“21st Century Re-Segregation Plan: Wrongly Classifying Students as Special Needs.”

During my tenure as a student in the public school system in the 1970's and 1980's, if I or any number of classmates required additional assistance in reading, writing, or arithmetic we'd receive tutoring to improve in the subject, and we went on with life. However, fast forward to the 1990's, and today more youth, disproportionately African Americans, are being labeled as "special needs" students in which academic achievement is not expected from them.

In the September 2010, the Guardian noted that the number of children said to have 'mild' special needs had increased from 14% to 18% in the past seven years. In some cases, the report described 15-16 year old students who were said to have special needs were at risk of falling short of their GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) grades. After receiving the special needs classification, the students received additional mentoring from senior staff' and improved in their schoolwork. It was suggested that, rather than wrongly classify or 'label,' students as having special needs, it's suggested that better teaching be required. This is not a new phenomenon of the claim that more students are receiving diagnoses of learning disabilities.

In 2011, it might seem more the norm, or nothing so remarkable, for a child to have disorders that represent the alphabet soup of ADHD, ADD, PDD-NOS, ED, LD, SPD, and on and on and to require social services in the form of speech therapy, behavioral specialist, occupational therapy and therapeutic staff support. In the Republic it’s more common to ask, “Hey, does your child have a diagnosis,” than not. Additionally, it is easy to say that students the are classified as special needs lack parental involvement but this doctrine is a generalization that we can no longer afford nor accept because what is clearly occurring is school officials have decided that it is convenient and cost effective--for them to stamp the “seal of special needs” on a child rather than provide the resources to assist them to improve academically and socially.

For example, the parents and students in suburban Philadelphia filed suit against their school district for classifying black children as special education students improperly (Blunt et al v. Lower Merion School District). In July 2007, the African American families filed a class action lawsuit in federal court and claimed the district had failed to provide a proper education to their children. According to Sonja Kerr of the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia and director of the organization's Disabilities Rights Project, "The district is essentially wrongly using its special-education programs to resegregate their schools...Teachers and other staff often have unfairly low expectations for minority students, and they also often misperceive cultural differences as disabilities. What we hear from families is that this has been going on for generations." Those attitudes and misunderstandings lead directly to the racial disparity you see in Lower Merion schools. LMSD has definitely been aware of this problem since 1997 when it first created committees to address the problem, but the system has not improved."

Conversely, no matter how school administrators attempt to "juke" the statistics, the illiteracy and dropout rate among our youth is catastrophic. Further, one out of every 100 children are wrongly being branded special needs because they may require additional academic enrichment in one or two subjects but are relatively good students academically and socially and don’t warrant the stigma. To be issued the title “special needs” it might as well be stated: "If you require any additional academic and social assistance, there will be in essence no opportunities for you...not now or ever!"



“Progressives will bring balance to the Republic.”
Anthony P. Johnson