Selling Disability / Selling Special Education

(Almost) No one seems to like “Selling”… but….

We need to do MUCH better selling disability if we want a better world for disabled children and adults.

It isn’t just going to “happen”.

As parents of disabled children and disabled adults, we can do a lot to improve how we communicate with public services and systems, how we use our own resources, but at the end of the day, we’ve got to convince others that serving disabled people better IS important for them.

We live in a world with many, real competing priorities.

While the disabled community is a sizeable population, we are not a majority or evean a plurality of pretty much any community, there are other groups that are pushing and pulling for more support. Like it or not, these groups have legitimate needs and we are going to have to work hard, and often work together Radical Allyship to push for (dare I say “lobby for”?) the changes we need.

Caring Enough to Care

It took 27 years of dedicated work including 2 patents and a published book to get myself burned out on Computer Security.

One problem that I struggled with and never adequately delivered was “Selling Security”.

Ironically (is that right?), when I started to study how to be effective in the disability space, a core problem seemed to be the same:

Everyone “cares” about disability (and security), but no one seems to “care enough” to do anything about either.

What I found to be most effective was to move from my problem space (security or disability) into THEIR priority space.

Don’t try to make them care about disability, find a way to do better for disabled people based on what they DO already care about.

I tended to be more effective than many of my fellow security advisors because I spent a lot of time learning the language (and priorities) of the people I was working with.

Instead of presenting them with security problems or solutions, I’d focus on performance or financial or other benefits (or minimal costs) of doing security better – makiing their priorities, my (security) priority.

“Canary in the Coal Mine” and a “Free Ride”

In practice, supporting disabled people today is not a high priority in most organizations, companies, and other environments that I am aware of. In fact, disability services seem to be more of a “Canary in a Coal Mine”… an indicator that money is tight and that if something is at going to be cut, disability services are near the top of the list (reducing aides for special education students, as I write this in 2026, California reducing the allowed assets for MediCal from $130,000 to $3,000, …).

AN important part of this is the lack of organized advocacy leaving political and organizational leaders not perceiving negative consequences for disability related cuts, but they also do not (currently) seem to feel that serving disabled people is core to their mission… it is a nice to have or do, not a NEED to serve.

From my experience in the security field, I THINK (and my experience to date has supported this) that using a “good governance / good engineering perspective to slip better support for disability in has been fairly effective.

This is not about getting a big budget wedge or fundamental change in place, rather it is helping improve overall systems and processes (and financial performance)… and along the way, do serve disabled people better.

Tweaking the Disability “Mindset”

Effective advocacy can start informally (and perhaps formally) change the underlying model (see Economic Models of Disability) with which an organization “thinks about” disability.

If we can get a school district to move from seeing special education as a “compliance problem” to “preparing disabled students (ALL students) for the world” we are reframing how they engage with disability… and reframing the resources OTHERS can bring to disability issues.

This can happen both through outside advocacy and more focused restructuring goals and metrics (and the strategies and tactics used to achieve them).

Better Overall Performance

Everybody’s got metrics that they care about. Lower unemployement. Higher graduation rates. Better test scores. Higher median income.

The disabled population is big enough in almost every circumstance to have an impact… and likely more easily than other groups.

A number of years ago in my last school district, a board member talked about improving test scores with a “strong, across the board effort”…

This is, to put it nicely-ish, (B* Nonsense).

At best, it is inefficient.

At worst, it is doomed.

The Theory of Constraints

The Goal is a classic business book that explores improving performance at a factory. You don’t do this by “a strong, across the board effort”… you don’t (and can’t afford to make) every step in the assembly line 10% faster, you look at where the problems are (in a factory assembly line, this is a machine with a lot of parts backed up in front of it).

You look for chokepoints to progress.

Because it is a lot easier to improve test scores by improving the test scores of students currently getting 40% to 50% than it is to improve students who are already at 90% and somehow getting them to 100%.

It is actually achievable, less expensive, more likely to be effective, and, not coincidentally going to disproportionally target disabled students.

We know this.

Disabled students. Disabled people along with other marginalized groups sit firmly in the bottom tier of our society and schools by virtually all metrics.

Change their results and you’re likely to magnify system change (and this tends to work both ways).

While it is easier to improve academic performance from 40% to 50% than 90% to 100%, it is also easier to see performance slip from 40% to 30% than slip from 90% to 80%.

We get seduced by the simplicity of averages, completely forgetting that there isn’t a uniform populations of “average” persons, but a collection of groups that drive outcomes.

Target groups most in need, and you get disproportionate improvements (neglect them and get disproportionate declines).

Disproportionality

“Problem” metrics are rarely spread smoothly across a community. Just with positive outcomes, they are “lumpy”… and one of those “lunps” is often disabled people.

Two years(in 2024) ago, I analyzed suspension rates in my school district. Overall, they are quite good, but they had jumped 4 June 2024 PAUSD Board Meeting Comments.

Close to half of all suspensions were of Students with Disabilities even though they make up just over 10% of the student population(https://disabilityalmanac.com/17-december-2024-pausd-board-meeting-comments/).

This disproportionality hadn’t changed meaningfully (nor had it jumped for other groups).

It appeared that the jumps had been highly concentrated in a small number of schools.

Anecdotally, this matched with my experience talking to parents – where certain principals were quite agressive in punative (and often undocumented/informal) discipline for disabled students.

My hypothesis is that this is a principal and leadership training, process, and culture issue (something outside of the traditional world of special education).

Alas, I haven’t been able to get attention on this issue (yet).

Interestingly, the data is all there, the standard analytic models that are “averages focused” completely miss the disproportionality problems.

Disability advocates have talked about a national “Home and Community Based Services (HCBS) Crisis”, but if you look at the numbers, the problems are highly concentrated in a couple of states (Texas is FAR in the lead with 48.2 % of disabled people on HCBS waiting lists followed by Florida). Waiting and Waiting for Home and Community-Based Services

Breaking down the data can give insights leading to better strategies (and showing that Much Better is Possible)… many of our local elementary schools have no suspensions and XXX states have no waiting lists for HCBS services.

The Special Education Paradox?

When people see and talk about “Students with Disabilities” they see the students with more obvious and extensive needs (“intense” autism, etc.).. and see the whole of the disabled population throug that lens.

And so blithely accept dismal academic performance and other problematic metrics as just “the way it is” for those “poor kids”.

Even within the population of students who formally qualify for disability services under IDEA, this is fundamentally incorrect (at least where I’ve looked).

Most Disabled Students have “modest” disabilties and receive minimal supports yet their academic performance is grim.

Most disabled students in most states in the US spend the great majority of their time in general education. They are included. They typically get very modest services.

California is among the most segregated school systems with 18+% of students in highly segregated settings (less than 40% of their day in general education).

But, that means 80+ % of disabled students spend more than 40% of their day in general education..

Yet, it seems that their academic performance is still pretty grim. After all, the poor performance numbers for disabled students overall come from somewhere.

But no one seems to break this out.

One time only in my previous school district, they put together academic performance data based on “inclusion” (or likely lower support levels)… and the results were surprisingly… there was very little difference in academic performance between the different groups.

This was surprising.

I suspect it means we are systematically undersupporting disabled students with “modest” disabilities.

We actually report on academic performance of English Learners based on their level of English (pretty logical actually)… and California has added a formal top-level category to look at “Long Term English Learners”… as they presumably have noticed a problem in this area (I’m curious if they’ve looked into the intersection of Disabled Students and Long Term English Learners…).

But… why don’t we do the same for Disabled Learners?

We actually have available data using US metrics for Inclusion, so we should be able to report on academic performance by “Inclusion Cohort”.

(If you have any additional data on this, please let me know!!!!).

Illusion of Choice to Axis of Choice, Hard Costs (Money DOES make the world go around) and Relative Residual Consequences

After 39+ years of meetings and presentations, I’ve developed a bit of radar for when I’m being s(nowed) or I’m seeing sloppy staff work.

Floaty Numbers, Vague Analysis, Bogus Baselines, Spurious Comparisons

Answers without analysis. No trade-offs.

… or, as I tell my daughter…. if you want full or partial credit, make sure you show your work.

… and if you don’t show your work… I start suspecting you didn’t DO the work.

You won’t see disproportionality if you don’t disaggregate data. You can’t trade off options, if there aren’t options or criteria for success.

One Answer to Fool them all.
One Answer to Blind them.
One Answer to Lead Them All.
And in their Ignorance bind them.

(Apologies to Tolkien).

There are (almost) always choices.

In most circumstaances, there are two axes – outcome equivalence and cost/resource equivalence.

• Outcome Equivalence – for a given outcome target, what are our implementation otions (and their budgets).
• Budget Equivalence – for a given target budget, what are the options (and their outcomes).

And then there are the follow-on “value-adds”… items that you considered, but don’t include in your basic options.

• Value-Add Option – an additional option with a budget and projected outcome (or outcome improvement).
• Cost-Savings Option – an option with a budget savings and projected outcome. This is used less as typically, you would present choices with a Budget Equivalence presentation and you would present the “minimum viable budget”… You may present a series of Cost-savings options (typically ranked based on outcome) to provide a series of fall-backs in case of budget cuts.

After all, if someone presents you a single option to “decide on”… and they don’t justify that decision, they’ve chosen for you.

(A more subtle version of this problem is when someone chooses – or creates – an evaluation metric that hides important details – in computer security, this happened with aggregate “Risk Scores” – that were weighted averages of different specific threats – but the use of these single number scores hid the very important “weights” in the weighted averages – and, in some cases, different risks schouldn’t be aggregated – say risk of life vs. financial cost.)

The Power of Disability Data from Elsewhere

One of the first pieces of disability data that I stumbled on was the state-level inclusion data from the US Department of Education … and how dismally California was doing (and still is doing) and that led me to find school district data (formally in the US called Local Education Authorities – LEAs). At that time, the average number of disabled students in the most segregated settings* was 13.7%, the top states were down at 5%, and Calfornia was at 19.7% .. even worse, my local schol district was over 26%.

This blew my mind.

I had no idea our numbers were so grim (in California, but particularly in my school district!).

Since then, I have been obsessed with disablity numbers, particularly lower level numbers.

• They give me insights where I am at.
• They give me benchmarks to compare against.
• They give me targets for doing better.

They also give me places to dig in further – what is going on with either a positive or negative outlier? Is there something to learn? Someone to study? Someone to admire? Something that triggers my BS Meter?

• NOTE – Raising the Floor, not Raising the Ceiling – a lot of folks who are interested in inclusion for disabled students focus on increasing the number of students in the most inclusive settings… I think this is a flawed and perhaps dangerous approach.. we should focus on reducing the number of students in the most segregated settings (typically separate schools or segregated classrooms in public schools). After all it is easier to nudge folks up from modestly less segregated settings than to engage in the systemic change that will reduce the students in the most segregated settings… and likely the results will stall out once the “easy wins” are achieved.
• NOTE …Outcomes before Inclusion (and I shouldn’t have to choose) and, more importantly, we should be focused on improving outcomes (academic, work, etc.), not solely improving inclusion. I believe (without nearly as much data as I would like) that more inclusive education can lead to better outcomes… inclusion should be an inevitable strategic outcome for success for disabled students, not an input (and outcomes may suffer if inclusion is the goal instead of better outcomes).

Outcomes – Beware Easy Metrics amd Faux Outcomes

What you measure matters. The California Department of Rehabilitation

The California Department of Rehabilitation (DOR) works in partnership with consumers and other stakeholders to provide services and advocacy resulting in employment, independent living, and equality for individuals with disabilities.

As of today (4 August 2026), they list 3 metrics on their home page (https://www.dor.ca.gov/):

People with Disabilities (FY 2025/2026) – 181,055 Received Services.
Students (FY 2025/2026) – 52,110 Received Services,
Field Offices (FY 2025/2026) – 77 Provided Services.

No data on how many disabled people now have jobs or live independently (both should be measurable) or what percent of the state population they’ve succeeded with.

Metrics matter.

Measuring how many people you’ve “served” isn’t the outcome that you allegedly prioritize… and may lead to undesirable behavior.

Graduation rates for schools may lead to students being “socially promoted” and graduated, and not actually educated and prepared for life after school.

(It should be noteworthy that states have metrics for overidentification of students with disabilities, but not similar metrics for potential underidentification and failure to diagnose).

If we look carefully at actual outcomes, we may rethink our priorities and programs.

Lifecycle Costs and Consequences

Special Education / education for students with disabilities has been under constant funding pressure since the first version of IDEA was passed in 1975 as the Education for All Handicapped Children Act. Promised federal funding has never materialized and state and local funding is highly variable.

Yet, if we look at the just the financial costs of failure to educated disabled children (much less the burdens we add to their potential opportinites), we wind up with more disabled people under-educated, under-skilled to work, and unable to live independently – and thus, more dependent on state and federal services through their whole lives.

Similarly, Home and Community Based Services seem to be both more cost-effective and more respectful and appropriate for disabled adults, yet too many states have waiting lists and a bias (strengthening today alas) towards re-institutionalization.

Laws that restrict disabled (and elderly) people from earning income and owning assets forces them to become wards of the state in order to be eligible for services are then unable to contribute to their own livelihoods at both economic and human cost. Without even going into the administrative burden of constantly proving eligibility.

Avoiding Sales at your Peril

A better world for disabled adults or your disabled child isn’t going to “happen”. We live in a world of competing and sometimes conflicting priorities. We need to build alliances both within and outside of the greater disability community to drive for change and fight to protect our victories (here in California, Governor Newsom has just rolled back the amount of assets disabled and elderly people can have to be eligible for Medi-Cal in the name of “fiscal responsibility” – his proposal was to reduce allowed individual assets to $2000 from $130,000 – this was increased to $21,000 by the Legislature – https://cahealthadvocates.org/legislature-rejects-many-of-governors-cuts-but-medi-cal-asset-limit-still-faces-major-reduction/ ).