14. MEASURING LEARNING DISABILITIES Hammill (1971) provided a description of a typical test battery to measure a child's learning disabilities: 1. Intelligence--WISC, Standford-Binet. Intelligence Scale (revised), Slosson. Intelligence Test for Children and Adults. 2. Language--ITPA. 3. Achievement-California Achievement Test, Metropolitan Achievement Tests, Stanford Achievement Tests, Jastak- Bijou. Achievement Test, Durrell-Sullivan Reading Capacity, and Achievement Tests, Gates Reading Readiness Scales. 4. Speech--The Templin-Darley Test of Articulation. 5. Perceptual Motor--Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test, Marianne Frostig Developmental Test of Visual Perception, Wepman Auditory Discrimination Test, Graham-Kendall Memory for Designs Test, and the Benton Visual Retention Test. The crisis milestones for the parents of the neurologically impaired child might be set forth as follows: 1. Securing an accurate diagnosis of the child's problems. 2. Getting the child ready for public education. 3. Finding a proper educational placement and supplementary therapeutic program. 4. Finding programs for the neurologically impaired adolescent. 5. Finding vocational education and life management programs for neurological impaired youths. 6. Finding post-parental-death programs for the neurologically impaired youth or adult. Once the child has been tested and programs are found, the following objectives, formulated by the by the Task Force on Early Childhood Development of the Education Commission of the States, are as follows: 1. To develop ways to reach the families of young children and to strengthen their capacities for parenting. 2. To involve parents directly in the formal education of their children and through the decision-making process. 3. To provide for the health, safety, and psychological needs of young children. 4. To start the educational process that will contribute to the development of individuals who will be able to solve a variety of problems and are willing to try to solve them. 5. To lay the foundation for improvements that should take place in the early years of schooling to make it more responsive to the needs of children. When working with children with learning disabilities, Silver (1974) advocated the use of the system approach and maintained it was essential since the family is a functional social system with boundaries, members, relationships, rules, and roles. Each family needs to achieve a level of comfortable functioning, and members of a family help to maintain this balance overtly and covertly. Families usually develop repetitious, circular, and predictable communication patterns and acceptable, versus unacceptable, roles to maintain this balance. When the family homeostasis is precarious, members exert effort to maintain it (p. 122). The activities and movements within a family might be considered in an analogous way with Newton's Laws of Physical Motion. First Law of Family Motion: Family members establish roles and patterns of interacting and communicating. Once all family members establish patterns that blend together to establish homeostasis, they continue in this state unless compelled by some external force to change that state. Second Law of Family Motion: When forced to change its roles and patterns of interacting and communicating, the rate of family change is proportional to the force acting on it and takes place in the direction in which the external force shifts it. Third Law of Family Motion: For every attempt by a member of the family system to change his role or pattern of interacting and communicating, thus altering the equilibrium, there is an equal and opposite by the other members of the family system to either return to the former level of equilibrium or to establish a new homeostasis. Silver (1974) stated that educators cannot look at the child with developmental disabilities in isolation. When one person in the family is in pain, all family members feel the pain and react in some way. The symptomatic member of the family (the patient) may have unique problems causing the pain but may also be serving a function for the family in maintaining homeostasis, even if this is dysfunctional homeostasis. External attempts at change will be reacted to by all members of the family. It is difficult to change one part of the family system (the patient) without working the whole system (p. 123). Ames (1974) contended that the transition from childhood to adulthood for many learning-disabled individuals may be a time of crisis, but it is also an occasion for imaginative and effective programming. Enough experience in designing and operating habilitative services for the learning disabled has been gained to allow educators an optimism tempered by the realities of the disability. The Life Adjustment approach to training and treatment, drawing upon the full range of skills and techniques which have emerged over the years and which are continually being improved upon, together with the development of a continuum of services throughout the life-cycle of the learning disabled, means that the educator must stand ready and able to give new meaning and depth to the ideal of the "good life." Ames concurred with Balch (1970) who said, "the measure of our civilization is the possibility for every individual's development." The most sweeping preventive actions would consist of reducing the school's mass production of failure and frustration in children. As Glasser (1969) suggested, this could be achieved by a redesign of schools which avoid failures, but that is a social and a political problem. Schools tend to be what the social system needs. The persistence of practices like letter grades may be attributed to powerful social support. Failure and frustration could be reduced by developing teacher understanding of the nature of learning disabilities and the performance limitations of the learning disabled child. There is much work in early education which would suggest preventive applications to high risk adolescent groups. For example, Irwin (1960) found that ten minutes of reading per day to infants, beginning at thirteen months, produced generally advanced linguistic ability by twenty months. Similarly, programmed instructional materials and hardware, as well as some television like "Sesame Street" and "The Electric Company" might be effectively be used with the high risk or early-diagnosed learning disability groups. Only recently Jacobson (1974) wrote that learning disabilities and juvenile delinquency have been strongly linked, despite the historical evidence of a close relationship. The critical importance of learning disabilities has been eclipsed by greater attention to social, intrapsychic, and intellectual factors. The evidence is now clearer: learning disabilities of various types appear to occur with a high degree of frequency in delinquents. The explanation of the relationship is as follows: schools, like society, are success ladders, with a few successes possible and pressure upon all to succeed. Children who have learning disabilities are more handicapped in such an extrusive, competitive system than are non-learning disabled children. Those children with learning disabilities become frustrated by school and interact with it in delinquent behaviors. The teacher, frustrated in return by the child, adds pressures by his/her reaction, which further catalyzes a delinquent orientation. Evaluating and remediating the learning disabilities Rice (1970) wrote, is the most efficient way to "rehabilitate" most delinquents. Ordinarily, the educational programs of correctional agencies are simply more of the same type of experiences which initially overwhelmed the learning disabled child. An analysis of probable learning disabilities could be added to the evaluation and testing centers of existing correctional institutions.