DIFFERENT UNIVERSES In “Education Policy and Politics in the Nation’s Capital” (EDUC 798C), Dr. Jane West (Ph.D. ‘88) guides students through the policy world and reveals its impacts on teaching and learning. by Joshua Lavender
Dr. Jane West
Before the 1975 passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, which later became the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, public schools accommodated only one out of five children with disabilities. More than a million American children had no access to public schools, and another 3.5 million children attended segregated facilities where instruction was often subpar. One federal law dramatically changed the picture.
Dr. West had recently graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she studied literature with extraordinary professors such as the poet Kenneth Rexroth, and she thought of herself as a “hippie poet.” Naturally, she taught poetry to her students. Amazed by their original poems, she gathered and submitted them to a school-wide poetry contest. But the school’s principal harbored some ideas of his own about the abilities of people with emotional disabilities. He was convinced that Dr. West’s students had not written the poems, and he flatly refused to allow them into the competition. “And there was nothing I could do about it,” Dr. West says, recalling her dismay. “Talk about how assigning labels to people leads us to have low expectations of them!” Dr. West and I are sitting over coffee in a Benjamin Building conference room. Sporting a polychrome neck scarf and designer specs, Dr. West is the very picture of a high-powered D.C. professional. A lobbyist and consultant, she is a longtime fixture in the education
D
r. Jane West remembers what American public schools were
policy world. But her quick intelligence and easygoing candor say
like before the passage of federal legislation requiring them to
“teacher.” We are meeting to discuss a class she teaches on education
accommodate students with disabilities. In the early 1970s, she was
policy and politics at the College of Education. Dr. West begins with
a special education paraprofessional. Her classroom was a trailer in
her journey from poetry to policy.
a Bronx schoolyard. She taught English to emotionally disturbed
After taking a master’s in special education at Teachers College
children who were transitioning from psychiatric care back into the
of Columbia University, Dr. West moved to the D.C. area, where she
school system.
continued to work with emotionally disturbed students as a special
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