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The Disproportionality Series Final Episode: A Conversation with Alfredo Artiles · DiveIn: Diving into Special Education's Most Complex and Pressing Debates

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From the Division of Research of the Council for Exceptional Children, this is
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Dive In. I am your host, Federico Weitholler,
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professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to the final episode
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of season three of Dive In. And this is also the
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final interview in our Disproportionality series.
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Now, we do have a bonus episode on disproportionality coming later
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this month, so stay tuned for that. But officially, this conversation
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today bring us our disproportionality series to a close.
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And honestly, this series has been one of the most
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intellectual, engaging genres we had in our podcast.
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I have learned so much for every guest we interview and
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and the contrast between their stances on disproportionalities.
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We started with Catherine Bulgarides exploring how states
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respond to disproportionality through policy and compliance structures.
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Then we spoke with Paul Morgan about methodologies like similarly situated
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students and how his research complicates some of
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the prior narratives about disproportionality.
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We also interview Rachel Fisher, who brought
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a powerful sociological lens to the conversation, pushing us to
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think more deeply about bias, institutional processes, and structural inequality.
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In our most recent episode, we talked to Donna Ford
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about disproportionality in gifted education and the persistor
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underrepresentation of minoritized students in those spaces.
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And today, to conclude the series, we are
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joined by someone who has been researching, theorizing,
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and wrestling with disproportionality for decades.
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In fact, he was the very first guest
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on Dive in, all the way back three years ago when we started the
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podcast to close out our series. We welcome
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an interview back Alfredo Artilles.
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In this conversation, Dr. Artiles challenges to
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rethink disproportionality itself. He pushes beyond simplistic
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binaries of under and over representation and offer examples
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of how research can generate more nuanced,
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historically grounded and transformative understanding
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of disproportionality. So, ready,
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let's dive in to the final interview in our Disproportionality
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series. Thank you, Alfredo,
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for being here with us today. You're welcome. I'm excited to spend time
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with you discussing these really critical issues in the field. So,
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you know, we have. Have you. We had you the
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first episode ever of this podcast three years ago. And it's great that
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we're having you now kind of closing out the third season with this disproportionality
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series that we've been engaging with with
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different points of view. And I know you have studied disproportionality for
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several, several, several decades. That doesn't mean that you're very old. It just means
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that your first paper was published in 9th grade in your elementary school,
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which speaks very well. Actually, in elementary school. I would love to take my kids
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there. But that was a very good paper. But we know you've been doing this
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for a while, so have you seen shifts over time
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regarding how we understand and research this
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equity issue? What have you seen in all these decades? Right, thank you.
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That's a great question. Because one of the things I'm going to stress today is
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the need for historicity to think about this issue in a historical perspective.
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And yes, you're right. I wrote the paper in 94. I was only
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10 at the time. But just kidding.
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You know, the whole attention we have seen in recent years about disproportionality
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is not new. I mean, as we know, this started many years
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ago. But before I say anything else, I want to make sure
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that I state the fact that this problem in
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the field is a reminder to the research community in special education
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that the vision of a standard human being,
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a vision of a standardized human development
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that we have used in the field, is not viable.
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We have to think about the fact of reality, given all
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the evidence we have from multiple disciplines that human development and learning
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is cultural and it has historical dimensions.
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Of course, there are regularities in human development. We want to document
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those across settings, groups, et cetera. But we have
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to remember that certain groups, specifically students of
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color, face the same developmental demands of all students.
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If we wanted to take a more generalizable perspective,
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every child in the world faces a number of developmental demands that
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are kind of similar in some way or another.
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But the difference is that certain groups have
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to navigate additional demands by virtue of their location,
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their cultural location, the historical location. And so in the case
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of the US Students of color face a set of developmental demands
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that are unique to their membership in those groups beyond what every other student
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is doing in the system. That in turn creates a number of very complicated
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circumstances for these students and how they experience education. And so to continue
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to assume that there is one decontextualize human
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development trajectory. And all we need to do is to track how certain groups fare
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in relation to that normative view. It's really a
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fallacy. It's really problematic. It doesn't acknowledge the realities of
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many communities around the country and the world. And so I just want to put
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that on the table to start with. I think it's important. Now back to your
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question. Have we seen changes over time. We know
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that this problem was first made visible in the 60s, late 60s,
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in an essay. There was not enough attention that I
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can recall. We saw in the 70s all the way to the
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90s, some peripheral attention to the issue.
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Special education gave some attention. Occasionally school
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psychology folks also paid attention, especially around issues of assessment and testing.
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Certain major legal cases like Larry P. And Diana really
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pushed the field to pay attention to that. Again around issues of assessment
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and identification. But the engagement in those two decades
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was really early peripheral. Then we
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saw greater attention in the 90s, all the way to
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today. Between the 90s and early 2000s,
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the research community started to pick up some attention to this.
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There was, in general terms, a search for factors that
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predict identification. The concern has been mostly with identification
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and whether there was any bias or to understand the conditions that
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shape who gets identified. A lot of that work used aggregate
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measures. That creates a number of methodological problems.
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Deeply concerning to me is the fact that a lot of that work
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was really theoretically thin. There was not enough attention
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to how do we theorize this? What is the theory of action in
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designing studies? How do we make sense of the role of institutional,
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community and individual factors? What is the vision that we bring to
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understand these disparities? Overall, I sense
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that there was the lack of a programmatic perspective. The field didn't come together
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to say here is an issue of policy and. And practice.
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How do we make sense of this? What should be the research
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tools that we need to be using? Can we identify a set of
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broader questions for us to address? It was more fragmented.
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It was really not enough attention. And so this whole
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time, from the late 60s to the maybe early 2000s,
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we see a lot of these situations. We made a
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lot of progress from 2000 to 2010,
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still fraught with all of these limitations that I just summarized.
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Yeah, the last 10 years there was also the two National Research Council tried to.
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That kind of consolidated that. There were two important milestones on
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this. Indeed. And I'm glad that you mentioned that, because one was in
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82. And that called attention to the
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fact that international academies of sciences are paying attention to these.
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It takes a lot of political and research effort
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to have those committees created and produce reports.
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The 82 report was a very good source.
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It had a lot of really good insights. It really didn't have
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much traction, Unfortunately. And then 20 years
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later, in 2002, we have the second report. And as a
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result of that, we saw some policy responses to create new
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regulations and monitoring requirements for idea. It Was happening
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around that time. I'm not saying that the report created those, but it was definitely
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a source of influence.
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So two reports at that level of attention is really an
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important indication that this is indeed something that is
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of national significance. In the last 10 years, we have seen a significant growth.
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It has been fraught with frictions because there is a group of
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researchers that are, on the one hand,
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oversimplifying the problem. In my view, I think it's
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unfortunately bringing the notion that race
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doesn't matter. Consistently, the findings in those studies suggest that there
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is no disparity, that a lot of these
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kids have many problems, mostly associated with poverty.
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But race doesn't seem to play a role in anything connected to the
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notion of bias. In addition to that idea that race doesn't
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matter in a country that was built around a racial structure
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arrangement, the idea is that special education is
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a benign system. It's a very interesting understanding
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that special ed is all about good things, and there are many
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good things about special ed. There are. There are many kids that benefit from special
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education. We need attention to kids with disabilities.
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That is not a benign system by any measure. There are many consequences
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that come attached to that, and we can expand on that later. In addition to
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this idea that race doesn't matter and that special ed is a benign system,
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A third trait of this research program is
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that they use a view of science that is dated. They bring
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this idea that science is about a technocratic enterprise,
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that all we need is technical knowledge to solve the
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problems. This is what we're learning. There is no attention to actually
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how research knowledge travels across scales
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and domains and how people make sense and use research
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knowledge to make a difference. And so there seems to be this naivete attached to
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a lot of these findings and that don't account for the complexities
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of school districts and schools. There is a growing literature on knowledge mobilization,
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showing the critical role of intermediary agents and organizations
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that remind us that research knowledge is not enough to change systems.
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That, you know, the idea that science is not detached
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from society and all the legacies that are sometimes positive,
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sometimes negative about differences, the fact that history matters
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in the role of science as well. And so when you see this combination
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and you see a group insisting that there is not a problem, all we need
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is to place more kids of color in special ed because they are broken.
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You have a historical moment in this country that takes
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those findings and weaponize them, and they weaponize
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those findings to advance an agenda that aims to erase race.
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And so you see Project 2025, citing the findings of this group
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saying, because this research is showing that race doesn't matter
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and in fact there is a problem, we should not have policies that require monitoring
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because race is irrelevant. Or as recently as
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April 2026, the America First
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Policy Institute released a report Last month, I quote
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from the report saying, as they quoted the research from
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Morgan and his colleagues saying, this research strongly
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suggests that equity in IDEA fundamentally misdiagnosed the
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nature of the national disparity in special education identification.
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Student background factors, not racial discrimination,
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are responsible. What that does is to reaffirm
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this longstanding trope that
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the problem is with the characteristics, the innate inherent characteristics
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of certain groups, and that what we need to do is fix
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these students with very specific attention to certain
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factors that are completely irrelevant to the experience of students. And so
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what happens with this perspective is that racism or discrimination are reduced
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to intentional acts of presumed prejudice
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individuals. The assumption is, is there bias? If there is no bias, there is not
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a problem. There must be something wrong with the kid. It's a very binary logic.
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And therefore then they ignore the fact that racism,
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as Bonilla Silva said, does not necessitate a racist. We see that
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happening. And so when we have an absence of evidence about individual
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intentional acts, what we do next is to scapegoat culture.
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And so we say racial disparities are explained because these kids come
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from families that have broken homes,
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or that they're exposed to developmental threats, or they're not motivated to learn,
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or that the idea is that they have low achievement.
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Look at their achievement level. And so they conflate low achievement with
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disability, which is a very problematic assumption. And so
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borrowing from Cheryl Harris, what they're saying is that racial inequality will
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only disappear when black and brown people are fixed. Lots of problematic
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reasoning. And what it does is that it deepens inequalities.
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It perpetuates that long standing trope of students of color as damaged
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people. So that's a lot of what actually is happening in the last 10 years.
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Lots of attention received. It resonated with a number of people that are
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weaponizing this work. Unfortunately, at the same time,
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we are witnessing the growth of a community of scholars
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that are advancing a new generation of research. And so I've been doing
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this work, as you suggested at the beginning, for 34 years. I started
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writing about this, but now I feel like we are beginning to see
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a larger community coalescing around this perspective that
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is paying more attention to theory, which is critical. I mean,
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that's how we advance Research and science by building theoretical
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developments. There are more refined methodological
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critiques of that model that I just outlined, particularly because of the coloniality
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of the model. And we see
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greater attention to mixed methods, which is a very powerful approach to understand.
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And we'll talk about this later today.
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That's very interesting. It took for so long. I remember you and I did a
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literature review back in 2010 when I was in ninth grade.
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Uh, and, and yeah, I remember
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we have, in the three decades there were like,
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you know, I remember like 30 something studies. Only in like 30,
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like in that period that that number
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has grown and has been been a, a big concern
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of policy, policy debate and also as you say, of like research
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and methodological debate. Right.
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You know, one of the things that you know, strikes me about your
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work you've been doing over time and you always play with the idea of tensions,
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of paradoxes, and you have started with that since then.
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I think your first article, I think, was the 9496
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or the dilemma of Difference and looking at the tensions within that,
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looking at Azure Special Education Asset Equity Paradox,
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you've been doing a lot of work with that. And more recently, when you talk
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about disability as an
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object of protection and also of discrimination, you've always been playing with these binaries,
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with these tensions. Can you explain
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these tensions and paradox and
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how this may help us better to understand this
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debate about over underrepresentation?
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Yes. For me, the idea of an equity paradox is
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a powerful one because it reminds us that we might be
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approaching the assessment of racial disparities in special education from
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an over simplistic perspective. We tend to rush
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to find binary options to answer things that are so
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complex. On the one hand, we see
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people saying, are you attacking special ed by raising this question?
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Is that implying that special ed is bad and racist and doing
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bad things to kids? Or can we rescue that mythic
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idea that special ed is going to save a lot of kids and families?
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I think it's a very unfortunate
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framing because it just oversimplifies a lot of the complexities that families,
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communities and schools face every day. One thing
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that I'd like to remind all of us is that humans act
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using tools and artifacts. That's how we make sense
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of the world we create.
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Institutional initiatives, tests, interventions,
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and everything that we create as human beings mediate
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how we make sense of it, including programs and policies.
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We thought about special education as a very
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important mediating structure to say there are kids
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who are vulnerable, who need attention,
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that oftentimes is specialized, and we are going
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to be using this artifact called special education for the well
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being of these kids. What we tend to forget is that human beings
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also get a hold of those artifacts and use them
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with new meanings. They attach new meanings to those artifacts and they
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use them for different purposes that sometimes do
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not align with the original intent of the use of that
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artifact. And so you see this tool,
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this artifact, this mediating structure called special education that
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had all these positive intentions to support
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these families, that actually was largely influenced by families,
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by the way, as we all know, being used in ways that are just disadvantaging
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students. It's been used oftentimes as a
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tool of exclusion, as a way of segregating certain groups.
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You have evidence showing that sometimes a black student
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will have a greater chance to be placed in a more segregated setting in special
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ed compared to their peers who have the same disability.
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When you see patterns like that, you wonder how is
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special ed being used in this case? What does it mean for these people in
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this district or this school? How is it that the original
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intent to support and advance these kids lives is now being used
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to perpetuate racial stratification? Because these kids get away and
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far placed in relation to the curriculum of the
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school or interacting with so called non disabled peers.
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That's what is the equity paradox that we need to remember that
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artifacts, in this case special education and people may use artifact
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in different ways, But I'm using it in this very specific way that these constructions
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that we design as human beings, systems, policies, are used oftentimes
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with new meanings, sometimes with perverse meanings that are doing harm
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in ways that are detaching from the original intent. And we need to
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be attentive to that. We need to always ask the question. And for
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me, the equity paradox is that a requirement that
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we bring what I call a situated analytical perspective that we need
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to understand not whether special ed is good or bad, not whether it's racist or
20:50
not racist, but to understand how this is being used,
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who is using it, where, when do they act
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this way or apply with this vision, under what conditions, for whom,
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with what consequences? All of those questions are
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really compelling us to bring this more situated approach.
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Yes, of course we want to get a general sense of how this is used
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over time in general patterns. But if we don't descend to the situated
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level of analysis, we miss a lot of the noise that
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many people are missing in their work about racial disparities.
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Yeah, yeah. I think
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it's also understanding who benefits too,
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in the short and long term.
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And we have, I think, very rare research on
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all those issues that you were mentioning related
21:45
to this. And looking from this equity
21:49
paradox point of view, I mean, you have also called for interdisciplinary and contextual approaches
21:54
to studying this proportionality. But people sometimes have
21:58
a little hard time getting their head around, okay, how a study would look like,
22:02
how a research is going to be, what would a research design
22:06
look like that could meaningfully integrate quantitative,
22:10
qualitative, and this historical perspective to really get to these
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paradoxes that you mentioned? That's a very complex,
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excellent question. And because we need those models and the field,
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as I mentioned a minute ago, is beginning to move in that direction.
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And so I'm excited to see teams of senior, and mostly,
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mostly senior and mid career colleagues advancing
22:34
this idea of paying attention to these issues of context and culture and history.
22:38
We published a paper with a group of colleagues that
22:42
was released in American Education Research Journal a couple of years
22:46
ago. And let me just outline a few features of that study that
22:50
I think exemplifies some of these ideas. And I will mention also a couple
22:54
of other things after I finish that. In that
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study we started at the state level, we wanted to understand beyond
23:02
this narrow, this reductive idea of whether is there disproportionality?
23:07
Is the problem over or under? We said, the truth is
23:11
that there are many regions and cities and districts in the country that are grappling
23:14
with disproportionality. So beyond that question, that doesn't get us far.
23:18
Let's go to a place where we know that has been documented
23:22
there is a problem and see if we begin to ask a new set of
23:26
questions to understand other dimensions of this problem. What happens in those places?
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How do people cope? What are the consequences for these families and kids
23:34
who gets affected? How do practitioners make sense of those circumstances?
23:38
So that was the impetus for the study. We started with analysis of the
23:43
state. Where are the districts that tend to be cited regularly
23:47
over time? What are the contexts in which we see those patterns? And we
23:51
started to look at all of this quantitative analysis. We saw that there were suburban
23:55
schools with the highest risk of being cited over time.
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From there, we started to look at specific characteristics of the schools,
24:03
trying to look at enrollment rates and proportions of different groups
24:07
in schools. And based on those quantitative analysis, we selected
24:12
certain suburban schools. Some of
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these schools, by the way, were high performing, they had great credentials,
24:20
they were doing well on a number of metrics, achievement,
24:23
enrollment, low absenteeism, et cetera.
24:28
We approached them, we selected two districts and say we
24:32
would like to go in and understand your history and how you're addressing this issue.
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You've been cited X number of years for the last 10 years. Help us understand.
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And so that's as we move from that analysis. And by the way, we also
24:44
calculated some indices of segregation, racial segregation in
24:50
the districts, to understand the quantitative dimension of
24:54
what the problem looked like beyond rates of identification.
24:58
Because we're bringing this idea that we need to look at the context, beyond key
25:03
characteristics of kids. We started the qualitative
25:07
dimension of that. And so we interviewed people asking,
25:11
did you know there is a problem? Why is there a problem?
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How do you explain it? What have you done? Who are the kids
25:19
affected? What kinds of things you would like to try?
25:22
And so one of the interesting metaphors that we heard early on
25:26
in that study was that staff kept referring to the district and the
25:30
school staff as a family. We are a family here and
25:36
we care about kids. We are showing good results.
25:40
But we just have this issue happening and we just cannot get rid
25:44
of it. That caught our attention and we said, okay,
25:48
family. That's an interesting recurring pattern in the data. Qualitatively speaking,
25:52
we started to ask, what does that mean for people? What does family
25:57
mean? As we dig into that, it was clear that family
26:01
included certain groups of people, but not everybody, that certain
26:05
markers, demographic and otherwise, suggested that some people
26:09
were members of the family and others were not. And as we saw
26:13
that, then we started to ask questions about the surrounding communities of these districts.
26:17
And we saw a tense history of race relations in
26:22
the city. As inner city schools started to close,
26:26
black kids started to migrate to the suburbs. And as
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they did that, there was a set of problems because of
26:33
housing policies, changing white flights from schools, et cetera,
26:36
impacting race relations in the community that
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spill over the school context and the vision and
26:45
the perceptions of this is coming. Black kids from the city
26:48
center into the suburbs where received with
26:53
a lot of damaged imagery from the staff. They are not
26:57
prepared. They don't care. They come from disorganizing what I just outlined in the
27:01
other research that I was critiquing. So that
27:05
was important for us because then we started to say, okay, how are responses and
27:09
programs organized in the district? And we found, for example, that a lot of
27:13
the kids were moved. All of the special ed kids were moved to specific sites
27:18
in the district. Schools in the district. A lot of the English
27:21
learners or multilingual learners were moved into certain campuses
27:26
in the district. The reasoning behind that was that it
27:30
was administratively more efficient so that teachers will not have to be moving around
27:34
the district to provide the services. It's better to have them in one place.
27:37
But that meant that created a set of special opportunity structures
27:42
that some kids were moved into a setting in which they were isolated
27:47
in some way, because they were all clustered in that specific site without access to
27:51
other kinds of things happening in the district, including extracurricular activities, et cetera.
27:55
And so because of this damaged imagery that we saw here,
28:00
we see a number of ripple effects in the
28:04
decisions made. We accounted for the fact that if you wanted to
28:08
understand racial disparities, you cannot stay within the school context. You need to understand the
28:13
history of racial relations, in this case between the community and the
28:17
school, because those things don't stay out of the school. They come into school
28:20
with the kids and the parents and the teachers.
28:23
And we saw also that space matters.
28:27
I wrote a paper in 2003 calling attention to the need to account for
28:31
culture and space in this region. And here we
28:35
are, 23 years later, beginning to get into these issues in more
28:40
systematic ways. I think attention to space in special ed has been probably in the
28:43
last 10 years or so. So I'm delighted that we see attention to this.
28:47
But it was important to document the role of special opportunity
28:51
structures that are really shaping disparities in identification
28:55
and discipline at the time. And then
28:59
we saw the district's responses that were symbolic. For the most part.
29:03
We're going to do professional development to address some of these
29:07
issues. Staff pushback. Why are you asking us to do that?
29:10
I mean, I don't have time. I'm doing all of these things. And so the
29:13
pressure coerced the administration. And they said, okay, well let's make
29:18
it optional. And then they made it optional. And in the end,
29:21
okay, well, let's just target those individuals who are referring
29:25
the most kids. And so you see how it was diluted, how we became
29:29
part of the district to the state. A symbolic measure that was taken.
29:34
It was mostly a color neutral response because there was not enough
29:38
attention to, for example, the fact that there was a. A true racial tension in
29:42
that community. At the same time,
29:45
on paper, they showed that they were compliant with the policy
29:49
requirements. So it's a perverse situation that is critical.
29:53
And we also conceptualize these findings by using this idea
29:57
of defect craft. That is important for me. I've been writing over
30:01
time about this to say this is not only about whether kids fit the
30:06
cognitive or linguistic profile of your tests. This is also about ideology.
30:10
There are ideologies and tools that are coming from the history of those
30:14
groups from the history of that city, connecting groups. And what it
30:18
does, what difficraft does, is that it pushes these othering
30:23
processes and practices, we other groups and those othering
30:27
processes and practices. What it does is that it imposes deficits
30:31
and deficiencies to individuals and groups that are already stigmatized
30:35
historically, racialized groups are stigmatized already. And on
30:39
top of that, we put additional deficits, disabilities.
30:42
And so what it does is that once we impose those deficits,
30:46
we make those deficits seem to be inherent
30:51
those groups. And so we create this cycle of thinking that that's the
30:56
way they are. And so we naturalize this
31:00
issue. And unfortunately it biologizes race
31:04
because black kids are low cognitive
31:09
functioning or disorganized or defiant.
31:13
Using these ideological assumptions for us was important to use this framework
31:17
of different craft to make sense of this data. But hopefully that
31:21
will give you a sense of how we are setting
31:24
up quantitative, qualitative in a mixed method framework to historicize
31:29
and at the same time raise questions about something I'm going to say more
31:33
about later, this idea of how we construct knowledge in special
31:37
education, the epistemological what we do. Now, one of
31:41
the things that throws me. Yeah. One of the things that strike me about what
31:45
you say is that, you know, we, we need to have a lot of interviews
31:49
and sometimes we focus in special education a lot, as we've been telling. It's like,
31:53
okay, there was over and under identified. We focus on the instance of that decision,
31:57
whether a student or it's not. Right.
32:00
Exactly. But what you're bringing in here is expanding
32:05
that area to understand that there is a whole historical process and spatial
32:09
process that when it comes to that instance of yes or no
32:13
or no disability, a lot of those fates, I don't
32:17
want to say they're already decided, but there's been a historical
32:21
work that already influenced that.
32:24
A scene in where students identify or not that we
32:28
tend to completely either ignore or put
32:33
it on the background in most studies of special education.
32:37
So that seems fascinating.
32:40
Absolutely. Yeah. And if I may just finish with a couple of
32:44
sentences, Enrico. So my colleagues involved in this study were
32:48
Ade Tefera, Catherine Voldemires, Alexandra Elward, and Sara
32:52
Alvarado. I wanted to make sure that I acknowledge their. Their work and there
32:56
are other teams, and that's what I said earlier. I'm excited about the fact that
33:00
there are other teams advancing these kinds of vision. And for example, Aydan Ball
33:04
has been doing a lot of work with the learning lab that is different from
33:08
what I said, but it has a lot of commonalities. Becca Cruz and
33:12
Alison Firestone also doing interesting work in this regard. So I
33:16
invite everyone who is interested in this issue to read this generation
33:20
of research that is giving us a new language, a new vocabulary
33:24
to understand this really complex problem. Yeah, absolutely.
33:28
And it's exciting work that is coming out.
33:31
So let's move a little bit from research to policy.
33:34
You know, we have always a
33:39
lot of challenges when trying to translate what we know to
33:43
into how we design policy around the
33:48
best evidence, the best knowledge that we hope to address this issue. If you
33:52
were to outline a next generation of policy agenda
33:56
on disproportionality, I give you a magic one. I make
34:00
you head of the super agency
34:05
to fix every policy educational issue in the history of the world.
34:08
What would you do? That's a million dollar question.
34:11
Because we continue to debate this issue from a policy perspective and
34:17
there are multiple answers to that. I think one immediate
34:22
answer to me has been and continues to be the need to infuse
34:27
in policies an interdisciplinary lens, something as simple
34:31
as the way we conceptualize learning in the interventions.
34:35
Why is that important? Because the policies that we use in the
34:39
field will inform, for example, programs of funding and
34:43
if grants from the federal government are asking for interventions
34:47
that are only focusing on the cognitive or the behavioral,
34:51
without attention to all of the things I talked about regarding context
34:56
and history and power and more importantly, opportunity. The fact
35:00
that these groups have very different trajectories and access to opportunities
35:04
we rarely see studies accounting. Are these kids
35:07
struggling because they haven't had opportunities to get advocates,
35:12
mentors, programs, access to extracurricular
35:16
activities the way many other students do. And so the
35:20
way we think about learning, even though it might sound like why it's such a
35:24
small thing, is critical because it has all these spillover effects into these
35:28
other areas that fund research and knowledge production activities. We wrote
35:33
a paper with my dear friend stan Trent in 24 for
35:37
review of Research and Education where we call attention to the fact that there are
35:41
incredibly exciting developments in learning sciences in how we think about
35:45
learning. But we don't see any cross pollination
35:50
with the way we think about learning in special education research and
35:54
vice versa. The learning sciences are not paying attention at all to ability differences.
35:59
And so there is this interesting. And we use the metaphor of two neighbors that
36:03
are good neighbors and they not at each other when they come out to get
36:07
the newspaper, if people are still doing that, and they just greet
36:11
each other politely but don't really mix up and do much with
36:16
each other. So there are opportunities for us that we can begin to capitalize
36:20
on, to begin to think, how do we begin to reimagine learning?
36:24
And unfortunately, there is such an insulary in the field that has
36:29
not promoted those kinds of things. We have seen development in some areas in
36:33
research, in special education about, for example,
36:37
the development around cognitive science and the way we
36:40
have thought about how certain cognitive skills
36:44
may be connected to issues of motivation and self regulation that are also contextual sometimes,
36:49
but the opportunities are far greater that we are not taking advantage
36:53
of it. So that one thing, I have many more things to say about policy.
36:56
I think you have another question about policy, right? So we can go deeper
37:00
into that. Is that the case, Federico?
37:04
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's get into that.
37:08
In the case of policy, I mean, what would be your recommendations
37:12
to address this outstanding issue?
37:16
Right. So the moment you say learning should be broadened
37:19
and defined in more complex ways, that will compel the field to have
37:23
a different unit of analysis. And so it's not going to be only about
37:28
capturing skills and traits of kids using
37:32
rating scales, checklists and assessments. It will compel us to see people
37:36
situated in institutional arenas.
37:39
It will compel us to see people coming to schools with
37:43
very different repertoires, to engage with each other, to talk with
37:48
each other, to learn material that is not necessarily
37:53
grounded in the standard perspective that we have used for decades
37:57
for generations in the educational system. And so there are a number
38:01
of things, policy wise, that we can be thinking about. One is,
38:05
I'm going to mention four, what I call
38:09
the box problem, and that is categories. We need categories.
38:13
Human beings need to organize the world by classifying things.
38:17
I have no qualm with classification. It's a human activity.
38:22
We need to do that. However, categories are enabling and
38:26
constraining. They have those properties. They help us do things,
38:30
organize, bring order, but it also makes certain things invisible.
38:34
And so I'm not saying we should not have classifications or
38:37
categories. We need to be. My point is, let's think
38:41
about this box problem that is created by having this really hardly
38:47
enforced categories that we attach to
38:51
funding schemes and staff training and assessments
38:55
and infuse in the policy a more deliberate
39:00
reflexivity in how we make sense of the categories we're using in the system.
39:05
To me, that means can we set up in districts and
39:09
states, a collaborative approach of teams in which we
39:13
do ongoing analysis of the categories we have in the system as a way
39:18
of asking ourselves reflexively, how are we doing with these Categories,
39:23
what work are they doing over time? Are they working well? Do we
39:27
need to adjust them over time? What are the shifting meanings
39:31
of those categories? When we have learning disabilities in
39:36
the 60s emerging as a new category, it served a mostly white
39:40
middle class population as we
39:43
saw litigation because a lot of the African American students were being placed
39:47
in intellectual disabilities. We saw legal mandates to reclassify
39:51
kids and we saw the migration of many African American students into the
39:55
LD category from ID intellectual disability. And we
39:59
saw at the same time the migration of white populations into new categories.
40:03
And we have studies showing how
40:07
these classification patterns change over time.
40:10
Tom have documented this in very
40:14
complex ways. And so how do we track those shifting meanings
40:19
without depending on you? Federico deciding I'm going to study this and
40:23
finding releasing a set of studies onding
40:27
documented how the white flight of communities
40:32
from one category to another one See what happened with autism, See what happens with
40:36
adhd. We know that categories
40:40
shift meanings. We know that they are used differentially by subgroups that
40:44
are often attached to social class or race. The box problem for
40:48
me will require some kind of reflexive mechanism in the system where
40:52
we have states and districts asking these questions as a
40:56
way of self correcting and calibrating over time. It will require
41:00
substantial resources to do this. But if we don't do this,
41:04
we have to find out that this is happening 20 years later or 30 years
41:08
later or 15 years later with a lot of consequences. So that's
41:12
one thing that it will be a challenge for the policy world to say,
41:15
what do we do about that? I'm happy to go into more details
41:19
about it because it's going to be a huge undertaking.
41:23
The second thing is we have to
41:27
think about the accountability model that we have used in IDEA and
41:32
especially around equity for many years.
41:35
We argue that in order to be equitable, IDEA needed to require
41:40
differential treatment for students with disabilities. They need to be treated differently,
41:44
they needed to have specialized programs, they needed to have a different
41:49
kind of approach to instruction, et cetera. But then
41:53
we saw the movement to adopt standards and the idea was,
41:57
well, disabilities have been too isolated. We need to
42:00
also have similar standards and expectations. And for that reason we need
42:05
to do more testing to understand achievement and are they making any progress.
42:08
And you know, we have many developments in that realm, including the latest Andrew
42:13
case that had a number of consequences for accountability purposes.
42:17
And so we see this shift shuffle between treating students
42:21
the same or different over time.
42:24
Which version of equity do we need to adopt as a
42:28
field? We need to spend time deciding what Is the appropriate accountability model,
42:32
again, not going back to the binaries? Do we do the same,
42:36
different treatments? But what does that mean? What are the consequences of
42:40
using one or the other? We need to be thinking in more expansive ways about
42:44
the accountability model. There is an interesting framework that the National
42:48
Education Policy center released a couple of years ago,
42:51
pushing or imagining a new way of thinking about accountability.
42:54
Kevin, Wellner and Schneider, among others,
42:57
were behind that. Interestingly enough,
43:01
there was not enough attention to disability. Again, because we see
43:05
that divide and not because they decided to ignore it. It's just a
43:09
reflex of every field. I mean, that part of this disproportionality
43:13
problem is that it has stayed for the most part in the special ed system,
43:17
when in reality this is a general education problem.
43:22
We have to look at those new developments in thinking about accountability.
43:26
The third thing I want to mention about policy is the
43:29
role of how we represent this intersections
43:35
of disability with other markers. That is largely ahistorical.
43:40
So the need for historicity is huge in our representations of these
43:44
students, especially as we pay attention to the intersections.
43:48
We have a wealth of evidence from
43:52
multiple disciplines reminding us that inequality is a
43:56
common experience in the lives of people. We have
44:00
that from health we know from the workplace, from labor,
44:04
from policing, from legal enforcement, from community life,
44:07
we have all of this evidence that race matters, that inequality
44:12
is part of everyday life for millions of people. Yet special
44:16
education insists that race doesn't matter. We refuse
44:20
to acknowledge that reality. And so we cannot afford to have ahistorical
44:25
representations of the problem. That's third. And finally, fourth,
44:28
we need to think about a policy model that requires that
44:33
the knowledge we produce really acknowledged the heterogeneity
44:38
and the trajectories of these groups. Over time, we have
44:42
had a color neutral model of knowledge production in the special education system.
44:46
When I was part of this consensus panel with the National Academies
44:50
of Sciences about the future of ies, one of their recommendations was
44:54
to center equity and attention to inequality as
44:58
a cornerstone of every study funded by ies. That's a revolutionary
45:03
idea, but it's not because it's part of the human experience in
45:07
this country. Why wouldn't you not account for it? What would happen if
45:11
we bring that requirement to say the knowledge we produce should account and acknowledge
45:15
all of those horrible circumstances that need to
45:20
be considered in this work. So you have.
45:24
I know, I was taking notes. You said just to summarize, because you
45:27
brought a lot of good ideas, that each of them could be a different episode
45:31
of the podcast. You talked about revisiting and
45:36
evaluating categories and how they emerge and how they be used, how they're being
45:40
made sense of. You talked about different accountability
45:44
systems, how they need to be rethink. So we
45:48
foreground equity and we grappled with these ideas
45:53
of we standardize to treat everybody the same or we give a
45:56
special treatment and how we do a
46:03
deep dig on understanding what are
46:07
the consequences of those different kinds of accountability.
46:11
Like you also talked about how we represent the data,
46:15
how we represent intersectionality, heterogeneity of
46:19
students with disabilities or students receiving special education services.
46:22
And finally
46:27
about, you know, you talked a little bit about all the production that needs to
46:30
be foreground in equity as well.
46:33
And you mentioned the recommendations for funding
46:38
for the national, for the National Academy. Right,
46:42
right. Yeah, yeah. That, by the way, we have
46:45
our first ever episode of Dive In a few years ago was exactly
46:49
about that with you. So it's interesting, you bring in all these
46:53
ideas, very complex, and I
46:59
can't imagine people working on the staff of senators and
47:06
legislators making sense of all this and putting their hairs off. But it's
47:10
ideas that definitely need to be grappled with.
47:14
You know, to wrap up,
47:18
I'm going to ask you a question. I ask every single of my guests.
47:21
Whether we talk about disproportionality or other issues, and it's about dreaming, it's about what
47:25
we would love to see in our field. And the question is very simple.
47:29
What would you like to see in five to 10 years regarding the teaching and
47:32
learning of students with disabilities? Thank you for that question. Yes.
47:35
And just to wrap up the previous conversation in two sentences, there is a
47:40
new issue of Education Policy Analysis Archives
47:43
that Ade Tefera and Melissa Cuba are editing.
47:47
On the 50th anniversary of IDEA,
47:51
I wrote a paper with Chris Gutierrez where we get into some of these ideas
47:55
about policy that are really hopefully provocative for us to
47:59
think about that and imagine new ways. We argue for the idea of using
48:04
the notion of cultural ecologies of ability differences and disability as
48:08
opposed to talk about individual disabilities. Can we think about cultural ecologies of
48:12
ability differences and disability and what are the ramifications for policy?
48:16
So that's a different topic. We can have a whole episode on that. But the
48:20
paper is coming out in the coming months, so keep an eye on that issue.
48:24
I'm sure it's going to be. I haven't seen the other papers, but I'm sure
48:26
it's going to be really good in terms of the next 10
48:31
years. You said five to 10 years. Yeah, yeah.
48:36
Gosh, there are so many things that come to mind. Let me mention three.
48:40
What do we want in terms of teaching and learning for students with disabilities?
48:45
One thing that is critical is to have
48:49
a stronger advocacy for communities of color device
48:53
systems that will empower and bring to
48:59
the center of the action communities of color as
49:03
equal partners in the implementation of programs
49:08
and to build what we're trying to do in one of the districts where we're
49:11
doing our research, what we call a model of shared governance.
49:15
Can we design shared governance with communities of
49:19
color who are the most affected by this? It doesn't have to be only communities
49:22
of color. It can be all families and all communities. But especially then,
49:26
we need greater advocacy. There is a lot of advocacy going on.
49:30
I'm not meaning to imply that it's not, but we need to bring it closer
49:34
to the center by having systems acknowledge
49:38
that and making it part of their design to have. If you think about the
49:41
experiences of many kids who are not coming from communities of color,
49:45
they experience and have institutional agents advocating
49:49
for them every day. These can be teachers, can be psychologists, can be people
49:55
in sports, coaches, et cetera. Many kids
49:59
of color don't have that. We need to think, what does it mean to have
50:03
institutional agents advocating for you? There is a literature in the experience of black students
50:07
in mostly black schools where you see that, but we don't see this as a
50:11
prevalent practice. So advocacy is huge for me. Second,
50:15
we need to think, how do we improve access for
50:20
communities of color with less administrative burden
50:24
for them to really make sure that they have access. There is a whole literature
50:27
in public policy about administrative burden and how impacts
50:31
the experience of certain marginalized communities because
50:35
of paperwork, because of bureaucracy, because of all the things that we make families
50:40
go through. And so let's rethink what access mean so
50:44
that they can improve the way they participate and the outcomes they can demand from
50:48
system for their kids. I think reimagining access in
50:53
ways that are more attentive to some of these issues
50:57
I think is huge. And then the third idea is to
51:01
challenge our system to build more integrated approaches.
51:06
The separation between gen ed, bilingual ed, special ed. We have
51:10
a new project looking at that, looking specific at data infrastructures.
51:13
We're going to Sacramento next week to present some of
51:17
the findings we have on dually identified kids in the state of California,
51:21
showing how the siloing of data
51:25
infrastructures between gen ed, special ed and bilingual ed is creating all kinds of
51:29
issues for dual identified kids who are not getting coherent services and
51:34
so an integrated approach across all of these sectors for data
51:38
systems, for personal prep, for delivery
51:42
of services is something that we have been grappling with for a long time.
51:44
It should be a priority given the complexities of the needs of
51:48
students that we have now. It's a major enterprise. There are
51:52
pockets of approaches being used in districts that we should be
51:56
looking at more carefully and trying to understand how to use, scale it up.
52:00
And so I think those three, in my mind are top. There are many others,
52:04
but let me just stop there. Thank you so much, Alfredo. And with
52:08
those great ideas and food for thought,
52:12
we're going to let you go. We're going to thank you for being in the
52:16
show. I know you have another meeting, so thank you for being here the second
52:20
time. We really appreciate all your wisdom. I'm grateful for the invitation.
52:24
Federico, always good to see you.
52:27
Thank you for listening to Dive In. I hope
52:31
you learned from this episode as much as I did. Please help us
52:35
to spread the word about the show. See you next time.