Two Miles of Chicken Wire and a Four-mile Cow Pasture:

Two Miles of Chicken Wire and a Four-mile Cow Pasture:
Definitional Issues Related to Students with EBD


Most current educators, in arguing for the importance of definition in working with students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD), demonstrate the rhetorical error of false analogy in suggesting that because diagnosis generally precedes and determines treatment in a medical model, the same should be true for education. This error is understandable and, most likely, derived from the fact that psychiatry, that shibboleth of the field, has managed to exist for the past hundred years with two entirely different and antagonistic views of humans and the human condition. When the psychiatrist is acting as a physician, that is to say, a scientist, he or she treats the patient as an organism, which will respond consistently to a prescribed treatment. If, for example, a particular psychiatrist's child has a staphylococcus infection, she is not concerned with the child's feelings about the infection, the family dynamics which may have led to exposure to the infection or any other factor. The medical doctor in the psychiatrist prescribes sulfathiazole for a period of one week, knowing that no peer can possibly question her judgment. Sulfathiazole cures staph infections. If the psychiatrist's first patient the next morning complains of anhedonia, an ever-present taste of aspirin in his mouth and a feeling of pointlessness in his life, the humanist in the psychiatrist, or "soul doctor" in German, has no equivalent to sulfathiazole. Depending upon her background, orientation and underlying assumptions, the psychiatrist may recommend years of traditional analysis, group therapy, a series of exercises done with the psychiatrist, 100 milligrams of Prozac daily or any combination of the above or other treatments, knowing that whatever she suggests is open to violent criticism by any of her peers.
The psychiatrist wears two hats, scientist and humanist, a schizophrenic wardrobe indeed; educators have only one hat, that of the humanist. We have no sulfathiazole, no readily accepted treatment for emotional and behavioral disorders. While research may suggest, for example, that adolescent sexual perpetrators respond better to group than to individual therapy, the success rate is low in either instance. Likewise, there is no empirically-proven educational intervention to prescribe for a student who, for example, can't read, throws chairs and regularly tells people he wishes he were dead. One shudders to think of going to a physician for a diagnosed infection and being told to take a medicine that might make some difference eventually. Or not. Or make the condition worse. Compared to medicine, our understanding and treatment of inappropriate human behavior has not advanced significantly since Aristotle. In the grip of the Cartesian dichotomy, our knowledge of our bodies so far surpasses our understanding of our minds that little meaningful communication can take place between C.P. Snow's "two cultures."
Philosophically, then, educators, lacking a universally accepted and prescribed course of treatment for even the simplest behavioral issue, have necessarily less concern with definition or diagnosis than do physicians using the scientific model. The background, experience and personal style of the educator and his or her institution have much more to do with the proposed educational plan than does objective evidence of the plan's efficacy. The proverb that "Everything looks like a nail if all you've got is a hammer" might be translated in EBD terms into "Everyone needs tokens if all you've got is a classroom economy" or "Everyone craves hugs if all you've got is the 1970s." While it is difficult to accept the notion that education for students with EBD is teacher- or institution-driven rather than student-driven, a brief glimpse at the population suggests its truth. Examination of the group of students identified as having EBD suggests that there is much more variability within this group than there is between individual students so identified and students carrying other disability labels or no labels at all. That is, were one to randomly identify 100 students with EBD and choose, say, 10 reasonable educational or behavioral variables, one suspects that a comparison of the EBD group and the other groups would show that, in terms of similarity, most students with EBD would "migrate" to other group's profiles and that there would be little evidence of commonality within the EBD group. Like the Unitarian Church, the EBD label embraces those who are in very few ways alike and in many ways different; neither the Unitarians nor the field of EBD has a single doctrine or belief which is necessary and sufficient for membership.
Regardless of philosophy, however, definition and labeling do matter politically and practically. It is difficult, if not well nigh impossible, to define accurately emotional and behavioral disturbances because their identification is extraordinarily subjective and based on cultural rather than statistical norms. As yet, we have no "weirdometer," so it is impossible to say that a student is two standard deviations above the mean in terms of weirdness. Likewise, a student's behavior may be borderline acceptable in some schools, while offering evidence of emotional disturbance in another. A girl with green hair and signs of self-mutilation with a razor might be immediately identified as emotionally disturbed in small-town Colebrook, New Hampshire; the same student would find a small, but not minuscule, peer group if she were to transfer to Nashua High School, and her appearance would not likely raise comment. The federal definition of "serious emotional disturbance" is filled with unclear terminology and logical inconsistency; like using two-miles of chicken wire to fence in a four-mile cattle pasture, the definition has little of the form and none of the function intended by its writers.
Anathema though it may be to those who wish to clarify the definition of EBD, the ambiguity present in the current definition of EBD may actually be in the best interests of both practicioners and, more important, students. Any definition of EBD is, no matter how elegantly stated, dependent upon subjective judgment rather than quantifiable data. To identify a student as having mental retardation, one must show that the student scores two or more standard deviations below the mean on a valid and reliable intelligence test and that the student demonstrates socially adaptive behavior (as measured on psychometrically acceptable instruments) which is significantly below that of his or her age peers. No such objectivity exists in the case of EBD. Nor can it. Nor should it. Ultimately, like the Supreme Court justice asked for his definition of pornography, the special educator is forced to say about EBD, "I can't tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it."