diversity in special education diversity in special education

Sign up for our newsletters to get the latest from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. So we're looking at it at a systems level and I think what some of the evidence that we have raises questions about is it really indicates a pattern that would suggest that maybe not all of the decisions that we are making are appropriate. Gutierrez, K., Baquedano-Lopez, P. & Tejada, C. (1999). 155156), one opens up the educational question of how one wants to live ones life, and not just emphasising opportunities to function informed by dominant norms and values. Diversity, Special Needs and Inclusion in Early Years Education These are all questions that we can ask at the district level, that you can ask at the school level and really think about opportunities to change the way that we provide education for kids with disabilities or kids that just have additional needs because the system has not met them well from their past. And if it's not, then what they need to do is they're required to spend 15% of their funds under IDEA on something called coordinated early intervening services. Eichmann admitted to have partaken in the actions but he denied the responsibility, because he was following orders,Footnote 2 while Parks comprehended the signs, white forward, coloured rear but refused to acknowledge the drivers authority to assign seatsFootnote 3 (Biesta 2020, p. 3). And then another flag for concerns for us for low income students was what happens after their identification. This is addressed by arguing that an understanding of diversity ought to be understood primarily in relation to being a personto be someone, and not a something like a bio-neuro-socio-cultural being, a concept coined by Biesta (2020), in which the human being is interpreted as a coordinate between a system axis and an individual. I hold that an understanding of disability within the framework of the capabilities approach is fruitful regarding an understanding of diversity relating to disability as basis for informing educational challenges in education. Funding Special Education by Capitation: Evidence from State Finance Reforms. By comparison, 47% of all public elementary and secondary school students in the U.S. were White in 2018-19, according to the most . Are there ways that schools and school systems can tackle the fact that separate programs for kids with disabilities do not have the same outcomes as inclusive programs? Whether these differences turn out to be disabling for that particular person, depends on cultural, material, valuerelated and structural factorsthe life experience of that person. Biesta relies on Hannah Arendts book from 1963 (2020 p. 3), in which Arendt investigates the banalities of evil. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. 2015. Cultivation, as an educational framework, primarily rests on an understanding of the human as a bio-neuro-socio-cultural being, and thus does not manage to get outside its own premises, it is, in a way, locked up in a looping effect of interactions (Hacking 2007Footnote 5). 2009. What that also means is that not all students that need extra support should be eligible for special education. & Farkas, G. The Wrong and Right Ways to Ensure Equity in IDEA.. 2009. Food Security Status of U.S. 2018. Beyond the dilemma of difference: The capability approach to disability and special educational needs. And importantly the other factor is that the child needs special education to access the curriculum. Hacking has coined the concept biosocial identity (2006, p. 81) which is close to Biestas concept bio-neuro-socio-cultural. Theory and Research in Education 9: 145162. In his view, all human beings are persons because persons are individuals in an unparalleled sense, not by their individual demonstration of specific features, but simply by their membership of the species from the beginning (p. 3). PDF A Perspective of Inclusion: Challenges for the Future - ed What is Special Education, and how it helps students with disabilities And why this is important is that people made the argument that if there are more low income students who are also students of color and we know that there are higher rates of disability among low income students because of things like access to healthcare, exposure to lead, low birth weight, then we would expect to see that students of color would be in special education at higher rates. But they do not tell us whether schools are giving black students the free and appropriate public education the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) guarantees them. Educational Review. Significant Disproportionality, 2016, 2. Vehmas, Simo and Pekka Mkel. Colin Barnes and Geof Mercer, 3954. New York: Routledge. Benjamin, Shereen. Buchanan, Allen. Race, poverty, and interpreting overrepresentation in special education I elaborate on the impairment/disability distinction further within this context, using the adjustments that Begon (2017) calls for regarding the capabilities approach. And this is one of the things that we do in my class is we have students simulate that eligibility process where all the different people in the room. Jill Anderson: Is there a specific policy recommendation that you would make? Biesta gives a pointed examination of Deweys educational theory, and why this educational framework fails to give an understanding of education that foregrounds the question of the I. See: Theoharis, Jeanne. 2011a. Jill Anderson: So tell me a little bit more about what you did find out because it sounds like there's a lot of reasons that you might end up seeing disproportionate numbers of kids in these classes. She has identified an underpinning weakness in the conceptualization of capabilities as opportunities to function. Oxford: Oxford university press inc. Hinchcliffe, Geoffrey, and Lorella Terzi. Ethnic and Racial Disparities in Education A downplay of the reality of impairment has been criticized by Vehmas and Watson (2016). But your mind is as bright as anyones. 258, 288). London: Allen Lane. Houndmills: Macmillan International Higher Education. Pring, Richard. & Farkas, G. Is Special Education Racist?, Morgan, P.L. Often, there is one way for all students to learn the material, such as a lecture or a slide presentation. Because I'm listening to you, I'm thinking it sounds like there's a lot of complexity to the entire system beyond just the eligibility process that make this really difficult work to do. Take Virtual Field Trips - Take a virtual field trip to another country or a cultural destination. Could this perhaps unveil an implicit view of ability expectations, a preference for certain abilities (Wolbring 2012) inherent in Nussbaums capabilities list as capabilities are important, when they contribute to functionings? Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content: Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. 2005b. Pring (2012) gives many examples of how the language of business and measurement is flooding the language of education. Sen, Amartya. But researchers hadn't really dug into that yet. Barnum, M. Many worry that students of color are too often identified as disabled. Google Scholar. Insight into the out-of-school learning sector and its unique impact on children's lives, Stanford Economist Thomas Dee explores the reasons for and implications of the post-pandemic enrollment dip in public schools, 2023 President and Fellows of Harvard College. Black children were three times as likely to live in poor families as white children in 2015. How is disability understood? Addressing ableism in schooling and society? And one of the things that we found even in doing this simulation multiple times with the students in the class that I take, is that they realize how complex this process is. Jill Anderson: Is it pretty well known that that is not a good thing in education to have special education students separated? The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. One of those regulations are actually just being implemented for the first time more aggressively now. My request is: Help your students become human. Barnes, Elizabeth. children with special education needs integrated in regular classrooms, continue to be taught separately, by special education teachers, inside the classroom (as push in services) and/or outside the classroom (as pull out services) thus continuing to be segregated within the walls of the . Biesta, Gert. To actualize these questions Ikheimo invites us to contemplate a thought-experiment regarding how many persons there are in a room and in so doing, he attempts to illustrate the attribution humans undertake in relation to person-making significances. He writes: Case 1: You are in a room with an average, more or less healthy friend of yours. So, what does Biesta mean by saying that education is about education? Other researchers have defined inclusion as relating to educational leadership (Randel et al. This is the Harvard EdCast produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Ian James Kidd, Jos Medina and Gaile Pohlhaus, 5360. The very act of considering culture and language skills when developing curricula and activities makes it more likely that lessons will be inclusive. Sullivan and Bal studied one Midwestern urban school district and found that while socioeconomic controls attenuate the impact of race, black students remain more likely than others to be identified for special education; they did not include student achievement as a covariate.13, Special education identification practices vary widely across and within states and districts we do not know a right level. The distinction was especially important in developing the social model, by breaking the theoretical causal link between impairment and disability, which was said to underpin the medical interpretations of disability (Oliver 1996, p. 41), and educational practices within special education (Gallagher Heshusius, Iano and Skrtic 2004). 2007) which was also intended to refer not only to disabled children (Kiuppis 2014), but to all school-age children. In 2010, Hibel, Farkas, and Morgan used the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) 1998 and its follow-up waves to come closer to the ideal scenario described by Donovan and Cross.8 While individual-level models controlling only for race and gender showed blacks more likely to be identified, adding a family socioeconomic status variable eliminated the effect of race for blacks, while Hispanics and Asians were significantly less likely to be in special education. European Journal of Special Needs Education 23: 135146. Diversity. How the effect of an impairment is experienced cannot be evaluated a priori but depends upon the life experience of a person. Instead, we should focus on building a better safety net and reducing child poverty. Theory and Research in Education 3: 197223. Kiuppis, Florian. That's where things like teaching teachers and teacher prep programs, things like universal design for learning and thinking about frameworks that anticipate diversity in the classroom and equip teachers to know how to provide for supports for students going forward and prepare them for that. study), the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002,11and the ECLS-Birth Cohort.12 These national patterns do not preclude local heterogeneity. A capability perspective on impairment, disability and special needs: Towards social justice in education. She recently published "Racial Differences in Special Education Identification and Placement: Evidence Across Three States" in the Harvard Educational Review. As Demmer-Dieckmann (2011) wrote, Dignity, thus for Nussbaum, is not defined prior to or independently of capabilities, but is intertwined with them and their definition (Reindal 2016, p. 8). 1. It doesn't mean that 100% of the time all students with disabilities are educated alongside of non-disabled peers and the preference is towards inclusive classrooms. And so I think what we need to do is look for opportunities to really bolster general education in a robust way so that it can meet the various needs of kids. This move is problematic, as an emphasis on achieved functionings in an educational setting might be informed by dominant norms and values, hence supporting ability expectations in that culture or society (Wolbring 2012). And if we switch the way that we think about how we have classroom management in our schools, then maybe we'll decrease the number of students that are referring and if using things like positive behavior, interventions and supports in a school wide way, what we may see is then decrease in the number of students who are being referred to special education for discipline issues or emotional issues. Journal of Philosophy of Education 39: 443459. Policy Futures in Education. 2012. Disability within such a theoretical framework, is thus understood as a kind of capabilities deprivation due to various differences caused by personal, social, and environmental circumstances. The aim of this article is to investigate the issue of diversity, as it relates to disability, in relation to crucial educational questions, and in so doing, I hope to make a contribution to putting persons back into the educational language of education that Pring (2012) advocates. From: Almond., D., Hoynes, H.W., & Schanzenbach, D.W. 2011. This is the task of inclusive education, to facilitate access to education and educational opportunities for every child, although this is not the definitive task of education, as will be elaborated on below. Likewise, argues Begon, many people struggling with impairment effects, such as ASC have difficulties in relation to emotional attachments, engaging in social interaction, or imagining the situation of another; Why should it be a requirement of justice, and a necessary constituent of dignity, that we have an opportunity for a functioning that is unachievable? (p. 167). The ontology of disability and impairment. In Exploring the divide: Illness and disability, eds. But when a district is identified with significant disproportionality, the first thing they need to do is review their policies, practices, and procedures, and determine whether that disproportionality is appropriate. Jewish Encounters. If the gaps between groups exceed state-determined thresholds for significant disproportionality, the state must examine local policies and require the district to devote more of its federal special education funds to early intervention.19. Laura A. Schifter, Ed.D., is a lecturer on education at Harvard Graduate School of Education and a senior fellow with the Aspen Institute leading the K12 Climate Action initiative. Jewish Encounters. (PDF) Considering Diversity in (Special) Education: Disability, Being However, argues Biesta, the cultivation paradigm of education is unable to explain the case of Parks (p. 7). The point that Begon wishes to make is that asexual persons, cannot achieve the functioning of sexual satisfaction and so cannot have that capability. So it's really tricky because one of the things that's in special education law is a requirement that students be placed in the least restrictive environment. We do not for example start to talk to a child as a thing and then alter our communication to the child as someone. In the capabilities approach, equality of capability is an essential goal where absence would be connected with a deficit in dignity and self-respect (Nussbaum 2006, p. 292). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. From: https://www.nap.edu/catalog/10128/minority-students-in-special-and-gifted-education. My argument is that a language of diversity needs to be embedded in a language about educational ends and other fundamental questions discussed in the philosophy of education, and not solely in discussions within the field of inclusive education, as is often found in the research literature relating to special education. Ikheimos thought experiment illustrates how the status of being a person might be attributed relative to contexts and ability expectations in social life. European Journal of Special Needs Education 31: 112. The minority body: A theory of disability. tracing connections from the start of the Salamanca process. International Journal of Inclusive Education 18: 746761. He then investigates the different inclusion and exclusion mechanisms in the contexts of social life, and analyses different factors that influence these person-making significances. Certain conclusions of his are as follows: As to what I have called interpersonal personhood, or the interpersonal component of what it is to be a person in a full-fledged sense, it is simply a fact that many disabled people suffer from lack of it (p. 88). This has been documented in the history of intellectual disability (Carlson 2009; Paul 1998). Previously, I have developed an understanding of disability as a social relational phenomenon as framework for interpreting educational needs (Reindal 2008) within the framework of the capabilities approach developed by Sen (1992, 2009) and Nussbaum (2006) using Terzis (41,42,, 2008, 2009) elaboration of difference as a multidimensional variable (Reindal 2009, 2010). So I did want to talk a little bit about what that process of evaluating a student for special education might look like. She criticises the use of the term diversity in education as an all-compassing term. 2013. Inclusive Education: Definition, Examples, and Classroom Strategies 2010. Who Is Placed into Special Education? But it also factors in information from the teacher reviewing the student within the context of their classroom. Guido de Graff and James Mumford. The case of asexuality, for example, reflects a problem that is different from people choosing celibacy as a life form, as no laws or social stigma prevent people from performing this functioning. I completely agree with Begon. This is especially important regarding inclusive education as is pointed out by Felder (2019). Factors associated with English learner representation in special education: . Notably, with the adjustment of the capabilities approach, pointed out by Begon (2017), capabilities are conceptualized as opportunities to exercise control in certain domains, rather than as opportunities to function. Celebrating diversity in education and the special case of disability. The social model of disability: A philosophical critique. In this web of interactions, the cultivation paradigm, is according to Biesta, unable to explain actions carried out by people who resist the cultural and social order, such as Rosa Parks. Quite obviously two? And what we've seen over time is the more that teachers know about what they're able to do in the classrooms, the more technology has advanced. The paradigm imparts an understanding, able to tell the story of who we are primarily in light of different subject fields in sciences, as a coordinate between the system axis and the individual, interacting between culture and environment. Watertown, MA: Intentional Educations. Jill Anderson: And what about policy? Lecturer Laura Schifter an expert on federal education policy and special education explains disproportionality and why so many students of color are placed in special education, often in separate classrooms from their peers. Thomas, Carol. Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates. OBrien, Mark with Gillian Kendall. Seeing the human being primarily as an interactive combination of nature, nurture or technology (Cyborgs) does not bring about a platform for the main educational question, the question of subjectification. So when we see differences that pop up in certain categories that are determined more by the educators within the school district instead of medical professionals, when we see patterns that indicate that these students also have segregated placements, these are indications that at a systems level we really need to ask ourselves what are practices on referral? 519520). From: Currie, J., Greenstone, M., & Moretti, E. 2011. When the focus is on opportunities to exercise control in certain domains (Begon 2017pp. The two main concepts of the approach are functioning and capability. Language of inclusion and diversity: Policy discourses and social practices in finnish and Norwegian schools. That said, Ikheimo stresses the importance of highlighting this fact by helping them lead their lives as fully as they can as persons among other persons (p. 88). 2019. To bring the I into play and keep the I of the student in play, is according to Biesta, specifically related to an understanding of education as existential, as opposed to education as cultivation (pp. Both cultural diversity and linguistic diversity play a role special education. Risks and Consequences of Oversimplifying Educational Inequities. Program Policies, Master of Education (Ed.M.) To summarize, I argue that the impairment/disability distinction, as developed within the social relational model of disability (Reindal 2008), drawing on the framework of the capabilities approach, is a fertile understanding of diversity regarding the issue of disability in education supporting an interpretation of educational needs. Children with different racial, ethnic or language backgrounds may have difficulty understanding classroom instruction and may not actually have special needs. Considering Diversity in (Special) Education: Disability, Being Someone and Existential Education. On the Parks-Eichmann paradox, spooky action at a distance and a missing dimension in the theory of education, Biesta (2020) addresses the difference between what he calls a paradigm of education as cultivation, versus an existential educational paradigm. Global education monitoring report 2020: inclusion and education: all means all. A Tale of Two Special Education Paradigms. Frontiers of justice: disability, nationality, species membership. From: Morgan, P.L. What that might be in a school district is something like multi-tiered systems of support where you're providing different interventions for kids over time and seeing how they respond to those interventions before referring a kid for special education to try and see if there's a way that we can provide more structure within general education to provide various services for kids before referring for special education.