Georgia's Separate and Unequal Special Education System

From The New Yorker, article by Rachel Aviv. Full article here.

A statewide network of schools for disabled students has trapped black children in neglect and isolation

Seth Murrell, a four-year-old boy with dreadlocks to his chin, moved with his family to Atlanta in the fall of 2015. On his first day at his new preschool, he cried the whole morning. He wouldn’t sit still in his chair. He’d pop up and snatch the glasses off a classmate’s face, or spit at the teacher. When he was tired, he waved his arms in the air, begging his teacher to hold him. On the rare occasions that his teacher complimented him, he shouted “Yay!” too loudly.

His mother, Latoya Martin, a hair stylist, had moved with her husband and three children from Donalsonville, a rural town in Seminole County, in the southwest corner of Georgia, to be closer to psychiatrists and neurologists who would understand why her son was developmentally delayed. He couldn’t string words together into a sentence. His teachers called Latoya nearly every day and told her to pick him up early, because he was disrupting the class. When Latoya resisted—she was busy looking for a new job—her friends warned her that the school might call child-protective services if she couldn’t pick up Seth promptly. Latoya sensed that the teachers were accusing her of being a bad parent, so she informed the school’s principal that she had never done drugs and that in high school her G.P.A. had been 4.0. Latoya’s sister Anita said, “They kept saying we needed to work with him more at home. I’m, like, we work with him—that’s not the problem. This is part of his disability!”

After a month, Latoya was told that Seth would be sent to a school twenty minutes away, in the Georgia Network for Educational and Therapeutic Support, a constellation of schools, known as GNETS, attended by four thousand students with emotional and behavioral disabilities. Anita, a public-school teacher in Atlanta for nearly two decades, said, “I was just trying to figure it out in my head—we already have special-ed classes in the schools, so why is there this second system?” GNETS has a ten-per-cent graduation rate, compared with seventy-eight per cent for other public schools in Georgia. …

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.”