Section Three
Module 11: Social and Systemic Factors in Education
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What mutual influences shape a society’s schools, children’s experiences in those schools, and the society itself?
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After working with the material in this module, readers will be able to
Summarize historical examples of discrimination in public education
Use current data to discuss whether U.S. public schools are currently being successful in their mission to “provide all children significant opportunity to receive a fair, equitable, and high-quality education, and to close educational achievement gaps” (ESSA Title I, Part A, Section 1001).
Provide examples of reality hypotheses and process hypotheses that could explain some part of the disparate representation patterns currently found in public school programs in the U.S., and discuss smaller or larger changes to practice patterns for speech-language pathology that might be required.
This module considers several historical, cultural, social, and identity-based issues that affect students and professionals in U.S. public schools. Approximately half of speech-language pathologists work in public schools and will find much of this material both familiar and directly relevant. If you do not work in public schools, try reading this chapter with an eye toward the mutual influences of schools and societies; we shape our schools, our schools shape us, and any work in any setting is influenced by a society’s schools.
Historical Background for Public Schools
Until the middle of the 1800s, as you may recall from your educational-foundations coursework, education for children in the U.S. was private, local, and/or religious. As public schools and school systems then began to be developed, they reflected the social realities of the time, including that blatant discrimination against some children on the basis of their race, language, or family background was legal, common, and viewed by many people as acceptable or even necessary. In many parts of the country, for example, Black children or Mexican American children were prohibited from attending school or prohibited from attending the same schools that White children attended. In some areas, discriminatory school attendance requirements were so accepted that variations existed in the absence of any controlling state law; local school boards in California, for example, understood that the state’s explicit prohibitions against Asian American and Native American children attending the same schools as White children gave them the implicit ability to segregate Mexican American children as well (Roos, 2019).
We also need to emphasize that there was no requirement at federal or state levels that separate schools be provided for the excluded children. Any separate schools that did exist, furthermore, were not required to be equivalent, despite our later popular use of the phrase “separate but equal” to refer to facilities from the early and mid 20th century. In addition, states that had provided schools for specific groups of children earlier in the timeframe between approximately 1850 and 1950 did not necessarily continue to do so throughout that entire timeframe. California had required communities to provide separate schools for students from Chinese backgrounds beginning in 1859, as one example, but that requirement was eliminated in 1870 – in the direction of not requiring schools for Chinese American children at all.
The combination of these factors meant that, in 1870, approximately 60% of White children in the U.S., but essentially none of the Black children and none of the children from Chinese backgrounds, were attending public schools in the U.S. (see Snyder, 1993, for extensive historical data about school attendance, achievement, and many related variables).
Are you familiar, also, with the “Indian Schools” that developed a little later?
Beginning in 1879, and based in part on federal legislation from 1819 that had specified a perceived need to “civilize” Native American people, hundreds of thousands of Native American children were removed from their families and sent to federally funded institutions referred to as “Indian Schools.” As was later well documented, the Indian Schools were not “schools” in the sense that we might use that word today; they did not focus on providing appropriate educational opportunities for the children. Instead, children at the Indian Schools were taught to read and write in English but not in their own languages, were taught about a religion that was not theirs, and spent much of their time performing unpaid labor; in these and many other ways, the major goal of the Schools was to “wash the ‘[Native American] habits’ and ‘tribal ethic’ out of a child’s mind and substitute a white middle-class value system in its place” (The Kennedy Report, Indian Education, 1969, Part I, I.A., p. 9). Poor living conditions, malnourishment, and other abuses at the Indian schools were well documented as early as 1928 (Meriam Report, 1928) and again in the 1969 Kennedy Report, but many Indian Schools continued to operate with only minimal reforms until the 1970s or later (see https://boardingschoolhealing.org/ ).
For other children, however, legal challenges to the openly discriminatory practices in public schools began to find success in the 1930s, beginning with examples for Mexican American children in California (see Antman & Cortes, 2021; Donato et al., 2017). Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed its earlier position that laws permitting or requiring separation by race could be “generally, if not universally, recognized” as “reasonable” (the terms the Court had used in Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896). In the best known of the relevant cases, the U.S. Supreme Court established, in 1954, that public facilities separated by race are “inherently unequal” and that students in segregated schools were “by reason of the segregation…deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment” (from the one case you would have heard of, if you know any of this history: Brown v. Board of Education, 1954).
Despite the Supreme Court’s clear ruling, however, it continued to be obvious after 1954 that the problem had not been simply that schools in the U.S. were separated by race.
The problem, which the Supreme Court’s 1954 desegregation decision did not solve, was that the schools reflected the society’s power structures (as Morgan, 1996, addressed; see Module 2) and reflected the widely-held stereotypes and prejudices of the time about children and communities.
Despite the Court’s rulings, therefore, many school districts in the south “defied and delayed” (Georgia Advisory Committee, 2007, p. 3) the Court’s requirements. By 1964, a full decade after the Brown decision, less than two percent of formerly segregated school districts had experienced “any desegregation,” and as late as 1969 only 32% of Black children in the southern U.S. attended a desegregated school (Georgia Advisory Committee, 2007, p. 3). This number reached 79% in 1971, but only after the U.S. Supreme Court had additionally required school districts to develop plans that could “realistically” desegregate their schools “now” (Green v. School Board of New Kent County, 391 U.S. 430, 1968).
My own community, the relatively liberal university town of Athens, Georgia, reflects these numbers strikingly well. Clarke County did not begin to integrate its public schools until 1963, and the process was not finished until 1970 (Thurmond, 2019). I assume that some teachers who resisted desegregation in 1970 were probably still working in the district when my children started school in the early 2000s.
More complexities also emerged after the schools were nominally desegrated — because, again, the fact of school segregation had been an outcome of society’s views, not an isolated fact about schools. Thus, even after the desegregation orders, many individual teachers and local school boards emphasized curricular, staff, behavioral, and other systems that supported White, English-speaking students and teachers, and/or that resulted in discrimination against students from other cultural or linguistic backgrounds (see hooks, 2004; Paris & Alim, 2017).
Spanish-speaking and Native American children in the Southwest, for example, tended not to be provided with the supports they would have needed to be successful in English-speaking schools with Europe-centered curricula.
In the South, thousands of highly educated, effective, successful Black teachers from the effective, successful Black schools that had managed to exist under segregation were actually fired by the newly desegregated school districts and replaced by newly hired White teachers who had both demonstrably poorer credentials and also a demonstrably lesser commitment to the Black children’s communities or futures (Lutz, 2017; Siddle Walker, 1996, 2009, 2018). Both paradoxically and predictably, these actions on the districts’ and school boards’ parts created problems that had not previously existed with the quality of the education provided to some Black children. (Our own profession contributed to some of the problems, in several ways, including through speech-language pathologists’ emphasis on speech and language norms that were based literally on White children from Kansas; see Section Four.)
Long after the legal and formal desegregation orders, in other words, educational opportunities and outcomes in the U.S. still remained markedly different for many Black children and for many children from other backgrounds than for many White children (again, see Snyder, 2013). These and other problems constituted the civil rights concerns that led, ultimately, to the legislation we discussed in Modules 3 and 4, including the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA, 1965) and the original Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EAHCA, 1975) a decade later.
Your Turn
What is your general reaction to reading about history? Do you tend to accept what you are reading and see its continuing implications, or do you tend to view the past as less relevant to today’s realities? How might our general tendencies toward history influence our current and future abilities to provide culturally and individually appropriate speech-language pathology?
My family includes an ancestor who served as a teacher at an Indian School. He was revered by my grandparents’ generation as a self-sacrificing missionary and conscientious educator, but my parents’ generation and certainly my generation have come to view him as having been part of a distinctly problematic infrastructure. I realized only relatively late in my life that my favorite uncle’s lifetime of service as an archeologist who supported and assisted many Native American groups to preserve and protect their land and their artifacts was probably, at least in part, a reaction to his family’s history – and that the older generations of our family would have perceived my uncle’s work, which I admire, as distinctly disrespectful to what they had viewed as their necessary work in providing an appropriate Christian education to Native American children. How does your family’s history influence your views of current cultural issues?
One interesting complexity in the history of culturally and individually appropriate education in U.S. public schools involves the fact that educators from many minoritized or excluded communities were not universally supportive of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and later requirements that all public schools be desegregated. Many communities, including Black groups in the South, Chinese communities in San Francisco (see Guan, n.d.), Jewish communities in the Northeast, and others, had worked to develop excellent schools for their own children during the time of enforced segregation. These schools were, in today’s words, culturally relevant, culturally responsive, and culturally sustaining. The strengths of the local Black schools, Chinese schools, and other schools, and the importance of their educators as leaders in their communities, also had many other benefits for the Black, Chinese American, Jewish, or other communities as a whole (Lutz, 2017; Siddle Walker, 1996, 2009, 2018). Think about some of the complexities here. Can one large educational system support each child’s individual abilities, each child’s identities as a member of important communities and subgroups, and also each child’s needs as a member of U.S. society writ large? How? Or, if not, then how can a society as large as ours support all children? Given the history of the public schools and the current status of the public schools, how can we as speech-language pathologists contribute to the development of a supportive, non-discriminatory society that truly does recognize, respect, and respond to each group’s and each individual’s needs?
Current Issues in Public Schools
We started this module by discussing previous or historical timeframes, but one of the greatest complexities that continue to face our profession is that children from some backgrounds or with some abilities have continued to have very different experiences in U.S. schools than many other children.
Data from throughout the 1980s and 1990s, for example, showed that more White children than children from other backgrounds met educational benchmarks in reading, mathematics, and science; that more White students finished high school; that White adults demonstrated better reading skills than other adults; and that all of these educational data were related to disparities in income, physical health, and mental health for large groups of adults in the U.S. (see Snyder, 2013). In 2002, in an attempt to address these continuing concerns, Congress made major changes to Title I of the ESEA, as part of its routine reauthorization of the act. These changes created the No Child Left Behind Act, or NCLB, which controlled public education in the U.S. between 2002 and 2015.
Among other requirements, NCLB required multiple annual standardized tests for most children, an effort that was intended to ensure that all children were being provided with the education they needed to be able to meet the same standards. This emphasis on federally mandated testing, while well intentioned, soon led many politicians, educators, parents, and students to view the NCLB as too dependent on the wrong measurements and as creating an ineffective focus on test scores, rather than a useful emphasis on meaningful educational outcomes for all children. To address these concerns and some other perceived problems, Congress replaced the NCLB Act in 2015 with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which is the current reauthorization of the ESEA (at least as of early 2025! you might need to read the next few paragraphs, which I will phrase in the present tense, as history).
Under the version of the ESSA that has been in place from 2015 until at least 2025, as under the previous NCLB Act, states are required to provide equal educational opportunities for all students and required to report test scores for subgroups of students as evidence that all children are being provided with the education they need to meet the same standards. As a substantial change from the systems required by NCLB, however, the ESSA requires states to develop and implement their own accountability systems, which must include not only academic measures but also at least one non-academic measure of school quality (e.g., school climate or evaluations of the factors surrounding chronic absenteeism). This requirement was intended to allow schools to identify the specific issues affecting their own communities and work to address those issues. The overall goal continues to be to “provide all children significant opportunity to receive a fair, equitable, and high-quality education, and to close educational achievement gaps” (ESSA Title I, Part A, Section 1001).
So how are we doing? Did the ESSA solve things?
Would you like to guess, or have you seen recent newspaper articles about these issues?
The answer is that, as a society, we clearly have not yet solved the problems.
In fact, in 2022, the federally required testing for 4th-grade and 8th-grade students showed that reading scores and math scores for Black, Native American, Hispanic, and several other groups of children were lower than those for White students and also had decreased more during the pandemic-influenced years since 2019; that is, all groups except Asian American students showed poorer academic outcomes in 2019 and in 2022, as compared with White students, and also were differentially more harmed between 2019 and 2022 by the universal harms of pandemic-years schooling.
In 2024, most reading scores had not changed, as compared with 2022 scores. Exceptions included that Hispanic students’ 8th-grade reading scores were significantly worse in 2024 than they had been in 2022, and that the reading scores of children in the 25th percentile (i.e., those who were already struggling or earning lower scores) were more likely to have decreased, as compared with students at the 50th or 75th percentile. Math scores in 2024 tended not to have changed or showed some improvements, again with important exceptions: students classified as economically disadvantaged, for example, lost ground in math between 2022 and 2024 in seven states and gained in one, while students classifed as not economically disadvantaged lost ground in three states and gained in four.
As a relatively predictable end point from all this, approximately 90% of White adolescents but only approximately 83% of Hispanic adolescents, 81% of Black students, and 74% of Native American and Alaska Native students finish high school (National Center for Education Statistics, 2024).
Filled blue dots on the right show high school graduation rates for White students, one bar per state (U.S. average in the middle, blue bar). Open white dots on the left show the uniformly lower rates for Black students in that state. The gap, in percentage points, is shown in the center of each bar.
(From National Center for Education Statistics. (2024). High School Graduation Rates)
The history of segregated and discriminatory education in the U.S. matters to us as today’s speech-language pathologists, in other words, because we as a society are still very much living in the middle of this story. Depending on your journey or your interests, your focus might be on Black children in the Northeast or in the South, Native American or Alaska Native children in New Mexico or in Alaska, children from any racial or ethnic background living in low-income rural areas or low-income portions of cities, or some other specific group in any part of the country. Alternatively, your “focus” might be general, stemming from your overall, basic desire to ensure that all children have the opportunity to “receive a fair, equitable, and high-quality education,” with no “educational achievement gaps” (ESSA Title I, Part A, Section 1001).
So let’s keep going, and let’s get away from the focus on test scores (as critics of the NCLB had suggested we should do). What opportunities are being provided to which children in the public schools, or are all children receiving the same opportunities?
Your Turn
My community held a small event a couple years ago at which the speakers were the people who, in 1963, had been the first African American children to attend our community’s previously segregated White schools (Aued, 2023). They were then, in 2023, approaching the older end of what we might call middle-aged adults, but they are active people of the 21st century whose lives included segregated schools. I myself was probably part of a university faculty whose current members had resisted desegregation: The University of Georgia enrolled its first Black students in 1961, and I have every reason to assume that some members of the 1961 faculty were probably still working when I was hired in 1995. How does the recency of segregation continue to influence your schools or your community?
This module emphasizes public schools because approximately 90% of children in the U.S. attend public school and because most speech-language pathologists who work in schools work in public schools. Are you more familiar with private schools? How might some of the complexities facing public schools be exacerbated or solved if a geographic area had more public schools or more private schools?
Disproportionate Representation in Educational Programs
As the social determinants of health model (from Module 10) reminds us, consistent and positive engagement in high-quality education programs influences children’s health and several related constructs about their lives, not just their academic achievement. In current U.S. schools, however, children’s opportunities to participate in educational programs remain influenced in many ways by their cultural and identity-based characteristics. Let’s think about what might be going on.
Imagine, as an oversimplified starting point, that you have started a new job as the speech-language pathologist at Westside Elementary School. Approximately 15% of the children are receiving special education services (the current national average; National Center for Education Statistics, 2023). You also notice, intriguingly, that 20% of the children whose last names start with A-G, but only 10% of the children whose last names start with S-Z, are receiving special education services. The pattern strikes you as odd, because you know that children with early-alphabet last names are no more or less likely to have special needs than children with late-alphabet last names.
What could be happening?
Lots of things could be happening, including that each child could be receiving the services they need, but let’s examine one possibility: What if the faculty and staff at Westside Elementary consistently organize their initial assessment work in alphabetical order by the children’s last names? They would start fresh, eager, and ready to provide whatever Abby Aaronson needs. By the end of the meeting or the end of Assessment Week, however, they might have become ever so slightly less eager to add Zoe Zyverri to their already-large caseload. The changes in their thinking and their decision-making would be subtle or subconscious, and the explanation might be something else entirely – but something is happening. In this fictional example, as is also true for real public schools, we can tell from the caseload data that something other than children’s abilities and needs is probably affecting the referral, assessment, identification, and placement processes.
What would you do, if you found yourself in such a situation? You might mention the alphabetic disparity you had noticed in the next staff meeting, ask your principal or special education director if anyone else had noticed the pattern, or suggest that the meetings and processes that need to be completed in the future could each address children in a different random order. You might plan to watch the children from the end of the alphabet a little more closely when you are in the classrooms over the next few weeks. You might even suggest that it would be worth re-screening the children from the end of the alphabet to make sure no one who needs services has been missed.
(Those last few ideas, doing something specific as a way of making up for problems created by previous processes, are examples of affirmative actions, which means actively taking a specific step in the present as a way of attempting to fix the continuing results of a past inequity. Depending on what you thought you believed about “affirmative action,” you might be surprised to find that it’s often a good and necessary thing to do.)
And are you ready for the more realistic and more problematic data, about children’s enrollment in special programs at school?
What if, when you started your new job at Westside Elementary, you realized that the Black students at your school were 40% more likely to be identified with a disability as compared with all students, and the American Indian and Alaska Native children at your school were receiving special education at twice the rate of the general student population? These are the actual figures reported for the U.S. public schools by the National Center for Learning Disabilities (2020).
What if, simultaneously, only 5.41% of the Black students in your school participated in the gifted education program, while 9.57% of the total school population participated in gifted education? These are the actual figures for public schools in the U.S. reported by Gentry et al. (2022) from nationwide data.
Now what is happening?
The general, objective term for any such situation is disproportionate representation, meaning that people from some subgroups are included among the people engaged in any activity, opportunity, or event at different rates or in different proportions.
Sometimes disproportionate representation is acceptable or even desirable. Adults are overrepresented, for example, and children and the elderly are underrepresented, among people in the U.S. with fulltime jobs, for good reasons.
In our public schools in the U.S., however, the situation appears to be at least potentially problematic: students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds are being placed into special education programs and gifted programs in different proportions. The issue has been known since the Office of Civil Rights first gathered data in 1968, it was described in detail by Heller et al. (1982), and it has been repeatedly reexamined and reconfirmed since in nationwide data (see Borland, 2004, 2021; Losen & Orfield, 2002; National Center for Learning Disabilities, 2020; McKenna, 2013; Robinson & Norton, 2019; Skiba et al., 2016).
Overall, students of color, with the exception of those from some Asian backgrounds, are routinely placed in special education programs in U.S. schools at higher rates than are White children. In addition, African American students, students learning English as a second or later language (or so categorized by the schools), and students with physical or other disabilities (as categorized by the schools, but consider the issues we addressed in Module 10) are underrepresented by 30 to 75% in gifted programs, as compared with the proportions that would be expected based on the overall proportions of students in schools.
Why? What are these data trying to tell us? And if these patterns need to change, do we as speech-language pathologists have any role in attempting that change?
Explanations and Solutions for Disproportionate Representation in Schools
The two primary categories of explanations for the known disproportionate representation of children from different backgrounds in different types of educational programs in U.S. public schools can be roughly described as the reality hypotheses and the process hypotheses (Coutinho & Oswald, 1998, 2000).
Reality hypotheses assert that there is a difference in children’s abilities across racial, ethnic, or other populations, suggesting that the disproportionate representation of certain groups in certain educational programs occurs because the populations differ and the children from all groups are being correctly identified.
Process hypotheses, in contrast, assert that the systems through which diagnoses, identifications, and educational placements are made create disparities, in the absence of any real differences among populations.
Both the reality hypotheses and the process hypotheses of disproportionate representation in educational programs can be exaggerated, in some discussions, by their supporters and by their detractors, but nuanced forms of both types are well supported, influence our work in speech-language pathology, and deserve to be understood.
Reality-hypothesis explanations, first, could include such unsupported prejudices as that people from some racial or ethnic groups are natively more or less intelligent than people from any other group. It might go without saying that such prejudices are untrue, but let’s be sure to say it anyway: No racial or ethnic group of people, as a group, is natively any more or less intelligent than any other.
More nuanced versions of reality-hypothesis explanations, however, are well supported by the substantial research that has been conducted about children’s disproportionate representation in educational programs. Think about the factors Module 10 addressed, including environmental, health, economic, educational, and other factors related to social determinants of health, and the ACEs. And think about children who live with those experiences: children who are living under conditions of economic uncertainty, in physically unhealthy neighborhoods, in families whose members have unaddressed physical or mental health problems, who have witnessed violence against family members and community members, and whose own physical and emotional needs are overtly difficult or are not predictably addressed by the stressed or troubled adults in their lives.
There is no inherent reason why children living under these circumstances would necessarily be from any particular racial or ethnic group, but statistically and empirically we do know that children living under many such circumstances in the U.S. are more likely to be from some racial, ethnic, and other backgrounds, because of the social history and social conditions in the U.S. (as we addressed in Modules 9 and 10). It is possible, therefore, that some children, who are in the U.S. disproportionately from some racial and ethnic backgrounds, reach school age genuinely needing greater assistance with learning because of the social determinants of health and ACEs they have already been exposed to. In fact, the social determinants of health model and the notion of ACEs both predict this exact result: children and adolescents who live under adverse circumstances for 5 to 10 years (or more) are harmed by those circumstances.
Some children’s experiences, in other words, have led them to have real problems with physical health, anxiety, depression, sleep, nutrition, time for reading or study, attention, emotion regulation, or even the acquisition of school supplies, all of which lead predictably to real problems with academic success or to the need for special services at school. Notice, again, that the issue is not that being from a certain racial or ethnic background leads directly to difficulties with learning; the issue is that children from some racial or ethnic groups in the U.S. are more likely than others to have lived with the social determinants of health and the adverse childhood experiences that are known to reduce the ability to succeed in school.
What about “process hypotheses”?
Process hypotheses, in contrast to “reality hypotheses,” suggest that something about how the decisions are made results in disproportionate identification of children from certain subgroups as gifted or as in need of other special services even though, by other definitions or given other processes, the reality would be that the children so identified do not, in any real sense, deserve that label. The definitions of gifted, emotionally stable, and behaviorally problematic, in particular, have all been called into question by authors who suggest that these categories are defined primarily for public schools in the U.S. from the point of view of White, middle-class, educated, monolingual, and Christian norms (see Borland, 2004, 2021, for discussions about giftedness; see Schiltz & Young, 2022, for a comprehensive recent review of the “emotionally and behaviorally disturbed” category in schools). Given these definitions, and given the instruments and processes built on these definitions, process hypotheses suggest that the schools’ identification systems, as systems, are responsible for the results that tend to categorize children from certain backgrounds as displaying either problematic or gifted behaviors.
What does that mean, or how could it happen?
This time imagine that a classroom teacher carries certain assumptions (or has what she thinks of as “knowledge”) about what a learning disability looks like and about what giftedness looks like. The teacher might believe that a child who does not follow her directions, does not complete classroom activities, and turns in homework worksheets unfinished and with multiple errors might be demonstrating signs of a learning disability. The same teacher might believe that a child who adds extra writing to the end of many writing assignments, who asks many creative questions, and who tends to provide long verbal answers or attempt to extend conversations with the teacher is displaying signs that they could be gifted.
Think carefully about these children’s behaviors. Do you see any possible complexities, contradictions, or culturally influenced issues?
The child who adds extra writing to the end of a writing assignment is “not following the teacher’s directions.” Is that extra writing a sign of a potential problem or a sign of potential giftedness?
The child who asks many questions and attempts to engage the teacher in extended conversations probably comes from a cultural background that assumes that children are free to take up adults’ time, which is one issue, or might be using these behaviors to compensate for their underlying lack of understanding, which raises other issues.
The child who turns in homework sheets unfinished might be extraordinarily academically gifted but responsible for several younger siblings at home. The child whose homework sheets contain multiple errors or who does not ask questions or provide extended answers might be still learning English as their second (or later) language, or she might be from a culture that expects children to interact with each other, not take up adults’ time.
Do you see the many interacting complexities? Why would the same child behavior (asking questions, or not finishing a worksheet) be interpreted as a sign of a possible problem in one child and as a sign of potential giftedness in another child?
Imagine, now, in addition, that the classroom teacher observing these children carries even the most minimal prejudice that some African American children tend to be not quite as smart, not quite as academically oriented, or not quite as interested in science or literature as other children. Even if this (incorrect!) belief posits only a minor difference between African American children and other children, it might be just enough that the teacher would be ready to see confirming evidence of that stereotype in action in their classroom, meaning that they would be ever so slightly more likely to interpret a Black child’s actions as problematic or to recommend White or Asian American children to be tested for the school’s gifted program (recall our discussions in Modules 8 and 9 about the influence of our initial beliefs on our interpretations of new evidence and on our individual choices).
Some of you might have experienced being misjudged or overlooked in this way yourselves, as children; it is very hard to deal with, in part because addressing any single occurrence gets reduced to a competition between two children (Jane was selected; Jenny was not) when the problem is not those two children at all.
Remember, too, that our initial beliefs can result in discriminatory outcomes even if those beliefs are not hugely or overtly problematic on the surface. What if the staff at an elementary school know, correctly from their district’s demographic data, that the White children in their town who speak Western American English and complete their math homework every week often come from highly educated families? They might then interpret a White child’s lack of attention to a simple classroom lesson as evidence that the child knows the material already and would benefit from advanced lessons in a gifted program – when the same lack of attention from a Black child might be interpreted as evidence of less knowledge or of a behavior problem (see McKenna, 2013).
What if several of the school staff are proud of themselves for having become aware that children with significant medical or physical conditions often tire of being singled out and made to feel different, or that a particular child’s family is already dealing with many extra schedules and complexities for medical appointments or therapies? They might not be eager to recommend that child for yet another extra activity, so they hesitate to recommend that child for the gifted program – even if the gifted program is exactly where the child belongs.
Can you think of other examples and other versions of reality-based or process-based explanations that might be contributing to the known disproportionate representation of children in different educational programs? Your hypothesized explanations are probably at least partially correct; the substantial research about the disproportionate representation of children in special education programs and in gifted programs supports many types of examples and explanations, because the problem is diffuse but very real (see especially Coutinho & Oswald, 1998, 2000).
We as well-intentioned speech-language pathologists would like to believe that we would never do anything as blatantly racist as assign the Black children and the Alaska Native children to special education (including identifying them as having speech or language disorders) while assigning the able-bodied, English-speaking, White children to the gifted and talented program.
We as well-intentioned speech-language pathologists also need to understand and accept the years’ worth of caseload data summarized in this section. The data show us clearly that somehow, to at least some degree, children from some backgrounds are disproportionately represented in certain programs in U.S. schools.
The complete solutions to these patterns are large and complex, because they reflect so many elements of our entire society and of our long and complex history. At the very least, however, we as speech-language pathologists can help simply by being aware of the history and aware of the current data discussed in this module (and elsewhere throughout this website). We can then also, from our own points of view and in our own unique ways and as we continue on our own journeys, also be actively aware of when, how, and on what basis we recommend that certain children “need” to be assigned to specific educational programs or activities.
Your Turn
Federal regulations distinguish among disproportionate representation, significant discrepancy, and significant disproportionality in schools, using some specific requirements for all state and local educational agencies (Office of Special Education Programs, 2017). Search for your state’s significant disproportionality definitions or your state’s education office devoted to these issues. What do you find, for your state?
Think about a time in your life when you received a gift or a benefit that you were not sure you had earned. Did you try to give it back? Did you try to explain that someone else was more deserving of the benefit than you were? Did you actively share the gift with someone you believed to be more deserving? Did you seek to change the givers’ systems, to make sure that people who deserved the benefit would receive it next time? Why?
Highlight Questions for Module 11
Summarize two of the examples that this chapter presented as evidence of historical discrimination in public education. What societal issues have changed since those examples occurred? What societal issues have not changed?
This module was based on wording from the ESSA, which requires public schools in the U.S. to “provide all children significant opportunity to receive a fair, equitable, and high-quality education, and to close educational achievement gaps” (ESSA Title I, Part A, Section 1001). Explain why the disproportionate assignment of children from some racial, ethnic, social, or linguistic backgrounds to special education programs, to the speech-language disorder diagnostic category, or to gifted education programs is inconsistent with the ESSA’s requirements.
Provide one example of a “reality hypothesis” and one example of a “process hypothesis” that could explain some part of the disparate representation patterns currently found in public school programs in the U.S. Discuss how your two examples could be improved for speech-language pathology diagnoses.