Mission
Everybody Advocate is a multidisciplinary collaboration of anybody and everybody who wants a better world of special education: students, special education professionals, parents, teachers, administrators, advocates, attorneys, doctors, private service providers, agencies, community, and more.
Our Mission
Our mission is to support and advance special education. We aim to increase respect, awareness, and funding for special education services and to address systemic barriers – whether bureaucratic, financial or cultural – for both students with disabilities and their educational service providers. In so doing, we also hope to improve student outcomes, better retain special education professionals and build a pipeline of future educators.
We’ve seen the cracks in the system and we are working together to close them. We seek out new ideas and opportunities to do things in better, more efficient and effective ways.
Our Philosophy
Our philosophy is that meeting the challenges of students with disabilities is key to innovation in education for all. Much like cardiologists and neurologists are specialized experts among doctors, our special education professionals work to be specialized experts among teachers. Unfortunately, education has failed to embrace a model similar to medicine, too often expecting teachers to be experts at everything while sidelining specialists and adopting lower expectations for students with disabilities.
We aim to increase respect, awareness in participation in the many fields of special education.
We believe special education is transforming and can be transformative. We believe in high standards. We believe in ambitious goals for students with well-trained specialists to support them. We believe in supportive and respectful environments for students with disabilities and their educators. What we learn from investing in and advancing special education benefits everyone.
I see public education’s treatment of special education as a lesser or separate discipline as the root of why schools have such difficulty with helping struggling learners of all kinds.
We cannot expect teachers to be experts at everything, especially in today’s rapidly changing world. Like primary care doctors would refer to specialists in medicine, teachers need to be able to reach out to educational specialists for added support.
Special education is not hospice care. It is not a service to avoid unless all else has failed. It is a collection of services to help students achieve grade level standards regardless of their disabilities. And the knowledge gained by helping our learners with the most significant challenges advances education for all.
A robust and well-implemented set of special education services is the cornerstone of all educational intervention.