What does my profession value?

I had no idea, when I started this website a year ago, that I would end up needing to devote considerable time during 2025 to re-writing and re-editing (and re-re-editing) as fundamental resources and requirements disappeared out from under us.

And I certainly had no idea that my own profession would revise its previously clear value statements during 2025 in ways that have almost abdicated our responsibilities to other people.

When I started working on this website, and as recently as early 2025, my work was guided by several required and fundamental documents. We as a country and we as a profession had stated publicly, in multiple places, that we valued trying to look beyond our own very small pieces of the world, and that we valued the presence and the contributions of other people (at least sometimes). We said we valued working to include everyone who deserved to be included (at least sometimes). We even said that we valued trying to make sure that everyone received what they needed — clearly with more caveats or differences of opinion here than on the first two, but again, at least sometimes, or at least to a limited extent.

Parts of how we attempted to live out these values, in our work as communication-care professionals, came from basic, guiding materials such as the Department of Health and Human Services’ standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services (the National CLAS Standards). Some of the editing I had to find time for during 2025 became necessary, however, because some previously-available materials about the CLAS standards, which I had linked to and quoted in my original writing, disappeared from the DHS website during 2025.

These disappearances did not occur because of routine updates or evidence-driven improvements. I was not busy with the typical “oops, there’s a new edition” kind of editing. These disappearances occurred because of our federal government’s crackdown on the words diversity, equity, and inclusion. I became very familiar, during 2025, with “page not found” errors for resources I had previously accessed many times and with statements that many previously fundamental materials were now being “reviewed.”

And the changes were not occurring solely at some distant federal-government level.

Our own 2017 accreditation standards for speech-language pathology educational programs had been revised in 2023 to require that speech-language pathology master’s degree or other professional preparation programs were to be “organized and delivered in such a manner that…diversity, equity, and inclusion are reflected in the program and throughout academic and clinical education.” Similarly, applicants seeking individual certification in speech-language pathology, and professionals seeking to maintain their certification, had been required since 2023 to demonstrate knowledge of professional values and actions including knowledge of human cultures, fairness, and other issues, including “cultural competency and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).”

This wording was changed during 2025, literally crossed out and replaced. Now, as of mid 2025, the words “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” no longer appear in our certification standards. Now, as of mid 2025, our certification standards do not mention cultural proficiency, culturally sustaining work, or cultural competence. In their place we have two old requirements (that we must have “knowledge of” “cultural correlates” and that we must “recognize” clients’ “cultural backgrounds”) and one important new phrase: that we are to provide care that “aligns with the unique histories, values, and circumstances of individuals, families, and/or communities.”

What a sneaky change!

It might sound person-centered or culturally appropriate on the surface, but aligning with history and circumstances differs in enormous ways from requiring and valuing diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Think about any group of people who have traditionally been marginalized, devalued, or oppressed in any society. Care that merely “aligns” with their history and their current circumstances keeps them marginalized, devalued, and even oppressed. If I as a care provider see a person and their culture as beneath me, then “aligning” the care I provide with their “history and circumstances” allows me to treat them as beneath me — and to keep them beneath me. The requirement that we are to “align” our care with people’s histories and circumstances allows us to imagine that there are bad people, with bad histories, in bad circumstances, who deserve bad care.

That kind of thought process, and that kind of work, was precisely what the previous version of our certification standards had committed us to changing. Our profession started in a distinctly problematic place, in the early 20th century. We have been accused, not entirely without justification, of being little more than elocution coaches intent on making everyone sound like a stereotypical upper-middle-class White girl. More recently, though, in part because of some hard-fought fights and in part because our society overall was changing around us, we really were trying to do better. We were trying to assert, and to act on, some inclusive 21st-century values and some associated professional responsibilities. It might be embarrassing that we took so long to get there, but at least we had gotten there. We at least stated clearly, for a few years, that we as a profession valued diversity, the opposite of which is a stultifying sameness and a cruel rejection of other people. We at least stated, until 2025, that we valued inclusion, the opposite of which is an active attempt to exclude people from whichever circles we have decided to exclude them from. We at least stated, until 2025, that we valued equity, the opposite of which is a determination to treat people unfairly. We had continued to argue among ourselves (appropriately!) about whether enough of our actions conformed to our stated beliefs, or about whether our beliefs and our actions truly valued and included everyone — that’s how I could write both of the stories that make up Module 14. But, honestly, at the very least, at least we were trying.

Now, as of 2025, we as a profession are officially no longer bothering to try — and, perhaps even more infuriatingly, there is very little record that we ever did.

The certification standards available on the ASHA website as I write today, in early 2026, are titled “2020 Standards and Implementation Procedures for the Certificate of Clinical Competence in Speech-Language Pathology,” and they are explicitly labeled “Effective Date: January 1, 2020.” All evidence that our profession had ever required its practitioners to strive for including all persons in equitable ways, and all evidence that our profession valued the resulting diversity, has been erased, with no evidence in the official document that changes occurred in 2023 or again in 2025. If we hadn’t saved our 2025 emails about the changes, or if we hadn’t been blogging about the proposed changes during 2025, we would have no way of knowing that the only way to understand our own profession’s certification standards is now to trace it all through the Wayback Machine.

Many rationales for changes like this have been offered during the last year or so, in our profession and throughout U.S. society. We needed to make these changes because of federal funding decisions in the current political climate, some have said, implicitly valuing money above their own basic, fundamental principles. This retreat was simply a strategic bit of professional self-preservation, some have said; we are protecting ourselves, and helping our present and future clients, by laying low and conforming to the expectations coming from the federal government. Workplace DEI programs had become too intrusive and were introducing discrimination of their own, some have said; the changes we are living through during 2025 are a necessary correction to a possibly reasonable idea that had definitely gone rogue. The words “diversity” and “equity” and “inclusion,” on their own, had been misused to the point of becoming toxic, some have said, or weaponized, or unclear; they needed to be reined in.

Is any of that true?

Maybe, but I don’t think so, and whether it’s true or not I also don’t actually believe that any of that is the real reason for what my profession, our profession, has done.

I cannot help but think that what is happening here, overall, what happened during 2025 and is still happening, is that enough people in enough positions of power in my profession kind of liked it the old way. I do not know who sat on the relevant committees during 2025, and I do not know how close the votes were or what their discussions entailed. I do know that they chose to remove the words diversity, equity, and inclusion from our fundamental guiding documents, and they chose to do so in way that left no formal record of the change.

I had to spend lots of my time during 2025 editing this website because our federal government decided to stop supporting culturally and linguistically appropriate healthcare and because my own profession decided to stop requiring fair treatment that includes everyone. That waste of my time makes me angry, but what it means for my profession makes me really very sad.

I had started 2025 with a fairly good understanding of what my profession valued, and what my profession required, and which direction my profession was headed, and why.

Now, honestly, as I start 2026, I really don’t know any more.

Anne Marcotte | February 1, 2026