’ve reach explanatory bedrock. In general, however, there is still a long way to go. Coles gives the example that, in the pre-Civil War United States, Black people had an illiteracy rate of 80% or higher. If you went off investigating this under the assumption that there must be something physiologically wrong with Black people, you’d be on the wrong track. Even if you could demonstrate that Europeans had "reading memory traces" (or some such nonsense) that Black people lacked, this wouldn’t account for the fact that Blacks were socially, legally, and immorally prevented from learning to read. The absences of "traces" (or whatever) would be a social product, not a physical one.

The philosopher Wittgenstein recommended that, when we wish to jump to physical conclusions about what was happening in the social world around us, we remind ourselves that we don’t really know whether or not the person we’re interacting with has a nervous system. When we fail to follow such recommendations, the physical explanations that satisfy us are really physiologizing, acting as if an unsubstantiated physical model revealed reality. Any sense of security obtained this way is false: as the eminent physiological psychologist Elliot Valenstein noted, "We must use methodologies that are appropriate to the level at which a phenomenon exists [emphasis in original]."

Real Origins. As is evident from the Armstrong extract above, critics of the status quo do not deny that some children may demonstrate problems in learning: they deny that the problems are necessarily medical conditions with a physiological basis. What’s more, they are suspicious about why the bogus explanations are taken for granted by professionals and so readily accepted by everyone. As I’ve repeatedly stated, the persuasiveness and general acceptance of these bogus explanations is attributable to a shared, pervasive ideology, combined with nearly complete control over any discussion of alternatives. But if the problems under consideration are wrongly presumed to arise from a physiological, medical condition, what do the critics consider their true source?

Many alternative origins of learning difficulties, alternatives considered more reasonable by critics, have come up during the review of specific conditions above. Here I will just run through some of them again; in-depth discussion of these alternatives will be found in the references cited earlier:

1. improper teaching methods, including a "one-size fits all" mentality that presumes a problem in the child rather than prescribing a flexible, student-centered approach to teaching and learning;
   
2. lack of financial commitment on the part of governments to provide suitable materials, reasonable facilities, and/or qualified, properly paid, dedicated personnel;
   
3. false expectations (self-fulfilling prophecies), on the parts of policy makers, administrators, parents, teachers, and/or individuals themselves, of inherent educational limitations due to race, class, sex, and so on;
   
4. boring, irrelevant, insensitive, and/or insulting curricula, programs, textbooks and/or conditions of learning;
   
5. a dominant social attitude that sees differences in terms of value-laden notions of better or worse than, instead of as just different;
   
6. an accelerating pace of life where, especially in the classroom, those who for whatever reason don’t "keep up" are abandoned, instead of helped along;
   
7. natural individual differences in readiness and willingness to learn, differences that, under (6) above, are systemically translated into failures;
   
8. family problems, perhaps conditioned or exacerbated by political, economic, and social class conditions (unemployment, low wages, turmoil, etc.) beyond the family’s control;
   
9. environmental conditions (pollution; pre- and post-natal nutrition), perhaps conditioned or exacerbated by political, economic, and social class conditions beyond local control
   
10. an appreciation of the vocationalism and indoctrination emphasized in modern Western education, eliciting resistance to the implicit assault on self.

This coverage is not intended to be complete, and each point could be (and has been) elaborated upon in considerably more detail. Rather than being from "out of left field," these are perfectly reasonable possibilities. Furthermore, they have the advantage of being explicit, at least when compared to inner, latent, hidden causes that are only detectable by an initiated priesthood.

Real Solutions. The most important question critics ask, implicitly and explicitly, is this: Why does mainstream special education defend the status quo? What point would there be to going through the rigmarole of making up bad lists of disorders, assessing them with bad tests, treating them with bad procedures, and so on, if little or nothing of the mainstream picture were true? Wouldn’t there be at least as much work to go around as there is now even if a profoundly different approach to special needs was taken?

For me, the beginning of an answer to these questions arises from considering two cases. First, perhaps everyone has heard of Helen Keller, who, blind and deaf from infancy, became a writer, a lecturer, a feminist, an activist, and a humanist. It is easy to attribute this to the extraordinary individual capacity of an extraordinary human being, but that would not be quite correct. Helen Keller had two advantages going for her that most people in her circumstances did not have: financially well-off parents, and, because of this, the steadfast attention of her own determined, brilliant teacher, Anne Sullivan. These facts do not detract from Ms. Keller’s achievements, particularly when it is recognized that her parents would have been satisfied had she merely learned to sit quietly, care somewhat for herself, and be "less of a burden" to them. That she considered this level of "training" unsatisfactory, and went almost incredibly far beyond it, makes Helen Keller an eternal inspiration. But how many other blind and deaf infants have lived out their days having only accomplished a minimal level of training, or less? What would it take for them to achieve a semblance of the quality of life Helen Keller achieved?

Second, in his moving history of mental retardation, James Trent documents that, in the very beginning, when institutions for the mentally retarded were first established, no one had any firm notion of what the residents might actually be able to accomplish intellectually. Rather, those who established the earliest institutions operated under the assumption that, while it might take longer and require extra effort, their students could be expected to accomplish as much as any student. And, more or less, that is exactly what they did. Problems set in when the original sources of funding went elsewhere, and those engaged in running the institutions switched into a bureaucratic mode of thought; that is, they took their own continuation as the true function of the institution, not the care and education of their charges. To bring about a stable funding base, later administrators "demonized" the mentally retarded (much as was done later to epileptics; many of the psychiatric hospitals existing today were originally built to incarcerate those labeled with the fraudulent diagnosis of "epileptic insanity"), creating and then preying upon public fears that, unless institutions for the mentally retarded were supported with public funds, these individuals would be released back into the world at large to wreck their murderous havoc.

The first conclusion I draw from these stories is that today, we have no real idea what special education could accomplish, even with the most intractable individual cases, since, as a society, we have never made it a priority to find this out. What the life of Helen Keller and James Trent’s history strongly suggests is that orderliness, control, and training are far too low an end-state to be satisfied with. In the hundred years since these accomplishments took place, however, we, as a society, have backed away considerably from the light our predecessors showed us. Second, the reason we don’t know what could be accomplished, is that it would take a reorientation away from the pursuit of profit as the central function of civil society into one that held quality of life for everyone as uppermost. Supporting a continued, vigorous line of work along the direction indicated in these two cases would have required greater taxation and a different distribution of effort in a capitalist society, or perhaps even a non-capitalist society altogether, one which committed a fair proportion of is surplus value to this particular task.

Mainstream special needs theory and practice functions as a bureaucracy keeping itself alive by limiting what is the "accepted knowledge" of what intervention "reasonably" could be hoped to accomplish. It promulgates an ideology of internal, medical causes for educational problems because (1) such an ideology favors certain groups (multinational drug companies; medical associations; psychological associations, etc.) which benefit from the ideology or who are, themselves, dependent upon its continuation, and (2) such an ideology creates the impression that little or nothing of a social, economic, or political nature can actually be done about those problems. That is, if we believed that intervention on a social, economic, and/or political nature was more likely to aid our children in their educational difficulties, that is what we would do! Rather than let debate on the possibility even arise, however, debate is ruled out by widespread inculcation of an ideology which can only conceive of the problem as internal to individual students.

The issue isn’t just that there would be as much work, if not more, under a profoundly different, social/environmental approach to special needs. It’s a question of who would be doing the work and what restructuring of society would be necessary in order to implement the alternative approach. The truth or falsity of internal explanations for learning problems is bureaucratically irrelevant, since the continuation of the bureaucracy is the problem being addressed, not the learning difficulties of children.

To see this more clearly, let’s have a look at some real medical conditions that impact negatively on children’s ability to learn. Environmental toxins have known effects, ranging from subtle to profound, on human cognitive processes. They are now omnipresent, with background levels increasing as industrialization increases in the world. Their sources are likely to be: a) groundwater pollution from (1) oil, mining, and/or timber operations, (2) pesticide and fertilizer use in agribusiness, etc.; b) air pollution from (1) automobile exhaust, (2) oil refinement, (3) sour gas burnoff, etc.; c) nutritional pollution from (1) pesticide residue, (2) byproducts of product refinement processes, etc. Now go back to the list of special needs categories given earlier and note what you find in the way of teratogens. There is only one: alcohol. Indeed, alcohol is a toxic substance with the power to inflict profound damage on human cognitive processes, but why is it the only one mentioned in comprehensive lists of special needs categories? My answer: because it can readily be blamed on the actions of individual people (i.e., drinking parents, who give rise to Fetal Alcohol Syndrome), and thus become an extension of the individualistic ideology of mainstream special education. Mercury from timber operations, arsenic from gold mining, pesticides from agribusiness, cadmium from sugar refining; these, too, and many other toxins, have the power to inflict profound harm on human cognitive and emotive processes. But these are more likely to have corporations as their source, corporations that don’t wish to have attention drawn to the irresponsible aspects of their enterprises, that worry about financial liability, and that fret about the cost of environmental cleanups and similar considerations that may affect their profit margin.

Or take another factor known to influence the attention span and learning ability of children: nutrition. The high carbohydrates diet of the marginalized classes, which leads to instability in insulin and sugar levels in the blood, isn’t chosen by them in an act of free will: it is imposed upon us (like it was in Residential School) by the fact that calories here are "cheaper" than in better quality, fresher, pesticide-free food products; eventually, the diet becomes habitual. The societal recognition of the importance of food to learning has led to initiatives like school lunch programs, designed to ensure every child would have at least one square meal a day. But what was behind mean-spirited initiatives, like the move during the Regan years to declare catsup a vegetable? While retaining the form of a socially responsible intervention, the move was designed to undermine any such substance.

Critics of the status quo of special needs don’t deny that individual children sometimes have problems learning. They are attacking a set of presumptions which buttresses a response to those problems that does little or nothing to alleviate them. As I said much earlier, in a capitalist society nothing happens unless money is thrown at problems; the critics are trying to change where the money gets thrown. Throw it at teacher training and teacher salaries, so that the discipline will attract the attentions of people who can make a difference; throw it at building programs and school budgets, so that no student will have to be educated in a classroom with more than 15 other students; throw it at equipment that will enhance the quality of life of people with a real handicap, and at researchers who are constantly trying to find ways to improve upon what has been accomplished so far; throw it at salaries of low income workers, and at social support funds for those who cannot work, so that they and their children will have quality housing, clothing and nutrition; throw it at environmental initiatives that will assure us clean air, clean food, and clean water, and that hold violators of such standards to account; throw it at real education, and not the vocational indoctrination that passes for education today. And stop throwing it at people who tell us we only have ourselves to blame.

But again, governments and bureaucracies follow an agenda set by Powers That Be, not Powers That Should Be. Bringing about change in where money is thrown is thus not solely a technical matter, for that assumes the logic of scientific investigation is the logic of bureaucratic survival. Good, solid science and sound thinking doesn’t lead policy; it is cited by bureaucracy when it conforms to what the bureaucracy has already been told to do. Otherwise, science is as marginalized as any one of us. Thus, changing where the money gets thrown is ultimately moral and political action; and it is there that we will find real solutions to children’s problems in learning.

Introduction

Having now covered the ground necessary for understanding the current situation, in this section I will look at current thought and practice concerning special needs for First Nations peoples, first from a federal perspective and then from a regional/provincial one. This turns out to be not nearly as interesting as it might have been, for with few exceptions all the existing approaches accept as their starting points (and apparently without question) the individualistic, meritocratic, victim-blaming model I have criticized here.

My understanding of why this has happened is that it has come about more by default than by design. It must be recalled that "education" for First Nations children was "special" before there was even such a thing as "special education:"

Influenced by the conviction of many "experts" that Indians had limited intellectual abilities, many Indian industrial schools introduced vocational training to prepare their pupils to fill certain limited occupations.

Or, more correctly, from the racist assumption of First Nations mental inferiority, a system of religious indoctrination and vocationalism was imposed and called "education." Specifically, the federal government off-loaded their treaty obligations, convincing churches of the opportunity of missionary evangelism this system occasioned, and reinforcing their cooperation by federal subsidies for school operation (which continually dwindled over the years) and a hands-off supervision policy. The aim was explicit: eliminate the "Indian problem" (our ownership of North America) by assimilating Indians into the lower classes of Canada. The policy reflected the bureaucratic imperatives reviewed earlier: (1) throw money into particular pockets, (2) throw as little of at it as possible, and (3) throw it in furtherance of your ideological program. Of course, that wasn’t the bargain agreed upon in any treaty, but Canada continually operated to eliminate any possibility of effective Aboriginal objection. In all this, of course, when those being assimilated don’t wish to be assimilated, the word genocide is the proper one.

All of us encounter the vestiges of this system today. The transition from this system to today’s thinking has been gradual, and because (1) Canada has never publicly owned up to its policies, (2) the ideology being imposed is taken for granted by the mainstream, and (3) bureaucracies are bureaucracies; the dynamic as described above never enters the consciousness of current federal bureaucrats. Thus, today Canada tells itself that it has "implemented" Indian control of Indian education, while at the same time (1) unilaterally mandating that provincial educational regulations must be followed, (2) maintaining complete control over budget allocation and transfer, (3) demanding priority for mainstream accreditation and credentialling of professional staff, (4) refusing resourcing for curriculum development, First Nations post-secondary institutions, and other points indicative of sovereign actions, and so on. INAC, in short, demands that First Nations react to INAC goals, initiatives, and standards, as if the "natives" are the "mental incompetents" of "childlike simplicity" or "untamed savagery" their bureaucratic ancestors convinced themselves they were working with. In dealings with the federal government, First Nations are forced into being reactive concerning educational policy, rather than being active or proactive.

However, even within the confined ideological space bureaucracies allow themselves there have been indications that INAC is experiencing difficulties with special education. Two internal papers, Review of Special Education Services for First Nations by HLA Consultants, January, 1993, and Special Education, First Nations Education in Canada and Related Educational Theory and Research: A Working Outline and Bibliography, by the Learning, Employment and Human Development section of the Social Policy and Programs Branch of INAC, Draft of October, 1998, reflect INAC’s internal interest in special education issues. These papers were made available to me for this essay, and their review, combined as appropriate with several formal and informal meetings with INAC staff since December, 1998, will form the basis of the current analysis.

January (1993) Review. The 1993 Review by HLA Consultants focused upon special education services for on reserve elementary and secondary students. Since approximately half of the First Nations students in Canada do not attend on reserve schools the report might be thought deficient on this ground. However, in my opinion the interest was more likely political economic than intentionally biased. For one thing, INAC did not then (and, according to informants in various regions, does not today) pay the same degree of critical attention to provincial school special education funding requests as it did (or does) to those coming from First Nations schools; special education appears, to a lesser degree, to lend the kind of subsidy the "bump" in tuition used provide provincial schools. For another, since according to the Canadian constitution the provinces have control over education, federal interest in their operation could be construed as interference. Another way to put this is that on reserve schools are the only places where INAC might consider it has the right to meddle.

The 1993 Review seems to have been commissioned to deal specifically with fiscal concerns, reviewing intervention trends within different provinces, national incidence rate estimates for different conditions affecting ability to learn, and so on. It provides several appendices of information on these matters that it would be well to have updated. However, in trying to characterize the federal response to special needs (through INAC and Health & Welfare), the authors concluded that clarity was elusive, primarily because of the diversity of special needs practices across provinces (to which INAC labored to maintain fidelity). They found it impossible to compare programs, disorders, assessments, and related matters, not only across provinces but also sometimes within them. Consequently, any characterization of what INAC was doing and whether funds were reasonably being spent proved impossible.

Certain selected of their conclusions deserve mention here. First, they call for the development of a national special needs policy by INAC (in agreement with the position taken by many First Nations political organizations). Second, they note the inconsistency of INAC policy across regions and suggest it might be due to the fact that these decisions are being made by individuals without a background in education, much less a background in special education. This resonates well with my own experiences in trying to obtain information for this report: (1) no one I contacted came from a special educational background; (2) no one seemed to know where the INAC testing policy (that non-indigenous consultants urged First Nations to acquiescence to; see Footnote 61) originated, nor upon whose advice it was adopted; (3) a request for what seemed to me a simple piece of information – what special needs service and equipment estimates are considered, and how calculated, when INAC establishes its overall educational budget – was met with repeated replies that funding formulas were set regionally (I was even sent some versions of regional formulas). Of course, this wasn’t an answer to the question I had asked. Third, HLA Consultants pointed out the disparity of hardship INAC assessment requirement work upon First Nations schools, in that they would not have the same capacity to call upon centralized services as mainstream schools (like, say, the Winnipeg school district). (However, no mention was made of the ethical/scientific violations inherent in any application of mainstream testing to First Nations children.) Fourth, the authors concluded INAC has an insufficient data base from which to calculate costs of special needs services. As well, they point out at various places that INAC funding policy calculations place First Nations schools at an overall disadvantage with respect to funding, compared with provincial school systems. Fifth, although they put a different emphasis on this than I do, they note that the funding inadequacies to First Nations schools literally drive special needs students out of First Nations schools, in order for them to attend a school that may have something in place to assist them. Sixth, they point out that there are no defensible incidence rates for the different categories of special need, so that financial planning is impossible (this remains true today, six year later, for both Canada and the United States). Finally, they recommend First Nations be involved first hand with any future INAC special needs policy developments.

Although all too consistent with mainstream thinking in special needs, the review by HLA Consultants was well carried out, useful, and should have been an impetus sufficient to move INAC in directions suggested by First Nations organizations.

Special Education Draft, October, 1998. To be fair, the draft version of the report by INAC’s Social Policy and Programs Branch is obviously a work in progress. As written, it carries throughout the cachet of the modern obsession to reduce government economic obligations (in this case, to First Nations rather than to taxpayers in general who expect health and education as part of the "sacred trusts" of participatory democracy), adopting the neoliberal jargon of today ("accountability," "inputs and outputs," "cost neutrality," and so on). It even presents a comparison of different possible formula funding options, evaluated largely in terms of neoliberal aspirations: cost neutrality, administrative simplicity, fiscal accountability, and incentive to efficiency. It’s interesting to note the one-sidedness of the economic obsession; the "problem" they continually come back to is: how is INAC going to enforce accountability when "flexible" programs under "local control" are being requested by First Nations. They never ask who is going to evaluate INAC’s or Canada’s accountability to upholding Canada’s treaty obligations, or how this is to be accomplished.

Further, there is an absence of critical evaluation when going through the bibliographic portion of the report. Again, the INAC authors seem unaware that all assessments applied to First Nations peoples violate professional guidelines, and they seem to have read that portion of the literature they cite without a grasp of research design, psychometrics, or the full sweep of special needs literature. The report does usefully highlight regional special education projects (some of them still ongoing), though again, with less skepticism than the fragile nature of some of the "research" warrants.

In all events, I can only hope the final version is an immense improvement over the one at hand.

Summary. As reflected in the documents examined and the personal interactions conducted, INAC grasp of special needs is partial, bureaucratic, and (under the assumption that they are supposed to be helping First Nations students) internally inconsistent. They have received some good advice, which they have ignored, and continue to run resolutely in place while the educational and special needs situations of First Nations children deteriorate. We must face the real possibility that, for whatever reasons, INAC (and, by extension, the Canadian government) is not educable with respect to the continued harm done by their educational policies.

INAC’s internal process notwithstanding, special needs initiatives abound in the provinces and the regions, in the former case because provinces have responsibility for the full range of educational service, and in the latter case because First Nations are confronted daily with the task of responding to a growing need. We shall have a look at Provincial and Regional First Nations initiatives together, primarily because federal policy mandates First Nations harmonize with provincial practices. However, because certain regions (in alphabetical order, Alberta, British Columbia, Quebec, and Saskatchewan) have produced considerable material of interest to the issues of special needs and First Nations, these contributions will be highlighted.

New Provincial Initiatives. The provinces of Nova Scotia and Manitoba have this year reviewed special education and are expected to bring in new policy; since the Nova Scotia review was not yet available I will comment more specifically on the Manitoba statement. However, Nova Scotia First Nations education organizations have made mention of concerns. First, experience with the framework agreement on education has given rise to concern of how well special needs will be addressed; for example, while not specifically mentioned, relevant research on First Nations special needs might well be an area of joint investigation by the Mi’kmaw Education Authority and Canada. Whose "model" of special needs will take precedence is undecided, as are all fiscal questions. Second, the special needs model most recently in force (inclusiveness, ideological MI assessment, adversarial review of placement decisions, etc.) was criticized privately as functioning in too authoritarian a fashion when parents challenged provincial decisions (despite objections by Department of Education officials that such things didn’t happen). To the extent new policy is a continuation of old, concern was expressed that it would serve neither the needs of First Nations students in the provincial system, nor function as a model for future Mi’kmaw-based policy.

The Manitoba Special Education Review Final Report is in many ways an exemplary report. In their literature review the authors acknowledge the disputability of many special needs categories (as above), and consider the possible biases operating in their employment. They review the policies of other Canadian provinces and territories, special education legislation across Canada, and the way in which different problems hand cross-jurisdictional (e.g., educational and health) issues. Overall, the usefulness of the report goes far beyond the borders of Manitoba.

The Final Report is also quite detailed with respect to the positives and negatives of special needs education and what should be done to improve the system. For example, the authors consider Manitoba’s version of inclusiveness, where intervention and support are based on specific student need rather than student diagnosis category, superior to jurisdictions focusing on diagnosis. Inclusiveness is also leading to full integration of provincial education and special education operations. However, the authors also find (1) that the absence of a clear statement of special education policy, terminology, assessment practices, and similar specifics makes implementation difficult for educators, as well as giving it an air of current educational fashion than deliberate government policy; (2) that lack of support (such as teacher in-servicing) for practical techniques needed (such as Individual Education Program development, differential instructional strategies, etc.) also makes practical classroom implementation of inclusiveness nearly impossible, and (3) that the absence of legislation concerning educational rights of exceptional children (Manitoba is the only province without such a statement) demonstrates a complacency to allow case law to fill a gap that should be mandated.

However, when First Nations issues arise at all (and that rarely happens in this document), they are slighted (for example, they are grouped with immigrant special education needs). The authors acknowledge that Manitoba does little in the way of addressing First Nations concerns, and recommend "culturally appropriate" special needs services, without, however, spending time on what those might be and how an understanding of them might be developed. The lack of attention to First Nations matters is curious, particularly since (1) the authors are aware that marginalized peoples ("less privileged socially and economically") are unfairly over-diagnosed as requiring special needs, and (2) Manitoba First Nations groups (e.g., the Manitoba Indian Education Association) have been consistently and incisively critical of their treatment under Manitoba special needs programming, establishing, for example, consistent funding biases in services provision and, compared with mainstream Manitobans, fewer trained special needs educators, particularly in remote areas. It may well be that the authors of the Final Report are caught in the same place First Nations people frequently find themselves, the limbo between federal responsibility to/jurisdiction over First Nations and provincial responsibility to/jurisdiction over education. Seizing, perhaps, upon the Framework Agreement of 1994 as a "parting of the educational ways," the authors chose to limit their inquiry. However, insufficient attention was given to the fact that First Nations students would continue in Manitoba educational jurisdictions for some time to come, regardless of the education system that eventually arises from the 1994 agreement, and that either by osmosis or force (i.e., federally mandated "comparability"), mainstream practices will continue to influence First Nations special needs.

Local Concerns. In Ontario and New Brunswick I had opportunity to meet only with a small number of local groups. Although New Brunswick has, like Manitoba, a need-based rather than diagnostic-based special education intervention policy, the groups with whom I met expressed concerns. First, since First Nations students only attend provincial post-secondary institutions, their treatment by those institutions was perceived as discriminatory. The perception was (although no numbers were provided) that First Nations students were over-diagnosed as requiring special needs, most specifically, as suffering from some behavioral/emotional problem. In contradiction to that, the groups with whom I spoke considered the problems as arising from (1) systemic racism and (2) systemic marginalization of First Nations students. That is, the mainstream schools in question were little inclined, if at all, to do anything (for example, in mainstream curriculum or extracurricular activities) to accommodate First Nations children, and in fact were made to feel like outsiders. The result is 70% or higher post-secondary dropout rates.

Related to these concerns were those raised by parents in private meetings. The specific problems was the number of them who had recently been called up before a special needs inquiry board (ostensibly a "cooperative" meeting of minds about what to do about a child’s learning difficulties) and bluntly told that, unless the child was put on Ritalin, he/she would not be readmitted to school. The parents were at a loss what to do in these instances, having the help of neither psychoeducational nor legal experts. This travesty of special needs "assistance" described in New Brunswick was also related to me as currently happening in Alberta, and I believe it is far more common than First Nations educational and political organizations suspect.

In Ontario I met with a community-based working group concerned with the devolution of services to on-reserve special needs children. A new funding formulaic approach to service provision, initiated by INAC in 1997, led to a redistribution of financial resources that was destructive to some programs. However, even those programs that received an increase under the new formula still considered that their requirements were not being met. In searching for alternative resourcing, the working group uncovered provincial programs, jointly funded by the Ministry of Health, Education, and Community & Social Services, that were accessible to non-First Nations students in Ontario and to First Nations students attending a provincial school, but which were denied to First Nations students attending First Nations institutions. When pressed on the matter, the province claimed that collateral programs were the responsibility of INAC (who hold responsibility for on-reserve schools), even though (1) multiple ministries were involved and (2) health care for on-reserve First Nations peoples in Ontario is an Ontario responsibility. In the classic Alphonse – Gaston Act, the province suggested the working group seek clarification from INAC.

It was this suggestion that led to my unsuccessful attempt, on behalf of the working group, to get INAC to detail what specific conditions and/or disorders are covered in coming up with their educational funding formulas, what was the basis of their incidence calculations, and upon what pieces of information were special needs cost projections developed. As already related, I only received recitals that "funding formulas are region-specific," which everyone already knew and was not an answer to my inquiry.

The working group is continuing to explore this systemic bias against First Nations schools in Ontario, and, on a more practical level, looking to find ways of reducing costs in some areas (e.g., assessment) so that service cutbacks, particularly in the areas of pre-kindergarten programs and speech & language intervention, can be restored.

I also had opportunity to examine some materials related to early childhood intervention programs in Ontario, funded through the federal Ministry of Health "Centre for Excellence for Children’s Well-Being" and aimed at off-reserve Aboriginal communities. In general, such programs are important and have demonstrable long-term effects on the health and education of participants. My concerns in looking over the material were (1) the enduring ideological commitment to meritocracy and individualism inherent in program specifications and guidelines; my overwhelming impression is that such projects are justified as providing participants with advantages, relative, of course, to children who do not have the opportunity to participate. But acceptance of "advantage" as a fundamental social tenet also legitimizes the privileges that eventually accrue to "the advantaged" while justifying the truncation of privileges in "the disadvantaged;" and (2) the overwhelming administrative burden the program appears to place on program providers. So intense is the focus on evaluation and assessment (although, thankfully, there seems to be some leeway concerning what constitutes an "assessment") that contact time between children and program providers cannot hope but be lost. As Darlington and his associates showed in their reanalysis of US Head Start data, impact can’t really be expected to be statistically demonstrable until 5 or even 10 years after early intervention has finished. Can’t we simply accept that early involvement in a caring and challenging social environment, along with a similarly stable home life, must be good for all our children, and therefore be the centerpiece of educational and social policy? Or do we really need "hard numbers" to keep early childhood educators from "pulling a fast one" on us?

Alberta. At the level of the province, Alberta is as insensitive to ethical and cultural issues related to the special needs of First Nations children as any other Canadian province. And, as mentioned above, children attending off-reserve schools seem to be getting faced with the "Ritalin Ultimatum" with increasing frequency.

On reserve there is little acquiescence to accepting the mainstream’s version of the special needs difficulties of First Nations students. Several First Nations reserves (notably, the Paul Band in Treaty Six and the Kainai Band in Treaty Seven regions) have made long term commitments to radical revision of existing special needs practices. In the early 1990’s Treaty 7 region undertook an energetic, proactive program in special needs, matched only, it seems, by an equally lethargic INAC counter-program. Treaty 7’s analysis has comprehensively covered a range of special needs issues, from political economic concerns to particular assessment and interventions practices. Their critique has included: (1) an insistence that special education be "core funded" instead of "proposal driven;" that is, that rather than consider special education as an afterthought, it be included in any calculation of educational spending; (2) a recognition of the arbitrary and biased assessment standards imposed by INAC; (3) a desire to assume control over teacher training, curriculum development, in-servicing, assessment tool development, and related activities that will assure the adequacy of an integrated education/special education system for their students; (4) an exposure of "accountability" jargon being used to maintain long-distance practical and ideological control over First Nations initiatives; (5) a commitment to grass-roots development and implementation of combined First Nations educational services; and (6) the intransigence of INAC.

The inability and/or unwillingness to move on the program Treaty 7 is trying to initiate may have an unremarkable origin; nowhere in what Treaty 7 proposes in its integrated education/ special education approach does there appear to be any need for a Department of Indian Affairs.

Quebec. The First Nations Education Council of Quebec has been spearheading a special needs initiative since 1990. It is one of the few projects that has actually generated data across a number of schools. In addition to documenting funding inequalities between First Nations schools and provincial ones, ongoing projects (like the one at Kahnawake) are in operation under FNEC supervision. An interesting feature of their Second Step behavioral management program for preschoolers through 5^th graders is the emphasis on culturally relevant methods of personal control, as opposed to medicating a presumed medical condition.

British Columbia. The First Nations Education Steering Committee has been addressing special needs in a number of different ways during the 1990’s, including: (1) production and circulation of information booklets on specific special needs; (2) production and circulation of an information video; (3) regular special needs conferences; and (4) a periodic newsletter focusing on special needs. In the domain of political economics, FNESC has documented a 99% (or greater) decrease in special needs funding for First Nations students during the 1990’s. Even if the number of special needs children has been greatly overestimated, there is no possibility that cuts of this level will not impact on services for those who do need them. One reaction has been that Native-run schools have been forced to send special needs children to provincial schools to obtain services, thus denying First Nations children the chance to grow and learn in the context of their own cultures.

One of FNESC’s reactions to this has been to undertake a study to document the incidence levels of special needs First Nations students in British Columbia. Although the study is at or near completion at this moment, I cannot judge the utility of the approach taken since the specifics of research design, assessment, analysis, and so forth are absent from the proposal documentation. From what is available, the approach seems entirely conventional, using the provincial special needs classification system and standard notions of assessment. This is unfortunate, since FNESC gives every indication of its appreciation of the oppressive nature of modern mainstream education.

Saskatchewan. The Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations commissioned a survey of special needs in First Nations schools (sent to administrators, resource teachers, and parents), the preliminary report of which was made available to me for this survey. The authors of the report seem to have followed somewhat the format adopted by Quebec, but are more properly circumscribed about the capacity of surveys to document an existing special need.

The survey has generated a great deal of interesting findings, including, for examples, (1) special needs teachers have, on average, larger classes than regular teachers; (2) one-third of the schools surveyed can assure access and support for education to special needs students equal to that provided regular students; (3) nearly two-thirds of the schools are creating their own materials "on the fly" to support special needs students; and (4) parents are strongly involved in supporting the educational activities of their special needs children. The conclusions FSIN will draw from the full data base and final analysis are still open, but I am positively inclined toward their efforts. The consulting staff has demonstrated a firm grasp of many of the intricacies I have complained about here (including a sophisticated approach to assessment). Further, FSIN expressed skepticism concerning the identification of large numbers of their students as "behaviorally disordered," and resist the label and associated explanation (pathology in individual First Nations students). The commitment seems unquestionably toward doing the right thing from first principles, not from a starting point designated by INAC.

An Insufficiently Critical Attitude. Much earlier in this essay I complained that the thinking in the area of special needs and First Nations education was insufficiently critical of initial assumptions; this attitude, I believe, is reflected in the kinds of programs, studies, and interventions surveyed here. While a comfortable adherence to a picture of the world conforming to their ideological assumptions is understandable on the part of federal and provincial bureaucrats and professionals, it is somewhat harder to understand on our part. Granted, we are more or less force-fed mainstream ideology; but if any group should be looking for a critique of the mainstream it is we, and the critical specialists in measurement, special needs, and education I have cited earlier are not hiding their work. It is cause for concern that acceptance of the meritocracy, blaming the victim, and even racism is so infused within our understanding of and reacting to the educational crisis we have been immersed in for so long. And this is not to say that each and every First Nations initiative reviewed here hasn't uncovered one or more parts of the ideological prison in which we are locked and hasn't, in the programs it has envisioned and/or initiated, tried to free itself. But absent is a comprehensive grasp of the way in which testing, research, diagnosis, grading, tracking, accounting, bureaucracy and similar educational program-related activities insinuates mainstream ideology, and thus works ultimately to undermine our struggles to liberate ourselves.

In speaking with traditional people and elders in several different communities, they were unanimous in asserting that there was no such thing as a "special needs" child in former times. They didn't mean that there weren't occasions where some physical or even psychological problems arose, or that everyone was more-or-less moderately competent at everything. They meant that everyone was respected for the strengths and weaknesses they brought to the life of their community, that there was a place for everyone because everyone depended in some way on what those around him/her could or could not accomplish. People weren't "fiscal burdens" on the "competitive economic well-being" of a society; they were people. The interdependence of all the members of any society wasn't hidden behind commodity production or specialization, and that interdependence was not seen as a weakness of some sort. Rather, it was taken as the fundamental meaning of "community." In diversity was strength, and the underlying tenet of First Nations societies was that greater ability justified greater responsibility, not greater privilege. How distant this reality is from a system built to foster privilege, and blame inequities in the quality of life on largely internal and unchangeable defects of individual people.

The education system of the mainstream not only reflects a world alien to our own, it inculcates it and erects an elaborate, nearly impenetrable myth about what it is doing and why. Within that system, as I have said before, there is a place for ostensibly First Nations peoples. However, it is not a place for us as First Nations peoples, but only as peoples willing to accept their mythological version of the way things must be. Within their system there will be the occasional successes, but more often the failures of our peoples, for a seamless procedure for the elevation of the few at the expense of the many is their ultimate goal, the "proper" operation of their educational bureaucracy. To become "one of them" not only must we accept the myth they are telling their own people, we must explicitly reject the version of truth, as spoken about by the traditionals and elders cited above, that are still the philosophical and practical foundations of First Nations existence.

The issues surrounding special needs and First Nations are not medical or psychological; they are historical, economic, and moral. We must not be blind to this.

V. RECOMMENDATIONS

Cuban distinguishes what he terms incremental reform (tinkering with an existing system) and fundamental reform (radical overhaul of an existing system) from the status quo (doing nothing), and argues that, in Canadian education, incremental reform quickly becomes status quo (no reform at all). From what I have written it is easily seen that I come down squarely on the side of fundamental reform as the only viable strategy for dealing with education and special needs education for First Nations. The international and national legal space exists for First Nations to do this; in this final section I will speculate briefly on what I feel we should be doing, as well as consider what is necessary to create the financial space and political/ social/educational will that is necessary to begin dealing effectively with special education.

1. Exposure of the ideological base underlying mainstream education and examination of its imposition upon First Nations. A failure to understand how mainstream education operates makes it all too likely we would reproduced it, by default, if given the opportunity. The Action Plan proposed by McCue is an appropriate forum for First Nations to begin the task of coming to grips with the dysfunctional nature of the mainstream educational system.
   
2. Political action to implement true jurisdiction over education. From my reading of McCue's conceptual analysis of jurisdiction it is clear that, of the possibilities he discusses, total and exclusive jurisdiction where the only constraints are costs and the expectations and demands of constituents is the only kind of educational system compatible with developing a truly First Nations approach to special needs.
   
3. National & international political, legal, & social action to establish a First Nations-controlled funding base for educational sovereignty. In my opinion there are actions that can be taken, in legal courts and in courts of public opinion, that can be used to bring about the financial security needed for the development of our own educational systems. A simple example is the long-term wholesale abuse of educational and psychological tests to classify us as stupid, depraved, and inadequate. Mandated by INAC and the provinces, implemented by the schools, and carried out by psychologists and educators, there is a long list, across a long period of time, of people fiscally responsible of depriving many of us, by unethical means, of an economic livelihood and reasonable life.
   
4. Theory into practice. A responsible approach to special needs can arise within an educational system under First Nations control. Presuming the funding was sufficient, what would such an educational system look like, and what would be its approach to special needs. There are numerous characteristics:

1. overall, the system would not divorce education from health, economic development, social services, or any other aspect of First Nations community well being. Planning and program implementation in any one of these areas, and more, cannot reasonably be undertaken in ignorance of what is happening in any other one of these areas.
2. control of teacher training, inservicing, curriculum development, certification, and all other nuts-and-bolts aspects of building educational systems. There are already initiatives in these directions in specific parts of Indian Country; these must be fostered, and generalized to locally controlled institutions across all regions.
3. adoption of a fundamentally different educational philosophy, developed from first principles in locally controlled First Nations institutions. The mainstream has always had it educational critics, and some of them (e.g., Vygotsky) have developed and currently operated systems that do not make the ideological assumptions criticized here. Such critics provide a starting point for our own local deliberations about "good, responsible and appropriate education" for our children.
4. rejection of "demonizing" assessment procedures. The utility of physical testing is not in dispute here, and should continue. The kinds of tests that have been used to call us unintelligent, hostile, right-brained, and similarly individually deranged are not going to undergo the sort of redoing necessary to make them minimally applicable to our own children. However, there exists a perfectly sound, long-standing tradition of classroom assessment procedures, fallen away from in the ideological zeal to find medical conditions inside children's heads, that could readily be brought back into use (particularly in classrooms where teaches had the time and resources to do more than multiple choice or standardized testing).
5. commitment to finding ways of reaching all students. I repeat: nobody has any idea of the educational limits imposed by any of the conditions, real or imaginary, considered as falling under special education. The mainstream does not pursue such research because it's more cost effective to "mass-teach" and toss aside those who give indications of not learning within such a system; after all, there are a lot of warm bodies and all of them aren't going to be allowed reasonable lives, anyway. However, if such a rationale is alien to First Nations thinking, it must be possible to do more than find excuses why all too many should be left behind.

I could go on but will stop here. I don't wish to (and could not) hand over a blueprint for the kinds of alternative educational systems it would be possible for us to create, given the proper conditions; after all, revolutions don't unfold according to a script. However, the mainstream is disinclined to do what is necessary to deal effectively with First Nations education and special needs education. To deal effectively with special needs we must find out what our oppressors don't want us to know. To give our children the chance to be all they can be, we must be better than any of us suspects we are.

The Color of Violence: Violence Against Woman of Color
April 28-29, 2000

University of California
Santa Cruz

The conference will bring together activists whose work challenges violence against women of color to explore and strategize around the relationships among racism, colonialism and gender violence in the lives and histories of women of color. The purpose of this conference is to analyze the connections between sexual and domestic violence in communities of color and the political and economic structures of violence nationally and globally.

To receive a full conference abstract, list of keynote speakers, the proposed agenda and registration materials, please contact:

Andrea Smith
123 Felix Street #4
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Ph: 831-460-1856
Fx: 831-459-3733
Email:andysm@cats.ucsc.edu

The Vera Institute of Justice in cooperation with the Mellon Foundation will fund a postdoctoral fellowship on the subject of race, crime and justice. It is designed for persons with recent doctorates in the field of criminal justice law, political science, anthropology, psychology, economics, ethnic studies, and related fields. The fellowship deadline is January 3, 2000. To receive and application package, please contact:

Eileen Sullivan, Director of Research
Vera Institute of Justice
377 Broadway
New York, NY 10013
Ph: 212-334-1300 X 308
Fx: 212-941-9497
E-mail: esullivan@vera.org

The National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder at the VA Boston Healthcare System announces the availability of four NIMH-supported postdoctoral fellowships to begin September 1, 2000. The primary objective of the training program is to prepare individuals for academically-oriented careers in clinical psychology with an emphasis on studying the effects of exposure to traumatic stressors. A completed application should include a personal statement of professional goals and interests, a curriculum vita and three letters of reference. Applications are now being accepted and will be until the positions are filled. Please submit your application to:

Daniel King, Ph.D.
National Institute for PTSD (116B-2)
VA Boston Healthcare System
150 South Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02130
E-mail: carney.andrea@bostonva.gov

The National Institute for Healthcare Research is seeking applications for a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship in the area of spirituality and health. The fellow will conduct research on understudied psychosocial variables in ongoing projects, supervise research assistants, and engage in collaborative research. Applications will be considered until positions are filled. Send vita, three letters of reference, publication reprints, and a list of coursework in research methods and statistics to:

Dr. Michael McCullough, Director of Research
NIHR, 6110 Executive Boulevard, Suite 908
Rockville, MD   20852

Also, check out http://www.apa.org/ppo/fellow.html   for information on the following fellowships (due January 7, 2000):

William Baily AIDS Policy Congressional Fellowship
Post doc for 2000-20001 APA Congressional Fellowship Program
Psychologist for APA Science Policy Fellowship 

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Counsellor – Rebuild the Circle Project. Wajeh, we are a Cree community in Northern Quebec. We are looking for professional assistance to help us implement our project, which has received funding under the Aboriginal Healing Foundation. The project will address the continued suffering of our people from the abuses while in the care of the residential schools and the effect it has had on the present and future generations. The position requires a two-week visit on at least two occasions (January & February) to provide counseling for individuals, couples and families. For more information, please contact:

Luke Macleod
Ph: (418) 923-3461 ext 315
Fx: (418) 923-3115

The National Mental Health Association, working in collaboration with the National Association of School Psychologists, is pleased to announce the establishment of its Violence Prevention Coordination Center (VPCC). Programs focus on implementing prevention and early intervention programs to help build resiliency in students, promote healthy choices, and decrease the risks associated with violence and substance abuse. As a result of this cooperative agreement, NMHA has immediate openings for the following positions:

Job Title: Consultant Brokers

The National Mental Health Association is seeking nine Consultant/Brokers to provide customized technical assistance to 94 federal grantees working to implement comprehensive interagency partnerships and school violence prevention programs in communities across the nation. The Consultant/Brokers are the primary link between grantees and the TA expertise/resources being mobilized by NMHA s federally funded national school violence prevention TA Center. The Consultant/Brokers must have extensive experience in school and community organizing and consultation; an understanding of evidence-based practices and prevention research; and sensitivity for the needs of diverse populations and audiences. Consultant/Brokers will be housed in field offices located across the nation. Extensive travel required.

Job Title: Community Liaisons

The National Mental Health Association is seeking four Community Liaisons to manage and implement the practices and resources clearinghouse of a federally funded national school violence prevention coordinating center. The Community Liaisons are the primary link between the coordinating center and the general public. Community Liaisons must have excellent verbal and written communication skills; demonstrated technical proficiency with online information management; experience in the mental health, education, justice or information management fields; and sensitivity to the needs of diverse populations and audiences. Please send a cover letter and current resume to:

National Mental Health Association
1021 Prince Street
Alexandria, VA 22314
Attn: sjm

If you have any questions regarding these two positions, please call Sandy McElhaney at (703) 838-7506.

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Assistant Professor, Counseling Psychology, Department of Counseling and Special Education, The University of Akron, Akron, Ohio. The position is a nine-month tenure track position commencing August 2000. It requires teaching doctoral courses, advising students, directing dissertations, conducting research and producing scholarly publications. Applicants must have a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from an APA approved program. The application deadline is November 12, 1999. To apply please send letter of application, vitae, official transcripts, three letters of professional reference, and other supporting documents to:

James R. Rogers, Ph.D.
Search Committee Chair
Department of Counseling and Special Education
The University of Akron, Akron
OH 44325-5007

Email: jrrogers@uakron.edu.

Assistant Professor, Psychology, Department of Behavioral Sciences, Calif. State Poly. Univ., Pomona, California. The position is a tenure track position. It requires teaching undergraduate courses such as industrial/personnel, human relations, and, leadership & motivation. Applicants must have a Ph.D. or ABD, teaching experience, and evidence of scholarly potential. For further information please contact Mary Gordon, Dept. Secretary, Behavioral Sciences Ph: (909) 869-3890; Fx: (909) 869-4930; Email: mgordon@csupomona.edu.

The Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia invites applications for four tenure track positions at the Assistant Professor level. The positions are as follows:

1. Cultural Psychology
2. Judgment and Decision-Making, Reasoning, or Other Higher Cognitive Processes
3. Clinical Psychology – 2 positions.

The positions begin July 1, 2000 and require teaching graduate and undergraduate courses, supervision of graduate student research, conducting research, and practicum supervision. Applicants must have a Ph.D. from an APA and CPA accredited program. The application deadline is December 1, 1999. For further information or to apply contact:

Chair, Faculty Search Committee
Department of Psychology
University of British Columbia
2136 West Mall
Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z4

Application requirements are cirriculum vitaee, samples of scholarly work, and three letters of reference.

Assistant Professor, Clinical Program, University of North Texas. The position is a tenure track position. UNT is seeking a child-oriented clinical psychologist capable of supervising research and clinical activities of graduate students. Applicants should be research oriented in clinical child psychology with a Ph.D. from an APA approved program including completion of an APA-approved internship. The application deadline is January 3, 2000. To apply please send vitae, three letters of reference, and reprints to:

Kenneth W. Sewell, Ph.D.
Director of Clinical Training
Department of Psychology
Box 311280, UNT
Denton, TX 76203-1280

Applicants can obtain further information at http://www.psyc.unt.edu

The Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago invites applications for a tenure-track/tenured academic year, faculty position at any rank. The position commences August 2000. Applicants with any of the following areas of research interests will be considered: (1) Psychology and Law or (2) Clinical Psychology. Responsibilities include teaching undergraduate and graduate courses, and supervising graduate student theses and dissertations. Application deadline is January 3, 2000. To apply please send a covering letter, vitae, reprints, and three letters of reference to:

Robin Mermelstein, Ph.D.
Chair, Search Committee
Department of Psychology
University of Illinois at Chicago
1007 W. Harrison
Chicago, IL 60607

Assistant Professor, Clinical Psychologist, Department of Psychology, Case Western Reserve University. The position requires teaching undergraduate and graduate courses and conducting research. Applicants with an active research program in emotion, health psychology, or social psychology are preferred. The application deadline is December 15, 1999. To apply please send vitae, three letters of reference, teaching portfolio, and statement of interest to:

Faculty Search,
Department of Psychology
Case Western Reserve University
10900 Euclid Ave
Cleveland, OH 44106-7123

For further information please contact James C. Overholser, Ph.D. Associate Professor Co-Chair, Faculty Search Committee. 

Dr. Carol Sansone
Department of Psychology
Behavioral Sciences Building
390 S. 1530 E. Room 502
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0251

Email: sansone@psych.utah.edu

Paul J. Handal, Ph.D.
Clinical Search Committee Chair
Department of Psychology
Saint Louis University
221 North Grand Blvd
St. Louis, MO 63103

Just received -- info about the CAUT J.W. Steward Reid Memorial Fellowship for 2000-2001 doctoral studies. Value of $5,000, tenable at any Canadian University, must be Canadian citizen or have landed immigrant status from April 30, 1999 (or earlier),have completed comprehensive examinations, or equivalent, and have had doctoral thesis proposal accepted by April 30, 2000, and have a first class academic record in a graduate program.

Application closing date: April 30,2000
Announcement of award: July, 2000.
website: stewartreid.caut.ca
For more information, please contact:
Alison McNeill-Hordern
Special Assistant to the Vice-President (Academic and Research)
Brandon University
Brandon, MB  R7A 6A9
Ph: (204) 727-7445
Fx: (204) 728-7340

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