The Politics of Learning Disabilities || Politics, Science, and the Future of Learning Disabilities

Hammill Institute on Disabilities

Politics, Science, and the Future of Learning DisabilitiesAuthor(s): James M. Kauffman, Daniel P. Hallahan and John Wills LloydSource: Learning Disability Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 4, The Politics of Learning Disabilities(Autumn, 1998), pp. 276-280Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1511173 .

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POLITICS, SCIENCE, AND THE FUTURE OF LEARNING DISABILITIES

James M. Kauffman, Daniel P. Hallahan, and John Wills Lloyd

Leading research scientists and those who interpret science for a general readership (e.g., Trefil, 1996) are quick to acknowledge that science and politics are nearly always mixed, often legitimately, but that the relative influence of one on the other is often off kilter. In fact, observing the triumph of politics over science can be a highly frustrating, if not embittering, experience for researchers in the physical sciences as well as those who study social phenomena.

Remember the Superconducting Supercol- lider? The SSC was supposed to be the next step in the quest to discover the ultimate nature of matter, a quest that began 2,000 years ago with the Greeks. In the largest high-tech construction program ever at- tempted, the SSC was going to occupy a fifty-two-mile circular tunnel under the plains south of Dallas. Unfortunately, Congress cut off funding for the project in 1993, and today the fourteen miles of completed tunnel are slowly filling with water, a monument to America's inability to focus on long-term goals.

Now I don't want you to think I'm bitter about this. The fact that in my darkest hours I think one of humanity's noblest dreams was cut off by an alliance of political hacks and a few scientists whose level of bad judgment was exceeded only by the depth of their envy really shouldn't sway your thinking one way or the other. Whatever we think, the SSC is dead, and we have to turn to the question of what is going to happen in the foreseeable future. (Trefil, 1996, p. 47)

We concur with the central message of the arti- cle by Kavale and Forness (this issue) that politics, perhaps best known as "advocacy," has over- whelmed the science of learning disabilities and that many of the consequences have been disap- pointing to researchers, if not undesirable for

children. We agree that advances in the field of learning disabilities will come only through care- ful, systematic, and persistent empirical research (Hallahan, Kauffman, & Lloyd, 1999). We may quibble about a statement here or there, but overall we find ourselves in substantial agreement that learning disabilities have come to mean some- thing that is defined loosely and treated unsys- tematically, primarily on the basis of advocacy and expedience. Our best strategy now may be to recognize that the scientific vehicles for studying learning disabilities have been overtaken by politics and to focus our efforts on what to do next, just as Trefil (1996) acknowledged the death of the SSC and then shifted his attention to events in the foreseeable future.

As Kavale and Forness are quick to recognize, politics cannot be divorced from learning disabilities; a proper or more desirable balance of science and politics is what might be achievable. However, the admixture that leads to the proper or most desirable balance is not immediately obvious, and we are probably well advised to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of various de-grees of tilt toward the scientific or political side.

It is important to remember that, without advocacy, millions of children with bona fide learning disabilities never would have received educational services. Like virtually all other areas of special education, children with learning disabilities were

JAMES M. KAUFFMAN, Ed.D., is Professor of Education, University of Virginia. DANIEL P. HALLAHAN, Ph.D., is Professor of Education and Chair, Department of Cur- riculum, Instruction and Special Education, University of Virginia. JOHN WILLS LLOYD, Ph.D., is Professor of Education, Univeristy of Virginia.

276 Learning Disability Quarterly



finally recognized as needing educational programs only after years of dogged advocacy by their parents. Although science must not bow to advocacy, we must not lose sight of the fact that parents cannot afford to sit and wait for issues of definition to be resolved while their children lan- guish educationally. And although it may be tempting to decide that parents should stick to advocacy and academics should stick to science, we fear that this division of labor would discour- age what little communication currently exists between parents and researchers. We offer no conclusions regarding the best mixture of politics and science, but we do suggest that answers to four questions may be critical in deciding what course to follow.

1. To what extent can learning disabilities be defined as an objective biological entity with reliable diagnostic criteria? This is a critical question for those who, like Kavale and Forness, emphasize the assumption that brain dysfunction is the essential feature distin-

guishing learning disabilities from other types of

learning problems. In the present era, it is not a question to be dismissed as disingenuous or impossible to answer. In fact, some consider the question, "Can we monitor the living brain?," to be among the top 10 contemporary problems in science (see Trefil, 1996).

Although we can say without hesitation that in late 1998 science does not allow reliable diagnosis of those brain characteristics that define learning disabilities, we believe it would be imprudent to suggest that such diagnosis is impossible or unlikely within the next decade or two. However, we caution that brain research may well lead to the conclusion that learning disabilities is not a clearly demarcated dysfunction in a particular part of the brain. More likely, learning disabilities will be found to represent a range of dysfunctions of various brain structures. Or learning disabilities may prove to be a diverse group of brain dysfunctions with a wide range of behavioral mani- festations, much in the same way that cancer is not a single disease entity within a given organ system but a range of neoplasms with diverse and often unpredictable effects on the functioning of the individual. Moreover, discriminating the brain functioning of students with specific learning disabilities from that of students with mental retardation or emotional/behavioral disorders may prove as difficult as discriminating the psycholog-

ical and educational performance of these diagnostic groups.

The implication of our speculation is that advances in brain research may not simplify or clarify the diagnosis of learning disabilities in the ways we might hope for but may further compli- cate matters of diagnosis. Particularly perplexing, given that a reliable link between brain function and learning difficulties is established, will be those cases in which the learning problem exists but the typical brain dysfunction cannot be demonstrated or the brain dysfunction can be shown but the learning problem does not exist. Given the extraordinary plasticity of the young brain and the unpredictable behavioral and emotional sequelae of brain trauma, we assume that such atypical cases are highly likely to be found even if the ability to monitor the living brain is achieved and links between brain function and learning are thereby established. A good example of how unpredictable the outcomes of brain dysfunction can be is contained in the expanding field of traumatic brain injury (TBI). Although one cannot equate TBI with learning disabilities, it is instructive to realize that outcomes for TBI are unpredictable and that cases sharing seemingly similar brain insults do not always produce similar cognitive or behavioral sequalae (cf. Savage & Wolcott, 1994; Snow & Hooper, 1994).

2. To what extent would a reliable, scientific definition of learning disabilities guide education or other ameliorative responses to it? At this time, the only reliable basis we have for developmental or remedial instruction is the student's response to instructional tasks. Biological or psychometric definitions of disabling conditions may suggest that some instructional tasks are highly likely to be inappropriate. For example, a student with the diagnosis "blind" is highly unlikely to profit from instructional materials requiring visual discriminations of the type routinely expected of those who do not carry that diagnosis. An algebra task is not likely to be appropriate for a student whose diagnosis is "severe mental retardation." A disability diagnosis may be useful in getting us into the ball- park, but it is not likely to get us beyond first base, if there, in designing effective instruction.

Educational habilitation is now only loosely linked to biological and psychometric diagnostic criteria for disabilities, even if those criteria are highly reliable and pertinent to the individual's

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overall functioning. Thus, even if reliable biological or psychometric tests were to give us a neatly and dependably homogeneous diagnostic group of students with learning disabilities, the implications for education would be rather small. Only if educational performance itself is the diagnostic criterion for defining the disability are reliable implications for educational practice likely to be found. In our judgment, this is likely to remain the case regardless of advances in assessment of brain function, as the task of educators will remain the manipulation of instructional tasks based on the student's discrimination of same- nesses and differences among those tasks regardless of what is known about the student's performance on medical or psychological tests. This is the reason why it is unconscionable for a teacher to ask students to perform educational tasks that they cannot do or to fail to teach students that of which they are capable, regardless of their diagnostic labels.

3. To what extent does political advocacy for children demonstrating an unacceptable level of achievement address the needs of those with "real" or scientifically valid learning disabilities? We assume here that an "unacceptable level of achievement" refers to a significantly lower level than we expect based on other indicators of the student's capa- bilities. That is, we recognize that students differ in capacity for learning specific tasks; some learn much more quickly than others, requiring fewer trials and mastering more difficult discriminations. The judgment that a student's achievement is acceptable is, we admit, arbitrary and fraught with potential for error. However, the judgment of the acceptability of achievement of a particular student in a particular realm of performance seems to us unlikely to be sharpened appreciably by knowledge of the student's brain functioning or performance on psychometric tests, given a sample of the student's past performance under known instructional conditions. That is, the best basis by far for judging the acceptability of performance is the student's response to prior instruction.

If a student's learning is slow or difficult across the board with adequate instruction, then he or she is likely to obtain a diagnosis of mental retardation; if learning rate is dramatically lower in one or two particular areas of performance than in several others, then a diagnosis of learning dis-

abilities is more likely. In either case, however, special education is designed to identify the student's performance as unacceptable and provide instruction intended to improve the student's achievement. This is the case regardless of the known or assumed etiology of the student's low achievement (the exception in the definition of learning disabilities being inadequate instruction, an exclusion we believe is unsupportable, as we discuss later). We fail to see how students with "real" or "true" learning disabilities are discrimi- nated against or left out of beneficial interven- tions if our advocacy is directed simply toward students whose achievement is judged unacceptable.

4. To what extent are children with unacceptable achievement placed at risk by the assumption that they have learning disabilities? A common fear of advocates for children is that a diagnosis or label associated with the need for special education will be damaging to students' self-esteem and social status and that the special services obtained as a result will be unhelpful if not hurtful.

Singer (1988) suggested that learning disabilities is likely the least noxious of current labels associated with special education. We think that research already suggests and may ultimately demonstrate that self-esteem and social status suf- fer considerably from unacceptable achievement and deportment and little from special education labels for these difficulties. Whether special education is helpful depends on the instruction that is offered. We recognize that special education, like general education, often has provided ineffective instruction. However, we doubt that the identifi- cation of students as having learning disabilities corrupts the instruction they are offered. Students identified as having learning disabilities have typ- ically failed to profit acceptably from instruction in general education. Moreover, most of these students receive most of their instruction, often including their special education, in the general education classroom alongside their nondisabled peers (see U.S. Department of Education, 1996).

Regardless of the origins of their difficulties, students with unacceptable achievement need special instruction if they are to reach the level of performance we deem acceptable. The fact that their unacceptable achievement may be a result of inadequate prior instruction should not exclude them from the needed teaching. Eliminating




these students from special education is the equiv- alent of excluding students in any category from needed services on the basis of circumstances over which they have no control; it is discrimina- tory in the most evil sense of the word. A paral- lel line of reasoning would include only children born deaf in education in manual language and exclude those whose deafness was acquired post- natally because they are not "truly" deaf.

Students are placed at risk by educators most clearly when their abilities or disabilities (e.g., their ability to hear, to see, to read, to calculate, etc.) are misapprehended or when the instruction they receive is ineffective, regardless of where or by whom it is offered. In our judgment, students are not placed at risk by their inclusion in a group assumed to have learning disabilities based on their unacceptable achievement, unless the meas- urement of their achievement is flawed or the instruction they receive is inadequate.

The argument advanced by Kavale and Forness (this issue), although clothed in appropriate con- cerns about the triumph of advocacy over science, is essentially about the definition of learning disabilities. Concern about how to define learning disabilities has a history as long as the history of the field itself (see Hallahan et al., 1999). Although advocates and scientists alike have suggested many definitions, none has been found entirely satisfactory.

The problem of definition must be viewed in the context of the difficulty of defining virtually any phenomenon in the field of special education and other social services: Where do we draw the line between diagnostic groups, whether for purposes of special education or any other social service? As The Washington Post put it in the case of drawing lines for purposes of deciding who should receive welfare benefits,

How do you create a program to help the poor that isn't at the same time unfair to the struggling people on the next rungs up-the ones who are making it, but often only bare- ly so and at enormous cost to themselves without the help? It is one of the oldest conundrums of public policy ... Lines are always being drawn, and redrawn, in benefit programs; that's what it means to have eligibility standards. And the difficulty of drawing an absolutely fair line, if there is such a thing, ought not become an excuse for doing nothing. (Editorial, 1996, C6)

Although learning disabilities may be unfavor- ably compared with mental retardation on the dimension of diagnostic clarity (under the assumption that the latter has a clear, formal demarcation from normalcy that is lacking in the former), it is instructive to note that the discrimination between mental retardation and normalcy is not a fact of nature but one that we set arbi- trarily (see Blatt, 1975). In passing, we recall the surge in the number of students found to have learning disabilities following a change in the definition of mental retardation by the American Association on Mental Retardation.

A similar case can be made about emotional and behavioral disorders ("serious emotional dis- turbance," in federal parlance). For example, how much depression is enough to merit special educational services? For how long must a problem persist before it represents a disorder as opposed to a problem? Perhaps the underlying principle in these conundrums is that people charged with serving students in schools will use whatever means are available to secure additional services for students whom they see as needing help. That seems to us to be advocacy in a worthwhile sense.

Our point here is not to call into question all definitions of disability but to make clear that definitions are not precision instruments. In human services (e.g., special education), they are created for the purpose of securing services for the people (e.g., students) who need them. As Kavale and Forness argue, science (the advancement of dependable knowledge) is ill served by an impre- cise definition of learning disabilities. When we visited this topic in the early 1980s (Lloyd, Hallahan, & Kauffman, 1980), we argued that there is an inevitable tension between having a tight, precise, sharp definition and a loose, flexi- ble, conceptual definition. Scientists would stand to benefit the most from a tight definition, but such a definition would create problems for clinicians charged with providing services. Converse- ly, clinicians benefit from having the flexibility accompanying a loose definition, as it makes pos- sible the delivery of services for students who they can see need help.

We still think a reasonable solution to this dilemma is to continue to use a loose definition for the purposes of service delivery and to encourage scientists to define their samples on the basis of characteristic markers. At this point,

Volume 21, Fall 1998 279



we think it would be much worse to use strict criteria to identify students with learning disabilities than to allow teachers and others some latitude in

making such decisions. The bottom line: We would rather trust our colleagues' clinical judg- ments, imperfect as they may be, than rely solely on scores obtained from educational, psychological, and/or neurological tests.

Although we do not doubt that learning disabilities exist, we doubt that the debate about what constitutes a real learning disability will be resolved in our lifetimes or those of our students. We do, however, harbor the hope that within the next decade the field will achieve the balance of science and politics that maximizes both the

opportunities for advancement of our under-

standing of the phenomena of learning disabilities and the availability of effective education for students who have these disabilities.

REFERENCES Blatt, B. (1975). Toward an understanding of people

with special needs. In J. M. Kauffman & J.S. Payne (Eds.), Mental retardation: Introduction and person- al perspectives (pp. 388-427). Columbus, OH: Merrill.

Editorial. (November 24, 1996). Line drawing. The Washington Post, C6.

Hallahan, D. P., Kauffman, J. M., & Lloyd, J. W. (1999). Introduction to learning disabilities (2nd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Lloyd, J. W., Hallahan, D. P., & Kauffman, J. M. (1980). Learning disabilities: Selected topics. In L. Mann & D. Sabatino (Eds.), The fourth review of special education (pp. 35-60). New York: Grune & Stratton.

Singer, J. D. (1988). Should special education merge with regular education? Educational Policy, 2, 409-424.

Savage, R. C., & Wolcott, G. F. (1994). (Eds.). Educational dimensions of acquired brain injury. Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.

Snow, J. H., & Hooper, S. R. (1994). Pediatric traumatic brain injury. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Trefil, J. (1996). The edge of the unknown. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

U.S. Department of Education. (1996). Eighteenth annual report to Congress on implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Wash- ington, DC: Author.

Correspondence should be addressed to: James M. Kauffman, Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Special Education, Ruffner Hall, 405 Emmet Street, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903.

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The Politics of Learning Disabilities || Politics, Science, and the Future of Learning Disabilities