The New York Times keeps trying to cover – the NEW education. How do we change what gets delivered to children has to be delivered to children. Now, let us go to special education. No one wants to talk about special ed as it is juxtaposed with typical children being served with a traditional educational paradigm.

A slippery slope where we are quite familiar with the ability of the well-worn map that directs kids into special education like the monster woman who emerges from the television in a dripping mayhem of, we the professionals, decent, caring teachers, who function in classrooms with compassion, but not too many people are asking why special education students are not graduating into a structured context that facilitates these kids to interact with typical children.

Which is where it’s at.

A place of interaction that turns into discovery. 

But it’s not happening.

Children who are successful and have typical homes in typical towns (this does not mean foster children) with typical schools at a time in the world that is bigger and more complicated than typical suggests. There is no such thing as typical. Typical is rhetoric that says what do we do with all these struggling kids. Special education itself has been treading water for so many decades that when the thing faces some needed change, the animal itself becomes unrecognizable.

I deal with adolescents with HIV. HIV is just the beginning. The I Am Going To Quit School Damn You Syndrome pops up a few years with my kids before it pops up with students we call typical. Failure is a huge hole in the ground they bury themselves into invisibility. No one transitions to regular school. Grade level is ephemeral. Success is a sliding scale. We fail them. We are stuck in the boiler room. Where we are not seen. We are the playground police. And you went to school to supervise playgrounds.Teachers become mere keepers of the peace. Soldiership becomes the status quo.