Depleting Special Education Oversight Will Enable Bureaucratic Sadism
Author Note: One of my most important pieces of advice for current Special Education students is that they may encounter many situations that cause legitimate righteous indignation, but not to let that indignation drive all of their decisions. I want today’s Special Ed students to know that no matter what bigots want for them, they deserve a meaningful life built on purpose and integrity. But I urge such students not to make anger about the barriers society places in the way of that life a bedrock of their identity. Don’t let anger crowd out opportunities for forgiveness and love.
Editing note: An unpublished version of this blog was initially edited by Alice Wong.
Content Note: Ableist slurs, discussion and depiction of overt discrimination.
As with all systems that serve people with disabilities, the Special Education system is built in a way that makes it easy for ableist bureaucrats to abuse their power over vulnerable people.
It is imprudent that in addition to the bevy of recent policy downgrades done to make some disability rights laws perceived as inordinately stringent be less “unduly burdensome”-such as radically reducing staff at the US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR)-the government has also attempted to fire most of the staff who oversee the implementation of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) during last year’s government shutdown. The government has also illegally moved Special Education oversight to the Department of Health and Human Services and cut dozens of grants for services like deaf-blind education and transitional programs. These changes have led to disabled students’ OCR complaints being stalled, weakened the Special Education infrastructure and shifted important oversight of IDEA to whatever authorities the government thinks should be entrusted with that task.
We can already see school districts taking advantage of weakened civil rights oversight, such as the Houston Texas School District demanding that Special Education students with intellectual disabilities learn only at designated schools instead of at their neighborhood schools.
Even if there weren’t so many examples of the Special Education infrastructure being eroded, my experiences tell me that hurriedly diluting and restructuring IDEA oversight and implementation will exacerbate the problem of Special Education students receiving a substandard education.
When I was a Special Education high school student between 1998 and 2002, people called Special Education students “SPEDS,” and I often heard teachers and students say things like:
Another teenager to me: “You’re a SPED? And you’re reading a book? That’s crazy. SPEDS are stupid and aren’t smart enough to read books!”
Social Studies teacher: “I used to work with r–. Oh, I’m sorry we can’t say that anymore, “Special Needs.” All I did there was rip people apart and keep them from killing each other.”
Teachers having a conversation in the hallway:
Teacher A: He said I was going to ruin his chances for college.”
Teacher B: “What does he mean? He’s a SPED, he’s stupid; he’s not going to college.”
But the comments weren’t Special Education students’ main problem; ambiguous laws gave authority figures the power to try to make Special Education students fulfill those stereotypes.
Between my sophomore and senior years of high school, Special Education and Guidance staff did the following things:
- Didn’t implement my sophomore IEP in a math class and told me to drop the class. As a junior I learned that I needed the class for college and fought to enroll in the class as a senior. I pointed out that I hadn’t completed the class because they had illegally violated my IEP. Staff tried to lean on the fact that the deadline for filing an IDEA complaint had already elapsed.
- The year that my IEP was violated, a bipartisan Massachusetts legislature lowered the state’s “Maximum Feasible Benefit” standard for Special Education to the federal Free and Appropriate Public Education “slightly more than the minimum” standard. Guidance and Special Education personnel claimed that because of that standard, the school only had to provide accommodations in classes that were “appropriate” for me to take, and that my dyscalculia was so severe that enrolling me in the class would be “inappropriate.”
- I did eventually manage to enroll in the class, but at the time, the law didn’t require Special Education teachers to be highly qualified in the subjects they provided intervention in, so the Special Education teacher didn’t understand the math curriculum; my family had to hire a tutor to do the Special Education teacher’s job.
- I later learned that the math class was a state graduation requirement, but no one told me that.
- Staff said that hiring a proctor for me to take the SAT II, which at the time was a version of the SAT that could help students show off their writing ability, was a waste of their money and wasn’t legally required because the Americans With Disabilities Act didn’t require schools to provide services that were “unduly burdensome” for them.
- Staff told me that actually, Special Education students didn’t go to college, so I shouldn’t bother taking any standardized tests at all.
Bigoted comments are upsetting, but they can, on some level, be “brushed off.” The worst things about this situation were the loopholes in the law that enabled staff to try to manipulate my choices.
For instance, one of the staff members most insistent on me not taking college entrance exams was my guidance counselor “Dr. D.” I was able to arrange to take the regular SAT off campus with a proctor who didn’t know me, but for whatever reason that wasn’t an option for the SAT II, and when I insisted on taking the SAT II, Dr. D. was able to exploit loopholes in the Educational Testing Services’s testing procedures for disabled students to make the process as miserable as possible. The regulations allowed schools to choose the proctor and give students standardized tests at whatever place or time was convenient for the proctor. This flexibility seems reasonable enough on paper and could have turned out fine. But, Dr. D. appointed himself as the proctor. Because I was getting double time on the exam, I wasn’t allowed to take the test on a Saturday morning like other students. He demanded that I take the test from 2 PM in the afternoon to 8 PM alone with him in his office, where he gleefully taunted me and violated my accommodations throughout the exam.
Unfortunately, this guidance counselor had control over several aspects of the college admissions process, so I had to be alone with him in his office several times.
For example, one day I dropped off paperwork at his office and he asked, “Meghan, did I upset you with what I said yesterday?”
“Well, what you said about ‘treating me differently’ hurt my feelings,” I said.
He said, “Well, you have to understand, you hurt me too, not to get into anything or anything.”
“How have I hurt you?” I asked.
“You kept interrupting me during the SAT, saying, “Why are we doing this now, why are we doing this now?”
(I asked this because he was conducting testing procedures in strange ways that violated my accommodations).
We went back and forth about a couple of other things, and I said,
“This is forbidden by my 504 plan.”
“Is it?” he sneered.
“Yes, and you were making noise,” I said.
“Oh.” he said.
(My accommodations for ADHD included a quiet environment, but he loudly shuffled papers, tapped files on his desk, printed paperwork and opened and closed file drawers while he was sitting across the table from me.)
The guidance counselor had insisted on appointing himself as my test proctor but, when I showed up to take the SAT II, I noticed that two other disabled students taking the regular SAT had been allowed to start their tests in the morning and were taking the SAT with hired proctors. So, I said,
“And you told me that you were giving the test to two other students, and when I showed up to take the test proctors had been hired to give the test to two other students, and you said you weren’t hiring proctors to give anyone’s test.”
“I said that I wasn’t going to hire anyone to give your test,” he taunted.
“That’s not what you said at the meeting,” I answered.
“Oh,” he quipped dismissively.
“And, if you were just going to give us the test together anyway, why would you make it so inconvenient for us by making us take it from the middle of the day until 8 PM? I mean, wouldn’t it be more convenient for you to just come in on a Saturday morning and give it to us? Why would you want to spend your entire evening doing that?”
“Meghan, what does your father do for a living?” he demanded.
“That’s not relevant.” I said.
“Yes it is. What does your father do for a living?”
“He’s a dentist,” I said.
“A dentist. And does anyone tell him when to do his job?”
“That has no relevance.” I answered.
“Yes it does. Why should I give up my Saturday just to give you a test?”
“Well, then why can’t someone else give it?” I asked.
“I do not have to go through the trouble of finding you a proctor.” he scoffed.
“Dr. D, I feel that I’m being discriminated against,” I said.
“Oh really?”
“Yes. You lied about the SAT. You lied about the math class,” I said.
“You’re a very disrespectful girl,” he snapped.
“How am I being disrespectful?” I asked.
“You talk back to me. You talk back to the Special Education Director.”
I answered, “I do not talk back, I’m standing up for my rights. I don’t feel you take my disability seriously.”
“No,” he said. “I know what a learning disability is. This is not about a learning disability. This is about failure to submit to authority. I’m the administrator and you’re the student, and you shouldn’t even be questioning the things you’re questioning. You have no respect for adults, and you do not deal well with them.”
Then he said, “Just wait until you get to college; you’re gonna learn that you can’t treat adults that way. I think it’ll be very different for you.”
When he said this, he smirked, as if he were enjoying imagining my future suffering.
I started to cry, and he kept nodding and saying “uh huh, uh huh.”
“I’m leaving,” I said. “Fine,” he said, “just go.”
In the months proceeding that exchange, the guidance counselor “accidentally” forgot to tell my AP English Exam proctor that I was getting accommodations on the test, and “accidentally” sent my transcripts to colleges without the standard explanation of our school’s weighted GPA system, which led at least one college to think that my GPA was 5 points lower than it really was.
All of this was very clearly discrimination and the system was corrupt, so I approached various people and organizations for help. I went to the Anti Defamation League diversity coordinators at my school, but they said I was experiencing a “personality conflict.” I called the ACLU, but they did not have a disability rights division.
The only agency that would investigate my complaint was the US Board of Education Office For Civil Rights. The process took 2 years to resolve in my favor, long after I had graduated. However, at least I was able to achieve a small measure of accountability. Moreover, after I filed the complaint, the guidance counselor “retired,” so no other disabled students had to work with that horrible bigot.
Multiple experiences like the ones I had in high school had a profound impact on my life. Before high school I had felt called to become a Special Education teacher, but I decided that I didn’t want to be part of that corrupt system. So, I pursued degrees in cultural studies and musicology. This led to wonderful opportunities, like publishing a chapter on eugenic representations of disability and euthanasia in film music; the kind of thing that the sadistic bureaucrats at my high school tried to force me not to do.
But later in my life I revisited my inclination to be a teacher and achieved a Masters in Special Education at the University of Texas at Austin. Now I have a wonderful job teaching at E4texas, UT’s postsecondary program for people with intellectual disabilities.
Teaching other adults with developmental disabilities has shown me that today’s Special Education students still experience bottlenecked potential and discrimination; yet with the right support, they can find the dignity and fulfillment that I have.
But this stampede of disability policy changes-making key disability rights statutes more ambiguous, radically reducing US Department of Education Special Education staff, arbitrarily moving Special Education to HHS and rushing to dismantle agencies like OCR-makes current Special Education students more vulnerable to being dehumanized and denied opportunities to flourish.
To assume that the aforementioned policy changes will turn out well for people with disabilities is to make inordinately generous assumptions about the competency of authority figures and bureaucrats, and the power of good people to resist them. That’s not how the world works.
Meghan Schrader is an instructor and mentor at the E4Texas (Texas Center for Disability Studies) program at the University of Texas at Austin. She has a Master’s degree in special education from the University of Texas at Austin and a Master’s in Musicology from the University of New Hampshire. Her experience growing up with a learning disorder also inspired her to serve on the governing board of the Boston Autistic Self Advocacy Network in 2015 and to volunteer as an education advocate for disabled students in foster care. Her research exploring bioethical issues in respect to musical representations of disability in 1950s America was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. She is the recipient of the 2018-2019 Quell Foundation Fighter scholarship for people who have survived severe mental illness.
About Rooted In Rights
Rooted in Rights exists to amplify the perspectives of the disability community. Blog posts and storyteller videos that we publish and content we re-share on social media do not necessarily reflect the opinions or values of Rooted in Rights nor indicate an endorsement of a program or service by Rooted in Rights. We respect and aim to reflect the diversity of opinions and experiences of the disability community. Rooted in Rights seeks to highlight discussions, not direct them. Learn more about Rooted In Rights.
