Framing Discipline Disparities Through DisCrit
SPED 4171/4192
Agenda for the Week
Agenda for Monday
Mini-Lesson/Class Discussion Regarding Content of the Reading and How the Content can be applicable to your practicum assignments
Here is where we left off
Race/Ethnicity of Enrollment | % Enrollment | % In School Suspensions | % Out of School Suspensions | % Expulsions | % Referrals to Law Enforcement |
Am Ind./AK Native | .2 | .1 | .1 | 0 | 0 |
Asian | 6.6 | .7 | .7 | 0 | 1.1 |
Black | 19.7 | 50.3 | 55.1 | 50 | 76.7 |
Hispanic | 11.9 | 6.6 | 6.8 | 25 | 1.1 |
Nat. HI/Pac Isl | 2.5 | 1.2 | 1.1 | 0 | 3.3 |
Two or More | 4.2 | 9 | 9.9 | 0 | 0 |
White | 55 | 32.1 | 26.2 | 25 | 17.8 |
Disability Service Type | Enrollment | In School Suspensions | Out of School Suspensions | Expulsions | Referrals to Law Enforcement |
504 Plan (raw number) | 128 | 17 | 25 | 0 | 1 |
Special Education (%) | 15.6 | 28.9 | 32.3 | 0 | 35.6 |
Race/Ethnicity of Special Education Students | % Enrollment | % In School Suspensions | % Out of School Suspensions | % Expulsions | % Referrals to Law Enforcement |
Am Ind./AK Native | .2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Asian | 1.4 | 0 | .6 | 0 | 0 |
Black | 38.6 | 56.7 | 58.4 | 0 | 90.6 |
Hispanic | 8.7 | 5.1 | 5.5 | 0 | 0 |
Nat. HI/Pac Isl | 1.3 | .9 | .8 | 0 | 0 |
Two or More | 9 | 9.8 | 11.6 | 0 | 0 |
White | 40.9 | 27.4 | 23 | 0 | 9.4 |
Introduction: Framing Discipline Disparities Through DisCrit
SPED 4171/4192
Agenda for Wednesday
At your tables discuss and document:
We left off here.
Public Law 94-142: Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 and Principles [including hyperlink to the Iowa Department of Education Definitional Documents] | Legal Requirement | Cultural-Historical and DisCrit Analysis of the Principles of IDEA |
Locate, Identity, & Provide Services to all eligible students with disabilities | ||
This principle guarantees that all children receive a free and appropriate public education, “no matter how severe their disability.” This principle also give the power to school districts to look for students who might have one of the 13 categories of disability, which can also be problematic if taken up uncritically and not accounting for how master narratives about dis/Abilities and how we access both ability and disability does not account for cultural, linguistic and other intersectional demographic factors that caregivers and Black, Indigenous and Youth of Color with and without dis/Abilities communicate and navigate educational, teaching and learning contexts. The problem of disproportionality has illustrated and has been a case study when we do not take seriously the mediating role of culture, race, gender and other forms of human variation in education, which either afford or constrain our understanding of the human potential of students at their intersections of difference (https://spedforeveryone.weebly.com/zero-reject.html, para 1.) | ||
Develop and Deliver an individualized education program of special education services that confers ambitious educational benefit | ||
As Harry and Ocasio-Stoutenburg (2022) pointed out, the legal historiography and actual legal arguments of P.A.R.C. v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Mills v. Board of Education which led to the development of FAPE not only did not account for race, but an intersectional imagination. This is the very point that Kimberly Crenshaw pointed out in the late 1980s and early 1990s, that intersectional analysis along race and gender, and in our case race and dis/Ability were not put forth. So understanding what counts as FAPE in policy and practice is important for the life chances of intersectionally situated students such as African Americans. | ||
The development of individualized education programs for children requiring special education and related services. All public and private agencies that provide special education are governed by policies, rules, statutes and procedures for the establishment, review, and revision of IEPs for all children requiring special education and for the maintenance of IEP records. | ||
All students with IEPs individualizations along their academic, social and emotional present levels of their academic and functional performance, but how these are conceptualized as not accounting for race or culture in more explicit ways is critical to interrogate in order to provide an IEP that does not conflate student’s language differences with a Learning Disability for example (Klingner & Artiles, 2006). How such tools like the IEP are used as tools of white and ability supremacy is critically important to question and disrupt so that larger mechanisms such as the school to nexus pipeline (Annamma, 2017; Stovall, 2018). | ||
Educate students with disabilities with non-disabled students to the maximum extent appropriate. | ||
The LRE is not created equally (Baglieri, 2012; Rueda et al., 2000; Sauer & Jorgensen, 2016). Research shows that students of Color are placed in more restrictive settings than their white peers with the same disability label (Artiles, 2011, 2019). According to Migliarini and Annamma (2021): “Early-21st-century legislation requiring free and equitable education in the least restrictive environment mandates that school professionals serve the needs of all students, especially those located at the interstices of multiple differences in inclusive settings. These combined commitments create tensions in teacher education, demanding that educators rethink relationships with students so that they are not simply recreating the trends of mass incarceration within schools. Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) shifts the questions that are asked from “How can we fix students who disobey rules?” to “How can preservice teacher education and existing behavioral management courses be transformed so that they are not steeped in color evasion and silent on interlocking systems of oppression?” (p. 1). | ||
A due process hearing is a formal event that occurs when disputes arise over a child's special education identification, evaluation, placement, or services. | ||
It is critical that due process hearings also allow Black, Indigenious and Youth and Parents of Color to share their full humanity and accounts of race and dis/Ability social and cultural constructions for justice to be recognized and understood beyond the positivist and objectivist framework that is the bedrock of traditional special education (Artiles & Ortiz, 2002; Gallagher, 2007). How white and ability supremacy has operated within the special educational system and within the legal history of the field is not only important to reframe and remediate through all of the tenets of DisCrit, however, in particular the following: DisCrit privileges voices of marginalized populations, traditionally not acknowledged within research. (5) DisCrit considers legal and historical aspects of dis/ability and race and how both have been used separately and together to deny the rights of some citizens. (6) DisCrit recognizes whiteness and Ability as Property and that gains for people labeled with dis/abilities have largely been made as the result of interest convergence of white, middle-class citizens. (7) DisCrit requires activism and supports all forms of resistance. Each of these will allow all stakeholders, to critically think and feel before we act in our personal, professional and programmatic selves and roles in educational systems so that we can enable more inclusive and sustaining systemic change efforts at the personal, interpersonal, structural and political levels of doing schooling in the 21st century that does not dehumanize students and their caregivers’ humanity and histories with such constructs like race and dis/Ability in the United States academic, social and emotional contexts. | ||
Comply with procedural requirements of the IDEA | ||
How we adhere to the law since the 1965 and 1975 passages of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Education of All Handicapped Children’s Act is central to collaborating, communicating and working together for the betterment of our children’s lives, their classrooms, schools, communities and nation and world. However, since the creation of these dis/Ability laws, whose values have been centered on white-middle and upper class able-bodied folks. How we undo the ableist and racist practices and policies encoded in the hidden curriculum of such policies is of urgent and paramount significance since Black, Indigenious and Youth and their caregivers humanity and lives are at stake given the historical legacies of chattel slavery and other forms of intersectional violence and forms of discrimination and vulnerabilities with U.S. society. How we apply due process is also not created equally, given bias and stereotypes that might interfere against the civil and educational rights of Black, Indigenious and Youth of Color and their caregivers as the stories and counter-narratives of the vodcast and caregiver interviewees attested. | ||
Conduct an assessment to determine if a student has an IDEA related disability and if they need special education services | ||
The IDEA has outlined the following protections in evaluation procedures: 1. Tests are selected and administered so as to be racially and culturally nondiscriminatory. 2. To the extent feasible, students are to be assessed in their primary language or primary mode of communication. 3. Tests must be validated for the specific purpose for which they are being used. 4. Tests must be administered by trained personnel in conformance with the instructions provided by the test producer/developer. 5. Tests... must include those designed to provide information about specific educational needs, not just a general intelligence score. 6. Decisions about students are to be based on more than their performance on a single test. 7. Evaluations are to be made by a multidisciplinary team that includes at least one teacher or other specialist with knowledge in the area of suspected disability. 8. Children must be assessed in all areas related to a specific disability, including where appropriate, health, vision, hearing, social-emotional status, general intelligence, academic performance, communicative skills and motor skills. | ||
Conduct an assessment to determine if a student has an IDEA related disability and if they need special education services | ||
Evaluations Decisions: 1. Documented and careful consideration 2. Made by a Team (Often the IEP Team) 3. Placement decisions based on evaluation data must follow the LRE Requirements. However, as Harry and Klingner (2006) has warranted us that special education has a “culture of referral” that we argue we must account for as we operationalize and produce the technical dimensions of special education such as the principles of IDEA: “Despite the presence of social reproduction processes at work in these schools, our most important finding defied all simplistic assumptions about the overrepresentation of Black and Hispanic students in special education. We learned that special education placement showed no systematic relationship either to school quality or to children’s own developmental or skills levels. Rather, it reflected a wide range of influences, including structural inequities, contextual biases, limited opportunity to learn, variability in referral and assessment processes, detrimental views of and interactions with families, and poor instruction and classroom management. Overarching all these was the power of each school’s ideology regarding special education, which we came to refer to as the school’s “culture of referral” (p. 24). | ||
“. . . False narrative that Black students, who are the most likely to experience disciplinary exclusion, engage in more serious or violent behaviors that warrant suspension and expulsion from school. However, there is imply no evidence that Black students engage in more serious infractions that warrant such extreme school reaction (Skiba et al., 2002, 2011).
Internal Factors versus External Factors
Common Sense Assumptions and Narratives [e.g., commonly accepted belief systems]
“There has been other promising research documenting that a classroom consultation model that incorporates feedback based on videotaped student teacher exchanges had positive outcomes in mitigating racial discipline disparities and improving student engagement.”
“Discipline decisions prone to implicit bias, could be addressed by teaching educators a simple neutralizing routine to help them make more equitable decisions in the moment. In another study, teachers who received a brief outline empathy intervention were less likely to suspend students compared with teacher in a control condition.”
“Taken together, the evidence suggests that the greater risk to Black students with dis/Abilities lies in how educators perceive their identities in relationship to their behavior in schools.”
“. . .Why educators are referring Black students more often[?]”
Perceive
Define
Interact
Within-person, deficit perspective
Where is the problem being located?
How have the people and environment around the student created and/or contributed to the concern?
Tenet 1: DisCrit focuses on ways that the forces of racism and ableism circulate interdependently, often in neutralized and invisible ways, to uphold notions of normalcy.
Intersectionality → Intersectional Disablism
Unique qualitatively different experience of oppression
Who is being disciplined?
Why?
Tenet 2: DisCrit values multidimensional identities and troubles singular notions of identity such as race or dis/ability or class or gender or sexuality, and so on.
Labels impact us [discursively]
Materially and Emotionally
Academic, social and emotional performance and achievement
“Educators should examine their own views of race and dis/ability and how those views inform their decisions and actions.”
Tenet 3: DisCrit emphasizes the social constructions of race and ability and yet recognizes the material and psychological impacts of being labeled as raced or dis/abled, which sets one outside of the western cultural norms.
Counter-Storytelling
“From a DisCrit perspective, educators must speak to, listen to, and include the voices and perspectives of Black and Native American students with dis/Abilities in order to better serve them.”
Student voice matters
“The goal is to understand how the student experienced the incident, which may change the [disciplinary] action.”
Tenet 4: DisCrit privileges voices of marginalized populations, traditionally not acknowledged within research.
“DisCrit embraces all forms of activism, including pedagogical, theoretical and [scholarship].”
“Not only observe injustices, but to take steps to remedy it.”
“From research on implicit bias, we know that educators can hold explicit egalitarian beliefs but still hold implicit biases that influence their decisions.”
Enabling a culture of (un)learning
Tenet 7: DisCrit requires activism and supports all forms of resistance.
Thank you!
Go team!