The New Best Way to Destroy Special Education

The best lies are always ones based in some truth.

The newest austerity project for districts across the nation, including the Chicago Public Schools, is to claim that special education budgets must be decimated: in the name of racial equality. Now, the refrain to destroy public services in the name of equality should sound familiar if you've been paying attention. Remember how corporate ed reformers claim that we must dismantle and privatize public education because of inequality, because of Civil Rights, because of racism? In fact, this is a favorite tactic of neoliberalism more broadly.

And now it's coming for special education.

Special ed has flown somewhat under the radar of the neoliberal education reform debate. Usually, it's brought up in the context of pushing out kids with special needs from "schools of choice" especially the charters where a significant disability is simply a liability on the books for free market privateers. These kids find themselves bounced around schools until they land back in the neighborhood school which must provide services, only now that school has been so striped resources as public money flows towards privatizers, the child languishes through schooling more unsupported than ever.

So now, districts that have had funding sources dry up-are looking to save money on the backs of their most fragile-but also most expensive-students: students with special needs.

Now, the one thing that stood in the way of this desire to slash costs, was that darned federally-protected document called an Individual Education Plan. There was legal recourse if this plan was not implemented. Charter or neighborhood, parents and kids had some rights. So the privatizers decided to use their favorite tool: a plea of racism and inequality as a reason to DENY services to needy kids.

Now, back to the beginning of this post, the best lies do have some truth in them. We do often see racial disparities in how special education services are doled out.

Yet all the studies I've seen focus solely on the individual. The problem has been completely framed as one of personal biases-usually the classroom teacher-who makes a racist decision to refer a child for special education. Those studies further the "bad teacher" mantra of the edreform crowd. (So naturally, it is those studies which get funded and published. Academia has been bought and paid for long ago. Sigh....)

Now, in an equal society, we should not see racial disparities. That's true. But who believes we live in an equal society?? We live in a deeply racist society, with real and damaging material impact on the quality of life, especially for kids, based on a legacy of racism.

District officials would have us believe that the rates of special education should be exactly the same, no matter the circumstances. And since they are not, teachers must just be over-identifying. Therefore, massive cutbacks in special education are not only warranted, they are a civil rights mandate.

No! Do not fall for the okey-doke, as my union president loves to say. They are using the language of equality to justify further inequalities.

If you live in a community experiencing massive environmental racism such as a lead poisoning epidemic, guess what? There should be higher rates of special education needs. If you live in a community facing tides of trauma and violence stemming from the intentional disinvestment, lack of affordable housing, lack of jobs, underfunded schools....guess what? All those factors can lead to learning challenges!! We know that too many Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) can warp a child's ability to learn as well as affect behavior. Since we don't protect kids from trauma in our society, special education is frankly all we've got. Yet, we ignore these obvious factors because those in charge would have us believe "equality" just means all the percentages equal out without touching the true underlying racism beneath?

In fact, students with special needs in affluent, often white areas, are getting far MORE special education services. Low income kids and kids of color are actually already being denied fair and equitable access to special education services and these budget cuts are exacerbating a bigger problem. It's likely that kids with special needs are actually under-identified in systems that are so underfunded and understaffed, that it's not possible to follow up on every suspected case.

Make no mistake. Special education is under attack. We either stand up to save it, or we allow those in charge to continue to discriminate in the name of "equality."

An Open Letter to Hillary Clinton, From a Chicago Teacher

Dear Madame Secretary,

I am writing to you today from Chicago on behalf of all the children, families, and staff in the middle of a massive manufactured crisis brewing in the Chicago Public Schools. A crisis in major part worsened by your friend, Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Rahm Emanuel and Hillary Clinton-AP

I am a special education teacher at an elementary school on the far South Side of the city in a high-poverty African-American community. Thanks to Rahm Emanuel's increased attacks on neighborhood public schools like ours, we are living under truly abhorrent conditions for teachers and students alike. My school is a survivor of his vicious, racist school closings from 2013 where the school down the street was forced into ours creating chaos and disruption for all involved. We have been beaten down by at least five separate rounds of budget cuts over the past 2 years since, with yet another round of cuts on the way. These cuts have seen lost teaching positions causing large class sizes (41 kindergartners in one classroom!), split classrooms (more than one grade in a class), and the laying off of other vital staff members. We no longer have a Librarian. We lost a much-needed clerk. We lost our Climate and Culture Coordinator and our mentoring program. CPS even has stolen our social worker and psychologist for all but a day or two a week despite the high number of children who have experienced trauma and need therapeutic services.

And we are indeed experiencing trauma. We are a school located in the middle of a neighborhood facing massive spikes in violence, thanks to Rahm's racist policies causing a lack of housing, jobs, and opportunity. Just yesterday, I sat huddled in my classroom, protecting my students during a lockdown as violence swirled around us, leaving a man dead on our streets just down the block and 2 others injured. As I comforted my students, crying and scared in the dark, the obscenity of Rahm's call for teachers to sacrifice MORE tore through my thoughts. Children at my school are in mental health crisis. Yet Rahm and his unelected school board have cut the very healing services we need now more than ever. As teachers, how can we allow these horrid conditions to stand?

Not only has Rahm gone after neighborhood schools, particularly in Black communities, but now he and CPS are coming after our most vulnerable population: students with special needs. CPS has changed funding formulas and procedures to access vital special education services in an attempt to save money for their crisis off the backs of our most fragile learners. We have seen harmful disruption in special ed services, with massive lawsuits brewing. Teachers are being laid off, support personnel are being lost, busing and transportation is being cut, and CPS has created a mountain of bureaucracy designed to prevent access to services. We are at criminal levels of harm to students.

Would you allow your granddaughter to attend a school suffering these types of assaults?

You say, "Black Lives Matter." Well now is the time for you to show that the Black Lives of children, children with disabilities, children living in poverty here in Chicago...that those lives matter to you. That the lives of Black Educators who are being laid off or pushed out of teaching in droves matter to you.

You say to teachers, "I'm with you." I heard you speak at the AFT National Conference this summer where you promised us that you are on our side. Well, in Chicago we are under attack, an attack led by your party's out-of-favor embarrassment, Rahm Emanuel. As the chosen candidate of the Democratic Party, we ask that you intervene directly. If you ask teachers to say, "I'm with her" then you need to show us that you truly are with us in our time of dire need.

Teachers in Chicago are on the eve of the second teachers' strike in four years. Members voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike because we see the unacceptable reality of underfunded, sabotaged schools every day. We are willing to stand up and fight for the schools our students deserve. While we deserve fair compensation and should not shoulder the burden of the elite's created fiscal crises, this strike is about so much more than our pay.

Secretary Clinton, I invite you to come walk the picket line at my school should we go out on strike beginning on October 11th. Show us which side you are on. The wealthy bankers that profit off of Rahm Emanuel's privatization schemes or the families and teachers of Chicago?

It's time for you step up and show what kind of president you will be.

Sincerely,
Katie Osgood
Special Education Teacher
CTU Delegate at a CPS Elementary School

Teachers and staff during the April 1st One Day Strike