Abstract
This chapter examines public policy as it applies to public education for students with disabilities in the United States. Public policy with respect to ‘special education’ has made important strides in the past half century and is not unjust in the explicit ways that it used to be. However, current US public special education policy is still unjust insofar as it is an instance of what Guy Adams and Danny Balfour call ‘administrative evil.’ Addressing this administrative evil will require both procedural changes in special education and addressing the ‘micropolitics’ of individualized educational plan (IEP) meetings.
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Notes
- 1.
My focus on federal educational policy means that my discussion is limited in a number of interrelated ways. First, each state in the United States is responsible for its own implementation of the relevant federal regulations. Sometimes, these state laws and regulations go beyond those at the federal level, in ways that it is important for parents and schools to know. Second, I am going to ignore ways that public schools may act “beyond their official roles, [such that] their actions do not constitute or express public policy” (Andrew I. Cohen, Philosophy, Ethics, and Public Policy (New York: Routledge, 2016), 4). Finally, I concentrate primarily on the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), though there are other laws and regulations that are also relevant.
- 2.
I find the phrase ‘special education’ to be problematic, for similar reasons to why many individuals involved with disability studies or disability rights think the phrase ‘special needs’ is problematic. While the testimony of individuals with disabilities isn’t uniform with respect to a number of terminological issues, many object to the use of ‘special needs’ and ‘special education’ in a way we ought to take seriously. Furthermore, it is not the aim or importance of education that is ‘special’; rather, it is primarily the delivery modalities of that education that is special. Thinking of ‘special education’ as distinct from education simpliciter makes it too easy to apply different standards, thereby contributing to discrimination or ableism. Nevertheless, ‘special education’ is the leading term in the relevant subsection of education literature; it is even defined in IDEA 300.39 as “specially designed instruction, at no cost to the parents, to meet the unique needs of a child with a disability.” Given this, I use it—but with reservations.
- 3.
For a discussion of these issues, see Cohen, Philosophy, Ethics, and Public Policy, Chap. 1.
- 4.
Ibid., 192.
- 5.
Jonathan Wolff, Ethics and Public Policy (New York: Routledge, 2011), 3.
- 6.
Ibid., 9.
- 7.
Ibid., 7.
- 8.
Ibid., 154.
- 9.
Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 64.
- 10.
Douglas Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, eds. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 33.
- 11.
Ibid., 33.
- 12.
Drapetomania and Sysaesthesia Aethiopis were two mental conditions used in this way, claimed to be significantly more frequent among free Blacks in the North compared to among slaves in the South.
- 13.
Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press), 57. This kind of sentiment was not limited to contexts of slavery; it also affected medicine, as when an article in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal argued that “it is this defective hematosis, or atmospherization of the blood, conjoined with a deficiency of cerebral matter in the cranium, and an excess of nervous matter distributed to the organs of sensation and assimilation, that is the true cause of that debasement of mind, which has rendered the people of Africa unable to take care of themselves” (as quoted in Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” 37.) Sometimes, these two came together, as when J.F. Miller argued in the North Carolina Medical Journal that freedom caused congenital health and mental defects.
- 14.
Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” 50. A desire to not be associated with the stigma of disability is also a reason that aspects of the Deaf community have rejected the claim of disability.
- 15.
Ibid., 41. Baynton also discusses how, as with discussions of race and ethnic minorities, the claims of women’s inferiority were often couched in terms of a lower level of evolutionary progress.
- 16.
Ibid., 43.
- 17.
As quoted in ibid., 47.
- 18.
For instance, the term Mongoloid, originally used to refer to individuals with Down Syndrome, is rooted in anti-Asian racism and used as a way of identifying the condition with a reversion to a ‘less evolutionarily advanced race,’ the Mongols. Similarly, as late as the 1940s, the claim that Native Americans were particularly prone to disability was used to justify failing to extend full rights to indigenous populations.
- 19.
Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States, 103.
- 20.
See Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” 45f. In fact, it was under this regulation that many gays and lesbians were denied entry into the United States prior to the American Psychiatric Association removing homosexuality from their list of mental illnesses in 1973.
- 21.
Ibid., 48. Exclusion of individuals with disability from full participation in the community was also rooted in other forms of public policy. During the same period between the late nineteenth and first few decades of the twentieth centuries, numerous cities enacted laws that prohibited those with disabilities or other ‘mutilated or deformed bodies’ from being in public.
- 22.
Brad Byrom, “A Pupil and a Patient: Hospital-Schools in Progressive American” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, eds. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 133.
- 23.
Ibid., 135.
- 24.
A dated but worthwhile discussion of this period with a focus on cognitive disabilities, but which extends beyond just education, see R.C. Scheerenberger, A History of Mental Retardation (Baltimore: Brookes Publishing Company). An excellent but more compressed overview of twentieth-century history of special education in the United States can be found in Allan G. Osborne and Charles J. Russo, “Free at Last? Legislation for Children with Disabilities,” in Kids in the Middle: The Micropolitics of Special Education, eds. Marshall Strax, Carol Strax, and Bruce S. Cooper (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 31–45.
- 25.
Historically, important cases include Watson v. City of Cambridge (1893), State ex rel. Beattie v. Board of Education of Antigo (1919), and Board of Education of Cleveland Heights v. State ex rel. Goldman (1934).
- 26.
For more on this period, see also Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States, particularly Chap. 7.
- 27.
Osborne and Russo, “Free at Last?” 31.
- 28.
Michael Farrell, New Perspectives in Special Education: Contemporary Philosophical Debates (New York: Routledge, 2012), 31.
- 29.
Michael Oliver, Understanding Disability: From Theory to Practice (London: Macmillan, 1996), 80.
- 30.
Marshall Strax, Carol Strax, and Bruce S. Cooper, “Preface” in Kids in the Middle: The Micropolitics of Special Education (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 20120), xii. According to the National Council on Disability’s 2000 report “Back to School on Civil Rights: Advancing the Federal Commitment to Leave No Child Behind,” over one million children, many of them institutionalized in state institutions, received limited or no educational services. Another 3.5 million children received a public education but were ‘warehoused’ in segregated classrooms or facilities that offered little, if any, academic instruction.
- 31.
Marshall Strax, “Borderline: The Political Divide in Special Education,” in Kids in the Middle: The Micropolitics of Special Education, eds. Marshall Strax, Carol Strax, and Bruce S. Cooper (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 6.
- 32.
That same year, Panitch v. State of Wisconsin ruled that failure to provide an appropriate education to children with disabilities at public expense violates the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment.
- 33.
IDEA has since been amended in 1997 and 2004; for an excellent discussion of the history of IDEA, see Charles J Russo and Allan G. Osborne Jr., “The Limits of Freedom: Legislation and Litigation in Special Education,” in Kids in the Middle: The Micropolitics of Special Education (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 20120).
- 34.
IDEA § 300.114.a.2, emphasis added.
- 35.
For instance, part 6 of the Michigan Administrative Rules of Special Education (MARSE), which focuses on funding of special education in the state of Michigan, is based on no federal IDEA regulations.
- 36.
It is estimated that on average it costs about 1.9 times as much to educate a student with a disability as it does to educate a nondisabled one; see B. D. Baker, P. Green, and C. E. Richards, Financing Education Systems (Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2008), 197.
- 37.
Unmasking Administrative Evil was awarded the 1998 Louis Brownlow Book Award, the National Academy of Public Administration’s highest award for excellence in public administration scholarship, among other awards.
- 38.
Guy B. Adams and Danny L. Balfour, Unmasking Administrative Evil, 3rd ed. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2009), 4.
- 39.
Margaret H. Vickers, “A New Concept,” Public Administration Review 60.5 (2000), 476.
- 40.
Adams and Balfour, Unmasking Administrative Evil, 109.
- 41.
Ibid., 5.
- 42.
Ibid., 112.
- 43.
Ibid., 4.
- 44.
Ibid.
- 45.
Strax, Strax, and Cooper, “Preface,” xiv.
- 46.
Strax, “Borderline,” 7.
- 47.
IDEA § 300.114.a.2, emphasis added.
- 48.
IDEA’s procedural safeguards allow an avenue for the implementation of an IEP without the parents’ consent in cases of sustained noninvolvement by the parents.
- 49.
See Eugenie Samier, “The Problem of Passive Evil in Educational Administration: Moral Implications of Doing Noting,” International Studies in Educational Administration 36.1 (2008), 2–21.
- 50.
Strax, “Borderline,” 13.
- 51.
“At any time, some public policy will be in place, and in most circumstances, the burden of argument for change is higher than for reflective or unreflective continuation of current policy.… In public policy debates the ‘home team’ has a significant advantage” Wolff, Ethics and Public Policy, 5 and 82.
- 52.
This is another reason that the intersectionality of disability with other factors, such as race, native language, and socioeconomic status are so important to address in a full treatment of special education in the US.
- 53.
Thanks to Frederick Aquino, Carlo Tarantino, and David Boonin for helpful input on an earlier version of this chapter. A previous version of this chapter was presented at the Wesleyan Philosophical Society conference in 2018.
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Timpe, K. (2018). Public Policy and the Administrative Evil of Special Education. In: Boonin, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93907-0_20
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