Episode 4 Transcript: Education Law
Hey this Blake Barber and you are listening to Five Minute Fridays. Before we get started I wanted to acknowledge the passing of Ruth Bader Gingsberg. She not only created space for women to be recognized, she created space for people who were not like her to be seen as well. Her passing impacts me and education.
I also wanted to acknowledge the verdict of the Breonna Taylor case. I have linked several Black women’s Instagram and Twitter profiles in the show notes. If you haven’t had your morality shaped by black woman in the last day please stop listening to this podcast and click on the links. Listen to their knowledge, experience, and ache and be moved by it. Say her name.
Welcome to Five Minute Fridays. I am Blake Barber and this is a podcast were I, a current doctoral student pursuing a degree in education policy talk about an education related topic for five minutes. In honor of Ruth Bader Ginsberg this weeks topic is Education Law. Specifically, The decision of Brown v. Board of Education.
Oliver Brown, a Black Man, wanted to enroll his daughter in a neighborhood elementary school. The school refused to admit his daughter because she was black and was to be bussed to a segregated elementary school. Oliver Brown with twelve other families filed a class action law suit that went all the way to the Supreme court. On May 17, 1954 The Supreme Court in a 9 to 0 decision ruled in favor of the Browns. This overturned Plessy v. Ferguson ending segregation in public schools.
The end
What a great story.
Well it actually isn’t because laws don’t actually matter. In episode two of this season I said Laws need people and policies to make the spirit of the law manifest in public. In the year of Brown v. Board’ 50th birthday Orfield and Eaton write, “ Slowly, quietly, and without the nation’s comprehension, political forces have converged to dismantle one of the greatest constitutional victories.”
Schools today are as segregated as they have ever been. Individuals, communities, and policy have worked subconsciously and consciously to exclude students of color from schools. The tools of exclusion… Housing policy and Special education.
Richard Rothstein has a fantastic book all about the history of excluding housing policy entitled the Color of Law. I hope to do a podcast on it in the near future. But today I want to focus on special education. In 2018 the Individual with Disabilities Education Act annual report to congress indicated that African Americans are significantly overrepresented across all thirteen legally sanctioned categories for learning disabilities. The overrepresentation is even more overt in the categories of mental retardation ( yes that is still a category ) and emotional disturbance.
In a study that occurred across ten districts 96.98 of students categorized as MR (mentally retarded) were African American, all those students were excluded from general education classes for more almost 25 percent of the academic day.
How did we get to this point… Well it began and continues to begin with teachers. 80 percent of referrals to special education across the ten districts came from teachers. In the 2 years following Brown v. Board newspapers reported extensively on the integration and its effects on students and teachers. In interviews teachers said things such as “the individual needs of the very inferior Black students just cannot be met in a class of this size.” And the principal of an integrated school said… “ They have differences of cultural background, family habits, educational level, interest in and capacity for learning, and parental concern and direction, and so on… They are so very different that teaching them is a problem.”
Ferri calls these interviews in the years following brown v. Board Cognitive merging of race and ability. The difference in syntax and culture is interpreted as a deficit and therefor leads to over referrals by teachers.
