Looking for Parents’ Stories
I need your help with research on parents’ involvement in special education. For the past several years, I have studied this topic from many different angles: the legal history of special education, the advice given to parents of disabled children, and the evolution of different disability diagnoses. Now, I need to better understand parents’ perspectives and their experiences advocating for their disabled children.
Please contact me (at the e-mail address or the phone number below) if you have a child receiving special education services and would be willing to complete a short survey and to participate in a phone interview of around one hour. Whatever you share with me will be kept anonymous in any presentations or publications (currently have a book publication contract with the University of Chicago Press).
There are no risks or direct benefits involved with participating in this research, although it is my hope that this research will shed more light on parents’ involvement in special education and help to make the special education more fair and equal.
Thanks, and I hope to hear from you!
Colin Ong-Dean, Ph.D.
phone: 858-945-3878
e-mail: [email protected]
Oh you will sell your book and you will make money off it and it will be full of stories from my parents and other peoples parents. I see you are the one gathering all the information and writing it up and doing a good bit of the work, however, what you need to understand is you are aiming at parents. Often parents have to spend alot of money on helping their kids get what they want and need fromt he education system. Lawyers to sue the school aren’t cheap. It is costly having an LD child even after they grow up. They are not payed fair wages due to their disability, and the state doesn’t provide much as far as disability goes. Often LD children have a hard time keeping a job as adults… Many get fired frequently for the label they wear. So please understand that i think it is assinine to not offer parents, who are often trying to save through these financial complications to pay for a higher education for their disabled children. While you and those like you come knocking on doors offering nothing and then trying to get something uniquely ours so that you can package it and sell it. You are no different fromt he rest and just the way you talk about it clearly indicates that you are objectifying people like me. So, though i realize the large work on this is done by you, and i respect you should be making something off of it, the product you are looking for belongs to us people like me and people like my parents…. Why should we just give it for you to make money off of without benefitting at all ourselves?