Letter from our Founder: Why Everybody Advocate?

Letter from Our Founder

As a special education advocate, I started Everybody Advocate because I have a vision of how special education can be… and I think it’s a vision that you may share.

Just like we have primary care doctors and medical specialists, in the world of teaching we have general education teachers and specialized education professionals. These include: speech and language therapists, educational therapists, resource teachers, psychologists, mental health clinicians, behaviorists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, assistive technology specialists, inclusion specialists, adaptive PE, vision impairment specialists, deaf and hard of hearing specialists, paraeducators, classroom aides, and more.

We should train them, treat them, and respect them as the experts we need them to be. We should respect and promote these professions as a society.

By comparison to medicine, progress in U.S. education has been relatively stagnant over recent decades. While disability research is advancing on medical and scientific fronts, the bulk of educational research has aimed at helping the top 50% of learners to achieve even more. That focus seems to have produced more anxiety than progress and only widened equity gaps. Consider instead: How far would cardiovascular surgery have advanced if we only studied healthy hearts? Like medical research, innovation and advancement in education will come from meeting the needs of students with the greatest challenges. It will come from specialized education.

Now, for various historical and cultural reasons, special education had a rocky start. In its early days, despite good intentions, it was viewed as a place – as opposed to a collection of services – with low expectations where schools could dump kids with disabilities, some of whom were not even allowed in school until 1975. In some states, diverting kids to special education rooms became just another way to discriminate against children based on race, nationality, or foreign language. But… there was also a time when doctors were considered butchers and leeches.

We have entered a new era. Special education is not educational hospice care. It is not a place. It is a collection of services from specialized educational professionals committed to helping students achieve their full potential by addressing their unique challenges. The right services at the right time from the right person absolutely transform lives. It’s time that we recognize and build on that.

At Everybody Advocate, we believe in people. We believe in honoring their potential and ambition, while also respecting their boundaries. Everybody Advocate is committed to work collaboratively across disciplines to tackle the systemic barriers (bureaucratic, cultural and financial) that make it difficult for our students with disabilities and the staff that support them to succeed.

People often say “the system is broken” in a dismissive and hopeless way without understanding how. In trying to help our most vulnerable students, we’ve seen the cracks clearly. We’ve seen where children fall in them. We’ve also seen too many dedicated and talented professionals leave public education. Public education is one of the most important institutions we have as a country. Its survival and its improvement are both vital. Working together, we believe we can transform education to provide a better and more successful experience for students and educators alike.

Let’s work together. Please join us with your time, talent or financial contribution.

Thank you,

Christina Maehr