Uncertainty and complexity are major themes of The Politics of Autism.
Political scientist Steven M. Teles has coined a term that comes in handy for any discussion of autism services: kludgeocracy. In computing, a “kludge” is a system consisting of ill- matched elements or parts made for other applications. Engineers patch it together and hook it up to an existing system in order to solve a new problem. Kludges are complicated, hard to understand, and subject to crashes. Teles says that this description fits much of American public policy: “From the mind-numbing complexity of the health care system … our Byzantine system of funding higher education, and our bewildering federal-state system of governing everything from the welfare state to environmental regulation, America has chosen more indirect and incoherent policy mechanisms than any comparable country."
Steven M. Teles, “Kludgeocracy: The American Way of Policy,” New America Foundation, December 2012. Online: https://static.newamerica.org/attachments/4209-kludgeocracy-the-american-way-of-policy/Teles_Steven_Kludgeocracy_NAF_Dec2012.d8a805aa40e34bca9e2fecb018a3dcb0.pdf
Is disability policy health policy? Is it education policy? Is it labor-force policy? Or is it social welfare? From the perspective of a family, these distinctions make little sense. I have subsequently found they are similarly confusing to congressional staffers. For children with disabilities, disability policy is education policy, and we were clueless. I was like Alice in Wonderland, lost in a place where I understood the words people spoke, but they made no sense to me.Services for disabled children are more fragmented and confusing than anything I had ever run into in health care. Your health insurance covers some things, typically those things that prevent and treat the disease that causes your disability. The things you need to work, go to school, or function in your daily life as a consequence of your disability are generally not covered by health insurance. Instead, you are in a whole new world. If you are birth to age 21 (in some states older) and need services and technology to go to school, they might be covered as part of special education, under IDEA. If you are age 18–65 and need them to be able to work, they might be covered by your state vocational rehabilitation agency. If you are over 65, your state or local agency for the aging might pay for something that is needed to maintain your independence and stay out of a nursing home. If medical insurance, educational programs, vocational rehabilitation, social services, or aging agencies won’t pay for what you need, maybe you can pay for it yourself, get a grant, or try crowdfunding....
The core problem goes back to that decision by Congress in the 1970s to place much of the responsibility for providing disability services to school-age children on schools. It makes a certain amount of sense. Not all kids have health insurance. Children spend the majority of their waking hours in school. Public schools can provide universal access. They might not have all of the expertise one would need to assess and manage all children with all kinds of disabilities, but they can receive federal and state funding to support specialized instruction, related services, and assistive technology.
But not all schools are created equal. According to the US census, in fiscal year 2016 New York spent $22,366 per pupil and Utah spent $6,953. Where we live, at the border of Kansas and Missouri, the states spent $9,960 and $10,313, respectively. Schools face funding shortfalls along with challenges finding experts for less common disabilities. And Congress has never met its promise to fund the educational mandate of special education at 40 percent of the “excess” costs of educating special education children. In March 2019 Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) introduced the IDEA Full Funding Act in the House, but there has been no further action since then.
In my role as a special-needs mom, everyone told me that my job was to advocate for my child. Of course I would advocate for my child. Who wouldn’t? The better question is, who cannot?
Navigating the fragmentation of services, the complexity of eligibility rules, and the sometimes adversarial processes of determining appropriateness of services is more manageable for those with time, money, education, and expertise. This means that the likelihood that a child will receive the medical, educational, and rehabilitative services and equipment they need to improve their functioning and start their education on a level playing field can depend on their parents’ situation and supports. This is, of course, true of our medical and educational systems as a whole, but for disabled kids and their parents, the stakes are even higher.
