Northwest Spring

Rainy Day on the Palouse: Music to Study By

My Latest Daily News Editorial: How effective are charter schools?

Public education in America is in a fallen, corrupt state and charter schools are the imminent savior of our American way of life; that is if we believe the hype from the raft of educational documentaries released in 2010 like “Waiting for Superman”; “The Lottery”; “Teached”; and “The Cartel”. According to these much ballyhooed films the American system of public education is going down the toilet, and charter schools are a big part of the prescription.

When we moved to Moscow in 2006, we enrolled our daughter in kindergarten at Moscow Charter School (MCS) on the recommendation of some community members. I still recall our first visit to the MCS campus in March 2006; although the academic achievement of MCS students was above average, I was primarily impressed by the community and competency displayed by the teachers and students. In 2007 my wife became president of the Parent Advisory Team at MCS, and in 2008 I joined the MCS Board of Directors. My tenure on the MCS Board taught me many valuable, bittersweet lessons.

Contrary to popular belief, charter schools are public schools and are funded by public dollars. The simplest way to describe how charters differ from “regular” public schools is that they trade funding for flexibility. Charter schools are able to stretch a buck further than most “regular” public schools. This is both a good and a bad thing. Charter schools receive the basic per pupil allotment from the state of Idaho but are unable to benefit from monies raised through local levies. School districts in Idaho were able to absorb drastic education cuts last year through local levy money, but not charter schools. Thus charter schools are hit much harder in difficult financial times than regular public schools.

In spite of these funding discrepancies, most charter schools in Idaho still offer smaller class sizes and more diverse programming than regular public schools. For example, the teacher to pupil ratio at MCS is about 20 to 1, significantly lower than most public elementary schools in Idaho. MCS, through donations and community support also continues to offer foreign language, arts, P.E., drama, music, and technology programming, whereas many public elementary schools in Idaho have seen the slow elimination of many of these programs. Tom Luna’s proposed agenda for reform will surely see the elimination of many more of these programs in the future along with an exponential increase in class size in most regular public schools in Idaho.

Despite their relative efficiency and diverse programs charter schools are, unfortunately, no better at increasing student achievement than regular public schools. Last year, a major longitudinal study by the U.S. Department of Education showed that over the past 8 years, the testing and achievement results at charter schools are on par with other public schools; charter schools are no better and no worse. Certainly there are shining examples of outstanding charter schools that challenge this finding, but there are also shining examples of “regular” public schools that challenge the notion that all schools in America are failing our children.

Where charter schools really shine is in the creation of a committed community of learners. Research over the past 10 years, while critical of the scholastic value of charter schools, has shown that students, teachers, and parents are more connected and involved in the day-to-day activities of the school. Regular public schools have a tendency to lose kids and families because of their large size and bureaucratic mazes; charter schools are small enough that parents can get involved with every aspect of their child’s education. Successful charter schools have a committed core of parents and teachers who are invested in the success of that school, and although that’s not an element of excellence that Tom Luna or the federal government is interested in measuring, it is the primary reason why, for me and my family, we choose the charter school.

Music for CORE 105/155: The Monsters We Make

"What Is Normal" Core Discovery Class ITunes Mix

November Editorial: On Education Policy, the Tea Party, and ME!

I think that it’s important to point out that one of the strongest messages delivered by the electorate last week is: Education is not important to Idahoans.  Idahoans reelected the only governor in the history of Idaho to cut public education funding, a superintendent of public instruction who has no experience in the classroom, and many of the legislators who shepherded these cuts through the legislature.  Thankfully, here in Latah County, we retained legislators who value public education and are strong advocates for our schools…but, this past election also highlighted a strange political divide around the issue of public education.

I freely admit that my political leanings tend to the left and, like many others in Latah County, I am not a really big fan of the Tea Party movement and its anti-government libertarian agenda, but as I began to notice Gresham Bouma’s “Burma Shave” signs I found myself agreeing with his message about education.  Me, a liberal intellectual, agreeing with a Tea Party Republican about public education policy!  I couldn’t believe it at first, but I have come to accept that Bouma’s message about local control is of the utmost importance if the American public school system is to survive.

Since the Reagan administration, the federal government has slowly expanded its reach into educational policy.  Reagan’s original intent was to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, but the release of a scathing report by his handpicked National Commission on Excellence in Education titled “A Nation at Risk” backfired.  “A Nation at Risk” argued for increased federal oversight and touched off a political tidal wave of increasingly heavy-handed federal education mandates.  The most recent of these being the infamous No Child Left Behind, currently due for reauthorization by the new Congress.

Education policy is now dictated by politicians who see public education as a tool to promote their agendas and influence the electorate.  The past twenty-five years of federal policy has removed educational decision-making from the hands of professional educators and has perpetuated the mindset that “those who can do, and those who can’t teach”.   Our political system has devalued and deprofessionalized educators.  Decisions about curriculum, assessment, classroom management, and more are now made by the least qualified: politicians and interest groups. 

Education policy has homogenized curricula and assessment across the country because politicians don’t trust educators.   We have schools obsessed by content standards and yearly test scores.  Schools across the country are now driven by what students (supposedly) need to learn, instead of teaching students how to learn.  Knowledge has been politicized through increased federal and state oversight of the curriculum.  Politicians can dictate what they think students should know, but this is an amateur approach to education that divorces the content of education from the process of learning.  Trained educators wouldn’t make this mistake, but they are forced to work within an educational system that requires them to live with this mistake every day.

Idaho is no different.  Despite our collective tendency to distrust the federal government, we have elected officials who support and perpetuate educational mandates that erode the authority and professionalism of our teachers and administrators.  Teachers and students have become political pawns upon whose back Governor Otter and the Legislature balance the budget.  The State Department of Education is obsessively preoccupied with the costly pursuit of ensuring compliance with federal mandates, and meanwhile my daughter has to bring home roughly stapled photocopies of reading books because there are only 7 books for her whole first grade class.  

So, if anything I’ve learned something through the past election cycle it is:  1) Mr. Bouma and I may have something in common.  I think we might agree that allowing communities, educators, and parents to take a more active, collaborative role in running schools is a better alternative to the direction we are currently heading, and 2) never underestimate the educational value of a well-placed, pithy “Bouma Shave” sign.

My Latest Newspaper Editorial: Sheltered Workshops Tarnish ADA's Intent

Here's the original: http://www.dnews.com/story/Opinion/54215/

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act.  The passage of the ADA by the George H.W. Bush administration was seen as a landmark civil rights policy for people with disabilities and was touted as a step toward ending discrimination on the basis of ability in the United States. Although the ADA has provided impetus for many important changes, the overall intent of the law has not been fulfilled.

As a researcher in the field of disability studies, I am very interested in the origins of attitudes toward individuals with disabilities and other physical differences. Over the years I have consistently identified a disturbing undercurrent of bitterness toward individuals with disabilities. A couple of years ago I spoke with a group of teachers from across Idaho about students with disabilities, and I was honestly shocked by some of their responses. One teacher said: "The handicapped kids give me a job, but I often wonder if I'm wasting my time. Most of the kids I work with won't grow up to have jobs, pay taxes, or contribute to the community; they will just be a burden on the system when they grow up." To be fair, this sentiment is widely held by many across our community and country. 

We live in a culture that is hopelessly preoccupied with physical perfection, and we are quick to judge those who appear or behave differently. We also live in a country that equates an individual's social worth with "productivity" - we glorify those who can generate/accumulate capital and look good while doing it. These distorted values leave many of us disillusioned and demoralized, but it also provides the energy for perpetuating destructive stereotypes about individuals with disabilities as unproductive, helpless and objects of pity. 

The ADA was drafted to combat the discrimination and prejudice that historically has relegated people with disabilities to the role of recipients of charity. The overall intent of the ADA was to extend basic civil rights protections to individuals with disabilities who experience discrimination in employment, housing, transportation, education and community life. The idea was to change society's treatment of people with disabilities, and to provide the legal recognition of individuals with disabilities as equal, productive members of American society. 

The ADA dramatically altered the urban landscape for individuals with disabilities in larger cities - curb cuts, ramps and accessible public transportation are now important elements of the U.S. urban geography, but individuals with disabilities in rural areas, and especially Idaho, still have to deal with a widespread dearth of public transportation, accessible homes and businesses, community resources and viable employment opportunities. Unfortunately, Idaho is a state that is severely underdeveloped in the area of viable employment opportunities for people with disabilities.

Nationally, the rate of unemployment for people with disabilities is an astounding 63.2 percent. In Idaho the rate of unemployment for individuals with disabilities is 57.4 percent, according a 2009 report issued by the Center on Disability Statistics and Demographics. Admittedly, Idaho is doing marginally better than the national average, but Idaho's numbers can be deceiving. Idaho is a state that still supports a large sheltered workshop industry where people with disabilities are employed for extremely low pay in dead-end, grindingly boring jobs. Most sheltered workshops also are exempt from minimum wage laws, a fact that makes them one of the sole bastions of modern slave labor in the U.S.

Sheltered workshops are counterproductive to the intent of the ADA. People with disabilities deserve the opportunity to hold meaningful, community-based jobs and to be viewed as truly productive members of their communities and the state. Idaho has a moral imperative to address the disability employment situation in our state. The ADA is a good foundation, but it doesn't change attitudes or provide jobs. As disability activist Mary Johnson has noted: "A law cannot guarantee what a culture will not give."

Students Come to UI Horribly Underprepared

My Town Crier Editorial--Moscow Daily News: February 10, 2010.  

See the original story here: http://www.dnews.com/archived-story/Opinion/95708/

For the past three years it has been my privilege to teach in the University of Idaho Core Discovery program.  Each year I look forward to meeting the new crop of first-year students.   I love to see their passion for the adventures of college life; but, from a pedagogical perspective, I have also learned to dread the first few weeks of class.  At the beginning of every semester, like clockwork, I inevitably get the same question from my students: “Is this going to be on the test?”  

I take great pains to inform my students that I don’t believe in tests, but prefer to assess their learning through reflective journaling, critical essays, and research papers, but that response makes them very nervous and creates tremendous tension in the classroom.  The anxiety level reaches fever pitch when I give them their first assignment, usually a variation on the “This I Believe” essay format made popular by Edward R. Murrow in the 1950’s and revived by NPR several years ago.  There are always a handful of students that rise to the challenge, but the vast majority struggle to complete the assignment.  Most students provide me with a generic essay that tells me more about what they have been told they should believe than what they really think.

Every year it is more and more difficult to see my students struggle with expressing and understanding themselves.  The rigidly prescriptive requirements of NCLB and the alienating nature of standards-based curriculum is the primary reason why so many students come to the university unprepared for the academic demands of college courses.  Regardless of how they perform on high school exit exams, like the WASL or ISAT, students are still coming to the university horribly underprepared. 

The 2009 ACT College Readiness Report indicates that only 21 percent of students meet the knowledge and skill benchmarks in reading, writing, math, and science required to succeed in entry-level college courses.   In an interview on February 6, 2010 U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan cited the statistic that 60% of college students have to take remedial courses in Math or English before they can adequately compete at the college level.   Current educational methods in U.S. public schools alienate students by focusing on discrete, measurable, learning outcomes that are decontextualized and focused on getting students to pass standardized tests like the WASL and ISAT in the interest of keeping schools’ scores high enough to avoid official sanctions while continuing to move students through with the lowest cost possible.  This focus on a single homogenized curriculum necessitates the marginalization of diverse voices and perspectives, creating students with narrow worldviews and little connection to place or community.  For many students learning has become a rote, mechanical exercise while the creativity and critical thinking skills, so essential to success at the college level, have been removed from the entire K-12 educational enterprise.

The Core Curriculum at the University of Idaho is committed to challenging and supporting this first generation of NCLB students through creative, interdisciplinary curricula that requires them to think about their place in their communities and their identity in the context of a broader, more diverse world of ideas; but the Core Curriculum at the University of Idaho is a program that is hanging by a thread.  Since its inception over 10 years ago the Core has had to beg and borrow from other colleges to maintain its status and solvency.  The Core Curriculum has become an easy target for administrators and faculty who see it as a drain on limited resources that could be used to hedge against deeper departmental cuts in these years of tight budgets.  But the Core Curriculum has a proven track record of promoting student retention and future success at the University of Idaho.   It has never been more important that first-year students at the University of Idaho experience an outreach-based pedagogy that challenges the technocratic methods they have grown accustomed to in the public schools.  In my opinion it’s one of the few programs that might help them recover their humanity and reinstill the wonder and passion of learning.

Monster Music Mix...for my Monsters!

So, here's my annual music mix that I make for my Monsters students. As much as I would like to provide each student with this music, I am suspicious and wary of copyright and filesharing issues. This is the best I can do...but many will find it interesting, of that I am sure!

Twenty Two Years Ago Today I Froze...

Almost twenty-two years ago, to the day at this exact time (9:30 pm), I was huddled under a snow-heavy willow tree seeking shelter from the vicious and incessant wind along Fossil Creek, deep in the White Mountains National Recreation Area. I was 15, and very, very cold…hypothermia had set in a couple hours earlier and I had passed the point of shivering. I couldn’t feel my hands, one of my feet had severe frostbite, and I had just about given up hope of getting warm. I was huddled therewith my father and we were both trying to keep each other sane and awake so that we would at least survive another hour until Dick Bouts came back on his snowmachine to carry us to the Windy Gap cabin where my younger brother Andy, hopefully, had a fire and warm sleeping bags waiting for us.

It was -45 degrees with a 20-25 mph wind and we had been in those conditions all day, trying to break trail with our snowmachines into the Windy Gap cabin. We had started at 10:00 in the morning, just as the sun broke the horizon and we had battled the elements all day, exhausting both our bodies and spirits. Around noon my snow machine had bogged down in a new patch of overflow on Wickersham Creek and, foolishly, I had stepped off the snowmachine to pull it onto more solid ice. I sunk in up to my knee and filled my right bunny boot with slush and water. I hated wet feet and the sloshing and squishing in my boot drove me crazy. By 2:00 pm we reached the Colorado Creek cabin where we intended to eat lunch and warm up before pushing on to the Windy Gap cabin for the night.

The Colorado Creek cabin is located next to a small kettle pond in a wide, windswept patch of tundra. As Andy and I broke out our peanut butter sandwiches, frozen stiff and solid, my Dad and Dick Bouts went out to find the woodpile for the cabin to light the woodstove. The plan was to eat lunch and allow me to dry out my boot and socks before proceeding to Windy Gap. In anticipation of the imminent warmth a fire would afford I took off my bunny boot and socks and put my cold foot in by parka to warm up. Just after I had removed my boot the adults returned with the devastating news that there was no wood to be found. To make things worse, the heavy snow over Christmas had buried all of the small black spruce that might have been cut for firewood in years with less snow. So, there I was with my wet, cold foot out in the -45 degree cabin, a pair of socks frozen stiff, and a bunny boot glazed inside and outside with ice. The next potential chance for warmth was 26 snowbound miles away at the Windy Gap cabin.

I had no choice but to don my frozen socks and boot. We all knew that the chances of my foot reheating the boot were next to none and we drove our snowmachines over the unbroken trail like bats out of hell in the hopes that the minutes we saved would lessen the inevitable damage to my foot, but we were stopped by deep snow and low gas almost 7 miles from the cabin. I remember sitting at the top of the ridge that dropped precipitously into the Fossil Creek drainage with 42 miles of trail behind us and 7 miles of unbroken powder ahead. We debated the pros and cons of going back or forging ahead and decided that our best bet lay in pushing on with one snowmachine to Windy Gap cabin to conserve gas. It was decided that my dad and I would scout and compact the trail with snowshoes down to Fossil Creek (almost 2 miles), Dick Bouts would follow our trail on an old BLM SkiDoo Tundra with Andy.

Once we got down to Fossil Creek, the overflow had created a smooth, new sheen of ice that Dick and Andy could follow without our help. It was decided that Dick and Andy would proceed to the Windy Gap cabin. Andy would remain at the cabin and get a fire started and Dick would then ferry my dad and I to the cabin, one by one, depending upon who was worse off. So, that’s why we found ourselves huddled beneath that small willow bower on a frigid January evening. I remember sitting there with my dad, the cold moonlight casting long shadows over the deep snow, straining our ears listening for the distant whine of the old Tundra coming back along the creek bed for us. I don’t remember much beyond this…neither does my dad.

My father and I haven’t talked much of this evening and I remember very little beyond being in the cabin, lying on an old moth-eaten mattress next to the fire crying as my frozen foot slowly began to unthaw. I am certain that very few people have experienced the sensation of warm blood flowing back into a frozen appendage, bursting the frozen, damaged blood vessels as it goes. It’s and excruciating experience and results in significant tissue damage. I eventually fell asleep, or passed out…I can’t remember which, but awoke the next morning in Windy Gap cabin with a coating of ice over my sleeping bag and a right foot that was almost three times its normal size. Our initial plan had been to head back to the Elliot Highway that morning and get back to town, but it quickly became apparent that my swollen foot was not going to fit in my boot. So we decided to stay at Windy Gap.

We ended up staying at Windy Gap for 4 days. We lived off old cans of Dinty Moore beef stew left from the winter before and by rationing our snacks. We spent that days stoking the fire to keep the -40 temperatures at bay, playing cards, reading and rereading old Outdoor Life magazines, and telling each other stories and jokes. In the evening we’d look out to see the most spectacular array of stars and we’d try and identify the few constellations we knew. The distant howl of wolves were haunting and left an indelible impression on me; I recall not being scared, in fact it was comforting to know that there were other living creatures out in the cold and I felt reassured by the nightly chorus of the wolves.

After our fourth day at Windy Gap the swelling in my foot had gone down enough to allow me to put on my boot again; it had also warmed up to a balmy -10 degrees so we packed up and ferried gear and people to the snowmachines we had left at the top of the Fossil Creek drainage. We unthawed our snowmachines and safely returned to our cars, parked near the Tolovana River on the Elliot Highway, but I still remember this trip every winter. When the temperature dips I still feel it in my right foot. My right foot has never recovered from the tissue damage and when the temperature falls below freezing my foot begins to get cold. My wife still doesn’t understand why I wear two pairs of socks on my right foot in the winter, and despite my best attempts my right foot still gets numb. So, at this time of year my foot always takes me back to that frigid evening on Fossil Creek when I realized that I was alone and alive.

UN: People With Disabilities Face Huge Obstacles

A great article that is worth the effort to read...disability rights really are the final phase of the civil rights movement.

The Problems with Special Ed by Jay P. Greene on National Review Online

The Problems with Special Ed by Jay P. Greene on National Review Online

This is an outstanding article that is worth a read if you get a chance. Although I don't want to totally agree with everything Dr. Greene says here, I do believe he has a point and I am a strong advocate for redefining the IDEA disability categories and revisiting programs for underprivileged and at-risk students.
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Elevator Pitch and Blog Focus

So, I'm really going to make an effort to write and post something here for the next month. It's a 31 day challenge that I've taken to strengthening and updating my online presence...dorky? Yes! Necessary? Yes! Will it help me think through some issues and keep focused on my scholarship? Yes! So, what do I have to lose? A few minutes a day?

The first challenge is an attempt to define the focus of this blog. Although I know the title indicates that the blog is focused on Disability Studies at UI, I'm not so sure that's what I want it to be...so, I'm going to try this elevator pitch method to define my focus.

So, here's my rough draft: "Disability Studies at the University of Idaho provides thought-provoking content and ideas on creating inclusive communities for scholars and everyday people...because inclusion means everyone!"

What do you think? Too cheesy? Too short? Too broad? Feedback is much appreciated!

More Thoughts on Inclusion

As I was writing today I was feeling unusually blocked in my progress and was having difficulty summarizing some key ideas I've been working with. After some reading and pondering I hammered out this little gem about the "site" of school reform:

What we need to address is how we prepare school administrators and teachers to change the system from within. Too often our teacher and administrator preparation programs merely reflect the current realities of "schooling" in America, and by focusing on those realities they inadvertently replicate them. We need a new model of personnel preparation that develops teachers and leaders who are skilled at bringing the community, culture, and context into the classroom; thereby acknowledging the interdependence and, paradoxically, the individuality of the students. Schools should not be "liminal spaces" suspended between hegemonic values and individual students' cultural identities. We need teachers and administrators who can create spaces that value students' "place" in the world while also giving them the tools to navigate and, if possible, recreate the hegemonic ideals that promote exclusion and cultural homogeneity.

It's still pretty rough, but I think it gets the idea across...your thoughts?

My Comments on Inclusion as a Discussant in Today's Session on Creating Inclusive Schools

I had the opportunity to be a Discussant in an AERA session on creating inclusive schools this afternoon. I really enjoyed reading the 4 papers and then trying to tie them together; they were disparate and engaging. I thought that some of you might enjoy my thoughts on these issues too, so I'm providing them here:



“Inclusion, much more than integration or mainstreaming, is embedded in a range of contexts—political and social, as well as psychological and educational—in noting that inclusive education is more that simply “integration”, it is important to stress that inclusive education is really about extending the comprehensive ideal in education. …[we should be] less concerned with children’s supposed ‘special needs’ and more concerned with developing an educational system in which equity is striven for and diversity is welcomed.” (Thomas & O’Hanlon, 2004). Certainly all the papers in this session agree on this point. Thankfully we’re all talking about changes within the system, which would seem to indicate that the various student populations discussed in these papers have been “integrated”—meaning that there is some level of acceptance of “these students” within the current educational context—but I think we can all agree that we are still some ways away from genuine “inclusion”…and so the question becomes how do we take the narratives, data, and insights from the research presented today to guide us in reaching that next level?



One of the major challenges to inclusive schooling is that we have an educational system that is based upon an acultural, technocratic ideal that has evolved minimally since the industrial revolution…certainly the facades have changed but the underlying structure and ethos have remained largely the same…rooted within hegemonic Western ideals of progress, homogeneity, and technical rationality…ideas that do not mesh well with diverse cultures, learners, families, or communities.



Schooling as a neutral, “acultural” and “apolitical” phenomenon is a fallacy and destructive to inclusive teaching…students whose individual identitied are suspended in a liminal political or legal space cannot possibly contextualize their learning on their own…because is many cases there is no context…schools need to create the context for learning…not deny it…



Sometimes the only way to get the hegemonic technocracy to acknowledge diversity and personal needs is to “resist” as pointed out by Kathleen Kosobud…now this is not sabotage of the educational process…it is constructive resistance that pushes the system outside of its tendency to homogenize, if just momentarily. Resistance in the form of narrative is certainly one means of making change, but as we see in Kathleen’s work, and as I’ve seen in my own work, parents, students, and advocates occasionally have to throw themselves upon the gears of the machine to get it to stop and acknowledge their individuality…and it is in this inability of the system to see the individual that a lo



Within the realm of research we deal with an interesting phenomenon with regards to this type of research. We study and advocate for inclusion and yet through the process of our study and advocacy we frequently end up highlighting the differences that are cited as the basis for segregation and marginalization in the first place. In the case of SNO’s and paraprofessionals, they play a valuable and irreplaceable in the CURRENT system, and yet the need for this particular role in schools is indicative of a much broader systemic issue for which the paraprofessional is just a band-aid. They help marginalized students navigate the system that marginalized them in the first place, calling attention to the students who need their help in the first place and thereby creating an additional social perception that the student is different and outside of the “normal” classroom community. “Integration” cannot be accomplished while simultaneously calling attention to difference. This is an extremely difficult balance to strike in the U.S., and an even more daunting task in Asia. Having worked in Taiwan with people with disabilities for several years I understand the stigma and overwhelming social barriers that families and individuals with disabilities face when trying to achieve some semblance of a normal life. As paraprofessionals in Singapore I can completely understand the struggle to identify oneself between competing political and social demands…one to maintain, the other to disrupt.



We are clearly all seeing educational systems that have an tremendous amount of institutional inertia behind them; the educational systems have incestuously reproduced professionals and administrators who, either knowingly or unknowingly, are trained to help the system maintain status quo, and the status quo that our systems maintain, as pointed out earlier is based upon an outdated and hegemonic ideal that is inscribed within the classroom, the school, and the entire educational industry. The school is too often removed from the day-to-day cultural existence of the students…so the culture of the students’ homes, neighborhoods, and communities need to be brought more into the school. I certainly think that the historic review of the James Adams Community Schools certainly has a lot to commend for future educational thought. Just as we are seeing an explosion in the locovore and organic gardening movements as local action-based remedies for global warming, so too do I think we need to look at a “back-to-basics”, community-centered approach to address global learning in local contexts.



Inclusion doesn’t just happen in the school…inclusion is a holistic construct that must also encompass community. Several years ago while I was helping develop a self-advocacy skills curriculum for students with disabilities in Alaska, I had the opportunity to visit a remote school in Interior Alaska that served a community of Yupik Eskimos on the vast alluvial plains of the Yukon River. Having worked with students with disabilities for 7 years prior, I had very clear expectations for how the students with disabilities would be treated at this school. In most schools that I had been in, students with disabilities were segregated; formally by attending separate “special” classes, and informally in social situations by their peers were uncomfortable around a student who was “different”.

As I spent time in this particular rural school I noticed that the students with disabilities were not viewed as separate by their peers and were not taught in segregated classrooms. They were hanging out with friends, eating lunch together, and walking to and from school together. On the surface, it appeared that for all intents and purposes the students with disabilities in this school were not viewed as “different” or “disabled” by their peers.

After school let out for the day, I found an opportunity to briefly talk with a group of boys leaving the school. I said to the group: “I noticed that you guys have a few friends who are different, do you hang out with them when you are at home too?” The boys looked at me quizzically, and I queried them more directly: “Why do you hang out with the kids with disabilities?” The boys thought about that for a brief second and then the eldest one of the group looked me straight in the eyes, an uncommon and confrontational gesture in Yupik culture, and said: “Because they’re one of us.” In this one statement lies the “esprit de corps” discussed by Christine and Travis, but it is much more…it embodies an ethic of interdependence that doesn’t see diversity or difference as threatening but vital to the cultural richness of the local community…it sees the success of the classroom, school, and community as hinging upon the success of its individuals and vice versa...