Michele Kule-Korgood was twenty years old, a brand-new special education teacher, when she met a boy in her class with cerebral palsy. He was a twin — his mother had been hit by a car five months into the pregnancy, and both children were born with cerebral palsy. His twin could walk and talk, but was significantly intellectually impaired. This boy could do neither. He couldn't walk. He couldn't talk.

But Michele knew something the paperwork didn't. "I knew he was a bright little boy," she told me. "I knew at six years old, he was reading and understanding. I couldn't prove it, but I knew it. I could tell."

She couldn't prove it, because the test wouldn't let her. Every year, the school measured his IQ with a standard verbal assessment — instructions given out loud, answers given out loud. Every year, the result came back the same. Around 40. What they called, at the time, profoundly retarded. Today, profoundly intellectually disabled.

Then, the following year, someone found an instrument that didn't require a voice at all — an eye-gaze test, four quadrants, the child answering just by looking. They ran a baseline first, to be sure the answers were real.

His IQ came back at 90.

"His intelligence didn't rise," Michele said. "Ours did. Our ability to measure his intelligence rose."

She never forgot it. Years later, as a special education attorney, she found herself asking the same questions at hearing, again and again, whenever a district had tested a child with a tool that didn't fit:

How were the instructions given? Verbally.

How were the answers given? Verbally.

Doesn't this child have a documented expressive language impairment — in fact, didn't you recommend speech services for it? Yes.

A receptive impairment too — and you recommended speech for that as well? Yes.

So isn't it true, she'd ask, that you gave this child an IQ test requiring them to understand spoken directions and produce spoken answers, when your own records say they can't reliably do either? You're not measuring their intelligence, she'd say. You're measuring the impairment.

And then, often, she'd ask the next question: did you consider a different instrument — something nonverbal, something that didn't depend on the very thing this child struggles with? Sometimes the answer was that no one had thought of it. Sometimes the answer was something else entirely.

“We don't have that one,” a witness told her once. The district didn't buy it. It's not in our closet.

Michele has carried that boy with her into every one of those hearings. "I've never forgotten that I was a twenty-year-old teacher," she said, "and it guides what I do every day. I can't stand when a district says, overtly or covertly, that they're not recommending anything else because they don't think this kid can achieve anymore. We're talking about a child. You're going to write the end of a life story for a child? Why not try something else?"

Why not try “something else”? That’s a phrase that’s probably not used enough.

"It's the assessments that are just not what they need to be," said Michele, drawing a larger point. "And that's the front end of all of this. The IEP isn't being fulfilled because they're not doing the right testing. And then it goes to due process — and it's $1.3 billion [spent on due process hearings] later. No wonder, right?"

But that $1.3 billion is another story.

The instrument matters as much as the result. If your child's evaluation required them to do something they struggle with — speaking, writing, sitting still, reading — ask whether a different tool was considered, and if not, why not. Sometimes the honest answer isn't that the right tool didn't exist. It's that the school simply didn't have it on hand.

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