Distinguishing Tool from Telos: the role of IEPs in classical education
Amy Richards
Special educators love acronyms. Or at the least they find themselves swimming in a sea of them. This I learned when reading my way into the field of special education nearly a decade ago. At the heart of the practice of special education in the United States stands one acronym in particular: IEP, or Individualized Education Program. This document weds two more acronyms: FAPE and LRE, the two tenets of IDEA law (yet another acronym!). The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act—a 1990 update of the EHA (Education for All Handicapped Children Act) of 1975—requires that public schools offer a Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) in the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE) possible for all learners. The vehicle through which schools demonstrate their compliance with this balance between offering an appropriate (or effective) education while not restricting a student’s interaction with his age peers is the IEP. The purpose of an IEP is at least fourfold: 1. to specify areas of need wherein a student falls below an established “grade level” in particular skills; 2. to establish targeted goals for the student in progressing towards closing this gap; 3. to delineate required interventions for addressing achievement of this progress; and 4. to establish procedures for measuring this progress. In writing, authorizing, and complying with IEPs for all students deemed to fall within the thirteen disability categories delineated in the IDEA, a school ensures that it is following the law with regards to providing an appropriate public education to these students.
But why rehearse all of this, which is likely well-worn ground for many of the readers of On Classical Education? And why lead any uninitiated readers into the alphabet soup of special education law? What has any of this to do with classical education in particular? Here we come to the crux of the matter: classical educators who serve students with disabilities and learning differences within the constraints of the IEP process often find themselves in the midst of a deep and difficult tension between competing models of education. Indeed, the presence of so many acronyms in special education law may serve as a warning flare to classical educators, alerting them to this tension. While there is certainly a specialized vocabulary of classical learning, as there is in any field of human study, the acronym heavy parlance of special education law does not lend itself to a focus on classical education’s goal of unfolding of a unique human person through education. Rather, it directs the educator’s focus to the achievement of specific useful skills through a model of efficiency and compliance. Beauty seems a distant concern.
In what follows, we will map the contours of the tension between the model of education implicit in the IEP process and the classical model. In so doing, we will reveal that this tension is not a direct contradiction, but rather what Martin Luther King, Jr. describes as a “constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth.”[1] Indeed, considering the IEP process and classical education side by side has the potential to lead to growth in our understanding both of the nature of classical education itself and of the potentially prophetic role of classical education in the broader culture.
Before we progress any further, we must acknowledge that at the heart of the IEP process stands an indispensable and noble goal: protecting and serving children with disabilities and learning differences, whose educational needs have been so frequently overlooked. The IEP at its best facilitates an awareness of the importance of this goal by providing a process to bring it continually to the forefront of our attention. However, the legal consequences accompanying the IEP process often obscure rather than clarify our view of these students. Too easily, our goal and thus our attention can move from providing the best possible education to a particular child to protecting the school from legal liability. Meant to help us to see and serve the individual student, the legal threat behind the IEP can create fear in teachers and schools.
Fear is a powerful motivator. The threat of legal action creates an immediate fear that makes it all-too-easy to mistake IEP compliance for the overarching purpose of education. In order to avoid liability and secure funding, educators must focus on proving they have completed the required interventions and that a student is making progress towards specific skill-based goals on schedule. This fear-based focus on compliance makes it difficult to attend to the growth of a particular student towards truth, beauty, and goodness that lies at the heart of the classical vision of education.
Further, there is an immediate danger in the act of measuring and quantifying itself that stands at the center of the IEP process. As philosopher Simone Weil reminds us, “there is nothing so clear and so simple as a row of figures.” The production of clear, measured data “easily manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is so much less.”[2] Classical education’s goal of forming a student towards her particular vocation in the world by awakening her to a poetic knowledge of its beauty and the possibilities of goodness inherent in her action within it is a complex endeavor. By comparison, leading her towards achievement of a particular score on a reading comprehension quiz is temptingly simple.
So, what is a classical charter school to do? Such schools are indeed bound by the law. And, beyond that, they do seek to offer a genuine education to students with disabilities and learning differences—the ostensible goal that launched IDEA and its predecessor from the start. The key, I suggest, is to recognize the level of necessity on which the IEP primarily operates: legal compliance designed to protect the vulnerable. We need to follow the dictates of an IEP not because it tells us all we need to know about a student, or about the nature and purpose of education: it does neither. Rather, we need to follow it because: 1. it provides us with a mechanism to check that particularly vulnerable students are not overlooked; and 2. it offers an avenue to address the foundational skills needed for these students to participate in the liberal arts, the practice of which frees their minds and bodies for seeing the true, doing the good, and participating in the beautiful. Given this limited purpose, we can see the IEP’s proper place in our purpose and praxis as classical educators. Or, perhaps more accurately, we can consider what our purpose as classical educators is, and then see what role the IEP might play in helping us to achieve this purpose within the framework of our society’s laws.
To put the point more succinctly, the Individualized Education Program (IEP) process is an educational tool rather than an educational telos. The telos, the end or purpose, of classical education is to lead each student towards his own telos—his own end or purpose, which is to take up his vocation, his calling within the world. This vocation comes to light through his training in the liberal arts, an education that allows him to be a free person able to think and act in light of the truth and thereby live a life animated by the pursuit of beauty and goodness in relationship with others. When the first question we ask of the tool of the IEP is how it can be leveraged to assist us in growing towards this telos, we place it in its proper context. In resisting the temptation to allow the simplicity of measurable goals to define the nature of education, we activate a creative tension between our legal processes and a classical understanding of the purpose of education. This tension can take us beyond a series of compliance-based acronyms to a vision of the beauty and possibilities of students with disabilities and learning differences.
[1] Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
[2] Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind, trans. Arthur Wills (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2002), 44. Italics in original.
