I first heard of the Abilene paradox years ago through my father-in-law. The gist of it is that a group of people ends up doing something none of them really want to do only because individual members of the group think their opinion differs from everyone else's and decide not to raise objections. Before you know it, everyone is in Abilene, even though everyone (or almost everyone) knew it was a bad idea to go there.
Well, my family is on the road to Abilene, and I'll be damned if I can figure out how to turn the car around.
For well over a year now, the school district has been pressuring us to have our son undergo a psychological evaluation. It first came up in April 2013. I was invited to a meeting to talk about educational planning. What it was really about was three district employees trying to railroad me into signing a consent form for a psych eval. The reasons given for the eval were cryptic at best -- "we need more information because we don't know what we don't know" -- and sinister at worst -- "this will determine his educational path." When I pressed on this, I was presented with something that sounded much more acceptable -- song and dance about their needing teaching methods. I actually get that. My son isn't your typical kid. Teaching him and then enabling him to show what he knows requires some creativity. You have to adapt for his vision and his CP and the fact that he's nonverbal. But that's not what it was really about. After an hour, it seemed clear to me that what they wanted was a test that would place a label on my son, a label that would enable them to remove him from mainstream education and let them off the hook in terms of trying to figure out how to work with him.
I didn't make a decision on the spot, though. I took the offered phone number of the psychologist who would be going the testing and said I would call her for further information before deciding. The special education director assured me that the psychologist knew all about my son because she had read his IEP and would be perfectly capable of testing him. Well, as it turns out, no. She didn't know much of anything. Most disturbing was the fact that she did not know he was nonverbal. She went on at length about the verbal response section of the test that would be used to determine his IQ. When I asked how she might adapt that test for a nonverbal students and she said she was not sure if she could. She would be giving a verbal test to my nonverbal child. She would be setting him up to fail. Needless to say, I said "no" to this evaluation. In its place, I asked the district to consider something that would be much more useful, an assistive technology eval aimed at setting up vision and communication accommodations so that he could be included in the mainstream classroom. The district finally got this rolling 7 months later and botched it, but that's a story for another time.
I thought the business of the psych eval was done. After all, the parent rights document my husband and I are given at every IEP meeting says that our child cannot be evaluated without out consent. We did not give consent for the psychological evaluation, so that should have been the end of it. What actually happened was over the next year, every time the IEP team met or I spoke with the special education director, she pressured me to go through with the psychological evaluation. I explained many times why I had said no, and this made no difference.
Here we are, 14 months later, and we're still getting leaned on to go through with the evaluation. Under the advice of our lawyer, my husband and I agreed to a telephone conference with the proposed evaluator and representatives from the school district. We also began researching what would be an appropriate test and searching for a psychologist to give it. Our searches proved to be fruitless. Countless experts all said the same things -- an appropriate test does not exist; it would be useless to test the child before he has a workable communication system in place; they would not evaluate and did not know of anybody who would.
The conference call did not do anything to relieve our concerns. The "expert" evaluator who supposedly had been given my son's IEP knew nothing about him. She acknowledged that there is no appropriate test. She did not know how she might adapt an existing test for him and stated that doing so would invalidate the test.The test would be completed in 1.5-3 hours.She would meet my son for the first time and evaluate him all in the same session. The output from the test would be a score that would let the district know what we could expect his performance to be in school. It would assist with eligibility and placement decisions. When I asked what information the test would offer beyond what we have already gotten from extensive vision evaluations, a fine motor evaluation, a gross motor evaluation, an OI evaluation, and 6 weeks of academic testing to assess his knowledge in every area of the state's core curriculum for K and 1st grade students, I was told that the psych eval would just give more information, an assessment of his cognitive ability, and his level of achievement.. When I asked questions about the validity of results, I got nothing. I was told that they felt confident they could evaluate effectively but could make no guarantees that the picture of his abilities would be at all accurate or the test at all valid for a student like him because there is no appropriate IQ test for a student like him.
Experts I shared this information with all said "No. Do Not Do This." The general consensus was "it's a trap." It's Abilene.
Yet, here we are, considering going there. We know that this pressure from the school district will not go away. They will keep asking and asking and asking. This alone would not be enough to make us cave. If I can withstand my younger son's meltdowns in the toy aisle in Wal-Mart or the Chinese water torture of my older's son's attempts to drive me insane with the behaviors that he knows get under my skin, I can hold out on the district. The real reason we're thinking about it is that our lawyer has suggested we may not have a choice. If the whole school situation blows up and goes to court (and it likely will), we will have a better chance of winning if we are seen as cooperative, collaborative, etc. If we take this trip to Abilene, it will look better for our side in the end. If we don't, the district can use our refusal to get out of some of the IDEA violations they have committed. The logic there is wrong and it's twisted, but sometimes these things are. So we have been advised to register our concerns, go along with the eval, and get a private one done that will be more appropriate and effective so that we can have our own data to put on the table to undercut theirs. The problem there, of course, is that we can find any psychologist willing to evaluate. They all think it's such a colossally bad idea that they won't risk their professional reputations by doing it. This leaves us in a bind. If we do go along with the district's plan, we won't have our own eval to fights against theirs.
We know the test won't be valid and will, in fact, show that our very bright son has the IQ of a doorstop. Every expert we have consulted except the proposed evaluator knows this. Our lawyer knows this too. Abilene looks a whole lot like a test that we know our kid is destined to fail, not because he's not capable, but because the evaluation is not appropriate or accessible for him. But we may just have to go there.
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