The posts you read here are designed to highlight and substantiate the issues presented. Under Links you can find connections to relevant material. You can go through the archives for recent and past posts. Expect to see minor changes in old posts to improve flow and accuracy. Corrections of content and form are welcomed. Views expressed are only my own.
Searching
If you are coming by Google and read only one page, you will miss the themes that naturally develop from extended inquiry. Look around and feel free to comment. Try to SEARCH by key word for topics of interest.
Support
We support fair use doctrine. The rule of thumb is for opinions to be connected to my personal experiences, including direct observation, the sense of the literature on any given topic, and one or more supporting sources where possible.
“cf.” is used for internal reference to other posts that follow or support a particular theme. The posts marked “solutions” provide assorted ideas about reducing misidentification. Entries in a series are numbered. We use the numbering to track related posts.
Links
From time to time links must be repaired. Most posts cover narrow topics so open searches will also turn up mentioned materials. Some sites purge their posts, retitle, or relocate. In many cases we give the URL in the post for a permanent record, and sometimes work in active links.
“Speech pathology,” “speech-language pathology,” and “speech therapy” are used interchangeably because of how people search on the internet. “Communication disorders” is preferred scientifically but it is not something typically used on the internet. We use “overidentification” as one word, recognizing “over-identification” can discover a different sort of website material.
WordPress
We continue to explore different WordPress “themes” for style, ease of navigation and attractiveness. We want bold type (font style), a fast-loading design and good pieces of content. Important is an archival listing on the front page so visitors can research past posts easily. Many good posts without catchy descriptions can get buried. Sometimes we repost these items for improved attention.
WordPress continues to add features adding more flexibility: “We’re always thinking about ways to help you better promote and share your blog content with the world, and the new sharing buttons we’ve just released are great tools to help you get the word out. The buttons—which support sharing via email, Blogger, Google Buzz, Twitter, and Facebook—can be placed under each blog post where your readers will easily see them.” However, we do not employ whistles and bells unless they improve content and readability.
Ethnography
There is an ethnographic or qualitative research viewpoint brought to bear on widely scattered and disconnected internet material. Some of the material is academic and represented in journal articles. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of proprietary material on the internet, limiting access.
Hence topics evolve across posts where there are are “gaps” of knowledge, and these topics surface on their own. For example, the history of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association is sketchy at best. For school SLPs to understand their profession, they need to know how their association came into being and how it formulated public policy definitions of the profession. One must infer first and evolved tenets giving us what we have today. In the middle of the 20th Century experts often said, “We are a very young profession.” But can one say now we are an “old” or mature professional now? How did we get here?
Thus navigation is partly heuristic as linguists say about language discoveries where nothing much is known. “Over-identification” is one topic where there are surprisingly few articles. Yet “disproportionality” is more widely discussed. There is a subtle parsing of two related concepts.
Verification
We continue to review posts and statements made therein. The general rule is statement accuracy should depend on direct personal experience plus one or more confirming sources. When new source material is found, qualifications are added accordingly. Overriding is the thematic structure of all posts. For example, when one finds statements about the misidentification of American black school children there are data plus historical facts forming a pattern within the culture. When one points out shifting special education category frequencies it is against the historical facts of efforts by Congress to rework the category system to reduce stigmatization, such as when poor children were being misplaced in the mental retardation category.
We do not take the journalist point of view which is to balance opinions. Our policy direction favors reducing the overidentification of non-disabled school children through well-formed regulations and accurate assessment.
NPR recently carried a story indicating internet surveys can uncover public information not otherwise available. The number of visits to medical websites can be taken as an indication a developing epidemic before health departments can detect them and report.
We must all be the keepers of the light: “Don’t needlessly place children in special education!”
