Remembering Tom Skrtic
Wayne Sailor, Professor Emeritus of Special Education
Tom Skrtic (1946–2021) was simultaneously my friend, colleague and hero. Occasions of sitting in on his doctoral classes, extended conversations in his often smoke-filled office and perusing his vast published works have greatly impacted my own personal philosophy as well as my academic output. In fact, he was a key factor in my family’s decision to relocate from the Bay Area to KU in 1992. He and I had previously worked on the development of grant proposals to fund our joint research interests
Tom, of Croatian descent, came from a working-class background in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was recruited to a joint appointment between the Department of Curriculum & Instruction and the Department of Special Education in 1976. He brought his sister, who experienced disabilities, with him and provided for her in a way that enabled her to work and live independently. In doing so, Tom became a national model for how an academic can both “talk the talk and walk the walk.” Tom gradually shifted to full-time, tenured status in the special education department and in 2015 was awarded the Wiliamson Distinguished Professorship which he held until his death.
Special education, a branch of general education with its own federal statute, is largely a practitioner-driven profession, informed by the scientific disciplines of psychology, sociology and anthropology, with behavioral psychology the dominant force in guiding its praxis. As such, it is rare to find an internationally recognized philosopher in its academic midst. But that was what Tom brought to the field. His view of what we collectively do was from 30,000 feet. His impact on the field today has been, and continues to be, enormous.
Tom’s teaching and research was mostly focused on two “big picture” issues facing special education but applicable to all the social professions. First, he was concerned with what he considered to be an emerging crisis in the professions, referring to the widening gap between the emancipatory values undergirding the professions, derived in the United States from its Constitution, and their actual practices, largely determined by adherence to objectivist (or positivist) epistemologies. Radical behaviorism, for example, derived from behavioral psychology, has dominated educational practices in special education directed to both child behavior and academic performance. The particular crisis in special education derives from the increasing insurgence of a contrasting paradigm (or epistemology), subjectivism. More about this clash of paradigms further on.
Tom’s second intellectual focus was on the way schools are organized and their implications for student outcomes likely to contribute to a democratic society. He considered himself to be a critical pragmatist consistent with the intellectual tradition of American progressive pragmatism with its roots in the writings of John Dewey during the turn of the last century. Extending from a branch of sociological research, Tom compared what he termed “professional bureaucracy” to the turn of the previous century’s emergence of “machine bureaucracy,” developed to fuel rapidly developing industries cranking out cars, refrigerators, etc., reacting to rapidly expanding demand by consumers. An example of professional bureaucracy in special education can be represented by the power differential that exists between school, district and state administrators, on the one hand, and teachers who are held responsible for child academic and social outcomes, on the other. Said teachers’ hands are largely tied by trying to keep up with the compliance standards and strict teaching guidelines and requirements that individualized educational plans (IEPs) are met. The result is often computer-generated IEPs with low student expectations, and frustrated teachers leaving the profession in droves, resulting in widespread teacher shortages.
Tom produced a large compendium of books, chapters and journal articles over the course of his career at KU, but two books in particular continue to stand out as seminal works in the field. The first, Behind Special Education, published in 1991, laid out his philosophical argument for the emerging crisis in special education (and the social professions generally) resulting from strict adherence to practices derived from positivism, the dominant paradigm of modernity, and the more recent trend toward subjectivism (or interpretivism).
Modernity in Tom’s schema refers to the period beginning with the Enlightenment and continuing to the present. The positivist paradigm (now called “post-positivism” for philosophical reasons) holds that there is an objective reality that exists outside of the human observer which can be manipulated through scientific methods to gain new knowledge. An example from special education is the profession’s adherence, until very recently on a large scale, to a medical model of diagnosis and referral for educational services of students considered to have one or more “disabilities.” The professional focus is on characteristics of children for determining their eligibility to receive professional services.
This stands in contrast to a professional focus on what a particular child needs to succeed in school.
In Behind Special Education, Tom describes the emergence of a more recent paradigm, also identified with Enlightenment philosophers, that contrasts with positivism by rejecting the premise of objective reality upon which modern science is bult. This paradigm, described in Tom’s terms as subjectivism, argues that the human observer cannot be separated or stand apart from the phenomenon observed. Reality is thus subjective, and pursuit of knowledge must proceed with different methods — methods that derive from the experience of the observer, i.e., narrative analysis. As Tom pointed out, special educators in universities tend to come in two flavors, positivists (e.g., behaviorists) or increasingly subjectivists with each having little respect for, or outright rejecting the intellectual traditions of, the other. The result is a crisis in the profession with resultant questions concerning the future of professional practices and the pursuit of knowledge.
In Tom’s perspective, this paradigmatic clash of modernist paradigms was seriously impairing the progress of building new knowledge with which to inform professional practice. For instance, in special education, journals that accepted papers with subjectivist methodology (i.e., qualitative investigations using, say, ethnography) would routinely reject papers reporting findings from use of objectivist methods (i.e., quantitative investigations using randomized clinical trials) and vice versa.
But Tom pointed to a way out of the mess created by the modernist paradigm clash. His solution was to call on the postmodernist paradigm (or epistemology) of pragmatism, a framework that rejects both modernist traditions and instead focuses on selecting among both traditions those methods in pursuit of new knowledge that are most closely tied to, and representative of, the core values that underlie the profession. An example is the aforementioned shift away from linking services and supports to characteristics of the individual (e.g., disability diagnosis), and toward identified needs. Rather than obeying physical objectivist or subjectivist paradigmatic rules, the pragmatist selects from the available modernist “toolbox” that which works in the service of emancipatory values. The recent emergence of pragmatism in special education is exemplified by increasing reliance on “mixed-method” investigations which combine quantitative approaches with qualitative ones. Increasingly, journals in the field accept rigorous applications of mixed method investigations.
Tom was not without his detractors in academic special education. Emergence of the term “postmodernism” generated fierce debates across all intellectual traditions, from English literature to the physical disciplines (e.g., biology) and the social professions. The eminent Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, for example, called for postmodernism to be relegated to the dustbin of history in his celebrated book Consilience, in which he argued that modern science was on the cusp of producing a single unified theory of everything in the cosmos. Tom’s response to his positivist critics was to point out that there are really two forms of postmodernism. First, he pointed to the Continental version identified with the French philosophers Jauques Derrida and Michel Foucault and termed this version “radical postmodernism.” He contrasted it with a more recent American version, called progressive postmodernism (identified with University of Virginia Professors Richard Rorty, Bob Antonio in KU’s Department of Sociology and others, including Tom). Progressive postmodernism, now more commonly termed postcolonialism, is closely identified with critical pragmatism. Pragmatic methodology is more heavily reliant on subjectivist epistemology than objectivism, but is not adverse to quantitative methods as long as they are closely aligned with undergirding values.
As a critical pragmatist, Tom’s impact on present-day discourses in education is reflected in the works, for example, of Elizabeth Kozleski, former chair of the Department of Special Education at KU, now at Stanford University and serving as an adjunct professor here; and Robin Rowland, professor of communication studies at KU, and former chair of that department. Kozleski and others write persuasively of the need to abandon the objectivist, medical model in special education and focus resources, services and interventions on identified student needs in a fully integrated social context. Similarly, she, Tom and others have argued forcefully for merging special education back into general education. Tom’s work provides the intellectual ammunition with which to proceed with a reform agenda.
Tom’s concern with school organization was predicated on the premise of standardization which he linked to the tendency of professional bureaucracies to mirror the machine bureaucracies of industry. Teachers, after all, are human beings who may be presumed to be well trained and well intentioned (particularly given the relatively low salary structure relative to other professions). In his book Disability and Democracy, Tom encouraged education academics to develop new grounded theory geared to deconstructing professional bureaucracy — and substituting what he termed “adhocracy” in its place, using critical pragmatism as the methodology. An example of adhocracy is represented by the use of team-driven decision processes and power concentrated within the operations of school leadership teams rather than it being ceded to an authoritarian principal.
Tom’s impact on all aspects of education in America is in full swing today. Increasingly, articles appear in the prestigious journals of the field calling for substantive reform of special education law and regulations as well as in school applications.
His work, for example, is often cited in ongoing published critiques of the inclusion movement. Efforts to fully include and engage students with extra support needs have largely failed after some three decades of effort. Tom essentially predicted this policy failure in his book, Behind Special Education, by showing that contemporary inclusion theory is itself locked within a professional bureaucracy, the rules of which empower administrators to make decisions, on the basis of their own agendas, as for whom inclusion is practicable and for whom it is not.
Postcolonial theory lives on at KU with prominent academics such as Bob Antonio and Argun Saatcioglu in sociology, and Robin Rowland in communication studies. Tom’s legacy is intact in ongoing public policy arenas in the U.S. Office of Special Education (OSEP) wherein some of his former doctoral students are well positioned.
Tom is sorely missed but his legacy lives on, and marginalized American school children will continue to be the beneficiaries.
Joel A. Colbert (Ed.D., 1981?)
I first met Tom in the fall of 1976. He was a new faculty member, and I was beginning my doctoral dissertation in curriculum & instruction. We began our relationship when P.L. 94–142 was enacted and KU received a significant grant to implement the new law. Tom worked on policy analysis, and I worked on curriculum design.
We became friends almost immediately. The friendship grew over the years, and we never lost touch. Tom was a devoted brother and son. In fact, his passion for special education began and developed as he cared for his sister, Cathy. I knew her as well and understood his passion for special education and having to deal with the inequities in educational delivery services for people with disabilities.
When I left KU, I came to California and taught for a total of 40-plus years, both in K-12 and in higher education. I visited Lawrence annually and always met with Tom over a beer or lunch. When he first had prostate cancer, I spoke with him often as he went through the recovery process. He also visited me when I was the director of the Ph.D. in education program at Chapman University.
Tom’s reputation in special education was stellar and our doctoral students thoroughly enjoyed meeting with him to discuss his research and experiences.
When he passed away, I was crushed. He left a legacy as a caring special educator and friend. His impact on the field will be everlasting as will his impact on our friendship.
Elizabeth Kozleski, Adjunct Professor of Special Education
I was standing at the bar at The Oread waiting for Tom Skrtic to show up. I’d known Tom by name for at least 15 years and as a colleague at a variety of meetings for at least eight. It had been a time since I’d seen him but he was definitely one of the reasons that I wanted to come to Lawrence. I was on my job visit in 2012. As I was ordering a glass of merlot, I turned around to glance at the door. There was Tom striding up to the bar. He was wearing something I’d never seen on him before, a three-piece suit. I would come to recognize his one dress-up outfit which he wore to solemn and important occasions. It was probably purchased in the early ’90s, a gray suit complete with a vest. He was proud to have it on and mentioned it as his opening gambit, “Do you like my suit? I wore it just for you. I even added the vest though I think it might be a little hot for it. I wanted you to see that I knew how to dress up.” And, so, our conversation ensued over drinks and dinner. His friend and wonderful scholar still at KU, Argun Saatcioglu, joined us. We laughed and talked about the University of Kansas Department of Special Education, the field in general, our hopes and dreams for the future of special education. We imagined what the department could become with the infusion of new folks who were coming on board and might come in the future. That conversation of possibility and hope enlarged my understanding of the breadth of what Tom brought to our still evolving field. Tom drew me to the opportunity to work at a university that had such stature in its community and cared so deeply about the people of Kansas.
Tom’s journey to become a Lawrencian began soon after he showed up at KU, first in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction and then in the Department of Special Education. He led with his heart and his soul and kept on doing it throughout his life. He cared deeply for the students and his colleagues, and for what the University of Kansas stood for in the special education community writ large.
His intellectual contribution to the world of disability was borne of the time in which he lived. His family, though urged by their local school system to institutionalize Tom’s sister, rejected that sentence. Tom grew up in time to have his name in the lottery for young men to be drafted for the Vietnam war. The wrenching fight over that war, fought disproportionately by young men and women from working class and racially diverse backgrounds was never redressed for those who came home. At the same time, Johnson’s War on Poverty, the Voting Rights Bill, the Elementary and Secondary Act, all intent on legitimizing everyone’s role in building a universally accessible, democratic union was fought at the margins of our school systems — in fact, schools were still being desegretated as late as the early 1970s. Tom came of age as a scholar in the midst of that tumultuous time.
His significant work was foregrounding dis/ability not as a problem to be eradicated but as an eddy in the caste system that imbues all our life stories with the historical and lived exercise of individual, group and political power threaded through familial, professional, commercial and governmental systems. Universal designs for learning — culturally sustaining lifelong learning, access and opportunity to learn — are built on the foundations of the thinking that Tom and his colleagues initiated. The University of Kansas is a great standard bearer for that kind of foundation. Tom helped to put it on the map and keep it there.
There was never a time that Tom turned down an assignment or an idea or a possibility that I brought to him. He was always there to shape ideas, create community and get the work done, ensuring that everybody’s voice was heard. I admired the teacher that he strove to be. He led students to think in ways that they had never been challenged to think, to read broadly outside our field, and to bring those ideas to the design of systems that were big enough, bold enough and full of enough ambition to believe that education was within everyone’s grasp.
Tom’s mind was amazing. He remembered minute details of conversations he had had with colleagues, dissidents and challengers to the positions that he took over the years. He challenged us all to consider the breadth of what it could mean to ensure that everyone had access and opportunity within a single, unified education community.
Students were beneficiaries of his democratic view of scholars and what he considered the bureaucratic boundaries between students and faculty that sometimes dampened the free exchange of information. He thought that the life of scholars should be open to reveal all of its complexity to our students. He understood life as a series of gambles on the future. Those gambles meant that personal and professional sacrifices needed to be made to make sure that no one was left behind. It was his greatest accomplishment to ensure that his sister Cathy had an enviable life full of relationships with all kinds of people. Cathy lived in Lawrence in her own home, supported by Tom until her death in 2020. Tom brought his students along on that journey with him. He put his mom and Cathy in front of his own opportunities.
I’m sure you’ll hear many stories from his students about how much they loved this good and complex man. I consider our friendship to be one of the great treasures of my life. Very few days go by without me thinking of what Tom might say or do. It’s something to say when you can have a very intense discussion about the meaning and application of complex ideas and in the next paragraph have a belly laugh about the vicissitudes of everyday life. What a friend. He lived his values, he spoke his truths, he wrote beautifully, he truly loved. He will never be forgotten.
David Egnor (Ph.D., 2000), Associate Division Director, Office of Special Education Programs, U.S. Department of Education
People who knew Tom often described him as a larger-than-life figure — a true scholar with a sharp intellect, an animated and engaging speaking style and a fierce devotion to his sister, students and friends. Tom was, and remains, the single most influential person in my professional life.
I never anticipated that Tom would become such a central figure in my life. Our early relationship could only be described as tumultuous. If you had asked Tom in the early 1990s who among his students was the biggest pain in the you-know-what, he likely would have answered: “Egnor, you know, that tall, argumentative guy.” At the same time, if someone had asked me which of my professors was the biggest pain in my you-know-what, I would have said, “Tom Skrtic, you know, that professor with the long hair and fanny pack.”
My 30-plus year relationship with Tom began by chance — or perhaps by fate. In my final year as an Ed.S. student in school psychology, Tom stepped in as a last-minute replacement to teach the course on special education exceptionalities due to a medical emergency affecting one of his colleagues. For those familiar with Tom’s work, the irony of him teaching a course on special education exceptionalities is difficult to miss. As a school psychologist in training and future gatekeeper to special education, I would learn about the 12 special education disability categories from the author of such then-recent works as Counter-hegemony: A Radical’s Attempt to Demystify Special Education Ideology and his seminal Harvard Educational Review article, “The Special Education Paradox: Equity as the Way to Excellence.” Tom’s body of work, particularly his critiques of the special education system in the early 1990s, was well known to many, marking him as a famous or infamous scholar, depending on one’s perspective.
When first entering the classroom, I noticed a middle-aged but youthful-looking man casually leaning against a table at the front, facing the entrance. I assumed he was waiting to deliver an important message to the course professor, or hand over a small article that was tucked away in his fanny pack. But it soon became clear that this wasn’t a delivery person or a graduate student — it was the professor! After a brief introduction and reminder of the course name, Dr. (“call me Tom”) Skrtic outlined the class: The first half would cover major special education policies, practices and foundational assumptions. The second half would switch to an “immanent critique” of those same policies, practices and assumptions. Tom planned to “deconstruct” the dominant discourses in these areas before “reconstructing” them, proposing an alternative school organizational structure and professional culture he called “adhocracy.”
Coming from an educational background in psychology, sociology and philosophy, I was intrigued by this unorthodox professor standing before us dressed in a sweatshirt, red shorts and a fanny pack. However, thoughts about his outward appearance quickly faded as I listened to this enthusiastic, animated and engaging professor who promised to open our eyes to hidden realities of special education and disability. Driving back to Lawrence from KU Medical Center, a fellow school psychology student and I shared our thoughts about the first day of class. We both noted Tom’s unconventional appearance, but we also marveled at how quickly such thoughts vanished, replaced by a sense of engagement, excitement and anticipation that something big was about to be revealed. We could hardly wait for the second class session.
Two days later, however, we could hardly wait for the second class session to be over.
During that lecture it became clear to me that Dr. (I refused to call him Tom) Skrtic was not-so-subtly implying that everything I was preparing for as a school psychologist would only serve to further pathologize diversity, based on faulty, implicit, unquestioned assumptions equating “schooling” with “educating.” And what were those implicit assumptions that my future school psychologist self was about to perpetuate? They were: that disability is a physical phenomenon, that disability is a type of chronic illness, that disability is individually owned, and that disability is a condition that requires fixing. Over the next several weeks, Dr. Skrtic not only critiqued (or deconstructed) each of these assumptions, but he also, by implication, would have us insert a “not” into each assumption as part of their reconstruction.
Putting yourself in my position as a school psychology graduate student, what would you have done? Would you have accepted Tom’s critique of special education, and by implication, his critique of the role you were about to assume? Or would you have done as I did — poke holes in his analysis and express those opinions when the opportunities arose in class? For example: “Dr. Skrtic, you noted that the inclusion of children with disabilities in general classrooms with their nondisabled peers is associated with improved outcomes for all children in the class. Couldn’t this simply be an artifact of heterogeneous group treatment effects vs. homogeneous group treatment effects?” You get the picture — I was a royal pain in his you-know-what.
Three years later, this pain in his you-know-what was sitting at the front of his conference presentations within the state and across neighboring states, nodding in agreement with what he was saying. And when I worked up the courage, I asked Tom Skrtic to take me on as his doctoral student. To my surprise and never-ending gratitude, Tom said yes.
By that point, I had served as a school psychologist in Topeka for three years and had gradually begun to understand what I had failed to grasp before. As the gatekeeper to special education, I was placed in a binary false choice scenario more than 80 times each school year (80 eligibility referrals). I had to either find an academically or behaviorally struggling student eligible for special education so that they could get “the help they needed,” or keep them out of special education, effectively denying them that help. What was supposed to be an objective decision regarding a child’s eligibility for special education was fraught with political and subjective undertones and pressures. And I was not the only one who saw things that way — other school psychologists and even some teachers shared similar concerns, though perhaps not as strongly as I did. Yet, to a person, they felt powerless to change the situation. The educational (i.e., schooling) organizational system was set up that way, and our hands were tied.
Tom took me on as his doctoral student, and to this day, I still feel his influence. He helped me see how professional bureaucracies and like-performance organizations perpetuate their practices, even when those practices are outdated or counterproductive. I also learned from Tom that organizational change almost always comes about slowly, and that “radical” change is preceded by many years of problems building up that can no longer be contained by the existing system. Tom put it best in a conversation we had years later about educational reform: “David, radical ends are achieved through incremental means, and in your role as education professional, you must find a way to hold on to those radical ends, knowing they will only be achieved through incremental means.”
Tom’s legacy goes well beyond his written work; it lives on in the countless students he mentored and the colleagues he inspired. I am just one of many who have been “Skrticized,” and I hope that those who knew Tom will recognize themselves in these words and find comfort in his wisdom. When I once felt down and ineffectual, Tom reminded me that radical change is achieved through incremental steps, and knowing this allows us to hold on to our ideals. The greatest danger in our professional lives — whether we’ve been “Skrticized” or not — is losing the idealism that drew us to this work in the first place. Thank you, Tom, for reminding me of this.
