Schools are supposed to provide children with disabilities with FAPE (Free Appropriate Public Education). But frequently, parents of children with disabilities and school districts don’t agree on the meaning of the word “appropriate.”
There is a lot of legal opinion on this topic that I don’t intend to get into here. For now, the main point is that there isn’t an agreed-upon standard to determine if a program is appropriate.
There are some generally accepted rules. For example, the school district is not required to provide the “best,” only what is appropriate. On the other hand, if a child is making no progress or very minimal progress, the program is clearly “not appropriate.” This can sometimes be an adversarial process; schools and parents sometimes turn to outside evaluators to help make the determination.
When you have a subjective standard like this, it is impossible to prevent huge biases from entering into the decision. This is especially true when the results of an evaluation can mean very large sums of money (e.g., if the evaluation causes a school district to outplace a student to a private school for example) and loss of control over a program.
I used to be one of the expert evaluators that would give an opinion on whether a program was “appropriate” or “not appropriate.” Although it can sometimes help children get better programming, I rarely agree to do these anymore. I just didn’t enjoy the work. I’d rather be the person doing the programming, and then let someone else evaluate my work. I’ll Poogi more that way, too.
The key lesson is that these decisions are rarely made solely based on the data (even if the issues are primarily decided by BCBAs). I’ve seen terrible programs survive an evaluation as appropriate. I’ve seen excellent programs be deemed not appropriate. It is not enough to master data analysis; we must learn to work in complex social environments too.