Cover Story
Truth in Labeling

When it comes to special ed and African-American kids, it's time for... Truth in Labeling

A Scenario: There's a boy in your class. He's Black, he's loud, he kicks his chair when he's upset and mocks you when you try to discipline him. His reading skills are dismal, he has language quirks you just don't "get," and he walks around agitated when it's time to focus. You've tried some fixes, but little seems to work. Question: Do you refer the boy to a special education teacher for an assessment? Or do you grit your teeth, keep him in your class, and continue the good fight? It's your decision to make, and you may well forge on. But national data suggest the odds are fairly high you won't, that in the end this child will end up a student of special education--not simply because he's been marked as having "problems," but, disturbingly, because he's Black and he's male.

On its face, this racial link may seem startling and unfair, even insidious. But, say government researchers, the statistics tell the tale: Nationally, African-American students show up in certain special education categories--the ones where the diagnosis is largely subjective--in numbers that so exceed their proportion in the general population, that some experts are now calling it a crisis.

Consider this: Blacks are nearly three times more likely than whites to be labeled mentally retarded (up to five times more in some states) and twice as likely to be labeled emotionally disturbed. Across the board the risks are higher for Black males than Black females. Even when accounting for the often-debilitating effects of poverty on early cognitive development, the overrepresentation is still there--and glaringly, according to researchers at the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. In fact, the odds of being labeled "mentally retarded" actually increase for African-American boys in middle and upper income school districts.

The implications for educators, for students, for social policy are profound, says Gary Orfield, professor of education and social policy at Harvard University and co-editor of the book, Racial Inequity in Special Education. Black students in special education, he says, are far more likely than their white peers to be isolated from mainstream classes, stigmatized, and suspended from school, then become drop-outs, face unemployment, and go to jail.

It's not fun stuff to talk about, Orfield notes, given the remarkable contribution special education has made to society over the decades. "[It] has been the great American accomplishment," he says. "But just like most good things, it can be misused." And in some critical areas, Orfield adds, it has.

A Complex Problem
What exactly has gone awry? To be sure, it's a question that has quietly percolated for the more than 30 years so-called "disproportionality" has been on the social policy radar. Civil rights activists and some educators have long argued that culturally biased IQ tests and unconscious bias among teachers are part of the problem--strands in an exceedingly complex web of causes that make the issue so emotion-charged and confounding. In the last few years as more solid data have emerged, many more educators, policy makers, and researchers have come to agree--but are now digging deeper into the question: What to do? And while they've come up with plenty big-picture solutions--more equitable funding of high-poverty schools, more uniform and unbiased criteria for testing, more certified special education teachers--some of the more promising answers fall squarely in the laps of regular education teachers. The teachers on the front lines. The teachers who have the best opportunity to make a difference before "special education" even becomes attached to a child's name.

From the President, who commissioned a recent report on special education; to the National Academy of Sciences, which published a groundbreaking study last year; to a bevy of minority organizations; indeed, to the NEA itself--the clarion cry goes like this: Equip teachers with new strategies to teach diverse students, make them more aware of cultural nuances, give them the tools to intervene early and effectively in the life of an at-risk child, and the likelihood is high that these kids will succeed--many without getting a referral at all.

"It's not to say there won't be kids who will require special education services," says Patti Ralabate, NEA's special education specialist, "but this process helps schools focus those resources on those who truly need them." And by giving the right supports to regular education teachers, she adds, "kids no longer have to fail before they can get help."

Already in areas around the country--Illinois, Seattle, New York--administrators are taking steps to make sure these kinds of reforms are in place. But few places are attacking the problem as holistically as officials are trying to in the state of Alabama.

Unlikely Advocate
Its name long synonymous with racial strife, Alabama may seem an unlikely champion for change--and to be sure, it was not the lone instigator for this one. It was a 1997 judicial review of consent decrees from a longstanding school desegregation suit, Lee v. Macon, which found, among other things, that Black Alabama students were more than three times more likely to be labeled mentally retarded than whites. The court declared this unacceptable and two years ago, this rural Black Belt state took the lead in mapping out an attack plan. Significantly, it was geared as much to improving how teachers taught and assessed all students as it was to how they taught and assessed Blacks. It included:

• Statewide awareness training to help teachers not only understand the overrepresentation issue, but become familiar with a multitude of instructional and classroom management strategies to help all students learn better;
• A new pre-referral process that requires teachers to use a host of intervention strategies, with the help of mentors and school-based support teams, for at least six weeks before even considering a referral;
• A revamped assessment process for determining who is mentally retarded and emotionally disturbed as well as the use of new, more culturally sensitive aptitude measurements;
• Re-evaluation of minorities who were borderline mentally retarded students;
• A state improvement grant to fund the changes;
• Regular monitoring of the district progress.

It was not meant to be a quick fix, nor an end in and of itself. But after more than a year of effort, state officials have charted small, encouraging signs of progress. The number of special education students overall has dropped; and the number of Black students identified for mental retardation decreased 2 percent (1,700 were re-identified as having specific learning disabilities and 400 "tested out" of special ed altogether). In addition, 500 fewer Black students were identified as emotionally disturbed.

And though teachers have hardly been across-the-board wowed by the required training--some have dismissed it as unhelpful and time-consuming--others have roundly applauded its benefits. Indeed, in places where pieces of the reform had begun before the consent decree was even official, teachers say the results have been eye-opening, even empowering. And, they add, at-risk kids are learning and succeeding.

Making it Work
Take Lee County, a poor, rural speck of a place just 8 miles from Auburn near the Georgia border. One could miss it driving through that quiet stretch of Highway 51. But if only to witness the newfound enthusiasm of some of the teachers, it is, arguably, worth the stop.

For years in Lee County, referrals of African-American students to special education was off the charts--and the evidence stunned. As recent as 1999, Blacks made up 59 percent of kids labeled mentally retarded and 44 percent of the emotionally disturbed, even though they make up 23 percent of the student population.

Then two years ago, the county instructional director, Eddie Clark, decided to take action. He directed all elementary teachers to begin learning and using multiple teaching strategies, particularly in reading and math, so learning for all children could improve as early as possible. Clark, an NEA member and former special education teacher, urged schools to establish grade level "teams" so teachers could confer and give special attention to students who were struggling, flexibly re-grouping them in at-risk classes that they would move in and out of as needed. These children would be held to the same academic standards, the thinking went, but would benefit the most from innovative, individualized teaching. As the Lee v. Macon consent decree kicked in, Clark began helping teachers develop what he calls a "mindset" change around special education--looking at it not as a place, but as services to be used after teachers have given all they've got.

"Before, all teachers had to do was make a modification or accommodation," Clark notes, "It was, 'Okay, I'll stand beside the child. I'll help him unpack his book bag. Instead of 20 spelling words, I'll give him 15.' Then many would go ahead and refer. Now they're looking at how they actually teach the child." Too, they're engaging in more pointed self-appraisal--asking questions, for example, about their own potential biases. (See "Looking Inward")

The result: special education referrals for Blacks have dropped to zero this year. The numbers of Blacks labeled emotionally disturbed have declined to 30 percent of the total and those deemed mentally retarded to 40 percent. Students are doing better academically, too. But more importantly, some teachers say they have been transformed as educators.

A Collaboration
In Opelika, at Beauregard Elementary School, a spanking new school where the Black students make up about 30 percent of enrollment and half the school is on free or reduced lunches, fourth-grade teacher Marcy Sherfield says the emphasis on new ways of teaching has reinvigorated her--and inspired her kids. "I haven't been teaching a long time, but long enough to get caught into the same routine," she says. "It was like, 'I'm teaching this way and I'm going to do it like this.' And so this made me sit down and redirect myself--to think, I can change this."

Mary Sanders, a colleague who teaches a K-1 transition class, agrees. The Lee v. Macon training confirmed the value of what she and her colleagues had already begun to do, she says. Now she finds herself constantly experimenting with a wide variety of approaches--even those she may not personally love. "I am not a scripted teacher, for instance, but if I'm doing my job, I figure out how to teach these children, period," she says. "It's not an excuse to say, 'Oh, but I don't like this,' or 'Oh, I don't believe in that.' I have to believe my children can learn."

The beauty of the reforms, she says, is that she can now go to a mentor--anybody she chooses in her school--to ask for help when she's at wit's end about what's best for a particular child. In fact, she must do this before formally going to what's known as the Building Based Student Support Team (BBSST). This team of counselors and teachers, newly required under Lee v. Macon, reviews everything the teacher has done, inquires about whether home-based visits have occurred, looks into medical and parental concerns, then lays out a six-week plan of instruction before allowing consideration of a referral.

Having colleagues all over the school who are engaged and geared up to think about new ways to help kids succeed has been a boon for the students, says Sherfield--and energizing, too.

"Mary and I had a debate one day in the hall," she says. "We were both debating about our different methods, and it was funny because I was saying, 'I believe in this way' and she was saying, 'I believe in that,' and we were talking also about what we both did like. But some people thought we were really upset at each other. We weren't. We were just excited."

Sharing ideas, in fact, is a constant. "I've had older teachers come in my room and say, 'You know, that's not working in our room,'" says Sanders. "So I have gone and just taken my whole class and we spend a week in that teacher's classroom doing a writing workshop to show that teacher how to implement reading and writing strategies through journal writing." Sherfield says she often goes to the special education teachers, and she'll say, "Okay, this is the situation I'm having. I've tried all these things, but I still want to hear from your area."

The Challenge
For all the energy and innovation, though, the teachers concede change has not been easy. They face great pressure teaching struggling kids, knowing they can't so easily move on if things aren't going well. "Many kids come to school angry," says Penny Call, a second-grade at-risk teacher. "I just think they're frustrated, but they come in defensive because they haven't learned. It's not that they can't, but they just missed it somewhere. So I've learned you really have to take a lot of time and talk to them. You set the pace a little slower then slowly speed up. If they get out of control, you don't say, 'I don't have the time; go sit in the corner.' You say, 'What's up today? I'm sorry you didn't sleep well. It's okay to be mad, but let's figure out how we can let go of that anger."

Call thinks of a child she teaches who smiles every time he gets in trouble. "It used to make me so mad because I thought he was being rude, laughing at me, but he wasn't. That's just inside him--his instinct."

Understanding the nuances can make for a bumpy ride--which is why the behavior management strategies and cultural awareness training offered under Lee v. Macon helped, says Sanders. "It was a great refresher on stuff I'd forgotten."

But there are other issues, too, not the least of which is actually having time. "It's hard," says Sanders. "I have 12 children reading on 12 different levels. You need the time to teach them, but you need time to prepare, and especially to talk to parents. You're constantly meeting with parents, because you have to form partnerships to give these children support."

While Clark allows time for professional development every nine weeks--he says he's lobbying for more--even he acknowledges it's not enough. The Alabama Education Association sponsors workshops, as does the school's professional development committee, and teachers can access the Lee v. Macon strategies anytime by CD-ROM. The teachers say they take advantage of those, in most cases using their free time to bone up on new methods. "But then," says Sanders, "you've got to try them out. And that's where patience and persistence comes in."

The Good Fight
National experts say that persistence and patience, in fact, is what will be required at all levels if real change is going to happen--and in many corners the buzz is that it must and will.

Late last year, for example, both the Washington-based Council for Exceptional Children and the National Alliance of Black School Educators held national conferences on the overrepresentation issue. Earlier, the Southeast Regional Resource Center, one of six regional centers established by the federal Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, brought together state administrators to share ideas about what's working to remedy the problem, and what's not. Last September, NEA President Reg Weaver strongly urged President Bush to use his muscle to spur congressional hearings on the issue and all its complexities.

But this is just the beginning, and the panoply of needed fixes can be dizzying. (See interview). "In many ways it starts at the teacher training level," says Asa Hilliard, a renowned professor in the Georgia State University Department of Education Psychology and Special Education. Hilliard, who has studied disproportionality for 30 years, says if more professors of education were truly "master teachers," more of their students would emerge from the ranks with a keener understanding of how to bring out the best in even the neediest kids. Without great training, he says, "neither the genius of children can be revealed, nor the genius of teaching."

Others cite a host of other "musts": stepped up monitoring of school districts by the Office of Civil Rights; more attention to Hispanics, who are often underrepresented because language barriers mask their disabilities; more focus on empowering minority parents, who often are too intimidated by the referral process to effectively advocate for their children; more certified teachers in high-poverty districts. The list goes on.

"It's formidable work," concedes Marilyn Hutton, an attorney in NEA's Human and Civil Rights department. "This is a problem, after all, that's been decades in the making, and it's unrealistic to expect it'll get solved overnight."

"The good news," Hutton goes on, "is that it's finally seeing the light of day--and legislators, policy makers, and educators are actually talking together about addressing it in a system-wide way."

And that, she notes, "is a very promising start."

--Marilyn Milloy

Looking Inward

Imagine queuing up beside 50 people in a room and being ordered to move to the other side if you or anybody in your family has been on welfare. Or been sexually harassed. Or been followed in a department store, or don't identify with Christianity.

How would you feel? Diminished? Embarrassed? Powerful?

James Patton, professor of education at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, routinely engages educators in this so-called "crosswalk" exercise as part of what he calls "cultural therapy"--getting people to come to grips with their cultural "other," as a way of understanding how their own life experiences shape the judgments they make about their students.

His work is part of a growing movement to help educators become "culturally competent"--or as University of South Florida professor Brenda Townsend likes to put it, "culturally responsive"--when interacting with children from backgrounds different from their own. The idea: unless you can accept and respect student differences, understand how to interpret them, then use them positively to help them learn, an unspoken chasm will develop. And biases that can make problems like disproportionality so intractable will fester.

But Patton and others say getting to a place of competency is necessarily hard work because it begins with turning a lens on oneself.

"When people think about culture, most people think, 'Mexican restaurant,'" he says. "They think about dance, customs, or clothes--the surface stuff. But if you look at where it really is, it's underneath where you can't see. The way you view beauty, subordinate relationships, group decision-making--all of these things are out of sight, but they are driven and shaped by culture."

In the case of the crosswalk, Patton explores power and privilege. "Usually the people who have it don't cross over," he says. Because so many kids who are overrepresented in special education come from families who feel powerless--and, in fact, are in many cases--Patton says getting educators to experience what that feels like, albeit simplistically, is often jarring and eye-opening.

But it's just a start. Educators must go the extra mile to understand, for example, that while African-Americans often move, talk, and dress differently, it doesn't mean something is wrong with them. "There are language differences--and I'm not just talking Ebonics, but also slang," says Townsend. Often it's loud and lively--but misinterpreted as confrontational, or dismissed as invalid. African-American boys have been shown to be "vervistic"--they have a propensity for lots of movement and rhythm. "It's very much a part of our culture," yet often that's seen as hyperactivity, says Townsend. Black girls sometimes twist and jerk their necks to communicate, but that's considered rebellious.

To help educators think about how to work creatively with these differences, Townsend and Gwendolyn Webb-Johnson, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, present what they call a "reality classroom" at various conferences and seminars. They use African-American schoolchildren to demonstrate how to deal with issues such as loudness, talking out of turn, aggression--and the often heady issues that emerge out of poverty and family dysfunction.

"It's not about sidetracking academics, or saying a child should not sit quietly," says Webb-Johnson. "It's about meeting him with his strengths first and then using that to teach him what's important in the classroom." Playing hip-hop music to teach rhyme, or using black geometric hairstyles to do math, or pulling from a playground fight to problem-solve--all foster connections and classroom harmony and helps kids learn, Webb-Johnson says.

"It's a challenge," concedes Townsend. "In many ways educators have to learn to be cultural brokers. They have to help kids negotiate behaviors--decide what setting is right for which." Still, she adds, "They can't make kids feel they have to check their culture at the classroom door."

--M.M.

For more: Contact Dr. Brenda L. Townsend at BTownsend@tempest.coedu.usf.edu; Dr. Gwendolyn Webb-Johnson at gwebbj@mail.utexas.edu, and Dr. James M. Patton at jmpatton@wm.edu.

Resources

Meeting the Challenge: Special Education Tools That Work for All Kids and The New IDEA Survival Guide. Contact the NEA Professional Library at www.nea.org/books or 800/229-4200.

NEA Human and Civil Rights Department, annually sponsors sessions on cultural competency at the pre-RA NEA Joint Conference on Concerns of Minorities and Women. Contact Marilyn Hutton at mhutton@nea.org.

NEA IDEA Special Education Resource Cadre helps members access professional development opportunities. Contact Patti Ralabate at pralabate@nea.org.

Minority Students in Special and Gifted Education. National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. Visit www.nap.edu or call 800/624-6242.

Racial Inequity in Special Education, by Daniel J. Losen and Gary Orfield, The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. Visit www.law.harvard.edu/civilrights.

Addressing Over-Representation of African American Students in Special Education: The Prereferral Process, published by the IDEA Partnerships. Visit www.ideapractices.org/resources/files/AddressingOverRep.pdf.

Alabama State Department of Education, Office of Special Education Services. Visit www.alsde.edu or contact Dorothea Walker at dwalker@alsde.edu.

The Council for Exceptional Children: www.cec.sped.org/.

Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence: www.crede.ucsc.edu.

The Politics of IDEA--Revisited

The reauthorization of the 1997 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is now on the political plate in Washington, and the overrepresentation of minorities promises to be one of the hot potato issues. Why? Because the Administration believes that fully funding IDEA--forking over the federal government's long-promised 40 percent share of the funds--might not be so necessary if, in reality, students are being targeted for special education services who don't really need them.

The Problem: The federal government has long balked at fully funding IDEA--it currently only provides 17 percent of the funds the law requires--and so, say NEA officials, using the disproportionality issue to beg off amounts to yet another stalling tactic. In truth, notes NEA lobbyist Kim Anderson, "regardless of how many children are receiving services, special education has always been underfunded because the federal government has never lived up to its promise."

Why fully fund? The number of students in the general population has soared to record numbers over the years and that has meant more special education students. Yet the concurrent need for more resources, says Anderson, has gone neglected. In addition, Hispanic and other minority students have been dramatically underrepresented for certain special education services; their proper identification will bring the numbers up, even if African-American numbers come down. Quality professional development in every school district-- critical to improving both general and special education teaching--will be costly, as well. Finally, the costs of special education for the severely disabled continue to grow as technology advances and increasing numbers are mainstreamed.

NEA urges members to wise up about the importance of full funding--and about other critical principles that will make for a "better IDEA."

How You Can Help: Go to NEA's Legislative Action Center and complete the IDEA survey. Then contact your members of Congress to tell them what you think--and prepare to get involved.