[nagdu] Who is NAC, and Why Should You Care

[Aaron Cannon]

For anyone who said "huh?" when NAC was mentioned, or for those of you
who have heard of them but don't know what the big deal is, you need
to read this article from the Braille Monitor:
https://nfb.org/images/nfb/publications/bm/bm09/bm0901/bm090103.htm

I've pasted it below for your convenience:


Why Bother about NAC,
Or What Can Abraham Lincoln Teach Us about the Subject?

by Peggy Elliott

Peggy Elliott
>From the Editor: For as long as I have been a member of the
Federation, the NFB has opposed the National Accreditation Council for
Agencies Serving Persons
with Blindness or Visual Impairment (NAC). In the early years it was a
war we fought with desperation every time a battlefield appeared. When
the NAC board
met in its closed meetings, the organized blind gathered outside,
chanting, marching, and singing NFB songs about NAC that we found
clever and pointed,
whatever the NAC board members thought of them. We called the
demonstrations outside NAC’s annual board meeting the “highlight of
the fall social season”
in the same way that the Washington Seminar in the winter and the
national convention in summer provided both fun and stimulating and
useful activity.


Sometime in the eighties NAC tried moving its meeting to mid-December
in the hope, we assumed, that so close to the holiday season
Federationists would
be unwilling to take the time and unable to afford the expense of
congregating outside their meetings. We responded by writing NAC
carols with which to
serenade them and entertain passers-by. We called these protests “NAC
Tracking,” and, though the activity took its toll on our voices, it
instilled a toughness
and dedication that were intensely invigorating to our movement.
Fortunately or unfortunately, nothing in the blindness field today
provides Federationists
with equivalent training and discipline. In fact, though it is
difficult for people of my generation to comprehend, newer and younger
Federationists know
only vaguely about NAC and the threat to quality services that it once
represented.

I reflected on all this when I was recently told that Colorado, which
for decades, maybe always, could boast of being a NAC-free
environment, had suddenly
been saddled with a local agency’s decision to seek NAC accreditation.
Partly this happened because many blind Coloradans have forgotten or
never really
understood what NAC represents and what damage its attitudes toward
quality service can bring about.

Whenever it is again time to examine the NAC issue, I turn immediately
to Peggy Elliott, who has helped general the NAC battles through the
years and has
been our NAC historian of record for almost two decades. Rather than
asking her simply to report on NAC’s current situation, I suggested
that she review
the history for those who have forgotten and those who have never
understood the antipathy between NAC and the organized blind. The
following article is
her review of the history and assessment of NAC. This is what she says:

Abraham Lincoln and P.T. Barnum, nineteenth century contemporaries and
each a giant in his field of endeavor, both commented upon the human
condition.
Lincoln famously said: “You can fool some of the people all of the
time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all
of the people
all of the time.” More succinctly, P. T. Barnum, the entertainment
impresario who popularized the three-ring circus, is supposed to have
said: “There’s
a sucker born every minute,” though some historians dispute this
quote, if not its sentiment. Both men in their own ways pointed to a
human failing we
all share: gullibility.

We have all believed things or believed in things or believed in
people we later learn to be less than or different from what we had
supposed. Our human
capacity to believe and our human yearning for the good can lead us to
believe what we later discover were exaggerations, pure puffery, or
lies. The motivation
of the exaggerator or liar is usually obvious and can range from
self-delusion through greed to pure, mean evil. The impulses
motivating the person being
tricked come from a much more complex array of causes, including a
deep desire to do good, and can range from greed and malice through
inattention and
lack of education to a yearning for the good of others. Studying
gullibility, in other words, requires probing both the motives of the
deceiver and of
the deceived.

Our American form of government, for example, is rooted in the belief
that self-interest is the strongest guardian of political, economic,
and civil rights.
We all learn some version of the concept so lucidly explained by James
Madison that public discussion during elections and concerning issues
of the day
is the best guarantee that good ideas will prevail and bad or crooked
or discriminatory ones will be discovered and rejected. Madison’s
prescription for
preventing gullibility by government, government officials, and the
people was constant, routine, omnivorous free speech.

Much of what the National Federation of the Blind does involves
combating gullibility. The public at large and, all too often, blind
people ourselves believe
myths and erroneous stereotypes about blindness and then act,
individually or collectively, upon those myths as truth. If a blind
person’s vocational goal
or an agency’s array of services is based on myth, that goal or those
services will miss the mark. Part of the Federation’s mission is to
untangle deceived
from deceiver, to explain to those who have been deceived what the
truth is and how to shed erroneous beliefs while, at the same time,
hunting down and
exposing the deceivers, those who derive wealth or power or community
approval by exaggerating or lying about the blind to aggrandize
themselves. Federationists
long ago abandoned our gullibility when it comes to proclamations of
concern for blind people. Applying the Madisonian test, the more
someone claims to
care about and want to help blind people and the more we probe the
resulting motives and actions, the more often we find that claimed
motives of charity
are being worn like sheep’s clothing to cover actions rooted in the
oldest and most false myths about the incompetence and inability of
blind people.

Take NAC, for example. To the surprise of some and unbeknown to most,
the National Accreditation Council for Agencies Serving People with
Blindness or
Visual Impairment (the modern, politically correct version of that
venerable old name “NAC”) has now passed its fortieth birthday and is
a mere eight years
from achieving the half-century mark. NAC’s survival is a tribute to
human gullibility and also a regrettable reminder of the persistent
impulse of some
humans to fool their fellow men and women.

NAC was born with fanfare, spent its early years in controversy, and
has idled away its last several decades not even on the sidelines but
somewhere behind
the bleachers, out of sight and unnoticed by most. For a long time it
didn’t have its own Website, lurking hidden away on the Website of a
supporter. Recently
NAC acquired its own Web address (Nacasb.org) to which, in mid-August
of 2008, the most recent postings were from December 2006, and on
which the most
recent list of NAC-accredited agencies was dated in 2003. Attempts to
review additional material on the site were for a time frustrated by
the expiration
of the site on August 16, 2008, a fitting metaphor for NAC’s
viability. By late September the site had reappeared, but the content
had not been updated
in the slightest.

A review of Monitor articles on the subject of NAC along with
knowledge of NFB history yields the following historical summary. The
National Federation
of the Blind from its founding in 1940 grew slowly for its first
decade and then, in the 1950s, more quickly to the point where, in the
late 1950s, it
was clearly going to establish affiliates in every state. This
nationwide spread was temporarily halted when the Federation underwent
a four-year period
of progressively more divisive internal strife from 1957 to 1961,
concluding at the 1961 national convention when a significant minority
was either expelled
or voluntarily departed from the organization.

Shortly after the Federation’s 1961 convention, planning meetings were
called and discussions begun about establishing an accreditation
organization for
the field of work with the blind. Observers of the field may differ
about whether accreditation was merely thought of at the same time the
NFB suffered
a split or whether that low point in the organized blind movement gave
agencies for the blind the idea that they needed to consolidate their
power before
the Federation could rebuild, but the historical coincidence is as
undeniable as is the fact that Federationists were rare indeed among
the hundreds of
people invited to think up an accreditation plan. The American
Foundation for the Blind spearheaded and largely funded these
discussions, attended by all
the well-known leaders of blindness agencies from around the country.

As a result of these discussions NAC itself was founded in 1966, still
largely funded by the American Foundation for the Blind, to accredit
agencies serving
blind people. It was intended to be the path through which agencies
received not only blindness-community approval but also funding, which
should, in NAC’s
view, be conditioned on NAC accreditation. Federationists from the
beginning characterized NAC as expensive, irrelevant, and designed to
enshrine agency
control of assessment of service quality as a means of keeping the
weakened and then recrudescent consumer movement from having a voice
in those assessments.

NAC’s first eight years of operation, from 1967 to 1975, saw half of
all agencies that have ever chosen to be accredited by NAC apply and
receive accreditation.
During those same eight years the Federation rebounded from its split
and established affiliates in every state. NAC reached its high-water
mark in 1986
with 104 accredited agencies. From 1986 to 1999 NAC accredited twenty
new agencies and lost seventy-seven, leaving its total of U.S.
accredited agencies
at forty-six. (Adding twenty to the 1986 total and then subtracting
seventy-seven leaves forty-seven, one more than the actual number in
1999, likely explained
by the addition of a Canadian agency counted in the earlier numbers
but excluded by NFB by the time of the 1999 report. All numbers since
1999 are U.S.-only
numbers.) From 1999 to 2003, the last list NAC has published, the
total sank even lower, to forty.

Thirty-three states (including the District of Columbia and Puerto
Rico) have no NAC agency within their borders. Thirteen more states
have only a single
NAC agency, leaving only six states that have more than one NAC
agency--Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio. The
organized blind in
those six states make no claim to the NAC agencies where they live
being superior to those in other states and often assert the reverse.
Moreover, in at
least two of those states NAC’s original desire to condition federal,
state, and private money on holding NAC certification was actually or
virtually achieved;
many Florida agencies believe they need NAC accreditation to receive
state funds, even though this is not true, and Ohio agencies receiving
state funds
must show accreditation from a short state-approved list on which NAC
has managed to appear. Florida and Ohio are the two states with the
highest number
of NAC-accredited agencies, accounting for nearly half of the forty
remaining NAC agencies, and it is easy to see why agencies in those
states remain loyal:
they must or think they must do so to get their money.

The field of work with the blind has three large types of agencies
along with numerous smaller geographically or issue-focused agencies.
The three large
types are a vocational rehabilitation agency in each state, schools
for the blind in most states, and sheltered workshops for the blind
affiliated with
National Industries for the Blind and included as one of the three
mainline types of agencies because their NIB affiliation brings in
substantial federal
procurement contracts. In 2008 not a single state vocational
rehabilitation agency for the blind holds NAC accreditation; only
eight schools for the blind
do; and only ten workshops do. Fewer than half of the forty accredited
agencies come from one of the three mainline agency types. In other
words, a majority
of the current NAC agencies, twenty-two (55 percent) are the smaller
geographic or issue-focused agencies. And, interestingly, ten of the
thirteen states
with only one NAC agency have as their one NAC agency a mainline
agency, suggesting that these six schools and four workshops still
hearken back to the
all-knowing agency professional model and are thus uninterested in
what blind consumers think, while the rest of the agencies in those
states have moved
forward with the times.

Combining lists from an AFB-published list of agencies on its Website,
which includes all VR agencies, with lists from National Industries
for the Blind,
the Council of Schools for the Blind, and the National Council of
Private Agencies for the Blind and Visually Impaired, and eliminating
duplications yields
in 2008 a total of 440 agencies serving the blind in the United
States, of which fewer than 10 percent are accredited by NAC forty-two
years after NAC’s
founding.

NAC’s early years featured board and membership meetings closed to the
public and blind consumers, provoking charges of secret
decision-making but never
an effort to hide the identities of the accredited agencies. In these
latter days it is impossible to find a public list of NAC-accredited
agencies dated
later than 2003, provoking snickers of derision and suggestions that
NAC’s remaining remnant of agencies prefers not to be publicly
identified.

Stepping back from this historical summary and review of NAC
statistics, the observer can readily detect that the entire field of
work with blind people
would have been different if the Federation had not opposed NAC.
Whatever its standards, whatever their value, whatever else had
happened, NAC was on a
trajectory in its early years to achieve control of work with the
blind, logging over 20 percent affiliation with it in its first two
decades. Today its
adherents are less than 10 percent and a secret. Even the director of
the American Foundation for the Blind, a former NAC staffer himself
and a proponent
of NAC accreditation in service agencies he headed or worked with for
most of his career, publicly urged NAC to dissolve in 2003 at a summit
NAC called
to assess its future. So how does it happen that NAC is still around
even though it’s hard to find and harder to justify?

Let us remember the subject of gullibility so well described by
Abraham Lincoln and P. T. Barnum and then move to a summary of the
Federation’s criticisms
of NAC as a means of discerning why that gullibility still moves some
to associate with this odd anachronism from the 1960s. Here is a list
of NAC’s failings
described by the Federation during NAC’s forty-two-year history. While
these seven NAC failings are summarized here, ample documentation in
Federation
literature exists for all, and they are provided in no particular
order, especially since they often reinforce one another:

1. NAC costs too much. For most of its life NAC’s accreditation cost
most agencies $2,500 a year plus the costs of the on-site team doing
the accreditation
review and the cost of agency staff performing the required self-study
prior to accreditation. Estimates of NAC’s five-year cost ranged from
$15,000 to
$20,000 for most agencies, depending on how large the on-site team was
and how lavishly it was entertained. These estimates never included
the cost of
staff time for the mandatory self-study, which precedes accreditation
in the NAC context. As NAC fell on hard times, it reportedly lowered
the cost of
the annual accreditation fee, promised small teams, which were often
two people, to keep costs down, and pledged to keep costs down by
bringing people
from nearby agencies only. None of these moves has increased its customer base.

2. NAC’s standards are so irrelevant that no cost whatsoever is
justified. Early versions of the NAC standards mimicked local fire and
building codes,
which already applied to the agency anyway and applied administrative
and budgetary rules from then-current management theory. The standards
in effect
measured easily measurable facts while completely ignoring quality of
service or outcome for clients, harder to measure than the number of
building exits
provided by an agency, but the real point of having an agency at all.
By the 2003 summit initiated by NAC to determine its future, even its
adherents agreed
that the standards were out of date and needed revision. NAC used to
have a Commission on Standards, but it was disbanded for financial
reasons and has
not functioned for at least a decade. At the 2003 summit NAC’s
supporters agreed that outcome-based assessment was undesirable and
pledged to find grant
funding for updating their objective, measurable standards. In other
words they agreed to keep the structure of ignoring agency outcomes as
their model
for accreditation.

3. NAC accredits anyone who pays its fees, and no agency has ever been
reported to have failed NAC accreditation, which makes that
accreditation useless.
In fact, there are numerous instances during NAC’s forty-two years of
existence when agencies who ceased payment of accreditation fees were
still included
as accredited on NAC’s list of accredited agencies because NAC hoped
to retain them in its fold by this act of kindness. NAC’s original
pitch was that
its standards represented all that was good about service to blind
people, but that claim long ago gave way to mere gratitude to any
agency willing to
seek or renew accreditation and the natural consequence that literally
anyone can get accredited just by asking and paying a small fee. In
contrast, the
Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities (CARF) has
rigorous standards by which it measures applicants, and it rejects or
grants provisional
accreditation to those agencies barely meeting its standards with
noted deficiencies. When CARF accreditation is renewed, CARF on-site
teams show up with
extensive notes of previous deficiencies and commence a full review.
With CARF you get rigor and public labeling of full, provisional, or
no accreditation,
giving the label meaning. And accreditation in the traditional CARF
areas like hospitals is so well understood and expected that entities
without it are
easy to identify and the reason for their lack of accreditation
learned. With NAC you pay your money and go through the motions, but
the accreditation
is assured by the mere fact of application. So few agencies are
accredited that lack of accreditation is meaningless, and its presence
is usually so little
understood as to be equally meaningless.

4. NAC accreditation itself is meaningless because it’s simply an
old-pal network of pals affirming that their pals uphold the outmoded
1960s style of
all-knowing professionals in charge of the blind. NAC accreditation is
performed by peers, which in the field of work with the blind means
friends vouching
for friends. The pledge in recent years to bring small on-site teams
from nearby to cut costs has merely emphasized this flaw. From its
inception NAC has
existed for the purpose of imposing irrelevant objective standards as
the sole measure of quality service. In the relatively small field of
work with the
blind, colleagues tend to know one another and to know which
colleagues share their views on service models and the consumer
organizations. NAC at one
time represented the dominant view in the field, but the paradigm has
long since shifted away from the all-knowing professional model
espoused by NAC.
Whether early on or today, NAC’s on-site teams already know what they
think of the applicant for accreditation, and the result is never in
doubt.

5. The widely recognized and valued accreditation for hospitals and
colleges is based on the objective presence or absence of a highly
specialized body
of knowledge acquired by study and practice, but service to blind
people does not contain such a body of knowledge. NAC has tried to
convince people that
the Federation opposes accreditation, but this has never been true.
Instead the Federation has consistently maintained that the field of
work with the
blind is not like those of hospitals or higher education. In the NAC
view highly trained and experienced professionals with rare and
arduously acquired
specialized knowledge should be in charge of agencies for the blind
and their blind clients. These highly trained and experienced
professionals can recognize
one another when serving on on-site teams and thus grant accreditation
appropriately. In the Federation’s view NAC’s view is a lot of
nonsense and held
the field of work with the blind back for far too long. The Federation
advocates a common-sense approach to blindness, accessible to anyone
who thinks
clearly on the subject and readily accessible to every blind person.
Blind people more and more understand that we do not need lifetime
caregivers but
rather appropriate training and positive beliefs, which are the
foundation for each of us personally to create our own independence by
living successful
lives without sight. Much of the field of work with the blind has
voted with its feet, choosing to move away from the all-knowing
professional model and
engage more directly with consumer organizations and consumer
criticisms of failed and inadequate service based on the outmoded
caregiver model. While
some agencies have more successfully rejected the caregiver model than
others, agencies by the hundreds have rejected the opportunity to
accredit with
NAC and deliberately adopt the all-knowing professional model.

6. NAC’s standards should never be the gateway to funds as NAC hoped
would happen. Agencies for the blind receiving public money already
account for this
money through the political process, and agencies funded by charitable
donations in a sense have a closer link to their funders, who must be
motivated
to give by belief in the value of gifts. In other words, for both
public and private agencies, funding already generates one type of
accountability regarding
each agency’s funding sources. In these days of tight budgets and
increased demand for services, no agency is looking for duplicative
ways to validate
its value, leading to the conclusion that NAC has not only irrelevant
standards but also irrelevant accreditation. As mentioned previously,
NAC has actually
managed to remain on a list of accreditation agencies from which Ohio
agencies receiving state funds must show accreditation, and Florida’s
agencies act
as though there is a similar requirement though this is untrue. It
seems regrettable that Ohio state officials are so unsure of their own
ability to assess
quality service that they are willing to accept accreditation based on
an outmoded and frankly offensive service model. The other forty-nine
states along
with D.C. and Puerto Rico have no such trouble, and in fact Florida
has state-based standards, which are the actual requirement for
receipt of state funds.
Put more bluntly, Ohio’s state officials are still fooled by the large
number of NAC agencies in that state into believing they are doing the
right thing
when, in fact, the rest of the nation has moved on to another, much
more service-oriented approach, leaving Ohio’s service system mired in
the all-knowing
service model with which its own agency beneficiaries are content. NAC
itself is headquartered in Ohio, where the second-largest number of
NAC agencies
per state is located, suggesting that pure, old-fashioned political
pull and not quality service explains the outdated mandatory use of
NAC’s dying service
model in that state only.

7. The other existing type of accountability for all agencies already
exists in the results they achieve. Blind consumers who use the
services and who
know about blindness provide vital assessments of the value of agency
services, and consumer organizations of blind people provide routine,
ongoing feedback
to agencies serving the blind who are interested in their quality of
service, as assessed by their customers. In fact federal law requires
regular interaction
with blind consumers as a condition of receiving vocational
rehabilitation money, and the boards of more and more agencies are
welcoming blind members,
nearly unheard of when NAC was founded. While blind consumers can
easily agree that the quality of agency services can still
significantly improve, we
less often encounter these days the kind of in-your-face,
sight-is-right arrogance and institutionalized custodialism so
prevalent before and during the
1960s and embodied in the NAC standards. In direct opposition to the
conclusion of the NAC summit in 2003, agencies around the country are
more alert today
than ever to the outcome of their services, and the trend now firmly
set is unlikely to be reversed. In other words, NAC accreditation
seeks to override
both funder and consumer accountability, replacing them with the NAC
all-knowing standard which completely validates everything the agency
does at a time
when most agencies serving the blind are content with the
accountability they currently have.

Given NAC’s track record, almost everyone in the field—funders,
consumers, and agencies—agree that paying any amount for its services
is not justified
and that accountability for funds and results already exists. So the
reasonable question to ask is: how does NAC survive? Another way to
ask this question
is to divide the topic into two halves and ask instead: why do some
agencies retain their association with NAC, and why does NAC continue
to offer its
outdated and unwanted accreditation? Abraham Lincoln and P. T. Barnum
may now re-emerge and urge us to assay the motives of both the
deceiver and the deceived.
Let us start with the deceived.

We earlier postulated that the range of motives for the deceived can
be very wide and can include both ignorance and benevolence. In the
current century,
as we have seen, the model of the all-knowing agency professional
class has largely been rejected. But not completely. One can still
find specimens in
the field of work with the blind, people who believe that their
professional training or their unique gifts or experience entitle them
to instruct blind
people what they may do, what they may think, and on whom they should
be dependent. This group of all-knowing professionals is rightly
classified along
with NAC as part of the deceiver class, and we will leave analysis of
their motivations to be aggregated with those of NAC itself. For the
rest, we can
assume that agencies still associated with NAC are either woefully
ignorant or misguidedly benevolent. They are agency professionals who
are either honestly
unaware of the changes in the field of work with the blind, who can be
fooled into thinking that NAC’s claims of high standards and quality
validation
must be true because no one would make such claims without
justification, or they so yearn to do good that they overlook the
possibility that people who
mouth the words that NAC does may not share their own impulse actually
to do good. These uninformed or soft-headed professionals have taken a
wrong turn,
but they have been impelled into their unfortunate detour by their own
gullibility and NAC’s eagerness to entice them out of the mainstream.
Observers
of the field can rightly criticize their poor judgment and powers of
observation without concluding that such professionals are consciously
adopting the
all-knowing professional model. In many cases the agencies they
represent are smaller city-based or regional agencies flattered by
being invited to play
with the big boys. They just don’t understand that the big boys they
happen to be playing with are a small group of bullies whose ideas
derive from the
last century, with legitimate ties to the century before that, and who
have chosen not to change with the times but rather to hope that the
times can be
brought back around to their archaic stance and the good old days when
agency professionals ruled and blind men and women obeyed.

Thus it is hard to categorize the agency of today that has voluntarily
associated itself with NAC. Rumors persist that a small agency named
Insight in
Fort Collins, Colorado, has recently sought and accepted NAC
accreditation. With only a five-year-old list of accredited agencies
and no updated Website
information to check, this agency’s insistence that it has recently
become NAC-accredited must be accepted. Why would an agency insist
that it is newly
NAC-accredited, given all the reasons to run fleet-footed from such
opprobrium, unless it is true? The only thing an observer can do is
shake the head
sadly, note that Abraham Lincoln and P. T. Barnum both spoke truly,
and then mourn for the Coloradans who have enjoyed a NAC-free
environment for so many
years only to have the gullibility of a small agency taint that
pristine condition.
With most large agencies for the blind casually uninterested in NAC
and most states NAC-free, we can pity that small group of agencies
whose gullibility
betrays them into remaining NAC-accredited. But what of NAC itself and
those agency professionals who still proclaim that the all-knowing
professional
model and not the outcome model is the correct assessment tool for
judging agency quality? These are not the deceived but the deceivers,
the men and women
who have chosen to espouse the outdated service model first championed
by NAC in 1966 and now rejected by the field it claims to measure.
These are not
people fooled by ignorance or benevolence. They are the ones doing the
fooling, the ones keeping alive that silly notion that blind people
need guards
and protectors and want lifetime dependency on caring professionals.

One of their leaders is Steven Hegedeos, NAC’s executive director
since 2001. Pretty much every time Mr. Hegedeos speaks about
accreditation, he mentions
that he has saved two other accreditation bodies from dissolution
before joining the stumbling NAC. It seems likely, then, that Mr.
Hegedeos has assigned
himself the life task of taking moribund accrediting bodies and
reviving them, regardless of the reason for the body’s original
decline. Or, put another
way, Mr. Hegedeos is determined to succeed in his life goal whether
the field of work with the blind wants accreditation or not. His
comments seem largely
to involve the subject of accreditation, regardless of context and
unrelated to the alleged beneficiaries. A life devoted to
accreditation has happened
to collide with a dying accrediting body, and the resulting fusion
will not be allowed by Mr. Hegedeos to expire, not even if the field
offered that accreditation
almost completely ignores it.

The remaining NAC champions, mostly heads of a few NAC-accredited
agencies themselves, get to be big fish in a little pond. With only
forty agencies accredited,
it’s not hard to rise to the top of the pool if you shout louder than
the next guy about how great NAC is. The same outmoded system NAC
upholds—all-knowing
professionals providing care to the frail blind—also creates a
hierarchy of professionals with those most vocally supporting NAC the
ones tapped to hold
its offices and go on its on-site teams.

Put in Lincoln’s terms, we have the outdated fooling some gullible
agencies all the time by annually collecting NAC accreditation fees
from them, the outdated
fooling the field of work with the blind all the time by not appearing
to pose a sufficient threat to be worth the euthanizing (except to the
Federation
and AFB’s director), and the outdated not able to fool all of the
field all of the time since the field largely ignores NAC though it
keeps receiving unpleasant
reminders like the little Colorado agency’s recent accreditation that
NAC has not yet left the field for good. Or, put more succinctly, the
Colorado agency
proves that P. T. Barnum is right that suckers still exist, and we can
hope for the day when, at least in the field of work with the blind,
the chance
for the anachronism of NAC to fool the gullible will finally be
eliminated forever.
Or the field of work with the blind can look at the whole NAC
situation from a different perspective, the one in the child’s rhyme:

Yesterday upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I wish, I wish he’d go away.

As kids we all liked the fast-paced rhyming and weren’t overly
bothered by the words’ making no sense. Now as adults we can easily
apply them to NAC, an
accreditation agency which essentially hasn’t been there for more than
half of its existence. In case after case, when blind people were
receiving poor
service, NAC issued and maintained accreditations. In case after case
chronicled in the Monitor, when blind people and especially children
were being assaulted
and endangered to the point of death, in case after case where
employees were being mistreated and funds embezzled and the analysis
of blind consumers
being ignored, NAC issued and maintained accreditation. As the field
moved on beyond NAC’s outmoded approach, NAC issued and maintained
accreditations
to an ever-shrinking list to the point where NAC has become that man
upon the stair, clearly there and clearly not, encountered very
occasionally as in
the instance of that little Colorado agency and then disappearing
quite literally off the Web and, when present, providing information
years out of date.
It’s been time for a long while for NAC to go away, though neither
lack of success nor lack of funding nor even the recommendation of the

AFB director seems to get the job done. But some day everyone knows
NAC will quietly wither away.
Perhaps yet another way of viewing NAC, of considering it that man
upon the stair, is to go back to our wise sixteenth president and rest
our hopes on
one more quotation of his. Lincoln had that knack of compressing into
a few words the wisdom he had absorbed, and his deep sense of equality
before the
law and before his God comes out in a quotation which could as easily
be applied to NAC and to those agencies which seek to rule the blind
according to
the all-knowing professional view. Just think if this prescription by
Lincoln could be filled by placing those all-knowing professionals
where they seek
to place their clients. It’s easy to imagine then how quickly NAC
would be gone. Lincoln put it this way: "Whenever I hear anyone
arguing for slavery,
I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."