Managing Learning Disability Services in the United States

Abstract

The effects of privatisation, public work force downsizing and schemes to re‐invent government have eroded the middle management capacity that is crucial to the success of many community development programmes and complex public and private partnerships for learning disability services in the US. The impact of these factors has been accelerated by reform proposals from within the learning disability field that associate government and management with the perceived ills of traditional specialised service agencies and assume that market and other approaches to providing services will be superior. In addition, the consolidation of learning disability within broader health and human services, at state and local levels, along with large losses in the number of managers in learning disability services, has added to the problems of managing community services. Managing community services is therefore an important challenge in the US, and attention needs to be paid to the unique problems in this environment, with the roles middle managers play in the large and complex organisational environment of community services crucial to their stability and success. Managers more than management frameworks are especially important in the US, as comprehensive administrative arrangements at local level are unlikely to emerge. Disappointment about traditional approaches in specialised provision should not lead to uncritical assumptions about the superiority of alternative arrangements for managing learning disability services.