Georgia’s Separate and Unequal
Special-Education System
The New Yorker
October 1, 2018 issue
By Rachel Aviv
LaToya Ruby Frazier produced a new photographic series to visually represent and advocate justice for six-year-old Seth Murrell and his mother Latoya Martin exposing Georgia’s segregated school system and abuse of Black children with disabilities. Please read and learn about Georgia’s Separate and Unequal Special-Education System in the Oct.1st New Yorker issue.
A statewide network of schools for disabled students has trapped black children in neglect and isolation.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (idea) requires that students with disabilities learn in the “least restrictive environment,” a loose term that may mean different things depending on the race or the class of the student. Nirmala Erevelles, a professor of disability studies at the University of Alabama, told me that, “in general, when it comes to people of color—particularly poor people of color—we choose the most restrictive possibility,” sending students to “the most segregated and punitive spaces in the public-school system.” According to Beth Ferri, a disability scholar at Syracuse University, idea provided a kind of loophole to the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in schools. Now racial segregation continued “under the guise of ‘disability,’ ” she said. “You don’t need to talk about any race anymore. You can just say that the kid is a slow learner, or defiant, or disrespectful.” Ferri said that idea “treated disability as apolitical—a biological fact. It didn’t think about things like racial or cultural bias.”
Courtesy of: The New Yorker
Special-Education System
