Special Education and the Subverting of Brown

Beth A. Ferri & David J. Connor, Beth A. Ferri, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of programs in Teaching and Leadership, Cultural Foundations of Education and Disability Studies at Syracuse University. David J. Connor is a doctoral candidate in the Learning dis-Abilities program at Teachers College, Columbia University. They are currently working on a book, Reading Resistance: Discourses of Exclusion in Desegregation and Inclusion Debates, for Peter Lang Publishers. They wish to thank Ji-Ryun Kim and Marisa Nealon for their research assistance.

I. Introduction.

In the next few years, we will celebrate two important milestones in education law: the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education1 decision in 2004 and the thirtieth anniversary of what we now know as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)2 in 2005. Each of these reforms asserted the need for increased educational opportunities for once- excluded groups of students. The outcomes, however, suggest that these reforms have yet to be fully realized. In other words, although there is much to celebrate, there is also a need to critically examine the unfulfilled promise of both of these legal milestones. As we approach the anniversary of Brown, for example, we must acknowledge that our schools are as segregated as ever.3 As Lamar Miller writes, "[a]lthough Brown was a great achievement, it has not solved the problems we had hoped it would."4 Likewise, students in special education continue to experience a separate existence from their non-disabled peers in schools despite being ensured a free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment.5 In addition to the individual failings of both Brown and the IDEA, we must also consider what failures are shared or interactive. To explore the possible reasons for these failures, we consider several interrelated questions: (1) How did special education law fail to account for the intersection of race and disability, and, in so doing, contribute to the failure of Brown?; (2) How did Brown fail to anticipate that disability would serve as a mechanism for re-segregating students of color within otherwise desegregated schools?; and (3) How and when did ideologies about race and ability become intertwined in each of these histories?

In this paper, we first summarize the latest data documenting the widespread and persistent problem of the overrepresentation of minority students in special education. We contend that overrepresentation points to the persistence of racial segregation in U.S. schools and illustrates one of the unanticipated f...

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