Special Ed is Wack if you're Black

This was recently published in an awesome magazine called, 'eth6'. There, it was called, "Files before faces", which is a much more appropriate title. But this is my blog and this is my affectionate title. Check out eth6 at www.ethsix.com

“Disproportionate representation: the extent to which membership in a given ethnic group affects the probability of being placed in a specific special education disability category (e.g., students with mild mental retardation).” --Oswald et al., 1999

My classroom at Berkeley High School measures 15’ by 10’, which is smaller than my bedroom at home. Within that space there are five tables (each seating two students), one smaller desk, two whiteboards, fourteen somewhat organized textbooks, a couple of boxes of pencils, three reams of paper, eight posters, one bucket of markers, five calculators, and six rulers. There are twelve high school students. It is the sixth and last period of the day and eight of the twelve students have just sprinted from physical education. It is cramped, sweaty, and the room vibrates with the anticipation of the end of the day. Of my twelve students, ten of them are Black and eleven of them are boys.

The student population of Berkeley High School is robust at roughly 3700 students enrolled. According to the school website, this population is a diverse body with an ethnic breakdown of 36.7 percent White, 29.1 percent Black, 12.6 percent Latino, 12.5 percent Multi Ethnic, 7.9 percent Asian, 0.6 percent Filipino, 0.3 percent American Indian, and 0.1 percent Native Hawaiian/other. I teach special education math. After having finished our budget project and furiously studying real-world statistics and percentages, my students could tell you that our particular tiny classroom is 91 percent male and 83 percent Black. They could also tell you, without any calculations, that this does not reflect the overall make-up of the student body, though that’s probably not exactly how they’d word it.

So why are so many of the students in Special Education students of color? A study by Harvard University substantiates the contention that a disproportionately high number of students from diverse backgrounds are placed in special education: African American children are almost three times (2.88) as likely as white children to be identified as mentally retarded, 1.9 times as likely to be identified as emotionally disturbed, and nearly 1.3 times as likely to be identified as having a learning disability. Diane Colburn, the Special Education Administrator at Berkeley High School took some time to talk to me about this very issue and some of her own research on the topic. According to her, it’s ironic that the field of Special Education emerged to level the playing field and has now developed into a sorting mechanism, thereby reducing the quality of education to many students of color. Her paper on this topic is appropriately titled, “Another Kind of Segregation” Clearly, there is no debate within the field of education about whether or not this issue exists. The data makes it credible, but one must merely spend a few hours within a public school to see the reality.

Many students on my caseload illustrate this conundrum. “Janine”, an African-American female in her junior year, had a file the size of Rhode Island. I attempted to sort through it, but more telling than the documents in her cumulative file, were the emails I began to receive from her teachers beginning the first week of school: “Janine is consistently tardy, argumentative, and disruptive…” or “Given chance after chance, Janine will come through at the very last second, barely skimming by, only to blow it again and again by accusing me of being biased or shouting loudly across the room” or simply, “I don’t know what to do about Janine…..” and worst of all, “I can’t teach or reach any other students with Janine in my classroom”. As her case manager, general education teachers reach out to me to give them ideas or assistance. Students in special education are entitled by law to be in the least restrictive environment and to have access to the general curriculum. It was unclear why Janine had been referred in the first place, though she had qualified due to an unspecified learning disability and had remained in special education, with minimal support, mostly due to her truancy and behavior. The amount of class she missed made it impossible for her to keep up with curriculum, and the way she behaved made it nearly impossible for teachers to teach. They consistently wanted her out of their room and she consistently used her powers of persuasion and keen verbalization skills to talk her way into staying…and skating by…barely.

One on one, she’s likable and hilarious. She converses with adults easily though her frustration and anger keep her from effectively using this skill to her advantage. She had learned, through years of being in the system how to get by. After four years of teaching and some of my own experiences in high school, I still had NO idea what her disability may be, but I knew she needed to learn strategies to succeed and her special education status hindered her from moving forward or gaining independent motivation. Janine herself told me many times that she was frustrated by the special education label, because, ‘she wasn’t dumb’ and ‘didn’t know why she had to have a case manager’, yet because she IS smart, she was also aware that her behavior and inconsistency affected her academic success.

California rates among the lowest of the states in public education (47^th in private research results from 2006/2007) yet last year Newsweek ranked Berkeley High School 297^th in public education. Berkeley High initiated desegregation independently in 1968 and was the first high school in the United States to have an African-American studies department. That said, the statistics from my own classroom in 2006/2007 highlight quite prophetically the existence of disproportionate representation of students of color in special education, even at a renowned public institution. At the high school level, my caseload of students hovers around twenty students. Most of my students qualify for special education because they’ve been identified as having a ‘specific learning disability’. Ironically, determining what that specific learning disability is can be tricky. By the time students reach high school, most have been in special education for several years, and it can take a lot of investigation to find the original reason a student was referred.

Janine is a great writer. Whether or not she initially should have been placed in special education is undetermined but somehow—early on—a limp had been detected (maybe just because of her behavior) and now she’d been leaning on a crutch for so long that it would be unjust to grab it from under her. At this point in the game if I were to exit her from special education, she would most likely fail.

Not surprisingly, these statistics and stories like Janine’s affect our society and the ability of students to succeed in the world beyond high school. Inappropriate placement in special education limits the success of children from diverse cultures after graduation. Among secondary aged youth with disabilities, about 75 percent of African American students, as compared to 47 percent of white students, are not employed two years out of school. Slightly more than half (52 percent) of African Americans, as compared to 29 percent of white young adults, are still not employed three to five years after school, according to 1994 data.

Teachers struggle with the difficulty in constructing instructional programs that address students’ unique learning strengths and needs. A student like Janine would have been referred in the mid-90s by school psychologists that learned their craft in the 1970s. She would have been identified before the Harvard study in 2001. As Colburn told me, “things aren’t really going to change until teachers and school psychologist, from the very earliest point—even in preschool—do more than understand these statistics, they actively employ strategies that avoid putting kids in special education that don’t need to be there.” Her research supports this statement, as she found that despite an increase in civil rights protections and educational services over the past 25 years, school districts nationwide continue to improperly and disproportionately place minority students in special education classes. My colleague and current vice-principal at Excel High School in west Oakland (with an overwhelmingly African-American population) says, “I believe one of the underlying causes of misidentification of students of color at early age is because of behavior challenges that teachers don't know how to best handle. It's easier to track a student into special education as opposed to admitting that the child presents a behavior challenge that a teacher doesn't have a solution to.” Janine, exasperated and kicked out of another class, rolls her eyes and tells me, ‘When I’m not there, my teachers are on me about that, but soon as I show up, they kick me out!”