You Can’t Compel Belief: On being right, winning anyway, and why neither one serves the child

You can have the law on your side. You can have the research on your side. You can have every recognized best practice in the field lined up behind you, documented, cited, undeniable. And you can still walk out of the building without the thing your learner actually needed.

I want to sit with that sentence for a minute, because almost everything in this work is built to pretend it isn't true.

We tell parents the system has a process. We tell them about the IEP, about mediation, about due process. We tell each other that if we just present the evidence clearly enough, if we just get the right evaluation in front of the right people, the outcome will follow. And sometimes it does. But often it doesn't, and the gap between "I was right" and "my learner got what they needed" is where a lot of us come apart.

So let me say the part out loud that we don't say enough. Being right and getting the outcome are two different things. They aren't even on the same axis.

Being right is a question of merit. It's about what the evidence shows, what the law requires, what good practice looks like. Getting the outcome is a question of power. It's about who in the room has the authority to say yes, and whether they've decided the cost of saying no is something they're willing to pay. A school that won't honor a student's communication has usually already done that math. They've weighed the cost of denying access against the cost of changing how they staff, train, and think, and they've concluded that denial is cheaper. Your binder full of evidence doesn't change that calculation. It just documents it.

I think about a student I'll call M.

M is a composite, drawn from more families than I can count, because the story is so common it's almost a template. M has communication access needs and doesn't rely on speech to communicate.

M had a way to communicate, a real one, the kind that lets a person show you the mind that was there all along. M's family had the evaluations. They had the documentation. They had me, or someone like me, ready to testify that what M needed was not exotic, not unreasonable, not a stretch. It was access. It was the floor, not the ceiling.

And M's team said no. Not in those words. They said it in the language of "we're not seeing that here" and "we have to be able to verify" and "we're concerned about prompt dependence." They said it by assigning a one-on-one who was never trained. They said it by offering a placement that was specialized, which is a word we use when we don't want to say segregated. They said it slowly, in a hundred small refusals, each one defensible on its own, until a year had gone by and M was no closer to being heard than the September before.

I was right. The research was right. The law was on M's side. And M lost the year anyway. M doesn't get that year back. There's no appeal that returns a sixth-grade September to a child.

If you do this work, you know M. You have your own M. Maybe more than you can hold.

To the people who fight for a living

I want to talk to the advocates, the expert witnesses, the consultants, the practitioners who walk into these meetings and hearings as the person who is supposed to know.

Here is something nobody warns you about: when your entire function is to be believed, watching belief lose is a specific kind of injury. It is not the same as ordinary disappointment. You were brought in because you are credible, because you have the credentials and the evidence and the standing, and you watch all of that get outweighed by a hearing officer's caution, a district's budget, a procedural technicality, a decision-maker who simply decided your learner wasn't worth the disruption. You did everything correctly and it didn't matter. That lands differently than a loss you can pin on your own mistake, because there's nothing to fix. You weren't wrong. You were just outweighed.

And here's the part that's even harder to say, because it sounds like ingratitude for the wins. Sometimes you win and it's still a loss. You prevail at the hearing. You get the placement ordered, the device written in, the service hours secured on paper. And then your learner walks into a building full of people who didn't want them there in the first place and now resent the ruling that put them there. The compliance is real. The belief never came. You can force a school to seat a child in a general education classroom. You cannot force anyone in that room to believe the child belongs there, to teach to them, to want them. And a child who is technically included and actually unwanted has not been given much. So you start to ask the question that sits under all of this: what is the point of winning if winning just relocates the child into a more sophisticated form of the same refusal? The ruling was never the thing the child needed. The belief was. And belief is the one thing no order can compel.

If you stay in this field long enough, that injury accumulates, the losses and the hollow wins both. And the way it tends to express itself is brutal. You start to believe that the outcome is a verdict on you. That if you'd been sharper, more persuasive, more strategic, more something, it would have gone differently. You take a system's refusal and you metabolize it as a personal failure.

I want to be precise because this is the part that matters: losing the case is not the same as doing the work wrong. Neither is winning one that doesn't change anything for the child.

The case and the child were never running on the same clock. The child needs access this year, in this body, in this childhood that does not pause while you build the macro argument. The case is part of a longer fight, the one about changing what the next family walks into. You can lose the first while serving the second. You can be exactly as right as you thought you were and still not win, because winning was never only about being right. It was about power, and on that particular day, in that particular room, you didn't have enough of it.

That's not your failure. That's the actual shape of the work. The sooner we say so to each other, the less it hollows us out.

To the parents weighing the decision

Now I want to talk to the families. Specifically, to the ones standing at one of the two hardest doors: the one marked exit, where you pull your child out, and the one marked settlement, where you accept terms that are less than what your child deserved because the concrete thing on the table now is better than years more of fighting for the principle.

You've been told, maybe by people who mean well, that you can't change a system if you opt out. That pulling your child from the public school is a kind of surrender. That taking the settlement instead of pushing the case all the way is letting them off the hook. That the principled thing, the brave thing, is to stay and fight for everything, all the way, no matter how long it takes.

I want to dismantle that carefully because it's doing real harm.

The fight to change the system runs on a long clock. It is measured in years, in policy cycles, in slow shifts in who believes what. Its beneficiary is diffuse. It's the next family, and the family after that, kids who haven't enrolled yet. That fight matters enormously. I've given a large part of my life to it.

Your child runs on a different clock entirely. Your child has one childhood, and it is happening right now, and it does not stop to wait for the system to evolve. A year spent as a test case is a year your child spends as a test case. They didn't volunteer for that. They can't get it back.

So when you pull your child out of a placement that won't keep them safe, won't honor their communication, won't believe they're in there, you are not abandoning the movement. When you take the settlement because it puts a real service in front of your child this year instead of a principle that might pay out after they've aged out, you are not selling anyone short. Hear me on this. You are doing the exact thing the movement exists to defend. The whole point, the entire reason any of us do this, is so that your child has agency, gets to be the author of their own life, isn't sacrificed to someone else's idea of what's good for them. When you choose your child over the test case, you are exercising precisely the agency we are all fighting to protect.

Any version of advocacy that makes you feel ashamed for that has lost the plot. It has started, somewhere along the way, to treat your child as instrumental to the cause, when the cause was only ever supposed to serve your child. I asked once what level of blood sacrifice is acceptable in the name of systems change, and the answer was none. It's still none. Your kid is not ammunition.

Pulling your child out is one right answer. Settling is another. Staying and fighting for all of it is a third, the one some families choose because they have the stamina and the resources and a placement that's actually salvageable. None of these is the correct answer in the abstract, because there is no abstract child. There's yours. The point is that the choice is yours to make, with the real tradeoffs in front of you, and nobody gets to shame you out of the one that protects your child.

The same fight, two clocks

Here's what I want both of you to see, the advocate and the parent, because you are so often in the same room holding the same loss from opposite sides.

You are not on opposite sides.

The parent who walks out the door and the advocate who stays at the table are running the same fight on two different clocks. The parent protects the child who can't wait. The advocate keeps the pressure on the system so that the next family walks in to a real choice instead of only the choice to flee. Neither one is the betrayal. The betrayal is the frame that pits them against each other, that tells the parent they're quitting and tells the advocate they failed, when both of them are doing exactly what their part of the work requires.

I keep that distinction close now, because it's the only thing that lets me stay in this without it breaking me. I am not personally the system that has to change. No single one of us is. The macro fight only works if it's carried across a whole field, a whole movement, so that no one person has to be right enough, strategic enough, relentless enough to bend a system on their own. That was never the job. The job is to keep showing up on your clock, and to stop punishing yourself for the losses that belong to the structure rather than to you.

Being right isn't enough. It never was. But it's not nothing, either. It's the thing that keeps the long fight honest, and it's the thing that tells a family, on the worst day, that they weren't crazy, they weren't asking for too much, and they were right to want more for their child.

Sometimes that's the only thing you get to win. Some days it has to be enough to keep going. And then you go back the next day, on whichever clock is yours, and you do it again.

If you're navigating one of these decisions yourself, whether that's an IEP that isn't working, a placement that won't honor your child's communication, or a fight that's headed toward due process, Reach Every Voice offers consultation, advocacy, and expert witness support. You don't have to figure out the next move alone. Get in touch.

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Lisa Mihalich Quinn, M.A / M.Ed. / MBA / ATACP is a licensed special educator with more than 15 years of experience making academic content accessible for neurodiverse students and learners who use Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). She is a former Maryland Public Schools teacher and the founder of Reach Every Voice, an organization dedicated to empowering individuals with communication access needs, and cofounder of Communication for Education, an online training program for people who support students using text-based multimodal communication in educational settings. Most recently, she has been working to lift the burden of content adaptation on parents and educators with the new transformative lesson adaptation tool, Adaptiverse App.

Lisa's passion for inclusion and equity runs deep, driving her work to help educators, learners, and families think creatively about how to reimagine systems that are historically resistant to change. She pushes folks to shift mindsets from "this is just how we do things..." and "we can't because..." to embody a spirit of "what if we tried..."

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