Open Society

This would be troubling enough if evidence and science were employed to justify all sorts of educational approaches, as seems to be the case with a label like “best practice.” But these words are almost always used to defend traditionalist practices such as direct instruction and control-based interventions derived from Skinnerian behaviorism such as Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) and Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS). A kind of ideological fervor tends to fuel each of these things, whereas actual empirical support for them could be described as somewhere between dubious and negligible.7

At best, then, there are important questions to ask about evidence that’s cited in favor of a given proposal, particularly when it’s intended to justify a one-size-fits-all teaching strategy. At worst, the term evidence-based is used not to invite questions but to discourage them, much as a religious person might seek to end all discussion by declaring that something is “God’s will.” Too often, the invocation of “science” to defend traditionalist education reflects an agenda based more on faith than on evidence.

Even more disturbing is the fact that the term evidence-based sometimes functions not as a meaningful modifier but just as a slogan, an all-purpose honorific like “all-natural” on a food label. Rather than denoting the existence of actual evidence, its purpose may be to brand those who disagree with one’s priorities as “unscientific” and pressure them to fall in line.6

But some people take an extreme, reductionist view of what qualifies as data, dismissing whatever can’t be reduced to numbers, or ignoring inner experience and focusing only on observable behaviors, or attempting to explain all of human life in terms of neurobiology. All of these have troubling implications for education, leaving us with a shallow understanding of the field. People who talk about the “science” of reading or learning, for example, rarely attend to student motivation or the fact that “all learning is a social process shaped by and infused with a system of cultural meaning.”2

Often it turns out that “effective,” along with other terms of approbation (“higher achievement,” “positive outcomes,” “better results”) signify nothing more than scoring well on a standardized test. Or having successfully memorized a list of facts. Or producing correct answers in a math class (without grasping the underlying principles). Or being able to recognize and pronounce words correctly (without necessarily understanding their meaning).

Even one of these qualifiers, let alone all of them, signifies that evidence of an “on-balance” effect for a given intervention doesn’t allow us to claim that it’s a sure bet for all kids.

so many literacy experts are skeptical of, if not alarmed by, what’s being presented as “evidence-based” in their field.

“Effective teaching is not just about using whatever science says ‘usually’ works best,” Richard Allington reminds us. “It is all about finding out what works best for the individual child and the group of children in front of you.”3

medical research is “trending toward more individualized diagnoses and treatments…[since] patients may differ greatly in the response to certain drugs or how their immune systems work….But the so-called ‘science of reading’ is moving in the opposite direction – toward a monolithic and standard approach.”4

Science complicates more often than it simplifies, which is your first clue that the use of “evidence based” or “the science of….” to demand that teachers must always do this or never do that — or even that they should be legally compelled to do this (or forbidden from doing that) — represents the very antithesis of good science.

Explicit academic instruction in preschools, too, is presented as evidence-based even though, once again, actual evidence not only fails to support this approach but warns of its possible harms.12

“the use of problem solving as a means of developing conceptual understanding [in math] was abandoned and replaced by direct instruction of skills” in California, and this move was similarly rationalized by “the use of the code phrase research-based instruction” even though the available research actually tended to point in the opposite direction (and still does). Indeed, Jacob added, the phrase research-based was just “a way of promoting instruction aligned with ideology.”1

Evidence of an effect at what cost? It’s not just that restricting evidence to what can be seen or measured limits our understanding of teaching and learning. It’s that doing so ends up supporting the kind of instruction that can alienate students and sap their interest in learning. Thus does schooling become not only less pleasant but considerably less effective. This exemplifies a broader phenomenon that Yong Zhao describes as a tendency to overlook unanticipated, harmful consequences. Even if a certain way of teaching did produce the desired effects, he argues, an inattention to its damaging side effects means that what’s sold to us as “evidence based” can sometimes do more harm than good.5

I’m watching kids in Self-Directed Education grow up with substantially less trauma – it’s making a big difference. “Pathological Demand Avoidance” provides a litmus test for non-coercive education.

My younger child is a PDAer. My experience is that SDE is ethically appropriate and helpful for all kids, deeply liberating for Neurodivergent kids and 100% necessary for PDAers. The defining feature of SDE is not in the way the child learns e.g. curriculum, project based, free exploration or whatever. The defining feature is that the child is the genuine decision maker.

we are systematically training teachers and ABA therapists alike, who may have completely the right intentions, how to indoctrinate neurodivergent students into this transactional world that is not built for anyone except the privileged, truly. Public education was designed to indoctrinate, not to educate, so I am afraid as hard as educators might try, the system just doesn’t work.

SDE does not attempt, in fact carefully avoids, trying to manipulate attention.

Pathologising labels facilitate the “free” unlimited imposition of demands from self-declared cultural authorities on those who are considered insignificant by the mono-cult. In this context the institutional landscape of cultural authorities relies on the internalised ableism of parents, educators, and medical professionals to perpetuate the mono-cult. Internalised ableism is the Achilles Heel of the mono-cult.

When disabled folks talk about crip time, sometimes we just mean that we're late all the time—maybe because we need more sleep than nondisabled people, maybe because the accessible gate in the train station was locked. But other times, when we talk about crip time, we mean something more beautiful and forgiving. We mean, as my friend Margaret Price explains, we live our lives with a "flexible approach to normative time frames" like work schedules, deadlines, or even just waking and sleeping. My friend Alison Kafer says that "rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds." I have embraced this beautiful notion for many years, living within the embrace of a crip time that lets me define my own "normal."

Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings. Some of us contend with the impairments of old age while still young; some of us are treated like children no matter how old we get. The medical language of illness tries to reimpose the linear, speaking in terms of the chronic, the progressive, and the terminal, of relapses and stages. But we who occupy the bodies of crip time know that we are never linear, and we rage silently—or not so silently—at the calm straightforwardness of those who live in the sheltered space of normative time.

Crip time is grief time. It is a time of loss, and of the crushing undertow that accompanies loss. I lost my mother when I was twenty and she was fifty-two, to a cancer that she had lived with for fifteen years. But those numbers don't say anything about the way the days slowed and swelled unbearably around her death, or how the years piled up afterward, always too much, never enough. When I fell ill just two years later, both doctors and relatives wanted to believe it was the result of my stored-up grief, my refusal to stop mourning my mother and move on with my life. Freud wrote in "Mourning and Melancholia" that "normal mourning" resolves on its own and needs no intervention. Only melancholia is a true illness, mourning without end, without resolution. The bodymind refuses to let go of the lost object, and deforms itself in the process.

In Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America, Dana Luciano traces how grief time emerged with modernity as a temporal and affective state juxtaposed to progressive, mechanical time. She writes that "grief was aligned with a sensibility that sought to provide time with a 'human' dimension, one that would be collective rather than productive, repetitive rather than linear, reflective rather than forward-moving." This sounds very much like the notion of crip time that Alison and Margaret were talking about. But disability scholars like Alison, Margaret, and I tend to celebrate this idea of crip time, to relish its non-linear flexibility, to explore its power and its possibility. What would it mean for us also to do what queer scholar Heather Love calls "feeling backward"? For us to hold on to that celebration, that new way of being, and yet also allow ourselves to feel the pain of crip time, its melancholy, its brokenness? For crip time is broken time. It requires us to break in our bodies and minds to new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and feeling and moving through the world. It forces us to take breaks, even when we don't want to, even when we want to keep going, to move ahead. It insists that we listen to our bodyminds so closely, so attentively, in a culture that tells us to divide the two and push the body away from us while also pushing it beyond its limits. Crip time means listening to the broken languages of our bodies, translating them, honoring their words.

Crip time is sick time. If you work a 9-5, 40-hour-a-week job, what is defined as full-time work in the United States, then (if you're lucky) you accumulate a certain number of sick days. There is always a strange arithmetic to this process: maybe for every eight hours you work, you accrue one sick hour. Or maybe one for every twenty work hours, or every forty. It's never a one-to-one ratio: you have to work hard to earn the time to be sick. The assumption, of course, is that we will not be too sick too often.

The essay Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time by Dr. Ellen Samuels resonated deeply with me in the Before Times and it speaks to me even more deeply now from the vantage point of a newly nonspeaking person. “ Crip time is broken time,” Samuels writes. “It requires us to break in our bodies and minds to new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and feeling and moving through the world. It forces us to take breaks, even when we don't want to, even when we want to keep going, to move ahead. It insists that we listen to our bodyminds so closely, so attentively, in a culture that tells us to divide the two and push the body away from us while also pushing it beyond its limits. Crip time means listening to the broken languages of our bodies, translating them, honoring their words.”

To crip something is to bend, compress, twist, subvert, and imbue disabled wisdom into systems, institutions, and cultures. As I’ve done before as a physically disabled person, I will now crip the world mightily with the multiple perspectives I have as a disabled, nonspeaking, ventilator-dependent, high-risk Asian American woman. It takes a tremendous amount of emotional and physical labor to crip the world. Like a baby snail, I am slowly becoming more involved with the AAC-using community, exploring and discovering new branches of lived experience. From what I’ve learned, the power of community is more important than any software update to my text-to-speech app or another new intervention.