Sally Tomlinson,The politics of race,class and special education: The selected works of Sally Tomlinson

Much of what happens in social life is the product of power struggles and vested interest, and special education is no exception. (Tomlinson, 2014: 17)

On reading this esteemed collection of Sally Tomlinson’s works, published in Routledge’s prestigious World Library of Educationalists series, I was struck by three things. First, Sally is one of only three women among the 26 scholars whose collections have been published in this series to date, and the only scholar researching questions relating to disability and special education. Second, her early work on the sociology of special education (Tomlinson, 1982) is just as pertinent today as her most recent research on the political scapegoating of low attainers in a global knowledge economy (Tomlinson, 2012). Third, I was reminded of the extent to which her research has both inspired and guided me as I now grapple with the same research problems, albeit in a different country and at a different time, but always from a similar sociological standpoint (Graham, 2012; Graham and Buckley, 2014; Graham and Jahnukainen, 2011; Graham and Sweller, 2011; Graham et al., 2014). Not surprisingly, the phrase that kept echoing through my head as I read through the 11 chapters chronicling a rich and immensely productive academic career was: ‘history repeats’. And throughout the book are numerous examples and observations as to why it does. To paraphrase, the answer is power, status and politics.

For the last 30 years, Sally Tomlinson has sought to understand the politics that inform and shape both who is believed to be in need of ‘special’ education and the type of education they subsequently receive. She, more than any other, has been responsible for showing educators, policymakers and even other educational researchers not only that special education is subject to the same power relations as education more broadly, but also that special education acts as a primary enabler – one that allows the entire education system and wider society to function in the ways that they do. In other words, without ‘special’ education there could be no ‘general’ education, no mainstream, no average, no concept of higher or lower achieving, no gifted, no streaming, no ‘socially, emotionally or behaviourally disordered’ or ‘educationally subnormal’, no special classes or special schools. Nor would the sorting and stratification of students in (and out of) general education be as efficient and enduring as it is without the logic and discourse of ‘special educational needs’. This logic and discourse is operationalised through psychometric and other evaluations that determine where a child sits in terms of cognitive or adaptive function, and what type of intervention or placement is then deemed necessary. But these processes are not infallible and nor are they socially, culturally or politically neutral.

Sally began her research career at a time when only a select few were beginning to realise that the field and practice of special education may have something to answer for. In the late 1960s, the outgoing president of the Council for Exceptional Children in the USA, Lloyd Dunn (1968: 5), openly questioned the over-representation of minority students in ‘separate programs for socioculturally deprived children with mild learning problems’. Across the Atlantic, the British researcher Bernard Coard (1971) was voicing concern over the disproportionate placement of West Indian children in classes for the ‘educationally subnormal’. These observations launched 40 years of research on disproportionate representation, which has since been dominated by researchers in North America. However, the type of research conducted has been mainly quantitative and little has changed since (Waitoller et al., 2010). This is partly because quantitative research allows researchers to map the topography of the landscape, but offers little to explain how that particular landscape came to be or what forces may be of influence. This is why Sally’s seminal book (A Sociology of Special Education, featured in Chapter 2) was so groundbreaking and so influential.

Special education has traditionally escaped critical scrutiny because it is couched within a discourse of ‘benevolent humanitarianism’ (Tomlinson, 2014: 16) – one that obscures and normalises practices whose effects weigh differently on different social groups. Indeed, the role and function of special education in maintaining an unequal educational system is a seam of research that many sociologists of education have neglected, perhaps because ‘sociologists are often as much influenced in their choice of studies by prevailing ideologies as anyone else, and accept the treatment of certain social groups as “natural” and therefore unworthy of study’ (Tomlinson, 2014: 18). Sally’s contribution to research in this field, and that of those who have followed in her footsteps, has been to show in graphic and inarguable terms, through both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, how unnatural this treatment can be. One of the ways that she has done this is to reveal the disproportionate representation of poor immigrant children of colour in particular categories of ‘special educational needs’ in the UK. Sally found that the more subjective the diagnostic and assessment procedures, the greater the discrepancy between the dominant group (white British middle-class children) and some minority groups (e.g. Black-Caribbean). Proportional discrepancy within and between placement types and disability categories suggests that factors other than disability – such as referral or assessment bias – are influencing diagnostic and placement outcomes.

This book is an excellent read and has much to teach researchers in both the sociology of education and inclusive or special education. The former will learn that there is a whole other universe out there – a shadow industry that mops up the mess created by their own. The latter will learn how to think more critically and more broadly about that shadow industry, helping them to realise that the object of their inquiry is an artefact of ‘deliberate decisions by people who have the power to make the decisions’ (Tomlinson, 2014: 16). Those people, most often, are in the general education system, and it is therefore not possible to study either system in isolation from each other or from the social, economic and political world in which they have been developed. Sally Tomlinson’s impressive body of work has taught us that.