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

[Steven Johnson]

It would be helpful to have the date on this article as well as the dates of any articles that you were referencing in the resolution.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jul 13, 2015, at 12:08 PM, Aaron Cannon via nagdu <nagdu at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> 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."
> 
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