LD Blog

Here’s another entry in the “LD means any problem” category. Writing on the BaltimoreSun Web site, Tawanda W. Johnson reports the happy story about students overcoming problems to graduate from high school. She wrote,

Feierstein, 18, credits Norbel with helping him deal with his learning disabilities -attention deficit disorder and oppositional defiance disorder. ADD is characterized by poor attention span, and ODD involves negative behavior patterns.

Once again, the term “Learning Disabilty” is used to refer to a general set of educational and health problems, not to the legally defined category of special education, “Learning Disability.” Here we have poor attention span (could that be represented as “Other Health Impaired?”) and “ODD” (oppositional defiant disorder in the language of psychiatry, right?) represented as “learning disabilities.” To be sure, Ms. Johnson used lower case letters in “learning disability,” but the reference is still plain.

I guess this is the consequence of failures by the education industry. We simply haven’t taught people to be careful about their language. We’d wish that writers would check the facts, the terms, etc. Still, each misuse such as Ms. Johnson’s—even in an otherwise uplifting story—further clouds the public’s understanding of the concept of LD, making it ever-more difficult for those who champion the needs of individuals with LD to keep the focus on those individuals’ needs.With LD under fire for being ill-defined (see the testimony on this topic during the run-up to the 2004 reauthorization of IDEA for examples of the fire), it’d help if people used the term in ways consistent with law and academic study.

I may tire of functioning as the LD Language Police, but I hope the effort will help us to sustain efforts to meet the needs of those with LD. To be sure, those with other disabilities need help, too. Let’s get it for them, but not by mis-identifying them as having LD.