Abstract
With the increasing emphasis on standardized tests as the measure of effective learning (and teaching), what it means to learn has become more and more individualized, and the means of assessment has turned into an end. Standardized tests shift the focus of learning to individual test-takers, rather than to the community to which teachers and learners belong. The sense of urgency that foregrounds the need to assess “knowledge” through an “objective” perspective fails to acknowledge the wide range of experiences, memories, and aspirations children bring to the classroom. Children learn in different ways through multiple senses, trial and error, and collaboration. In other words, reducing the complexity of children’s learning to filling out the bubble sheet leaves little space for celebrating differences that can thrive in a community of learners.
Righting Educational Wrongs: Disability Studies in Law and Education, edited by Arlene S Kanter and Beth A Ferri, makes space for differences in education through a disability studies perspective. Kanter and Ferri challenge the socially constructed notion of disability by thoughtfully bringing together discussions around the ways in which various models of disability, legal mandates, and perspectives of different stakeholders become entangled in historical, educational, and cultural settings. This book will inform the perspectives of early childhood education practitioners and teacher educators through disability studies and legal studies perspectives. The book is rich in tools for challenging the deficit model of understanding differences, examining the gaps in between theoretical, historical, and legal constructions of disability. By disrupting static expectations and assumptions around what children can do and how childhoods are supposed to be, the contributing authors critically examine ways in which disability studies intersects with legal studies. The contributors explore disability in the institutional structures of K–12 (kindergarten to Grade 12) and higher education, policy limitations, and perspectives on children with a disability.
The first chapter of the book begins by describing disability studies as an interdisciplinary and transformative field which challenges the viewpoint that frames disability as a deficit. Kanter articulates that examining law through a disability studies perspective enables us to view disability as a social and political construct, rather than an individual deficit. Disability studies values the voices of people with a disability by revealing the pervasive inequalities that they experience.
In chapter 2, Martha Minow describes the increasingly prevalent discourses about disability and the debates about the integration of people with disabilities. She compares the resistance to inclusion of people with a disability in mainstream society to the difficulties surrounding racial integration in the USA. Based on the premise that differences emerge in relationships rather than originate from individuals (Minow, 1990), Minow advocates for adopting the ideal of universal design in education as a way to take into account varying needs from a structural standpoint (Preiser and Smith, 2011).
In the third chapter of the book, Thomas Skrtic and J Robert Kent describe and caution readers about how federal laws and policies, particularly the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, can perpetuate discrimination against people with disabilities, rather than challenging the archaic and calcified structures. Their core argument is grounded in the understanding of the injustice perpetuated on an institutional level and the relational approach to conceptualizing differences (Minow, 1990), critiquing the limits of rights-based policies and practices.
Drawing from their experiences implementing disability studies in teacher education programs in higher education institutions, Susan Baglieri and Linda Ware articulate how “disability studies [is] central to the long overdue reconceptualization of schooling for all” (126). The authors share their attempts to instigate other interdisciplinary inquiries by training pre-service teachers through the disability studies lens, while combating the issues of limited time, resources, and support in the higher education system.
The next three chapters examine the historical, cultural, and systemic problems around disability. In chapter 5, “Treating the incomplete child,” Scot Danforth and Theodoto Ressa investigate assumptions about childhood learning difficulties. By exploring the history of special education science, they criticize the medical approach to differences that aims to find out and fix individual defects. They argue that this practice is based on the logic of exclusion rather than inclusion. In the following chapter, Philip Ferguson addresses the assumption of the continuum of (dis)ability that focuses on the individual as the locus of differences. For instance, even though an individual segregated in an institution is frequently labeled as having a significant intellectual disability, “the concept of the ‘well-run institution’ is easily left unchallenged” (156). Chapter 7 examines the intersection between disability studies and race in the context of education. Pointing out how many black boys are put into the low tracks in schools and simultaneously stereotyped as “intellectually disabled or emotionally disturbed,” Zanita Fenton critiques how the educational laws and policies are used to maintain the status quo by promoting racial segregation (176). Education in this context has become a focus of social competition and a site for inequity, rather than social justice and democracy.
Chapters 8 and 9 examine the relationships between various stakeholders in the legal system, including children, parents, expert witnesses, and lawyers. Under the bureaucracy of special education and legal systems, the lived experiences of children with a disability are not adequately represented. The perspectives of parents and lawyers are emphasized because the children are minors and have limited legal rights. Particularly in chapter 9, Alicia Broderick calls attention to the intricate correlation between the dominant beliefs about disability and “expertism, empiricism, positivism, and the ways of thinking about knowledge, legitimacy of expertise, and power” in the context of her experience as an expert witness in court cases (239).
Chapter 10 examines the qualification criteria of services and legal protection for children with disabilities. Wendy Hensel acknowledges the danger of using academic performance as the means to determine whether a child with a disability is in need of legal assistance. Because the current performance-based system does not consider how children with a disability need to work significantly harder than their peers, the existing structure “enhances the stigma of disability and trivializes the struggles” (264). Hensel argues for a systemic transformation to account for the “contextual need for assistance” (244).
Similarly to the previous chapter, Ani Satz points out how the US Supreme Court frequently uses outcomes as the measures of determining disability. Arguing for the need to conceptualize disability as a natural part of the human condition, rather than as an identity category, Satz suggests universal benefit programs as a way to address some of the current system’s perceived limits. This resonates with Minow’s suggestion for universal design in learning in chapter 2. Considering the limited resources for accommodation and the existence of multiple separate legal mandates, disability protection is fragmented, particularly in transitions from one level of schooling to another, as well as from school to employment.
Focusing on the gap between K–12 and higher education, chapter 12 explains the multiple layers of discontinuity between federally mandated assistance programs in K–12 and disability services in higher education institutions. While secondary education and higher education share much history, theory, and practice, Wendy Harbour argues that there is a lack of continuity between special education and disability services. The prevailing issues include the responsibility of accessing available services, the financial cost of being legally recognized as eligible for services, and the process of negotiating the identity of a person with a disability.
In closing, Ferri cautions us against the danger of falling into the dichotomy between the social and the personal in envisioning disability. Rather, she urges us to consider “the simultaneous and dialogic play of power between social structures and individual agency … ; the politics of language and naming; and the irreducibility of identity into discrete, unitary or static categories” as key elements that reveal experiences around the constructed notion of disability from a deficit perspective (313). Some disability studies scholars are challenging the binary by examining the intersections between disability studies and gender, race, sexuality, nationality, and social class.
This book serves as a solid foundation for challenging the deficit model of disability engrained in law and other institutional structures, exploring discrepancies, inequities, and much needed changes. The task of “disentangling impairment (as a biological fact) from disability (a socially produced system of barriers and negative values ascribed to impairment)” has many possible implications in the field of early childhood education (309; original emphasis). For instance, recontextualizing the following questions posed by Kanter provides us with a critical perspective to examine the place of disability in early childhood classrooms and teacher education programs:
What does it mean to be “normal” for the purpose of legal decision making? How does and should the law respond to differences among us? How can we challenge the privilege afforded to the able-bodied norm within the legal system? (36)
Of course, reconceptualizing early childhood education through a disability studies perspective requires a commitment to attend to the emergent needs of all children within environmental, legal, and systemic limitations. Righting Educational Wrongs: Disability Studies in Law and Education is an important addition to the efforts to problematize the normalizing assumptions of the developmental-theory-based perspective and to celebrating the wide range of differences that children bring to classrooms, communities, and our lives.