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

[Aaron Cannon]

Yes it does.

In this case, I believe it is January 2009.

On 7/13/15, Cindy Ray via nagdu <nagdu at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> He put the link in; if you were to go to it, it would likely say the Monitor
> it came from?
>
> Cindy
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nagdu [mailto:nagdu-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Steven Johnson
> via nagdu
> Sent: Monday, July 13, 2015 1:27 PM
> To: NAGDU Mailing List, the National Association of Guide Dog Users
> Cc: Steven Johnson
> Subject: Re: [nagdu] Who is NAC, and Why Should You Care
>
> 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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