Author Soyoung Park.
For teachers, parents, and advocates of students with disabilities, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s confirmation hearing—during which she failed to demonstrate any understanding of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), or even remember what IDEA stands for—has raised newfound concerns about how such students will fare under the Trump Administration. What’s more, a push by Republican lawmakers in Congress to enact a nationwide, federally administered school voucher program threatens the rights granted to students with disabilities by IDEA, further marginalizing them.
Soyoung Park, director of online early childhood and childhood special education programs at the Bank Street Graduate School of Education, wants the country’s 7.5 million students who receive special education services—many of them Black, Indigenous, and Latinx—to be integrated rather than segregated and isolated from their peers.
Harvard Education Press
Her latest book, (Re)Imagining Inclusion for Children of Color with Disabilities, is a clearly and forcefully written argument for educational strategies geared to individual children that build upon their abilities, interests, and perceptions. Eschewing both a “factory model” of schooling that prizes conformity and a “medical model” that tries to “fix” the child, she instead offers concrete strategies for teaching and learning that are grounded in Dis/ability Critical Race Studies. This is a framework, she writes, “for critically assessing status quo practices and reimagining what transformation of schooling for children of color with disabilities might entail.”
This transformation, clearly a tall order in President Donald Trump’s United States, is nonetheless visionary and stresses gains that result when teachers have the resources and support they need to create respectful and creative learning communities for their students.
The Progressive spoke with Park about the book shortly before its release. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: You write that Black youth with disabilities are three times more likely to receive their education in a correctional facility than white youth with disabilities. Although a lot has been written about the racist school-to-prison pipeline, can an inclusive model of education break this cycle?
Soyoung Park: From my perspective, prisons are an extreme version of isolation and segregation for people who are deemed to be deviant. This is also what we do in schools. Any time that adults feel that kids are not behaving in ways we feel are appropriate, we push them into special education. We don’t allow kids to be who they are. Rather than trying to figure out what a child’s behavior is attempting to communicate and working to preserve their humanity, many teachers punish children for not following the rigid learning method that is prioritized.
A model where the student is listened to, is given choices, and is treated humanely and with respect and flexibility, gives them a sense of their own value. As I write in the book, “the goal of the school-factory is to churn out productive citizens whose behavior matches the white, middle-class, non-disabled standards of the greater society and who therefore can contribute economically.” Kids pick up when they are considered disposable or unwelcome.
Q: Is this because teacher training programs fail to adequately prepare aspiring educators in alternatives to formulaic, test-driven learning?
Park: Of course, we need better teacher training to give people skills and strategies to use in the classroom, but increasing a teacher’s toolkit is not always the best or only solution. Teachers need to do internal work to let go of controlling everything that happens in a classroom. They need to find ways to address the high stress of working with children so they can embrace many different ways of being human. Having teaching strategies is important, but the starting point is how we, as adults, see kids, especially kids of color. This internal work should be part of every teacher’s preparation so that every educator, not only those assigned to teach special education, has the capacity to meet the needs of children with disabilities in an integrated classroom.
Q: Are there best practices for teaching students with diverse abilities and diverse disabilities?
Park: One of the most effective strategies is to give kids options and structure the environment so there are multiple ways to engage with learning. Some classrooms provide a variety of materials so kids have some agency in terms of how they learn. In other places, kids are given a structured space for project-based learning that allows them to follow their interests. This is extremely effective for kids who might not respond well to text-based lessons.
Q: (Re)Imaging Inclusion argues that students of color with disabilities can be emotionally and intellectually damaged by being isolated or segregated from their peers, but many in the deaf and hard of hearing community argue that separate classes where American Sign Language is used result in better learning. Do you think separate instruction can ever be beneficial?
Park: It is very important to preserve language and culture for many groups of disabled people. I think what’s most important is to give folks the space they need to preserve their identities. Oppressed people need reserved spaces where they can come together. I see this as different from removing kids with disabilities from an inclusive classroom environment. Still, much of this needs to be determined on a case-by-case basis. The reality is that as long as we live in a society that is not designed for the disabled and is certainly not designed for children of color with disabilities, separate environments can sometimes feel better and be more comfortable.
My book is in many ways aspirational. I want to see a world where everyone’s true self is seen and respected as valuable to the human family.
Q: Despite organizing by disability justice activists, people with disabilities continue to be discriminated against and treated as inferior. Can inclusive education play a role in changing this perception?
Park: We certainly need a lot more education about disability overall. We also need to center disabled voices more than we do. Unless people with disabilities are seen and heard, disability will continue to be considered unusual rather than as part of the natural human continuum. In addition, social justice movements can do a better job of centering disability. When many progressives argue in favor of diversity, equity, and inclusion, they address race, gender, and sexuality but ignore disability. Early childhood educators have a role to play as well. It’s not enough to mention disability one day a year at an event or school assembly. From an early age, kids should see people with disabilities represented and integrated into everything. Disability should not be a classroom add-on. Unfortunately, school systems that silo special education apart from general education continue to treat students with disabilities as different.
In the current period, we’ve seen the pendulum swing toward the medical model, with intensive screenings to see if kids are meeting arbitrary developmental markers. Similarly, many schools require teachers to follow a scripted curriculum. I believe we need something else, spaces that value kids for who they are. The disability justice movement has played an important role in pushing back against regimentation. Many parents of children with disabilities and many educators want more humane approaches to allow kids to develop in ways that are intrinsic to who they are. We need to continue elevating this model even though public education is currently under attack.
Q: Special education teachers often leave the field pretty quickly, leading to a revolving door and little academic consistency for students with disabilities. Why do so many teachers leave after just a few years?
Park: A big reason for special education burnout is paperwork. There are so many administrative tasks that get in the way of working with kids and their families. The drive for compliance takes the joy out of teaching. Having more administrative support to help teachers with the bureaucratic demands would help people stay in the field.
Teachers also need time to plan and collaborate with their colleagues. Without this, teaching can be really lonely. When teachers can’t go home and recharge because they have so many forms to complete, the job simply becomes unsustainable.
Q: Public education is under fierce attacks from the right wing. What is your goal for the book since it is coming out in the midst of these attacks?
Park: People from across the political spectrum should be able to relate to the stories in the book—stories that, at their core, are about the universal desire to belong.
I wrote the book because I got tired of walking into learning communities and seeing race and disability exclusion and siloing. I got sick of people seeing Black and brown kids, disabled and not, of all genders, as dangerous or “other.” And I am inspired by the many teachers I’ve met—they are gems—who make inclusion possible for children of color with disabilities. I hope teachers will see themselves in the people whose work I included or see that it’s really not hard to create a classroom that fosters belonging. Finally, I hope administrators will read the book and see how important it is for them to support their teachers. One of the examples in the book is about a classroom with two adults and twenty-eight kids. The teachers established a room that was so trusting and caring. But this required them to not only trust themselves and the kids but be trusted by their administration to do good work despite what looked like disorder.
Our society is obsessed with meritocracy, and this is one of the reasons people with disabilities are too often treated as disposable. Kids with disabilities should not have to earn the right to be in class with other kids. Every kid should belong.
What I’m really advocating is radical love. If we can get to a place where people recognize our common humanity, we might be able to survive as a species.
Q: The federal government is pushing the opposite of this, with proposals for universal voucher programs in every state and block grants to finance public schools. How can we push back against this?
Park: Public education is one of the biggest sites of civil rights for children with disabilities. Universal school vouchers allow independent, private schools to deny access to kids based on neurodiversity or other disabilities. It’s a bad model and is openly discriminatory. Right now, parents, teachers, advocates, and activists need to be vocal.
The potential saving grace is that disability is not a partisan issue. It affects families all over the country in red, blue, and purple states. Lawmakers need to hear from constituents about the importance of education funding and inclusive education. We also have to lift up the stories of children of color with disabilities.
Park’s new book, (Re)Imagining Inclusion for Children of Color with Disabilities, will be published on March 18 by Harvard Education Press.