Search

Research on teaching students with disabilities has historically been dominated by behaviorist and cognitive theories that privilege the individual as the unit of analysis (Conway & Artiles, 2005)....

Across the United States, the ‘no-excuses’ charter school movement featuring strict discipline policies and rigorous academic standards has gained popularity among schools serving poor and working-...

This study presents a longitudinal analysis of racial inequities evidenced in placement patterns in the least restrictive environment (LRE). We compared placement trends in neighborhoods and charter schools for Black and White students receiving special education services (SRSES). Drawing from the concept of institutional isomorphism and using a longitudinal analysis of odds ratio, we examined annual school data from 2008 to 2012 on students’ placement in the LRE in Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Our findings indicate that over time charter schools mirror neighborhood schools’ (NS) racial inequities evidenced in access to general education classrooms.

Here Kathleen A. King Thorius and Federico R. Waitoller respond to Harvard Educational Review's Spring 2017 forum on their 2016 article “Cross-Pollinating Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and Universal Design for Learning: Toward an Inclusive Pedagogy That Accounts for Dis/Ability.” The forum invited six scholars from the field of disability studies who have helped create and spread culturally sustaining pedagogy to discuss the opportunities and challenges of “cross-pollinating” these two approaches. The authors rejoin the conversation, clarifying and expanding on the forum's comments.

The purpose of this study is to compare and examine special education enrollment trends across disability categories and grade spans for public neighborhood and charter schools in the City of Chicago. Using multilevel longitudinal data analysis methods, we examined annual school enrollment and demographic reports. Our findings indicated that neighborhood schools serve significantly higher proportions of students receiving special education services (SRSE) than charter schools at the aggregate grade level (i.e., elementary and high school enrollments) and at each grade level. In addition, we found that charter schools enroll equal or significantly higher proportions of students with learning disabilities (LD), speech and language impairments (SLI), other health impairments (OHI), and emotional disturbance (ED), and substantially smaller proportions of students with autism, sensory impairments (SI), and intellectual disabilities (ID), when compared with neighborhood schools. However, we found that these differences vary between grade levels. We discuss the implications of these findings for policies affecting charter school authorization and contract renewal, and for policies establishing special education enrollment targets in charter schools.

The purpose of the study was to answer the following questions: (a) What contradictions emerge in the context of a school/university partnership for inclusive education? And (b) How do resident teachers resolve these contradictions as they learned to be inclusive education teachers? Contradictions emerged as teacher residents were required to use in their classrooms pedagogical artifacts taught in the masters’ program that were in conflict with the school district’s curricular policies and mandated practices. We use the notion of curating to explain how resident teachers resolved contradictions in situated practice. We provide recommendations for research and teacher learning efforts for inclusive education.

In this article, Federico R. Waitoller and Kathleen A. King Thorius extend recent discussions on culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) in order to explicitly account for student dis/ability. The authors engage in this work as part of an inclusive education agenda. Toward this aim, they discuss how CSP and universal design for learning will benefit from cross-pollination and then conclude by suggesting interdisciplinary dialogue as a means to building emancipatory pedagogies that attend to intersecting markers of difference (e.g., dis/ability, class, gender, race, language, and ethnicity).

We examined how an inquiry group composed of a university professor, 3 doctoral students, and a grade-level team of 7th- and 8th-grade teachers negotiated their collaborative work. This effort resulted in the development of a 2-week unit that tapped into students’ out-of-school knowledge. Our research question asked how learning occurs within a boundary practice formed by university and middle school participants. We used analytical tools from Grounded Theory to analyze videos of meetings between university and school personnel, field notes, and meeting artifacts. Participants engaged in a dance in which boundaries among institutions and professions were sustained and challenged. The inquiry project became an open-ended learning zone in which all participants sought and gave support in joint action, expanding the mutual understandings of the object of their work. We recommend developing relational agency (Edwards, 2007) to engage in inquiry projects for inclusive education.

In this paper, we focus on the city of Chicago to examine how Black and Latinx parents of students with dis/abilities engage with school choice. Using analytical tools from grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) and a theoretical lens informed by critical notions of space, race and dis/ability, we analyze interviews with parents of students with dis/abilities, field notes, and various artifacts from charter schools (e.g., student handbooks and websites). We found that parents engaged with the politics of desperation (Stovall, 2013): an assemblage of thoughts and rationales to make school decisions amid poor and ableist educational options for Black and Latinx students with dis/abilities. We found that the neoliberal restructuring of urban education space was a driving force shaping parents’ engagement with the politics of desperation. Thus, our study sheds light on the relationship between race, dis/ability, and urban spatial restructuring.

In this paper, guest editors Gutierrez and Waitoller introduce the special issue, Restructuring and Resisting Education Reforms in Chicago’s Public Schools. As a pioneer of neoliberal education reforms, the city of Chicago and its public school system offers a rich context for critical policy scholarship on the dialectic between education restructuring and community resistance against these reforms. First, the authors contextualize Chicago education reforms within the larger neoliberal project by providing an overview of the policies driving the closures of traditional public schools and expansion of charter schools that the contributors to this special issue examine. The authors also address the co-constitutive nature of race and neoliberalism in education policy, and the disproportionate impact these policies have on low-income communities of color. Next, the authors discuss the significance of this collection of papers for educational policy analysis and call for more research that situates examinations of urban educational reforms in their specific socio-historical, political, and economic contexts. The paper concludes with a summary of the articles included in the special issue.

School choice research has provided some initial understandings of how parents choose schools. Parents’ school options are bounded to differentiated choice sets—the menu of school options that parents construct when making school selections. The geographical location where families live and schools are located and families’ race and class differences appear to play a role shaping the constriction of choice sets. In this article, we describe a theoretical framework to address two limitations of research on school choice sets: limited attention to students with disabilities and dichotomization of space and place. We advance a framework that fuses critical notions of space with critical notions of disability and race. This framework allows theorizing on how the construction of school choice sets is shaped by structural and individual factors related to the interactions of students’ race and disability and geographical location.