Myths about myths, validity, and natural message-passing tests, Part II

This post continues my critique of Jennifer  Binder Le-Pape’s recent blog post on the official Spelling to Communicate (S2C) website. This piece, as I noted earlier, professes to give readers valid, evidence-based arguments against what she calls the “top 10 myths” perpetrated by critics of Spelling to Communicate and other variants of facilitated communication (FC).

What Binder-Le Pape actually puts forth, however, are a combination of argument from authority, straw man arguments, circular reasoning, and unsupported and misleading statements. Last time I showed how this plays out in her first 5 purported myths; I pick up here at Myth 6.

Myth 6, per Binder-Le Pape, is that “It is dangerous to presume competence; an individual should prove that they are authentically communicating before participating in a public forum.” Here, Binder-Le Pape cites the legal system, which, she says, “presumes adults to be competent unless proven otherwise.” This would make it legally impermissible to assess people for competence. After all, if we’re required to presume competence, then presumably we shouldn’t be assessing it. But most of us recognize that evaluations of competence are sometimes necessary.

Standard evaluations of competence are psychological evaluations, which are supposed to be conducted without facilitators facilitating. Binder-Le Pape claims that “many individuals have undergone rigorous evaluations, only to be repeatedly questioned by detractors who demand a repeat performance or an additional one based on their preferred method.” She does not tell us what these rigorous evaluations entailed.

Myth 7, per Binder-Le Pape, is “Using prompts in the early stages of learning to use S2C renders it invalid.”  This one is a straw man. Many people recognize that prompts are needed in the early stages of learning.  The key question is whether those prompts are faded. Binder-Le Pape cites applied behavioral analysis (ABA), but here’s what ABA guidelines have to say about prompting.

Once the child has learned to touch one of two items held in front of him, training should be given on learning to touch one of two items placed on a table. The procedure is similar, but this type of trial is often a little more difficult for a child because it eliminates most inadvertent prompts (e.g., slight position, movement, or eye prompts).

(From Sundberg and Partington’s ABA-based Teaching Language to Children with Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, italics mine).

Unlike S2C, which has no such guidelines, ABA makes a distinction between teaching prompts and inadvertent prompts, has protocols for fading inadvertent prompts as soon as possible, and recognizes the potential of slight movements, including eye gaze, to direct a client’s responses.

Myth 8: “Using S2C or related methods to take standardized tests automatically invalidates their results.” Here what constitutes debunking, for Binder-Le Pape, is simply to list the testing organizations that allow “communication and regulations partners” and “hand-held S2C laminated letterboards.” According to Binder-Le Pape, these include New York’s TASC (its GED or high school equivalency test), Philadelphia’s Keystone, and the ACT. (When I search “laminated letterboard” plus “Keystone”/”TASC”/”ACT”, nothing comes up). She also suggests that the guidelines for two IQ tests—those of the WAIS-IV, which make reference to “preferred mode of accommodation”, and those of the WISC-V, which allude to “clinical judgment” about “modification”—permit this type of “accommodation”.

Myth 9: “Some individuals have made false or unproven accusations using methods similar to S2C, and therefore, no one using these methods should be believed.”  This one is another straw man. The false abuse accusations are one of many problems with FC, but that does not, in and of itself, mean that people using these methods should not be believed. When someone makes a false accusation via FC, the first step should be a rigorous authorship test. Interestingly, these days when judges order such tests, the response has generally been to drop charges—which is quite suggestive of what the people facilitating those charges know, deep down inside, about what rigorous authorship testing would reveal.

Myth 10 is a rhetorical question “Is S2C valid, or is S2C a ‘discredited method’ that has been debunked?” Defining valid as “logically or factually sound”, Binder-Le Pape claims that her above arguments have that characteristic, and refers readers who think those arguments fall short to an earlier blog post of hers which I addressed here.

She then adds as another metric of validity “having legal force or being legally acceptable,” and goes on to cite the ADA on giving “primary consideration to the requests of individuals with disabilities” and on requiring equal educational opportunity. As all the available evidence suggests, however, S2C and its variants interfere with the ability of individuals with disabilities to make requests and diminish their educational opportunities.

Binder-Le Pape also cites the guidelines of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) on evidence-based practices, noting that they include “clinical expertise/expert opinion,” “evidence”, and “client/parent/caregiver perspectives.” Re the last two, she alludes to her earlier arguments, “valid” as they are in her view. Re clinical expertise/expert opinion, she cites the many speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, and people with special ed degrees who have come to believe in S2C. She leaves out ASHA’s position statements against S2C and its variants.

Binder-Le Pape concludes by reminding us of the “many, many universities, colleges, government committees, nonprofits, researchers, professors, teachers, doctors, psychologists, occupational therapists, lawyers, and journalists" who support S2C.

The constant appeals to authority throughout this post are a huge red flag. If the strongest case you can make for a particular practice is that most authorities accept that practice, you are on thin ice—particularly if you bear in mind the long history of bigotry in the past century and earlier, including bigotry against people with disabilities, by large numbers of authorities in politics, academia, and journalism.

But Binder-Le Pape is confident that this time the authorities—at least the ones she cites—are on the right side, in contrast to the “small group of detractors” she returns to in her closing remarks.

FC proponents never seem to ask themselves what motivation this “small group” could possibly have for undermining the authentic communications of society’s most vulnerable members.  In fact, we do the opposite. Not only do we advocate against the communication-suppressing practices of S2C and other variants of facilitated communication; many of us have devoted long hours to inventing innovative assistive devices or language teaching tools designed to enhance the independent, authentic communication of minimally speaking individuals.

Naturally, some of our detractors have asserted, without evidence, that we make large amounts of money off of these endeavors: that that’s why we oppose S2C, and that we’re the ones cynically exploiting desperate parents and their vulnerable children.  My guess is that the peddlers of S2C et al, with those “thousands of hours of practice” leading to apparently miraculous language and literacy skills, and the hours of ongoing communication and regulations partnering that many parents outsource to clinics and clinicians, make far more money off of desperate parents than any of us do with our decidedly non-miraculous, low-labor-intensive, assistive and teaching technologies.

These days especially, “skeptic” has a bad ring—and not just when used as a pejorative suffix to words like “climate” and “vaccine.” But the true skeptics I’ve met, including members of this “small group,” are some of the kindest, humblest, most self-effacing people I know. When we critique the opposition, we critique their claims and lack of evidence; we don’t make personal attacks or say nasty things about them behind their backs. Perhaps that’s no accident: when one puts evidence first and insists on being guided by that evidence, that tends to minimize one’s cognitive dissonance—along with the nastiness that cognitive dissonance often gives rise to—and to deliver regular doses of humility.

REFERENCES

Beals, K.P. (2024) Can message-passing anecdotes tell us anything about the validity of RPM and S2C?, Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention, DOI: 10.1080/17489539.2023.2290298

Sundberg, M. L., & Partington, J. W. (2013). Teaching language to children with autism and other developmental disabilities. Behavior Analysts.