posted on April 9, 2009

For low-vision students, cultivating their own relationships with classroom teachers and organizations that provide reading resources is what drives academic success.

Reading is the most difficult and time-consuming school task, yet is also how we discover and explore interests, develop our identity, and connect with the world. So it’s vital for students to know how to accomplish any reading task, regardless of deadline.

From long experience, I can tell you that when you’re legally blind (i.e. too much vision for braille, but still in need of help), literacy isn’t acquired, it’s built: you read using an internal triage system of cultivated resources that include: audio- and large-print books; e-texts, screen readers, magnification devices, personal readers, and other strategies that develop through awareness of one’s skills and needs.

Such a system could take one years to develop, as it did me, or could be outlined for a student in an hour or two.

Unfortunately special education doesn’t work this way. It shepherds rather than liberates. It’s hard to imagine a special education teacher saying, “Let’s take a morning and get you everything you need so you can get back to being a student.” Such independence might unloop that student from the cat’s cradle of coercion and compliance known as the I.E.P.

Fortunately, there is nothing special education provides that low vision students and parents can’t get on their own, usually for free, always more quickly and efficiently.

And it’s this getting, this surveying and connecting, that far beyond leveling the playing field, enables students to storm the heights: to develop a system that facilitates any reading task and fosters an identity-building spirit of exploration, confidence, and independence. Resource-conscious students get what they need immediately, are open to reading and learning opportunities beyond the I.E.P., and can easily increase academic performance while making the day-to-day management of classroom participation more efficient for teachers.

I remember the futility of my special education—peeking under a blindfold to distinguish braille dots. Braille and typing classes addressed none of my needs, but at my I.E.P meeting, the teachers told me quitting would mean no more books on tape. Five years of special education eroded my self-esteem, consumed precious time, diminished my enthusiasm for learning, and delayed for years the full development of my literacy.

The school’s justification (not without merit) was staying in a program would insure access to services and materials. The harm was not learning that I could access taped books, the most crucial component of my education, on my own.

At 17, almost by accident, I learned how to join Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic. I went on to earn a Master’s degree, read thousands of books in a variety of formats, and devoted my first book, numerous articles, and an upcoming e-book to expanding low-vision literacy.

Despite my experience, I’m not against special education and know many adults (though none with low vision) who would never have become educated without it.

In the end, it’s not about me, or about debating the efficacy of special education, but simply asking, “What does my child need to succeed in school?”

If parents knew just how accessible the essential resources are, their child’s success, with or without special education, is all but guaranteed.