David Z. Hambrick, Madeline Marquardt: There are advantages to being smart. People who do well on standardized tests of intelligence—IQ tests—tend to be more successful in the classroom and the workplace. Although the reasons are not fully understood, they also tend to live longer, healthier lives, and are less likely to experience negative life events … Continue reading Bad News for the Highly Intelligent →

Gabriela Borter: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a 9.8% increase in measles cases as of May 10, a resurgence that public health officials have attributed to the spread of misinformation about the measles vaccine. Data are updated every Monday. In New York, 66 cases were reported according to CDC spokesman Jason … Continue reading U.S. measles outbreak grows with 75 new cases, mostly in New York →

BBC: A county in New York state has declared a state of emergency following a severe outbreak of measles. Rockland County, on the Hudson river north of New York City, has barred unvaccinated children from public spaces after 153 cases were confirmed. Violating the order will be punishable by a fine of $500 (£378) and … Continue reading New York county declares measles outbreak emergency →

Ashley May: People choosing not to vaccinate has emerged into a global health threat in 2019, the the World Health Organization recently reported. The CDC has also recognized that the number of children who aren’t being vaccinated by 24 months old has been gradually increasing. Some parents opt not to vaccinate because of the discredited … Continue reading People near Portland aren’t vaccinating babies. Health officials just declared a measles emergency →

Logan Wroge: The Madison School Board on Monday backed a proposed contract that would keep police officers at Madison’s four main high schools. Board members voted 4-2 in favor of the proposed contract, which would emphasize alternative disciplines instead of arresting or citing students, lay the groundwork for a new complaint procedure against the officers … Continue reading Madison School Board backs contract that would keep police officers in high schools →

Ni Dandan: Cheng Yanbin always knew his son, nicknamed Junjun, was different from other kids. Whenever his fellow kindergarteners played together in gleeful twos and threes, Junjun sat off to one side and didn’t join in the fun. “Other kids would laugh at a funny game or story, but his facial expression just stayed the … Continue reading In China’s Public Schools, Kids With Asperger’s Are Cut Adrift →

Julio Ochoa: Children registering for school in Florida this year were asked to reveal some history about their mental health. The new requirement is part of a law rushed through the state legislature after the February shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. The state’s school districts now must ask whether a … Continue reading Parents Are Leery Of Schools Requiring ‘Mental Health’ Disclosures By Students →

Travis Pillow, via a kind Deb Britt email: Twenty-five years ago CRPE was founded on the idea of the school as the locus of change. Today we are reexamining our old assumptions in light of new technical possibilities, changes in the economy, and a recognition that even the most effective schools may need to develop … Continue reading For Brandon: How One Family’s Struggle Can Help Us Imagine an Education System That Does Better by Exceptional Children →

The Economist: ONE of the internet’s most odious conspiracy theorists has had his videos and podcasts removed from Apple, YouTube, Spotify and Facebook. Alex Jones (pictured), who has a radio show and runs a few websites, including Infowars, has raised doubts about the murders of 26 children and teachers in the Sandy Hook mass shooting, … Continue reading Are Facebook and YouTube quasi-governmental actors? →

Nicholette Zeliadt: There are different views on whether ‘people with autism’ or ‘autistic people’ is the better way to refer to individuals on the spectrum. Some of the people quoted in this article prefer to say ‘autistic,’ but Spectrum’s style is to refer to ‘people with autism.’ It wasn’t until Anna Remington had nearly finished … Continue reading Partnerships with people on the spectrum yield rich research insights →

Said Jilani: Authors Jonathan Wai, a research fellow at Geisinger Health System at the Autism and Developmental Medicine Institute, and Kaja Perina, the editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, collected a sample of 1,979 employees working at two of America’s most prominent and influential newspapers, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, during 2016. They … Continue reading Graduates of Elite Universities Dominate the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, Study Finds →

unit 9: The Party is based on a concept by the author Lucy Hawking and is written by Sumita Majumdar, who drew on her own experiences as a person with autism in similar social situations. Throughout the film, viewers hear Layla’s thoughts, voiced by the autistic teenager Honey Jones. The storyline was developed after extensive … Continue reading The Party →

BBC: About 700,000 people in the UK are on the autism spectrum, according to the National Autistic Society Five times as many males as females are diagnosed Autism is under-diagnosed in females

Gloria Orrigi: The paradigm shift from the age of information to the age of reputation must be taken into account when we try to defend ourselves from ‘fake news’ and other misinformation and disinformation techniques that are proliferating through contemporary societies. What a mature citizen of the digital age should be competent at is not … Continue reading Say goodbye to the information age: it’s all about reputation now →

Susan Du: Over the past few months, Humboldt High teacher Rachel Wannarka started noticing a lot of kids being transferred to her special education math class after failing out of regular math. While regular math takes place daily, special ed math is every other day, taught at a level several grades lower than what many … Continue reading Teachers: St. Paul schools are violating federal law with special ed kids →

Sandor Farkas: One hour into the lecture, an audience member asked her whether she thinks Buchanan’s libertarian philosophy was motivated by “personal greed” or “malevolence,” to which she responded by speculating that support for individual liberty might actually be the result of a mental disorder. “It’s striking to me how many of the architects of … Continue reading Campus Rhetoric →

Stuart Richie: ‘IQ tests just measure how good you are at doing IQ tests.’ This is the argument that is almost always made when intelligence-testing is mentioned. It’s often promoted by people who are, otherwise, highly scientifically literate. You wouldn’t catch them arguing that climate change is a myth or that vaccines might cause autism. … Continue reading How clever is it to dismiss IQ tests? →

Lisa Speckhard Pasque: Madison School Board members Anna Moffit and Mary Burke have announced they will be running for re-election in 2018. In April, the terms will expire for seats 1 and 2 on the Madison Metropolitan School Board, currently occupied by Moffit and Burke. Burke has filed a declaration of candidacy with the Madison … Continue reading Madison K-12 Status Quo? Anna Moffit, Mary Burke running for re-election to Madison school board in 2018 →

David Z. Hambrick, Madeline Marquardt: There are advantages to being smart. People who do well on standardized tests of intelligence—IQ tests—tend to be more successful in the classroom and the workplace. Although the reasons are not fully understood, they also tend to live longer, healthier lives, and are less likely to experience negative life events … Continue reading Bad News for the Highly Intelligent →

Sarah Karp: After Julie Rodriguez enrolled her 10-year-old autistic son at a public school on Chicago’s Southwest Side last year, she found herself navigating a maze of paperwork that she said seemed designed to prevent her son from getting the special education services he needed. Rodriguez had just moved to the city from the suburbs, … Continue reading WBEZ Investigation: CPS Secretly Overhauled Special Education At Students’ Expense →

Kathryn Schulz: I learned this fact about myself (and you) from one of the more unlikely books I lately committed to reading: “Teeth: A Very Short Introduction,” by Peter S. Ungar, a professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas. Like its subject, “Teeth” is both a freestanding entity and part of a larger body: … Continue reading What you learn from the Very Short Introduction series. →

Tom Chivers: It started simply enough – with suggestions that her child should follow an unremarkable-sounding special diet. “They did these tests: a stool test and a urine test,” Layla (not her real name) tells BuzzFeed News. “I can’t remember where they were from – not the NHS, obviously, but some lab. The results had … Continue reading How Online Filter Bubbles Are Making Parents Of Autistic Children Targets For Fake “Cures” →

Glenn Howatt and Faiza Mahamud: As Minnesota confronts its second measles outbreak in seven years, public health officials are battling to contain the disease while also trying to educate parents in the face of an organized opposition. As happened in 2011, anti-vaccine activists are reaching out to Minnesota’s Somali community, where both outbreaks have been … Continue reading Anti-vaccine groups step up outreach to Minnesota Somali families over measles outbreak →

Travis M. Andrews: Along with her twin sister, she was born 26 weeks early. At 1 pound 12 ounces, she weighed slightly less than the healthy Keeley. Then, 10 hours into life, Kara suffered a brain hemorrhage. Seventeen years later, she’s lucky to be alive. But she has cerebral palsy and severe autism, which in … Continue reading ‘There is no other medicine’: Texas father breaks law to treat self-harming autistic daughter with marijuana →

Peter Hotez: It’s looking as if 2017 could become the year when the anti-vaccination movement gains ascendancy in the United States and we begin to see a reversal of several decades in steady public health gains. The first blow will be measles outbreaks in America. Measles is one of the most contagious and most lethal … Continue reading How the Anti-Vaxxers Are Winning →

Brian M. Rosenthal: During the first week of school at Shadow Forest Elementary, a frail kindergartner named Roanin Walker had a meltdown at recess. Overwhelmed by the shrieking and giggling, he hid by the swings and then tried to escape the playground, hitting a classmate and biting a teacher before being restrained. The principal called … Continue reading Denied: How Texas keeps tens of thousands of children out of special education →

Leif Reigstad: The video was posted on Facebook as a trailer for Vaxxed, a documentary film directed by disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield, the author of a since-retracted study that linked vaccines with autism. The film, which doubled down on his research, drew so much criticism from actual doctors that it was pulled from the … Continue reading The Anti-Vaccination Movement Is Gaining Ground In Texas →

BBC News: Donald Grey Triplett was the first person to be diagnosed with autism. The fulfilling life he has led offers an important lesson for today, John Donvan and Caren Zucker write. After Rain Man, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, the next great autism portrayal the stage or screen might … Continue reading Donald Grey Triplett: The first boy diagnosed as autistic →

University of Cambridge: Autistic traits are not the same as having a diagnosis of autism; instead, these are characteristics of personality and behaviour that are found throughout the general population and are linked to what is seen in the clinical condition of autism. Everyone has some autistic traits – such as difficulty in taking another … Continue reading Study of half a million people reveals sex and job predict how many autistic traits you have →

The Economist: Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. By Steve Silberman. Avery; 544 pages; $29.95. Allen & Unwin; £16.99. EVERYTHING about autism, which is among the most common and the most slippery of mental conditions, is contested. The American Psychiatric Association, which determines what ailments American insurance companies will pay to … Continue reading The treatment of autistic children in the 20th century was shocking →

The Economist: THE REBECCA SCHOOL for autistic children occupies all five floors of a building in midtown Manhattan. Its rooftop playground has a fine view of the Empire State Building. It features colourful classrooms and lots of places for children to lie down and recover from the sensory overload often suffered by autistic people. “My … Continue reading Youthful Folly →

Kayleb Moon-Robinson is a 12-year-old boy who lives in Virginia. One day at school, he kicked a trash can and was charged with disorderly conduct in juvenile court. A few weeks later, he disobeyed a new rule (made just for him) that he stay behind in the classroom while his peers left. When the school … Continue reading The corrosive cult of compliance in our schools →

Daniela Hernandez: Lee and her husband, who was getting his doctorate in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, discovered their son’s condition was serious enough that they wouldn’t be able to go back to the life they had as game developers in South Korea. The family decided to stay in the U.S. Lee … Continue reading This mom is coding iPad apps to help her autistic child explore the world →

Hank Long: Public schools are required by state and federal law to accept students with disabilities and to make appropriate accommodations for their learning. So when a district – despite its best of intentions – fails to meet the individual educational needs of such students, where are the students and their families to turn? That’s … Continue reading ‘Education savings account’ for students with disabilities? Or ‘voucher?’ →

Philip Ball: We’re surely now in the Age of the Brain. In the United States, the BRAIN Initiative, announced in 2013 and with a projected cost of $3bn, aims to map the activity of every neuron in the brain—first, those of mice and other animals, then of humans. The European Union has assigned €1bn to … Continue reading Are we living in the age of the brain? →

The Economist: DR BOB SEARS, a paediatrician from Orange County, California, does not like to call his patients “free-riders”. True, he specialises in treating vaccine-sceptics, those families who resent being told to immunise their children against nasty diseases, from measles to whooping cough. It is also the case that, as a trained doctor, he believes … Continue reading California’s anti-vaccine brigade and the dark side of individualism →

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email: IDA Dyslexia Handbook: What Every Family Should Know is now available online Free Open LETRS Training An overview of the professional development program Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling. This session is especially for district administrators: superintendents, curriculum directors, special education directors, reading specialists, principals, etc. … Continue reading Reading Resources & Conferences →

Radiolab: 3 months later a specialist sat Ron and Cornelia down and said the word that changed everything for them: Autism. In this episode, the Suskind family finds an unlikely way to access their silent son’s world. We set off to figure out what their story can tell us about Autism, a disorder with a … Continue reading Juicervose →

Heather Vogell: Carson Luke, a young boy with autism, shattered bones in his hand and foot after educators grabbed him and tried to shut him into a “scream room.” Kids across the country risked similar harm at least 267,000 times in just one school year. he room where they locked up Heather Luke’s 10-year-old son … Continue reading Violent and Legal: The Shocking Ways School Kids are Being Pinned Down, Isolated Against Their Will →

Gail Robinson : Eleven-year-old Matthew Votto sits at an iPad, his teacher at his elbow. She holds up a small laminated picture of a $20 bill. “What money is this?” she asks. Matthew looks at the iPad, touches a square marked “Money Identification,” and then presses “$20.” “Twenty,” the tablet intones, while the teacher, Edwina … Continue reading IPads, Galaxys, and other devices are becoming staples of special-ed classrooms. →

Jennifer Richler: A few days ago, an old friend sent me a panicked email. She had just finished reading Ron Suskind’s beautiful essay in the New York Times Magazine about raising a son with autism: “Reaching My Autistic Son Through Disney.” Suskind describes how, at almost 3 years of age, his son Owen “disappeared.” The … Continue reading Could a 3-Year-Old Just “Disappear”? →

The Economist: AUTISM is a strange condition. Sometimes its symptoms of “social blindness” (an inability to read or comprehend the emotions of others) occur alone. This is dubbed high-functioning autism, or Asperger’s syndrome. Though their fellow men and women may regard them as a bit odd, high-functioning autists are often successful (sometimes very successful) members … Continue reading Why it’s not “Rain Woman”: Women have fewer cognitive disorders than men do because their bodies are better at ignoring the mutations which cause them →

David Dobbs:

If you want a look at a high-profile field dealing with a lot of humbling snags, peer into #ASHG2013, the Twitter hashtag for last week’s meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics, held in Boston. You will see successes, to be sure: Geneticists are sequencing and analyzing genomes ever faster and more precisely. In the last year alone, the field has quintupled the rate at which it identifies genes for rare diseases. These advances are leading to treatments and cures for obscure illnesses that doctors could do nothing about only a few years ago, as well as genetic tests that allow prospective parents to bear healthy children instead of suffering miscarriage after miscarriage.
But many of the tweets–or any frank geneticist–will also tell you stories of struggle and confusion: The current list of cancer-risk genes, the detection of which leads some people to have “real organs removed,” likely contains many false positives, even as standard diagnostic sequencing techniques are missing many disease-causing mutations. There’s a real possibility that the “majority of cancer predisposition genes in databases are wrong.” And a sharp team of geneticists just last week cleanly dismantled a hyped study from last year that claimed to find a genetic signature of autism clear enough to diagnose the risk of it in unborn children.

Amanda Winkler:

We felt like our family was totally violated by the sheriff’s department and the school district,” says Doug and Catherine Snodgrass of Temecula, California. Last December their 17-year-old autistic high school son was arrested after twice buying marijuana for an undercover Riverside county police officer.
The undercover operation, titled “Operation Glass House,” spanned a few months and included undercover officers in three area high schools: Chaparral, Temecula Valley, and Rancho Vista Continuation. The officers posed as regular high school students and would ask other students for drugs. Twenty-two students were arrested – the majority of them are reported to be special needs students like the Snodgrass’ son.
Their son, who wished to remain unnamed, is noticeably handicapped and has been diagnosed with autism as well as bipolar disorder, Tourettes, and several anxiety disorders.
“Everyday is a challenge for him,” says his father.
Their son’s list of disabilities have many in the community wondering why he was targeted in this undercover drug operation.

David Mitchell:

The 13-year-old author of The Reason I Jump invites you, his reader, to imagine a daily life in which your faculty of speech is taken away. Explaining that you’re hungry, or tired, or in pain, is now as beyond your powers as a chat with a friend. I’d like to push the thought-experiment a little further. Now imagine that after you lose your ability to communicate, the editor-in-residence who orders your thoughts walks out without notice. The chances are that you never knew this mind-editor existed, but now that he or she has gone, you realize too late how the editor allowed your mind to function for all these years. A dam-burst of ideas, memories, impulses, and thoughts is cascading over you, unstoppably. Your editor controlled this flow, diverting the vast majority away, and recommending just a tiny number for your conscious consideration. But now you’re on your own.
Now your mind is a room where 20 radios, all tuned to different stations, are blaring out voices and music. The radios have no off-switches or volume controls, the room you’re in has no door or window, and relief will come only when you’re too exhausted to stay awake. To make matters worse, another hitherto unrecognized editor has just quit without notice–your editor of the senses. Suddenly, sensory input from your environment is flooding in, too, unfiltered in quality and overwhelming in quantity. Colors and patterns swim and clamor for your attention. The fabric softener in your sweater smells as strong as air freshener fired up your nostrils. Your comfy jeans are now as scratchy as steel wool. Your vestibular and proprioceptive senses are also out of kilter, so the floor keeps tilting like a ferry in heavy seas, and you’re no longer sure where your hands and feet are in relation to the rest of you. You can feel the plates of your skull, plus your facial muscles and your jaw; your head feels trapped inside a motorcycle helmet three sizes too small which may or may not explain why the air conditioner is as deafening as an electric drill, but your father–who’s right here in front of you–sounds as if he’s speaking to you from a cellphone, on a train going through lots of short tunnels, in fluent Cantonese. You are no longer able to comprehend your mother tongue, or any tongue: From now on, all languages will be foreign languages. Even your sense of time has gone, rendering you unable to distinguish between a minute and an hour, as if you’ve been entombed in an Emily Dickinson poem about eternity, or locked into a time-bending sci-fi film. Poems and films, however, come to an end, whereas this is your new ongoing reality. Autism is a lifelong condition. But even the word autism makes no more sense to you now than the word 自閉症 or αυτισµός or .

Tom Cutterham:

Christopher Boone loves prime numbers and hates being touched. Oskar Schell has a hyperactive imagination. He won’t swear, but he will say, “Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake.” The behavioral problems of Christopher and Oskar, the respective narrators and protagonists of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, are never explicitly labeled as autistic spectrum disorders, In a brief statement, worth reading, Mark Haddon has written that “Curious Incident is not a novel about Asperger’s… If anything, it’s a novel about difference, about being an outsider.”but it has been easy for readers to identify them in these terms. As much as both novels have relied on an existing public understanding of autism, they have each — supported by stage and screen adaptations — also helped to construct it. More than any other two books, these have encoded the autistic perspective into a literary trope with its own set of mechanisms and effects.
While both the novels have male protagonists, and males are about four times more likely to have autistic spectrum disorders than females, the most prominent autobiographies of autism have been by women: See Temple Grandin’s Emergence and Donna Williams’ Nobody Nowhere.What distinguishes the autistic person is a difficulty gaining access to other people’s minds. TNI Vol. 18: Family Planning is out now. Subscribe for $2 and get it today. He lacks the ability to reconstruct and predict thoughts, feelings, desires, and reactions. The neurologist Simon Baron-Cohen has called this “mindblindness.” Those who don’t suffer from this problem, on the other hand, unconsciously translate myriad physical and symbolic cues — subtext, allusion, tone, and all the elements of body language. In Baron-Cohen’s terms, we can read minds.

Emily Le Coz:

The last word Watson Dollar spoke before autism erased his ability to do so was “lights.”
The chubby cheeked toddler lay in his father’s arms as anesthesia, administered for an ear-tube surgery, dimmed his consciousness. Head lolling back, body going limp, Watson gazed at the fluorescent lamps above him, uttering the one-syllable noun.
Then he closed his eyes and never spoke again. That was 20 years ago.
In the two months between Halloween and Christmas of 1992, Watson had lost almost of all of his 150-word vocabulary along with an interest in the world.
His parents initially failed to notice the change, chalking up the subtle signs to stubbornness or fatigue or the ever-changing nature of a developing child.
By New Year’s, though, the difference was both inescapable and worrisome.

K Jackson:

Some people see computers as little more than gaming consoles and shopping tools. Recently developed electronics, however, have revolutionized education for children with disabilities. If you know a child with disabilities who is struggling, you might want to explore some of these devices.
Technology for Kids With Autism
Children with autism often don’t develop typical communication skills. It takes years and years of therapy for some of these children to start using simple language. Just because a child cannot speak does not mean that he or she doesn’t have something to say.
That’s where revolutionary electronics come in. For years, counselors have used picture cards to communicate with non-verbal children. Now, they can use some of these apps that let autistic kids express practically any thought or feeling. They just load the app on a laptop of your choice so the kids can point and click their way to expression.

Colin Macilwain:

The United States spent more than US$3 billion last year across 209 federal programmes intended to lure young people into careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). The money goes on a plethora of schemes at school, undergraduate and postgraduate levels, all aimed at promoting science and technology, and raising standards of science education.
In a report published on 10 April, Congress’s Government Accountability Office (GAO) asked a few pointed questions about why so many potentially overlapping programmes coexist. The same day, the 2014 budget proposal of President Barack Obama’s administration suggested consolidating the programmes, but increasing funding.
What no one asked was whether these many activities actually benefit science and engineering, or society as a whole. My answer to both questions is an emphatic ‘no’.
Students with autism gravitate toward STEM majors
Taken individually, of course, these programmes are all very cuddly and wonderful. They are keenly pursued by governments around the world — particularly in countries that fret about their economic competitiveness, such as the United Kingdom and the United States.
But taken together, these schemes — which allocate perhaps $600 to each child passing through the US education system — constitute bad public policy. Government promotion of science careers ultimately damages science and engineering, by inflating supply and depressing demand for scientists and engineers in the employment market.

Aleks Eror:

It’s not exactly news that China is setting itself up as a new global superpower, is it? While Western civilization chokes on its own gluttony like a latter-day Marlon Brando, China continues to buy up American debt and lock away the world’s natural resources. But now, not content to simply laugh and make jerk-off signs as they pass us on the geopolitical highway, they’ve also developed a state-endorsed genetic-engineering project.
At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation’s intelligence by five to 15 IQ points. Within a couple of generations, competing with the Chinese on an intellectual level will be like challenging Lena Dunham to a getting-naked-on-TV contest.
Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist and lecturer at NYU, is one of the 2,000 braniacs who contributed their DNA. I spoke to him about what this creepy-ass program might mean for the future of Chinese kids.

Related: New data reveal scale of China abortions and Eugenics.
Many links here.
Technology Review:

In its scientific work, BGI often acts as the enabler of other people’s ideas. That is the case in a major project conceived by Steve Hsu, vice president for research at Michigan State University, to search for genes that influence intelligence. Under the guidance of Zhao Bowen, BGI is now sequencing the DNA of more than 2,000 people–mostly Americans–who have IQ scores of at least 160, or four standard deviations above the mean.
The DNA comes primarily from a collection of blood ­samples amassed by Robert Plomin, a psychologist at King’s College, London. The plan, to compare the genomes of geniuses and people of ordinary intelligence, is scientifically risky (it’s likely that thousands of genes are involved) and somewhat controversial. For those reasons it would be very hard to find the $15 or $20 million needed to carry out the project in the West. “Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t,” Plomin says. “But BGI is doing it basically for free.”
From Plomin’s perspective, BGI is so large that it appears to have more DNA sequencing capacity than it knows what to do with. It has “all those machines and people that have to be fed” with projects, he says. The IQ study isn’t the only mega-project under way. With a U.S. nonprofit, Autism Speaks, BGI is being paid to sequence the DNA of up to 10,000 people from families with autistic children. For researchers in Denmark, BGI is decoding the genomes of 3,000 obese people and 3,000 lean ones.

Amy SF Lutz:

Earlier this year, I was out to dinner with a friend and our combined eight kids. My 14-year-old son, Jonah, who has autism, was very excited about the imminent arrival of his hamburger and french fries, so he was acting as he does when he’s happy: bouncing in his seat, clapping his hands, and vocalizing a mishmash of squawks and catchphrases from his favorite Sesame Street videos. He wasn’t exceedingly loud, but the oddness of his behavior had clearly caught the attention of an older gentleman at the one other table occupied at that early hour.
“Shhhhhhh,” he hissed from across the room.
Everyone at the table instantly froze–except, of course, for Jonah. “I’m sorry,” I explained, rising from my seat and taking a few steps toward him so I wouldn’t have to holler. “My son is autistic … ”
“Oh, sorry,” he said.
“He’s not trying to disturb you intentionally … “

Katherine Beals:

Children have long been graded not just for academics, but also for elements of “character” — particularly behavior and emotional maturity. However, in the last few decades, socially eccentric children have seen their awkwardness or aloofness factored into their grades in math, language arts, and social studies. Ironically, this trend has coincided with a rise in diagnoses of autistic spectrum disorders.
For children on the autism spectrum, new social studies curricula pose a particular challenge. Once restricted to readings, worksheets, and essays on history, government, and politics, the subject increasingly requires students to reflect on their connections within their local communities. They are asked to present projects to their classmates (even in primary school), spend much of class time working in groups, and evaluate scenarios such as this one, from a worksheet for 3rd graders:

Erin Richards:

When Miriam Oakleaf was 10 months old, her parents noticed something was wrong.
By 2 1/2 she had been formally diagnosed with autism, epilepsy and a rare skin and central nervous system condition called linear nevus sebaceous syndrome.
Now 8 and in second grade at Crestwood Elementary School in Madison, Miriam’s schooling requires extensive support and planning from a variety of education professionals – administrators, therapists, teachers and aides – in addition to her parents.
The story of Miriam and children like her is at the heart of a $21 million proposal in Gov. Scott Walker’s state budget that would allow 5% of kids with disabilities in Wisconsin to attend private or public schools outside their home districts on a taxpayer-funded voucher.
The proposal has driven a wedge through the state’s network of special-needs parents. Some believe it would open up more schooling options for their children while others contend it will drain more resources from their local public schools.

Katie Rophie:

As the writer Andrew Solomon, his husband, John Habich, and their three-year-old son George descend the stone steps, they bring a burst of colour to the dark grey underworld of the New York Transit Museum: John in brilliant red corduroys, George in an orange-striped shirt, Andrew in a bright-blue striped shirt and scarlet socks.
I have brought along my son, Leo. Being three, the boys don’t really talk to each other, they run. There are antique buses to drive, models of the third rail to electrify, subways to bounce around.
Solomon has just published his spectacularly successful book Far from the Tree: A Dozen Kinds of Love, which chronicles the stories of children who, for various reasons, are extremely different from their parents. The book took 11 years to write and its 702 pages include autism, schizophrenia, Down’s syndrome, child prodigies, transgendered children, deafness, dwarfism, and crime. Each chapter tackles a different subject, seen through interviews with numerous families.

Nature:

Mutations generate sequence diversity and provide a substrate for selection. The rate of de novo mutations is therefore of major importance to evolution. Here we conduct a study of genome-wide mutation rates by sequencing the entire genomes of 78 Icelandic parent-offspring trios at high coverage. We show that in our samples, with an average father’s age of 29.7, the average de novo mutation rate is 1.20 × 10−8 per nucleotide per generation. Most notably, the diversity in mutation rate of single nucleotide polymorphisms is dominated by the age of the father at conception of the child. The effect is an increase of about two mutations per year. An exponential model estimates paternal mutations doubling every 16.5 years. After accounting for random Poisson variation, father’s age is estimated to explain nearly all of the remaining variation in the de novo mutation counts. These observations shed light on the importance of the father’s age on the risk of diseases such as schizophrenia and autism.

Allison Hertog:

Mississippi recently became the first state in the nation to adopt a public and private school choice program in which state and federal monies are provided directly to schools which parents choose. Aimed at students with dyslexia, it’s also the second special needs school choice program in the country designed for children with a single type of disability. (Ohio’s Autism Scholarship Program enacted in 2003 was the first.)
What makes this new program interesting is that it may be a starting point for other state legislatures where special needs voucher bills have failed due to concerns about parent accountability – Wisconsin comes to mind – or where special needs voucher laws have come under increased scrutiny due to reports of private school abuse of public money – Florida comes to mind.
Mississippi’s program morphed from a dyslexia screening and treatment bill (supported by a governor who struggled with the learning disorder) into a school choice measure during the proverbial sausage-making legislative process. It’s not as carefully or as broadly designed as it could have been. It also appears there’s currently only one school in the state which is specialized enough to meet the exceedingly specific criteria to participate. But nonetheless, it succeeds in incentivizing the growth of more highly-accountable school options for parents.

Alan Borsuk:

The 10-year flight of Wings Academy will end Tuesday. The closing of the small school on the south side where the vast majority of students qualify for special education leaves me thinking that nationwide we haven’t worked hard enough on figuring out what to aim for with special ed kids and how to figure out if we’re achieving it.
To what degree should we set the same goals for at least a large portion of special ed kids as for other kids, largely measured by test scores? Is success on less measurable fronts – personal development and preparation for adulthood – good enough? Better? Settling for too little?
Wings was an independent charter school, authorized to operate by the Milwaukee School Board. It had the atmosphere of a friendly, energetic, but, as one staff member put it, squirrelly family. Its program included phonics-oriented reading instruction, individualized and project-based work in many classes, tae kwon as its physical education focus, and a lot of relationship building among staff, students and families.
Test scores at Wings were, as Nicola Ciurro, co-founder and head of the school, put it, terrible. “We always knew that,” she said. Among 10th-graders in last fall’s testing, 34% were proficient in reading, 6% in math.
About 80% of the 150 students, who ranged from first- to 12th-graders, had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, learning disorders, autism, Asperger’s syndrome, dyslexia or other special circumstances. Many of the other 20% were “gray area” kids when it came to special needs, Ciurro said.

Associated Press:

One in 3 young adults with autism have no paid job experience, college or technical schooling nearly seven years after high school graduation, a study finds. That’s a poorer showing than those with other disabilities including those who are mentally disabled, the researchers said.
With roughly half a million autistic kids reaching adulthood in the next decade, experts say it’s an issue policymakers urgently need to address.
The study was done well before unemployment peaked from the recession. The situation today is tough even for young adults who don’t have such limitations.

Oliver Chou:

Global public health crisis and a fast-growing epidemic: these were the stark terms used by experts at an international summit held here last weekend to describe the cost of autism. The descriptions are backed up by grim figures. In South Korea, as many as one in 38 children are diagnosed as having autism spectrum disorders.
The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention reports prevalence at about one in 88 youngsters in the country. Hong Kong doesn’t have an official estimate, but groups say the number ranges from 70,000 to 200,000, depending on the screening criteria.