FORUM

The problem is education not ‘‘special education’’

Gene Fellner

Received: 11 November 2013 / Accepted: 11 November 2013� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Abstract In his article, Urban special education policy and the lived experience of

stigma in a high school science classroom, Chris Hale persuasively argues that the Indi-

viduals with Disabilities Education Act and subsequent special education policies have

largely failed to serve special education students who are stigmatized by their deficit

classification. Though classified students may be doubly stigmatized, research suggests that

students of color who live in economically stressed communities are also subject to sys-

temic educational policies that produce stigma; special education should be understood

within the larger context of educational policy in the inner city. Though we cannot

immediately dismantle the macro level structures that nurture stigma, I suggest pedagogies

based on facilitating phenomenological awareness enacted through individual-collectively

based methodologies to challenge the stigma that classified as well as non-classified stu-

dents in the inner city often carry with them.

Keywords Special education � Deficit lenses � Pedagogy � Inner city

schools � Stigma

Chris Hale’s informative and insightful article well conveys the stigma carried by youth

categorized as special education students. He also makes a strong case that though ‘‘special

education’’ policy emerged from the struggle for civil rights in the United States, the

practice of special education violates the spirit of the laws upon which it was founded,

targets students of color disproportionately and so is discriminatory, excludes special

This review essay addresses issues raised in Chris Hale’s paper entitled: Urban special education policy andthe lived experience of stigma in a high school science classroom. (doi: 10.1007/s11422-013-9548-x).

Lead Editor: G. Reis

G. Fellner (&)College of Staten Island, New York, NY, USAe-mail: genefellner@genefellnerart.com

123

Cult Stud of Sci EducDOI 10.1007/s11422-013-9559-7

education students from the promise of academic learning at its best and too often carries

with it long-term negative consequences for those it was established to serve.

Many scholars, including Alfredo Artiles and Beth Harry (Chamberlain 2005), argue that

special education needs to be understood within the context of general education in eco-

nomically struggling communities of color where the high rate of failure and despair is also

mediated by systemic exclusion from the opportunities afforded young people from more

privileged demographics. In fact, research strongly suggests that the process through which

students are placed within remedial or special education often seems arbitrary since the

classification tends to be mediated by parental ability to navigate the system rather than on any

difference in academic abilities between students who are and who are not assigned IEPs

(McCall and Skrtic 2009). Both special and general education students in the inner city are

disproportionately poor and non-white within a system in which poverty and color continue to

be systemic obstacles to academic achievement (Artiles, Kozleski, Trent, Osher and Ortiz

2010). Inner city students who are not classified often receive their own version of special

education in the form of remedial curricula, which is also demeaning and infused with stigma.

On a national scale, race and class powerfully correlate with special education designations as

well as with remedial programs, which persuasively demonstrates that identified deficits

within school are socially and historically produced and maintained—not genetically

encoded. It also suggests that many individual schools administer special education policy on

a racist basis even though they may not be consciously or deliberately doing so.

Certainly there are youth who are in need of services beyond that which public schools

can provide. As a society, we do not yet understand how to best serve students who are on

the extremes of behavioral or emotional spectrums, or students who are autistic to the

degree of being socially dysfunctional. Though we need to think about how to do so

carefully and unformulaically, these students compose what Alfredo Artiles calls a ‘‘small

minority’’ (Chamberlain 2005, p. 112) of students in special education programs. For the

vast majority of special education students, race and class rather than dysfunction remain

the great mediators of classification and the stigma associated with it (Artiles et al. 2010).

This is partly because, as studies indicate, parents who face economic obstacles and are

otherwise marginalized have a more difficult time navigating the classification process and

advocating for their children than do parents of more privileged youth; they thus find it

harder to reject an IEP determination. Zach McCall and Thomas Skrtic write, ‘‘the degree

to which parents are reduced to passive cases in the special education process depends on

their economic and cultural resources, with privileged parents … in the most advantageous

position in terms of advocating for their children’’ (2009, p. 14). The National Research

council ‘‘confirmed again that learners from historically underserved groups are dispro-

portionately represented in high-incidence disability categories’’ (Artiles et al. 2010,

p. 280). They are also disproportionately represented in classrooms in which remedial

learning is policy (Kozol 2005). The classification of special education students and the

systemic policy of remediation in schools serving inner city students of color are part and

parcel of the same issue: race and class are formidable mediators of educational quality.

Largely because of systemic racism and its links to poverty, Black and Latino children

tend to enter kindergarten with academic skills substantially weaker than those of eco-

nomically more privileged youngsters and they rarely achieve grade level proficiency

(Heckman 2006). The academic and professional underachievement that is propelled

through this dynamic correlates with long-lasting psychological, physical, social and

economic effects (Cunha and Heckman 2010) reflected in high drop out rates (Orfield and

Lee 2005) and high incarceration rates (Harlow 2003). Even though the present imple-

mentation of educational policy may not be fueled by a conscious desire to demean, the

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founding intention of that policy to segregate and stigmatize, rooted in the history of

slavery and legally mandated segregation, remains at its core.

For many of the excluded, persistent systemic academic failure, across generations, gen-

erates a deep unconsciously sustained internalization of the sense that they are unable to

succeed academically because of personal failures and deficits. This stigma can manifest itself

in withdrawal from or undirected rebellion against dominant norms that seem unattainable. The

dialectical dynamic between systemic exclusion and voluntary or semi-voluntary withdrawal

perpetuates the official devaluation of students who do not easily conform to academic stan-

dards and thus appears to justify categories that sustain marginalization. Various aspects of this

process have been analyzed by scholars such as John Ogbu and Maria Eugenia Matute Bianchi

(1986), Allan Luke (2008), and Fred Erickson (1987). Ann Ferguson (2001) explains that the

deficit lenses that shape thought and policy criminalize youth of color at a very young age,

categorizing and stigmatizing them as academically hopeless in much the same way that special

education children are categorized. As we shall see below, pedagogy geared towards remedi-

ation rather than enrichment for those categorized as incapable of higher-level thought is often

the norm in the inner city (Ravitch 2010) where parents of students often lack the social, cultural

and economic capital to resist its imposition (McCall and Skrtic 2009).

Awareness, however, of systemic obstacles that are used to justify remediation and that

produce stigma combined with a collective validation of the often invisible, unrecognized

or ignored strengths and talents that students carry with them has the potential to facilitate

conscious and fruitful resistance to deficit perspectives among those who are stigmatized.

That awareness can be stimulated through phenomenological approaches to pedagogy that

view the experiences of students and the emotions bound to those experiences as funda-

mental to academic achievement. Moreover, it is through an individual-collective dialec-

tical dynamic that these experiences are brought to consciousness, reflected upon and

interpreted. The urgency of implementing such an approach is especially acute in schools

that serve our most marginalized students.

I start this article with a brief discussion of Hale’s text, reflecting on the stigma man-

ifested by the students he focuses on. I then discuss how stigma is also a common com-

panion among general education students within inner city schools. I argue that remedial

education is a version of special education for Black and Latino youth in economically

struggling communities. Finally, I suggest pedagogies that raise awareness among students

of their own capacities despite systemic obstacles to their success; these pedagogies

challenge and can begin to heal identities wounded by stigma. The healing itself confronts

the systemic forces through which stigma flows, and though it cannot by itself destroy

those forces, it can begin to create cracks in their foundations.

In this Forum that builds on Hale’s article, I hope to establish:

• General education students of color in economically struggling communities, like

special education students, are generally assessed through deficit lenses that facilitate

pedagogies based on remediation that carry stigma.

• Because of the narrow lenses through which student abilities are assessed, inner city

schools tend not to recognize the strengths of inner-city students or develop a pedagogy

that builds on these strengths. Schools thus misrepresent students as one-dimensional

representatives of failure. Partly this is due to the epistemological belief that everything

that counts as knowledge can be quantified through tests. I argue that a phenomeno-

logical dimension to pedagogy and assessment that welcomes, recognizes, and reflects

upon students’ experiences in school would foster more engagement with the academic

mission of formal education and greater academic achievement.

The problem is education not ‘‘special education’’

123

• Methodologies and pedagogies that have at their core phenomenological values can build self-

esteem and validate student strengths. The possibilities for this process to be transformative are

enhanced when the individual collective dialectic is surrounded by positive emotions and

group solidarity and nurtures a growing awareness of students’ capabilities. Through such

reflections, the dismantling of structures that facilitate stigma can begin.

Stigma and special education

In the science classroom cogenerative dialog (Tobin 2006) with which Hale begins his article,

the thoughtfulness and passion with which the participants engage each other contrast starkly

with the stigma they carry. Though some of the students may be challenged by standards of

academic, emotional and/or behavioral performance, the transcript and description of their

discussion and their interactions with one another during that discussion reveal no cognitive,

emotional, or behavioral deficits that seem to merit isolating them from other students. Con-

tradicting the official stigmatic representation of these students is the dialogic evidence of these

students’ self-awareness, their understanding of how they have been stigmatized (indicated

through verbal and gestural language) though not why, and the struggles they face to interpret,

accept, defy and deny the labeling practices of authority. Hale quotes Jabbar, a student who

believes that special education is for ‘‘People who struggle at certain things,’’ but Jabbar does

not believe he should be so classified because he ‘‘highly doubts’’ he has a disability. He is upset

by being a ‘‘special education’’ student, as indicated by the description of his walking away from

the group to be by himself. Shanna agrees with Jabbar’s definition of disability by saying, ‘‘I

don’t struggle. I’m smart.’’ The sense of stigma that circulates through the group is made

palpable through the polyphonic conversation about their classification illuminated through

micro and meso video analysis. The video and Hale’s analysis of it provide evidence that these

students are aware that their demeaned status is bound to their special education classification.

They know that their classification results in other students calling them ‘‘retarded.’’ Whatever

academic weaknesses these students have, they are overshadowed in the video by their con-

scious awareness of their exclusion from the mainstream. This awareness, this stigma, plays no

role in how the school determines their classification or their classroom environment, and no

consideration is given as to how the stigma will mediate their academic possibilities, their

outlook on the world and themselves, and their emotional states. How classification itself

mediates students’ experience of their schooling is not included in pedagogical assessments or

curricula planning. It is difficult, however, to understand how a pedagogy can be successful if it

does not explore and address the experiences, infused with the emotions, that students bring

with them into the classroom and those that they generate while there. These emotions have

critical impact on educational achievement and possibility (Erickson 1987).

Hale illuminates the manifestation of stigma in the cogenerative dialog he researched in

order to prepare the groundwork for his main concern, the systemic production of policies

on which stigma rides. Though it is crucial to recognize and oppose the formidable sys-

temic forces that he identifies and that feed stigma, it is equally crucial to confront stigma,

day-to-day, in the spaces where teachers and students are teaching and learning together.

Transformation does not only trickle down from macro scales of ideology and policy to the

meso and micro scales of social interactions within the classroom, but rather change on any

scale mediates what takes place on all the others because these scales are dialectically

engaged. Randall Collins (1981) argues that it is the micro level of unconsciously enacted

activity upon which all scales of activity are founded, but he notes as well, ‘‘micro and

macro are relative terms in both time and space, and the distinction itself may be regarded

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as a pair of continuous variable’’ (p. 987). From an activist stance that values personal

agency as instrumental to achieving justice, it is necessary to engage in transformative

struggle wherever you are and on whatever scale is available to you in the moment

knowing that enacting change on any scale will mediate change on every scale. On the

meso-micro scales of classroom activity that Hale presents, it is not clear if the students

involved in dialog were guided to reflect upon the structures that facilitated their stigma-

infused exclusion from the mainstream, or if they were encouraged to become conscious of

their own strengths while examining their own internalization of deficit perspectives.

Without such reflection, the experience of stigma can easily disperse into the air, gener-

ating pervasive despair but not the tools to reverse it. The phenomenological imperative of

capturing experience through reflection (a re-experience) joined with the drive to interpret

the experience in fruitful ways can create a pedagogy that is relevant, empowering and

academically rewarding, maybe especially to those who are most stigmatized.

Stigma within the general education population of inner city schools

A focus on special education, though important, can distract from the more fundamental

macro conditions that lead to entire school systems, and the neighborhoods within which

they operate, being severely segregated economically and racially. I argue in this article

that the educational system in the United States systemically stigmatizes Blacks and

Hispanics, whether in special education or in general education, by maintaining a largely

segregated school system in which remedial education is normative; it is ‘‘special edu-

cation’’ for poor people and especially poor people of color. This stigma’s internalized

persistence, intensified by continued exclusion from mainstream opportunity, often leads to

poverty-associated stress, anger, neglect and alienation; rarely are these emotional medi-

ators of learning addressed in meaningful ways within school.

In one of his memoirs, Sleepaway School, Lee Stringer (2004) writes about being a

‘‘child at risk’’ belonging to a ‘‘people at risk’’ (p. xi). When in elementary school, Stringer

punched a boy called Richard who sported ‘‘his all-American good looks, the kinds of

looks that buy you an easier time of it all around’’ (p. 5) in response to feelings he himself

did not understand. As a result, Stringer was expelled. Such a disciplinary response to a

Black perpetrator of a fight in school is not unusual even today, over 50 years after the

event Stringer details took place.

Stringer writes, ‘‘To this day I do not remember throwing the punch. …I was as shocked

as he was’’ (p. 5). When the principal asks him why he had bloodied Richard, Stringer is

unable to answer though his thoughts reflect the stigma of being Black, poor, devalued and

alienated from mainstream society, the same qualities that Hale uses to characterize the

stigma of being classified as a special education student:

Maybe it was just that it was a Thursday. Thursday afternoons we had social studies.

… The slave ships. The plantations. The North. The South. The Civil War. The

Negro. A heritage all too stingy on the kind of valor, honor, courage and greatness

that seemed to amply color all the rest of recorded history. All it did was make me

squirm. It reeked of lowliness with which I had no interest in being associated.

Race and class often serve to brand the stigma of exclusion and underachievement onto

Black and Latino youth at a very young age, making it seem, on a deep unconscious level, as if

dark skin—a personal, inherent and unalterable feature—rather than policies inscribed with

hegemonic thought, lead to reduced ability and possibility. The stigma emerges from the

The problem is education not ‘‘special education’’

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dialectical interrelationship between the prejudices of the dominant culture, inscribed in and

perpetuated by racist structures, and the unconsciously constructed early internalization of

dominant logic by the victims of exclusionary policies. The stigma of underachievement and

failure, then, spreads far beyond those students who are classified as special education stu-

dents into the general population of underserved youth, also disproportionately Black and

Hispanic. An aspect of this dynamic has been given the name, Stereotype Threat. Claude

Steele (2003), who coined the term with her colleagues, defines stereotype threat as ‘‘the

threat of being viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype, or the fear of doing some-

thing that would inadvertently confirm that stereotype’’ (p. 111). Steele found that when

students believe that the stereotype about their group has validity, they tend to perform less

well on tests. Her research demonstrating that believing the stereotype mediated achievement

also showed that when the belief was successfully challenged performance improved. This

overcoming of stigma reflects the possibilities of transformation through a meso level indi-

vidual-collective dialectical process in which group awareness can, by challenging hege-

monic thought, diminish the individual internalization of stigma. It is an example of

awareness and resistance being able to transform seemingly predetermined trajectories. To be

clear, systemic conditions powerfully mediate underachievement, but diminishing stigma

through conscious examination of its foundations can weaken hegemony’s strength.

Remedial learning as educational policy in the inner city

[Writing Template- Students are told that everything not in bold is to be copied word for word] Dear ____________, OR Title (Grab the readers' attention by starting with a hook). This (word, question, quote, image) comes to my mind when I think about the following issue. It has been brought to my attention that (state the issue). After careful consideration of this pertinent issue, I have come to an objective conclusion and I strongly (give position ). Please continue to read my (letter/essay) as it will serve to explain my reasoning. First, I'd like to start by mentioning that (state first reason). Recent studies conducted by (newspaper, school, organization, person) found that (give research to support the reason. Don't repeat the reason). This shows that.___________ could relate to this because (make a connection by giving an example). After this experience, I learned that (explain how the experience relates to the first reason.) Second, (state second reason). For example, (name a famous or important person) once said, "(provide quote or opinion about the second reason. It can bemore than one sentence). This shows that (explain how quote/opinion relates to the second reason). Imagine (have the audience imagine something powerful that has to do with your reason. Put THEM in the situation. DETAILS!) All in all, the above-mentioned reasons have clearly indicated why (repeat your position). Keep in mind that (repeat 1st and 2nd reason). I understand that this may be difficult, but I think the right decision will be made for the betterment of (school, students, safety - whatever the issue is). After reading my (letter/essay), I hope you do the right thing. Don't disappoint us!

Middle school writing template for persuasive essay

G. Fellner

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The stigma mediated by the legacy of racist social and economic policies that replaced

slavery is perpetuated in schools by canned teaching and rote learning that would not be

tolerated in schools that serve middle-class populations. It is, nevertheless, often the norm

in the segregated inner city where students are more likely to be considered deficient

intellectually, culturally and emotionally, and where their parents do not have the social or

political capital to change school policy. In these schools, critical thinking skills are much

less likely to be supported and valued than they are in schools that serve the working

classes and the poor (Anyon 2005). In one inner city middle school I visited, eighth graders

were told to write a persuasive essay following a prescribed template (see above) from

which many of the sentences had to be copied word-for-word. I read almost fifty persuasive

essays, each one of them containing three identical lines: ‘‘But after careful consideration I

have come to the objective conclusion that…’’ ‘‘Please continue to read my essay as it will

serve to explain my reasoning,’’ and ‘‘After reading my letter, I know you’ll do the right

thing.’’ The teacher explained to the students that they had to copy the template but assured

them, ‘‘Once I know you understand what belongs where, I’ll let you use your own

sentences.’’ Jonathan Kozol (2005) has repeatedly condemned the remedial learning and

rote exercises that are forced upon inner city students in segregated schools of color, the

low critical thinking skills that are demanded of them, and the disciplinary policies they are

forced to submit to. Though special education students within inner city segregated schools

may be doubly stigmatized, students within the general population of inner city schools are

also subjected to pedagogies that carry stigma, mostly on the unaware and therefore

difficult-to-combat level of social life.

Case studies: alternate research methodologies and pedagogical approachesto assessment and achievement

The video files of students that Hale reviewed made visible data that were previously unrec-

ognized—his evidence challenged the narrow constraints of official data collection and

interpretation. Nancy Fraser writes, ‘‘interpretations are political acts’’ (McCall and Skrtic

2009, p. 9). Even before interpretation, what you choose to observe (what you count as data)

and the vantage point from which you observe are also political acts. They affect how we think

about education. In schools, tests that quantify are generally the major tools of assessment and

advancement. The scores students receive tend to confirm the preconceptions that go hand-in-

hand with deficit lenses because they correlate strongly with racial and class demographics.

They seem to validate the categories into which students have been placed reaffirming the

perspectives that led to their initial establishment. They are used to justify the ranking of

students from most to least ‘‘able’’—with ‘‘disabled’’ being on the bottom. What cannot be

quantified does not count as knowledge within this framework, and so data that might con-

tradict the reduction of student knowledge to a number on a form is not admitted as relevant.

Viewing students as complex and multidimensional reflects a different ontological and

axiological stance, a journey outside the narrow confines of official procedures. It com-

plicates policy, challenges rigid assessments based only on standardized tests, disputes the

quantification of knowledge as the only means of evaluation, and illuminates students’

strengths as well as their weaknesses thus confounding efforts to rank students according to

a predetermined scale. The methods that reflect a multidimensional approach to teaching

and learning include close observation of students, constructing relationships with them

built on trust and support, and creating an environment in which student voices, inter-

pretations, emotions and experiences are valued. Consciously sensing and centralizing

The problem is education not ‘‘special education’’

123

student experience itself is the phenomenological aspect of these methods. Reflecting upon

and interpreting the experience could be called the hermeneutic dimension though when I

speak of phenomenology I will use it to embrace both the sensing and interpreting of

experience.

Stigma is created through an individual-collective dialectic, an internalized shame

mediated by judgment from others that is recursively facilitated by socially-constructed

categories based on deficit perspectives. Like stigma, awareness is also mediated by an

individual-collective dialectical process. In the following case studies, I demonstrate a

phenomenologically infused pedagogy that rests on an individual-collective dialogic

engagement; the collective production of positive emotions and solidarity raises students’

awareness of their own strengths and possibilities. Such awareness is an important step on

the way to eradicating structures that stigmatize and ostracize students so fundamentally

that their self-images themselves become enduring structures impeding the full develop-

ment of their potential. Whereas the dialectical dynamic that mediates stigma is distorted

by power and exclusion (exercised through domineering structures and hegemonic

thinking), the dialectical dynamic that facilitates awareness is enriched through collec-

tively produced attention, patience and love. For this reason, a pedagogical approach that

illuminates this negative individual-collective dialectic and confronts it with a radically

positive one can break the downward cycle of deterministically-inclined patterns of failure.

The positive dialectic makes available a set of resources and positive emotions that

enable a reflexive re-experiencing of social life and a rewriting of possible future

trajectories.

Ana and Lourdes

Three years ago, Ana, then an African-American seventh-grader who had had an IEP,

showed me her memoir. It was written in response to a class assignment and specific

prompts I had given the students. The memoir assignment was the first one of the school

year, especially designed to focus on the experiences of the students themselves. This

project recognized that these mostly underperforming students were experts in at least one

subject—their own lives. The brainstorming prompts, preceding the first draft, asked

students to identify and then discuss with each other one of the most important events of

the last 3 years, the people involved in that event, and the setting, colors, sounds, textures,

smells, dialog and feelings associated with it.

Ana had failed the language arts standardized test and her reading assessment placed her

on about a third grade reading level. When I asked her why she had not done better on the

tests she replied, ‘‘I can’t stay focused on them. I look at the tests and just hear music. Like,

I don’t want to know this. Give me some real stuff. This is all fake.’’ Though Ana’s

statement could be taken at face value, and probably reflects at least part of what she feels,

it could also be interpreted as a defense against humiliation. When she received her score

on the standardized test, she showed it to me and whispered, ‘‘I gotta read better to get into

college.’’

Though Ana’s writing for school was mostly lackadaisical and unremarkable, reflecting

maybe her disinterest in the assignments, her memoir was rich with descriptive language,

‘‘One night in my kitchen with its dimmed light all you could see was the black and white

stove, the off white fridge, the dusty old glass table set and what was left of the wooden

cabinets.’’ Her memoir also conveyed a thirst for knowledge, ‘‘I asked Mimi, ‘Is God and

the Bible on my side?’ I wanted a bible so I could understand more.’’ In addition to Ana’s

descriptive powers, her memoir included dialog, character development, and reflective

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123

thought, all demonstrating her close following of the prompts and engagement with the

assignment. These skills and sensibilities were not reflected in Ana’s grades or her tran-

scripts, which labeled her as a failing and undistinguished student, a 200 out of a possible

300, an adolescent who is deficient as a writer, reader and thinker even though, as her

memoir reveals, the event she chose to write up as one of the most important of her life

revolved around her thirst to ‘‘understand more’’ rather than a birthday celebration or a trip

to Disney Land. The transcripts did not recognize her acute powers of observation, her love

of language, her thoughtfulness, or her attempts to make sense of her life through writing.

In Ana’s case, none of this officially counted as knowledge. Like most of her classmates,

her test scores combined with her demographic characteristics conveyed a stereotypical,

generalized image of failure.

Ana, her teacher, and I worked together on her memoir for 3 months, and the memoir

went through many versions as we developed a relationship of trust and respect. We

worked with her to improve her academic writing and thinking skills while working on a

project that engaged her deeply. In this way, we gave Ana individualized attention and

differentiated instruction within an emotionally nurturing dialogic context (which an IEP is

supposed to facilitate) and helped her become aware of the significance of her own

experience.

Weeks after the memoir was completed, Ana showed me some love poems she had

written on her own time to help her navigate the turmoil of her own life and, the following

year, Ana, asked me if I would come to her school and look at new poems she had written.

One of them began, ‘‘I was once with a person I gave everything to. He was always first

when I was last. He had my whole heart when I only had half of his.’’ She and I, and two

friends of hers who had just returned from suspension, discussed her poems while sitting in

the corner of one of the school corridors, probing her experiences with and conceptions of

love and parsing the meaning of her metaphors. Her former language arts teacher joined

our discussion and then we read her poems to a 7th grade language arts class telling them

that a poet they knew had written them. They thought maybe it was Maya Angelou. Ana

was present in the classroom while the students, over a period of 90 minutes, related her

poems to their own lives, interrogating their own experiences of love. They were astounded

when they found out that Ana was the poet. Many of them, failing students like Ana, told

us, ‘‘We’re poets too,’’ a recognition that they could be powerful writers despite failure

after failure on the state exams that discouraged them from putting their best efforts into

the tests (a possible manifestation of stereotype threat as described earlier). Ana had helped

them become aware of their owns strengths, and conveyed the knowledge that their own

lives were worth writing about and had something to offer others. Through doing so, Ana

had also become aware of her own power as a writer despite the tests that told her she had

little ability.

There is no way to know for certain if the relationship we had established during the

memoir exercise served as a stimulus for Ana’s sharing her poems, but it is reasonable to

think so. What is certain is that neither her teacher nor I knew that she wrote for herself,

and the public record made no mention of it. It assessed her on the basis of narrowly

conceived data that magnified her weaknesses and ignored her strengths. Because the

nature of the collective-individual dynamic that we established with Ana was radically

supportive and indeed celebratory of her strengths, Ana chose to show us her poems, gave

us entry into her life, and allowed us to reflect with her on her experiences and the

emotions associated with them; we were then able to discuss these with her entire language

arts class. We then compared the themes Ana addressed in her writing with themes in texts

by famous authors thus boosting Ana’s self-esteem, disseminating the idea that failing

The problem is education not ‘‘special education’’

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students could be excellent writers, combating stereotype threat, and facilitating the notion

that school could be engaging and useful. The collective support of teachers and peers

discussing Ana’s experiences as conveyed through her writing mediated Ana’s self-image.

In effect, we engaged in a phenomenological pedagogy through an individual-collective

dialogic engagement that raised student awareness of the possibility of expressing indi-

vidual talents and experiences to counter the systemic obstacles that prevented their

valuation.

If Ana, unbeknownst to her school, writes compelling essays and poems on her own

time, how many other students who fail language arts are also using language to make

sense of their lives in ways that schools do not notice and, therefore, cannot incorporate in

their assessments? If the experiences of our students are not welcomed in school, if they do

not become central to the type of pedagogies we enact, we will never know the answer to

that question.

But we know, for certain, there are other students like Ana. Two years ago, Lourdes,

then 12-years-old, inspired by the reading of Ana’s poetry in her classroom, told us that

she, too, was a poet. She convinced her classroom teacher and me to start an after-school

poetry workshop. Lourdes is a Puerto Rican adolescent. Like Ana, she straddles the border

between failure and success on the standardized language arts tests; one year she scored

one point below failure, the next year one point above failure. Statistically, like Ana,

Lourdes’s future is bleak, and like Ana, official data represent Lourdes as one more

undifferentiated example of failure. Lourdes like Ana, however, is a talented poet and

could become an important writer if her talent were recognized and nurtured, and if the

experiences that were the fount for her poems were central to making formal education

relevant to her.

I invited Lourdes and her language arts teacher to the College of Staten Island (CSI)

where I teach a course in literacy pedagogy for pre-service teachers of special education.

Lourdes was beside herself with excitement about co-teaching a college class with me. In

the weeks before the event, she met repeatedly and enthusiastically with me and her

language arts teacher to discuss her poetry with us and talk about how she might approach

sharing her insights about her own life and about writing with graduate students. The

intensive attention and the serious questions we posed helped Lourdes and us reflect on her

work, and it made Lourdes feel as if she had something to offer others despite her low

score on the language arts tests. And she did have something special to offer. Lourdes led

the class in a 2-hour discussion of her poetry, a discussion that also provided insight into

her life as an adolescent Puerto Rican living as what Lee Stringer called ‘‘a child at risk’’

belonging to ‘‘a people at risk’’ in an underserved community of color. Lourdes had never

been on a college campus before or read her poems to anyone outside of her teacher and

her classroom peers. When a pre-service teacher asked her how such an inspirational writer

could receive failing scores in language arts she replied, ‘‘It kind of all goes with the whole

point that kids have hidden talents. Just by a standardized tests, you can’t tell that a kid

could have such feelings and turn such words into poems or stories.’’ I do not think

Lourdes would have been aware of that contradiction had we not discussed her talents with

her, discussed her transcripts with her, discussed her life and her community with her, and

given her a forum in which she could shine. We engaged with her in a phenomenologically

infused pedagogy that rested on an individual-collective dialogic process that mediated

consciousness of the systemic barriers to academic success.

I also do not know how to quantify what Lourdes learned at CSI, or speak definitively

about the relationship between Lourdes speaking at CSI and her future academic trajectory,

but she repeatedly asked if I would invite her back to the college this year, and her belief in

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the possibility of actually attending college was strengthened. She felt empowered and

exhilarated by the experience of having master’s students look up to her and ask her

questions. She became aware that her presence and her writing enriched the lives of others

who had much greater economic and social capital than she had. She became aware of her

academic powers despite her failing test scores. She changed the way master’s students

thought about the underserved in the inner city, and the collective-individual dynamic

transformed how she thought of herself. The class she taught received the most favorable

student ranking of all the classes that semester.

Reina

I first met Reina a few years ago in a 6th grade special education class of about fifteen

students. She was a sullen 11-year-old Puerto Rican student in a mostly Hispanic class in a

mostly Hispanic school. She ignored most of her teacher’s requests and directives and

occasionally responded with hostile words. Reina would barely speak to me when I tried to

engage her in a conversation.

One day last year, Lourdes asked if she could bring her older sister to our poetry

workshop; it turned out her older sister was Reina. Though quiet and withdrawn at first,

Reina began to actively participate, first by passing notes with her thoughts written on them

to the teacher; I could not believe it was the same sullen young woman I had seen 2 years

earlier. When we took Lourdes to Staten Island, Reina wanted to come as well. On the way

to the campus Reina told us that she was ‘‘too dumb’’ to go to college, manifesting the

stigma that Hale writes about. Once in the college classroom, Reina set up the video

camera, demonstrated enthusiastic pride in her sister’s poems, and was actively engaged in

the conversations that were taking place, laughing often and occasionally responding to

questions directed at her or her sister. I do not know why Reina was and remains classified

as a special education student, but I do know that there was nothing that took place during

the time I spent with her that indicated needs greater than many of my other students who

are not classified. Indeed her participation in our class and in the poetry workshop indi-

cated that she could thrive in a general education setting, a segregated environment that

would nevertheless be a less restrictive environment than the special education setting. The

video of Lourdes and Reina together at CSI provides evidence that contradicts the story

told by the official statistical record.

How might we theorize Reina’s transformation when working with her sister, with her

teacher and with me during our poetry sessions and the Staten Island class? The trans-

formation, I believe, was facilitated by a positive collective-individual dialectic, a sensed

feeling of solidarity that was not subject to measurement or quantification, an awareness

that her life and her experience counted. When she began participating in the poetry group

and when she was so enthusiastic about going to CSI, there was an alignment of resonant

emotional structures in which exclusion or marginalization played no role. It never

occurred to us to define Reina by whatever deficits were reported on her school assess-

ments. Reina felt as if she belonged to our group, was welcomed there nonjudgementally,

and that her contributions were attentively considered. She became aware that she had

something valuable to offer us, that she was appreciated, and that she was not being defined

by an externally imposed label. The collectively facilitated awareness that Reina was

multidimensional and vibrant helped her manifest the fullness of her spirit and recognize

within herself a self that was invisible within the special education setting.

In this section I have introduced three middle schoolers: Ana, Lourdes and Reina. One

was classified as a special education student (Reina), one had been classified (Ana), and the

The problem is education not ‘‘special education’’

123

third did not have an IEP (Lourdes). All three of them were stigmatized by officially

validated data that represented their deficits but excluded their strengths. Lourdes and Ana

were able to recognize the injustice of the stigma associated with their test scores (though

this does not mean that the stigma was erased). Reina was doubly stigmatized by being

classified as a special education student, a condition we hope to examine with her further

over the coming years.

Education and special education

Hale documents the injustices that suffuse special education in our schools, the stigma that

follows students with IEPs throughout their lives, and the difficult trajectories these stu-

dents have finding work and/or continuing in higher education. In this Forum article, I

suggest that the injustices, the stigma, and the obstacles to achieving a fulfilled life are not

limited to those in special education but disproportionally target Black and Hispanic

students whether they have or do not have IEPs. The stigma is rooted in a history of

systemic oppression, produced, maintained and perpetuated by deficit lenses, which finds

one of its most enduring manifestations in the general education classes of our inner-city

public schools.

Though many Blacks and Hispanics overcome the systemic obstacles that they face as

they pursue their dreams, race and class too often structure formidable barriers to success

that are then used to justify the deficit perspectives that in turn fortify the oppressive

structures in what seems an unending cycle. The structures become especially insidious

when those they victimize internalize them as valid; it is the internalization combined with

the deficit lenses operating through an unexamined collective-individual dialectic that

produce stigma. All these structures, however, are socially produced, and they can all be

socially dismantled. While macro structures are formidable, they are vulnerable as well,

and resistance on every level of activity can create cracks in their edifice. Fruitful resis-

tance begins with awareness, and pedagogies that foster consciousness of hegemonic

structures and personal strengths are key to producing healthier and more just societies.

Pedagogical approaches that are phenomenologically imbued and are enacted through a

collective-individual dynamic that facilitates positive emotions and solidarity can radically

confront the forces that produce stigma and begin to reverse its effects. Though such a

pedagogy, by itself, will not topple the racial and class inequities that on a systemic scale

stigmatize so many of our students and frustrate their prospects, it will contribute to the

process of awareness and reflection that will lead to their transformation.

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Author Biography

Gene Fellner is an adjunct assistant professor of education at Lehman College and at the College of StatenIsland (CSI), both part of the City University of New York. He teaches courses on research methodology atLehman and literacy courses for pre-service special education teachers at CSI. Gene is interested inilluminating the knowledge students bring with them to school that is suppressed, demeaned and ignored byofficial tools of evaluation. He also explores how recognition of the artistic dimensions of daily socialinteraction might advance pedagogy, social justice, and educational exuberance.

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