The Unteachables: Disability Rights and the Invention of Black Special Education

How special education used disability labels to marginalize Black students in public schools

The Unteachables examines the overrepresentation of Black students in special education over the course of the twentieth century. As African American children integrated predominantly white schools, many were disproportionately labeled educable mentally retarded (EMR), learning disabled (LD), and emotionally behavioral disordered (EBD). Keith A. Mayes charts the evolution of disability categories and how these labels kept Black learners segregated in American classrooms.

The civil rights and the educational disability rights movements, Mayes shows, have both collaborated and worked at cross-purposes since the beginning of school desegregation. Disability rights advocates built upon the opportunity provided by the civil rights movement to make claims about student invisibility at the level of intellectual and cognitive disabilities. Although special education ostensibly included children from all racial groups, educational disability rights advocates focused on the needs of white disabled students, while school systems used disability discourses to malign and marginalize Black students.

From the 1940s to the present, social science researchers, policymakers, school administrators, and teachers have each contributed to the overrepresentation of Black students in special education. Excavating the deep-seated racism embedded in both the public school system and public policy, The Unteachables explores the discriminatory labeling of Black students, and how it indelibly contributed to special education disproportionality, to student discipline and push-out practices, and to the school-to-prison pipeline effect.

ISBN-13: 9781517910273

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

Publication Date: 01-24-2023

Pages: 384

Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

Keith A. Mayes is associate professor in African American & African Studies and faculty affiliate in Sociocultural Studies in Education at the University of Minnesota. He is author of Kwanzaa: Black Power and the Making of the African American Holiday Tradition.

Table of Contents

Note on Terminology vii

Abbreviations ix

Introduction 1

1 Who Are the Unteachables? A Genealogy of Race, Retardation, and Intelligence 13

2 The Road from Mental Retardation: Civil Rights, Disability Rights, and Equal Educational Opportunity 55

3 Disabling Black Poverty, Supporting White Underachievement: Race and the Construction of Federal Special Education Policy 111

4 Challenging Special Education from Above and Below: Contestations of the 1970s and 1980s 149

5 Emotional Behavior Disorder and Other Conduct Problems: The Intersection of Race, Research, and Policy 189

6 The Implications of Unteachability: Special Education into the Twenty-First Century 247

Acknowledgments 279

Appendix: Policy Summaries 283

Notes 287

Index 367

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