FNED: Snow Day Post on Special Education and the Overrepresentation of Students of Color

The primary crux of "In the Shadow of Brown: Special Education and Overrepresentation of Students of Color" by Beth Ferri and David Connor is that as educators, we need to begin to "consider how many of our current educational practices serve as tools of social control and exclusion, and not, as we might prefer to think, as democratic tools of social transformation," including special education. The authors trace the history of special education back to the years following the Brown vs. Board of Education supreme court case which racially desegregated schools de jure. In those early years that followed, many schools utilized academic tracking systems and separate special education classrooms under the guise of "natural abilities" as a way to resegregate the school population. These underhanded attempts to further perpetuate institutionalized racism and classism have resounding effects today: African American and Hispanic students have been severely overrepresented in special education programs well into the 21st century. 

In my first year teaching in Providence, I taught a self-contained 11th grade English class. I was soon shocked by the language with which other educators or professional support staff would use to describe my students, and the low expectations other teachers had for them, just as the authors notes that "students in special education are more likely to experience lower teacher expectations as a result of being labeled and provided with instruction associated with poor transition outcomes after the student leaves school." The one place where the article and my experience could be different is that the school that I teach in is still predominantly Hispanic and African-American, so the racial demographics of our special education population and the general population are not drastically different, as they would be in other areas. However, this is not to say that our schools are not still extremely segregated. As the article mentions briefly, the effect of white flight on our urban schools is staggering and renders our learning institutions perhaps even more segregated than during the era of Brown. Overall, I think it is important to think critically about the institution of special education and analyze the lasting impacts its founding intentions have on the wellbeings of all our students, lest they are forced to unduly experience "feelings of inferiority... that may affect their hearts and minds in a way very unlikely ever to be undone."