I’ve taken a lot of clinical psychology courses as a psychology major at Bowdoin, but in my classes we seldom discuss issues of race and class, and how these factors affect people’s access to treatment for mental health disorders. For this project I was interested in learning more about how special education systems in US public schools function, and about how special education intersects with themes that we’ve been discussing in Urban Education this semester, such as race, class, the school to prison pipeline and student-teacher relationships. Before beginning this project I was aware that special education resources were not equally distributed across different racial and socioeconomic groups in the US, but I did not know the extent to which certain racial, cultural and linguistic groups were overrepresented in the special education system. I’ve learned that many of these children are placed in special education when they don’t need to be, receive an education that is not at the appropriate level for them, and are more likely to drop out and get suspended as a result. I was also not aware of the high rates of suspension and drop outs within the special education system, which are much higher for certain groups of students, like African American students, than for others. The fact that students are more likely to drop out of or get suspended from special education programs means that disproportionality reinforces the school to prison pipeline, and many organizations advocating against the school to prison pipeline also advocate against disproportionality in special education programs. An additional consequence of the phenomenon of disproportionality is that the people who do need special education are less likely to receive it, both because resources are being devoted to children who don’t need them. Additionally, some racial groups have been shown to fear the public education system because of disproportionality, meaning that some parents might avoid special education for their child at all costs, even when they could benefit from it.

Most importantly, though, I’ve learned a lot about the efforts being made in public schools by students, parents and educators to reduce disproportionality in special education and to ensure that only those who actually need special education are placed into it. Some of these efforts include district wide training programs for teachers to ensure that they understand diagnosis requirements for mental disorders, and that teachers are consistent and fair in their evaluations across all their students.

Some efforts, though, start at the grassroots level. The grassroots organizations I found that related to equity in special education fell into two groups: organizations trying to help students who need special education get access to it, and organizations trying to ensure that those who don’t need special education are kept out of the special education system. The former type of group often consisted of parents and families who had a child with a disability and who had already begun to navigate the complicated special education system. These parents and families would often create advocacy groups and networks of resources and support to help other families navigate the system successfully. Oftentimes these groups would focus on reaching out to those who have some barrier to accessing these resources, for example some of the California grassroots organizations that I found provided bilingual resources for Spanish speaking families. Other groups focused on disproportionality in special education. These groups would often have a broader mission, such as combating racial disproportionality in school discipline, and would include disproportionality in special education as a part of their broader efforts to make schools more equitable in general.

In learning about these grassroots movements, it was interesting to discover how communities attempted to tackle equity in special education from so many different angles. Learning about the efforts of these communities taught me that the issue of disproportionality in special education, like all of the issues we’ve been learning about in our class, is multifaceted, and that those who hope to address this issue must consider it from multiple perspectives. I also found it fascinating that special education resources can be so crucial to the education of students with disabilities, and also so crippling for students who don’t have disabilities. Ultimately, I’ve learned that schools should create positive and understanding environments where all students, with and without disabilities, are listened to and provided with the education that their individual needs require.