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  • What is "Eugenics" and How Does it Relate to Special Education?

    What is "Eugenics" and How Does it Relate to Special Education?
    2025/05/10
    Many people don't know what the word "eugenics" means, but parents of special education students will recognize the behavior associated with eugenicist thinking. Special education is not an isolated, siloed experience with no bearing on the rest of society, and history shows us that societies don’t just collapse because of a few bad actors or terrible ideas. They collapse because their systems stop evolving with the needs of their people. I have spent the last 34 years upholding democracy at the local level through special education compliance, asserting all the while that special education is the “canary in the coalmine” for the rest of our civilization. The degree to which a society is civilized is revealed by the degree to which it takes care of its most vulnerable members. When societies collapse, systems that once protected people can no longer fulfill their functions and start existing for their own benefit, causing constituent needs to become the means of perpetuating the system rather than the ends served by the system. These systems stop spiraling upward through stages of reflection, accountability, and self-correction and, instead, stagnate and drift into patterns we recognize all too well; patterns that include horrors like eugenics. What Is Eugenics, and Why Should We Be Worried? Eugenics is the scientifically discredited and morally indefensible idea that society can be “improved” by encouraging reproduction among people with “desirable” traits while suppressing or eliminating reproduction among those deemed “undesirable.” In the early 20th century this ideology fueled forced sterilizations, segregation, and systemic discrimination against the poor, disabled, mentally ill, and minority populations (NHGRI). Even after the Holocaust exposed the full horror of where eugenic thinking leads, many of its assumptions remained embedded in law, policy, and cultural attitudes. Today we are seeing a resurgence of these ideas under new guises: Coerced sterilizations of women in immigration detention centersCuts to disaster relief and public-health infrastructure that disproportionately impact marginalized communitiesErasure of tracking systems for disease, disaster, and civil-rights data, making vulnerable groups less visible and less protected These actions aren’t accidents. They are systematic attempts to decide who deserves to survive and who doesn’t, without ever saying the real intent out loud. One of the things about my tendency to use Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) in any attempt to understand behavior is that it really helps identify when actions speak louder than words, which is why I recommend that everyone have a basic understanding of ABA. It's hard to miss the function of a behavior when it's this obvious. Project 2025 Threatens Publicly Funded Special Education Project 2025 is a published blueprint backed by major political operatives that calls for dismantling federal civil-rights enforcement, including abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. Key figures inside the current administration have publicly stated that their job is to “eliminate” the Department. Project 2025 proposes to: Eliminate or severely weaken the USDOERoll back enforcement of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)Shift authority to states without guaranteeing civil-rights complianceDivert public funds to private schools that need not serve disabled students equitably So, Project 2025 and Eugenics: Here's the Link At its core, eugenics builds systems that decide whose lives are worth protecting and whose are expendable. Project 2025 follows this template by removing protections for disabled, poor, and marginalized students, making survival and success conditional on wealth, ability, and conformity. While supporters frame these moves in language about “freedom” and “efficiency,” the practical effect is to systematically privilege some groups while abandoning others. Selective protection of life, determined by productivity and conformity, is the operational definition of modern eugenics (ACLU analysis). Understanding this connection matters because it shows that the fight for special education compliance is not merely bureaucratic; it is a defense of human dignity against an organized eugenics campaign. If the rights of a nonverbal child with autism don't matter, why should anyone else's? The eugenicists refer to our most severely impacted special education students as "useless eaters," just as the Nazi's did in WWII Germany as they tossed them into concentration camps, experimented on them, and later disposed of them in gas chambers. This is How Special Education Compliance Fights Eugenics Eugenics thrives where human dignity is rationed. Special education compliance, by contrast, mandates recognition of each individual’s inherent worth, no matter what it takes to give them equitable access to everything that everyone else can access. The IDEA requires ...
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    12 分
  • Using ABA to Identify & Deal with Misinformation

    Using ABA to Identify & Deal with Misinformation
    2025/04/07
    Special education and disability-related areas of civil rights law are complex systems of law and science that require an understanding of how an individual person is impacted by their unique disabilities within the unique contexts of their unique individual lives. The whole person has to be taken into account in order to determine the degree to which their disabilities impact their Activities of Daily Living (ADLs), which includes learning, employment, and community access. In special education, the presence of disability alone does not automatically make a student eligible for special education, though it still makes them protected under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (504) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). In special education, having a disability satisfies only one prong of a two-pronged line of inquiry that requires, upon evidence of a disability, further evidence that the disability interferes with the student’s access to education in some kind of meaningful way that requires specialized instruction of some form. In some states, such as California, if a student demonstrates a speech and/or language impairment such that they satisfy the Speech-Language Impaired (SLI) eligibility category pursuant to the regulations, and require speech-language services but not Specialized Academic Instruction (SAI), the speech-language services can be considered SAI for the purposes of finding the student eligible for special education. This is because public school instruction is so heavily weighted on language that having intact language skills is necessary for accessing the instruction. That said, many students, particularly those found eligible under the Autism (AUT) criteria, experience significant impairments in pragmatic language that many not interfere with their academics in most cases, but greatly interfere with their ability to interact in socially appropriate ways with others. This can impact their peer interactions during unstructured times like lunch and recess or passing periods, participation in group learning activities in the classroom, safe behavior during school drills or actual emergencies, etc. Addressing these kinds of challenges through special education can be just as educationally necessary as addressing the academic needs of a child with an intellectual disability, profound medical condition, or learning disability. Figuring out who needs what, if anything, in special education requires an expert level of assessment and data analyses. Furthermore, special education is a regulated process. Local education agencies have to abide by the rules attached to the federal special education dollars in order for their states to receive said dollars. Compliance with 504 is non-optional for any entity receiving federal dollars of any kind, such as public schools, and compliance with the ADA is mandatory, period. Federal special education law mandates the application of the peer-reviewed research to the design and delivery of special education, to the degree doing so is practicable. This means that approaches that have already been proven to work, that is, evidence-based practices, must be used when addressing the individual needs of each special education student pursuant to the applicable regulations. In theory, logic should prevail under the circumstances. However, as the whole world is now seeing first-hand, the government in America has always been infiltrated by anti-democratic thinkers and morons who have no idea what they are doing. Sometimes these people are one in the same. Not to say, “I told you so,” but back when people kept comparing me to Don Quixote when I’d make a stink about special education violations as a matter of a departure from the rule of law by local government agencies, I kept telling people that special education was the “canary in the coal mine” for democracy in this country. The measure of how civilized a society is goes to how well it takes care of its most vulnerable members. If the civil rights of children with disabilities means nothing, no one’s rights mean anything. If one of us is denied liberty, all of us are denied liberty. There cannot be any class of humans who are excluded from human rights in a civilized society, but there are many mentally ill people currently in power who regard other people with disabilities as “useless eaters.” The irony that this is the mentally ill calling other people with disabilities unworthy of life doesn’t escape me. Only broken minds do the kinds of things we’re seeing happen within American government at the federal level, right now. This is what I was up against for the first 25 years of my career at the local and State level. It’s now finally escalated up the food chain to the national level such that it’s now finally affecting everyone and not just marginalized populations. Police are now putting up barricades and blocking off streets so that white people can safely peacefully ...
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    33 分
  • Talkido & KPS4Parents from Our IG Live Event

    Talkido & KPS4Parents from Our IG Live Event
    2025/02/08

    On February 7, 2025, Ege Cakaloz of Talkido and Anne Zachry of KPS4Parents conducted an Instagram Live event. See the video recording of this live event to learn more about individualizing intervention for individuals with challenging learning needs using Talkido's technology.

    Learn more at https://kps4parents.org/individualized-interventions-using-talkido/
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    35 分
  • KPS4Parents on Instagram Live

    KPS4Parents on Instagram Live
    2025/02/05

    Hello! This is Anne Zachry, author and moderator of “Making Special Education Actually Work,” an online publication, produced in blog and podcast form, by KPS4Parents, a nonprofit child and family lay advocacy and consultancy organization focused on learners and workers with disabilities.

    I am excited to announce that, because of work I am doing on behalf of one of my direct services clients, I will be participating in an Instagram Live event with the CEO and co-founder of Talkido, one of the technology tools I am using as part of my client’s highly individualized program of intervention. My client has a seizure disorder, intellectual disability, autism, and vision loss. Creating an effective program of intervention given his unique challenges has required some innovation, but I was able to achieve it using affordable, and often inexpensive, resources.

    Find out more about how I’ve used tactile icons with auditory tags using Talkido’s technology to teach emotional vocabulary, and how these vocabulary concepts are further supported by personally created AI-generated songs using social scripts and stories as lyrics with the targeted emotional vocabulary terms worked into them by attending our Instagram Live Event on Friday, February 7, 2025, at 5pm PST, which is 8pm EST.

    Follow this link for more information: https://kps4parents.org/individualized-interventions-using-talkido/

    I’m looking forward to answering questions about how I individualized this program, how others can apply the same strategies to individualizing programming for other individuals, and how the technologies I’m using can be used to help others. I hope you can join us on Instagram on Friday, February 7, 2025 at 5pm PST/8pm EST. Thanks for supporting our important work! We look forward to bringing useful information to you.
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    3 分
  • Post-Election Strategies for Parents of Children with Disabilities Needing Special Education or 504 Accommodations and Supports

    Post-Election Strategies for Parents of Children with Disabilities Needing Special Education or 504 Accommodations and Supports
    2024/12/17
    As the dust starts to settle, to the degree it can following the 2024 election cycle, parents of children with disabilities who need special education or 504 accommodations and supports are now searching for answers as to how the promised changes to public education in the United States will affect their children. Many of these parents had no idea prior to the election what the fallout for public education and students with disabilities would be, and are only now starting to realize the magnitude of the changes on the horizon. This is not the first time the disabled community has had to deal with seismic shifts in the legal landscape as it relates to disability rights laws, and I'd like to quiet the worried minds of those parents who are on the verge of freaking out, right now, to tell you that "This to shall pass." This isn't my first rodeo and I've gotten really good at dealing with the ineptitude, stupidity, apathy, and egocentricity of the types of tiny minds responsible for discriminatory practices against the most vulnerable members of our communities. I don't say this to minimize what's coming. We are about to enter into some very trying times in the special education community following the inauguration of the 47th President of the United States and the installation of his cabinet in January 2025. Number 47 has already promised to shut down the U.S. Department of Education without any regard for how this will affect the millions of children with disabilities who rely on federal civil rights protections being implemented and enforced by the U.S. Department of Education, including those who receive federally funded special education programming. This is causing widespread panic among families of children with special needs and public-school employees who are employed to service this population of learners. The concern is entirely justified, but the panic is not, at least not for now, and I need everyone to calm down and let me explain why that is. Regardless of Number 47’s inclinations and intentions, the United States still is not a dictatorship, at least not yet. It certainly won’t instantly become a dictatorship the second Number 47 is sworn in. There are laws in place that control how our federal agencies are organized, the duties they are required by law to perform, and their respective enforcement authorities. No presidential administration has the authority to simply put an end to our laws. It will take more than Number 47’s four years in office to fight Congress, the courts, and the will of the American people to shut down the U.S. Department of Education and all the laws it is responsible for implementing and enforcing. We have to remember that he tried to do this once before with Betsy DeVos when he was Number 45. DeVos actually shut down the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) upon assuming office. It took 18 months of litigation to get it reopened, but it was still reopened because it exists to carry out specific legally mandated duties that could not be performed if it no longer existed. It was the existing laws on the books that mandated OCR’s existence, and those laws remain on the books now. Further, the legal precedent for preserving OCR is now also on the books, so Number 47’s new Secretary of Education is already prevented from repeating that approach by existing caselaw, and OCR is operated by a bunch of lawyers who are likely going to rely on that existing caselaw to resist any future efforts to shut down OCR. We also have to consider who Number 47 wants to name as the secretary of education, which is an absolute weirdo from the world of professional wrestling with no background in education science or law and a questionable relationship with lawful conduct. I’m willing to believe that her absolute ineptitude and lack of understanding of how anything in public education actually works will eat up enough time that by the time she figures much out, we’ll be at the 2026 midterms where we can beef up Congress in such a way as to legislate our ways out of this mess in spite of the pressure coming from the executive branch. The way I’m looking at the next four years is that the incoming administration is headed by Dr. Evil, Number 2, and Frau Farbissina, but they’re going to be too preoccupied with fem-bots and sharks with lasers to really get that far with things that matter to the rest of us. They will still do a lot of damage and people will still likely die unnecessarily again from their policies, just like when COVID first broke out. I still remember the refrigerator trucks full of dead bodies from when COVID first hit because our morgues were filled to capacity. But I also remember that, as Number 45, he who is now Number 47 was going to build a huge wall between the United States and Mexico, and make Mexico pay for it, which never happened, and that his last attempt to shut down the U.S. Department of Education failed in such ...
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    22 分
  • Using AI-Generated Music to Teach Social Scripts

    Using AI-Generated Music to Teach Social Scripts
    2024/10/31
    I have to say from the start that this is not a paid endorsement, and endorsing specific products is not something I normally do, but I've discovered a tool that has been a game-changer for how I work with one of my direct services clients as his counselor. That solution is using AI to create songs that are individualized to a specific person with lyrics based on therapeutically appropriate social scripts tailored to the person. I discovered this solution in the course of looking for ways to embed peer-reviewed music therapy elements into my counseling sessions with this client because he is highly responsive to music, and seems to remember lyrics set to music better than spoken words. Given that he's lost his eyesight, we've got to rely on his other senses. I was looking for an easy way to generate songs he would take seriously as legitimate musical productions that contained the social scripts, such as "safe hands," "inside voice," and "be patient," with which he was already familiar in order to expand his understanding and application of these concepts in his day-to-day life. I'm still shocked at how easy it was with the AI. These individualized songs are also serving as a stepping-off point to teach my client new, more sophisticated social/emotional skills and scripts, going forward, once he's incorporated them into his music listening routines and we work with them in our sessions. As time goes on, I'll be adding new songs that tackle more sophisticated concerns than those that I've initially created to get him started. My counseling client is in his late 20s and lives in a group home with 2 other men who have developmental disabilities. My client is blind, autistic, and intellectually disabled. He struggles to produce spontaneous speech and relies largely on scripted speech to communicate verbally with others. Since 2010, I've been this young man's lay advocate, his attorney's paralegal, his compensatory education services provider. He and I have gotten to know each other well and have instant rapport with each other, even after not seeing each other in person for a couple of years. Given the friendship and rapport I share with my client, I guess I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was at how quickly he took to the songs I created for him using AI, but I was actually flabbergasted. It was during my last session with him, in which I was collecting the last of the baseline data I needed to inform my program goals for him over the next 10 months, when I introduced the songs to him. The moment I started playing the songs, the stimming decreased to nearly none and he sat listening, turning his head so his ears faced the music, and orienting to me as if looking me in the face to repeat familiar scripts he was hearing in the lyrics with a grin on his face. He was fully engaged and it took next to no effort from me. I was floored. I was sure that I was going to have to work to sell him on the idea, but he took to it like a fish to water. This has left me inspired, because I know he can't be the only one who would benefit from this. I was in an online IEP meeting for one of my other students a few days ago, and mentioned this experience to the other professionals who were already logged into the meeting, while we were waiting for the parent and a few other professionals to log in. When I told my colleagues about what I'd done using the AI with social scripts to create highly individualized music for therapeutic purposes, they got all excited about it. So, based on the feedback I've gotten so far, I'm stopping what I'm doing right now to bust out this short post/podcast to share this information with anyone else who might benefit from it so that I can let it go and move on with the rest of my day. This is going to keep bugging me until I share it, and it's preventing me from finishing anything else until it's off my plate. Call me perseverative if you want; it is what it is. Thankfully, this can be fairly brief. The music-generating AI website I stumbled upon after 30 whole seconds of Googling is MakeBestMusic (https://makebestmusic.com/app/create-music). Again, this is not a paid endorsement. I didn't compare this AI against any other. It was the first one I tried and it instantly gave me what I was looking for in just the free demo. I copied and pasted the list of social scripts that I wanted incorporated into a song, selected some genre-specific tags, and hit the "go" button, then a minute or so later, I had two new songs using the words I'd provided as lyrics and one of them was absolutely perfect. I repeated the process for three more sets of social scripts and ended up with a total of four songs. For the sake of illustrating my point, I'm playing one of them, titled "Ask for Help," here: [listen in podcast] Listen to the lyrics and you'll hear that they are clearly about social behaviors, but it's sounds like a real song and not lame like something I'd make up if I had to do it myself. The robots...
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    11 分
  • Project 2025 and Special Education

    Project 2025 and Special Education
    2024/07/19
    Most people these days have now heard about Project 2025. It's now one of the most commonly searched terms on the internet these days. These fascist shysters aren't even trying to cover up what they are doing anymore, but what I want to emphasize as I start this post/podcast is that none of the Project 2025 agenda is anything new and these are the same exact people we've been up against in public education at the local level for the entire time that I've worked as a special education lay advocate, paralegal, and educational consultant, starting in 1991. These individuals now feel even more emboldened by their far-right leaders and they are now done pretending that they work within public education to teach children. They are now openly acknowledging that they want to hijack our government of, for, and by the People so they can, among other horrible things, replace our public education system with programs of extremist indoctrination that promotes white male wealth at the expense of everyone else. They have never been in support of special education because people with disabilities, particularly if they are not white male landowners, are less than human to them. None of this new. These are the same people who made the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (Section 504), and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) necessary in the first place. We wouldn't need laws that protect people with disabilities in our public schools, other government agencies, and the community at large if it weren't for these same exact people. For the same reasons that honor and ethics alone cannot be expected from Supreme Court justices without regulatory oversight, our public agencies from top to bottom cannot be expected to function in an honorable and ethical manner without controlling regulations and systems of accountability. It doesn't help that the people responsible for Project 2025 are almost guaranteed to, themselves, be mentally and/or emotionally impaired in some kind of way such that they are incapable of viewing other people as equal in worth to themselves and have a collective compulsion to identify classes of individuals to target for abuse for being different from themselves. There is no universe in which any of that kind of behavior reflects intact social/emotional development. It appears that nearly 1/3rd of our population is personality disordered or similarly impaired, and the difficult thing about these types of disorders is that those who suffer from them are often incapable of understanding that they are the ones with the problems. This is why they consistently blame everyone else for the consequences of their own behaviors. There is no logic or mental health in any of it. Personality disorders and conditions with similar features have nothing to do with intelligence or communication abilities. Take, for example, the current Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who insists the Earth is only 6000 years old and that dinosaurs and humans existed at the same time, thereby making the Flintstones historically accurate. One would think that he is cognitively intact enough to mentally process the facts and evidence to the contrary, and he technically is, but his social/emotional underdevelopment compels him to ignore facts that contradict his worldview, no matter how insane it is. The fact that he is communicatively adept also helps him superficially appear more competent than he really is, which is exactly what makes him and people like him so dangerous. People like this can "pass" as developmentally intact, at least temporarily, because they can successfully mimic the behaviors of intact people up to a point, but it's all scripted language and learned behaviors meant to help them navigate a world mostly full of sane people. They are masking to gain access to the things they need to meet their wants and needs, but they lack the social/emotional development to understand the perspectives of others and assume anyone who doesn't agree with them is automatically in the wrong. They are each the center of their own little personal universes, functioning at an egocentric level that is age-typical in young children, but handicapping at ages beyond early childhood. Other people are simply objects in orbit around them, like furniture and buildings, that are either useful to them in the moment or not, and every decision they make is entirely selfish. It doesn't even occur to people like this that other people have their own unique wants and needs that are often very different from their own, which is why they seek to create homogenous rather than diverse communities and target anyone who disagrees with them with abuse. From a social/emotional developmental standpoint, they are like toddlers who don't want to share. They consider the conflicting needs of others to be an affront to themselves, and use their adult-level knowledge, communication skills, and access to ...
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    16 分
  • Online Trolls, Mental Health, & Social Justice

    Online Trolls, Mental Health, & Social Justice
    2024/04/05
    For the benefit of the majority of Americans who are capable of understanding what I'm about to say, I appreciate the opportunity to share some insights with you that might help you better frame how you think about current events and other people's behaviors. For those of you who struggle to understand what I'm about to say, just know that the point is to find a way for you to still be included in the public discourse with as much understanding as can be achieved. We want everyone making thoughtful, informed decisions and not just reacting emotionally to things they don't understand, which requires patience and understanding on everyone's part. Recent events have inspired this post/podcast, and they arose around other online content I'd already published and then promoted through Facebook Ads, which was probably just asking for it. Facebook has become a toxic environment in which conspiracy theories abound as they are passed around among our least informed and/or least emotionally stable members of society and boosted by Facebook's algorithms. Even though our content was supposed to be targeted to pro-democracy users, enough people on Facebook are apparently hate-searching the same hashtags as those used by pro-democracy activists and then posting hateful messages full of misinformation, which likely feeds the algorithm information about their user habits that increases their ability to engage with pro-democracy content without regard for how they are actually interacting. The algorithm is looking at the frequency and duration of a user's involvement with content, not the qualitative nature of what that involvement looks like. Hateful comments are just comments to the algorithm. Clicks are just clicks, regardless of the beliefs or intentions of the users doing the clicking. These algorithms are configured to increase the exposure of frequently clicked- and commented-on content based on its popularity with users, regardless of why it's becoming popular. This is how social media has been weaponized by bad actors to feed lies and misinformation to unsophisticated users who have no idea that their behaviors are being reinforced for all the wrong reasons, which effectively manipulates them into behaving in hateful ways with increasing intensity over time. My working theory about what reinforces trolling behaviors is that it's automatically reinforcing because there is an internal adrenaline rush that users get when their posts and comments gain popularity and get shared, which gives them emotional validation. It's a protest behavior that gets reinforced and maintained by attention from others. It is only people who are starved for emotionally validating attention from others who seek it out online and fall into the deep well of online trolling behaviors to get it. If that's the only source of validation and feeling "successful" in their lives, they're going to do it. The solution is to give them a more appropriate functionally equivalent replacement behavior that still allows them to express their wants and needs such that they are validated with attention, but more importantly, that are met with more powerful reinforcers than the ones they receive by trolling. We've got to give them something more rewarding than what they get from spewing hatred while still giving a voice to their wants and needs, as well as access to appropriate solutions. These are not our brightest problem-solvers. These are the people with arrested emotional development and limited coping skills who resort to name-calling and hostile behavior because that's the best they've got. They feel trapped in a life they can't handle where their wants and needs go unmet and they don't know how to appropriately advocate for themselves. Emotionally speaking, they are simply very old children. Thankfully, only a handful of trolls found our online content. All of them were adult males, mostly middle-aged or older and white, based on their Facebook profiles. All of them were triggered by a single word in the title of the program being promoted, which is our Social Justice group on Meetup, in which I conduct live events and share content with group members who are interested in learning how to participate in the advocacy processes of publicly funded programs to enforce their rights as program beneficiaries or the rights of other eligible beneficiaries who need help advocating for themselves. In our Meetup group, I take my experiences working in special education, regional center, rehabilitation, and other publicly-funded programs for people with disabilities and generalize them to the same processes and procedures that exist within other publicly-funded programs that exist to benefit citizens with other other types of need than disability. Many of these other programs address social welfare issues, like housing, food, and healthcare. Americans pay into these programs so that they are there for them if and when they need ...
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    40 分