Sherman Dorn

Learning in inclusive education research: Re-mediating theory and methods with a transformative agenda

This is the authors accepted manuscript. The original publication is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.3102/0091732X030001065.

Accountability in a Postdesegregation Era: The Continuing Significance of Racial Segregation in Florida’s Schools:

In the wake of both the end of court-ordered school desegregation and the growing popularity of accountability as a mechanism to maximize student achievement, the authors explore the association between racial segregation and the percentage of students passing high-stakes tests in Florida’s schools. Results suggest that segregation matters in predicting school-level performance on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test after control for other known and purported predictors of standardized test performance. Also, these results suggest that neither recent efforts by the state of Florida to equalize the funding of education nor current efforts involving high-stakes testing will close the Black-White achievement gap without consideration of the racial distribution of students across schools.

COMPETING NOTIONS OF SOCIAL JUSTICE AND CONTRADICTIONS IN SPECIAL EDUCATION REFORM

In the past three decades, special education has been subjected to extensive critique and reform of practices. These critiques have been based on notions of social justice and equity. However, the field has suffered from inadequate attention to assumptions about social justice. Social justice is essentially a contested concept. Rather than representing a unitary and universally shared concept, social justice has variable meanings. Differing views of social justice can be seen to underlie apparent contradictions in continuing practice in response to pressures for reform. Reforms predicated on individual rights have been undermined by deep commitments to meritocratic practices in U.S. schools. Reforms based on more communitarian principles, however, ignore the need for structure and the tendency for communal values to marginalize people with disabilities. Special education reform today requires a different basis in a relational definition of the self, structures to support the qualities of relationships, and a belief in the mutability of social justice.

The Political Dilemmas of Formative Assessment

The literature base on using formative assessment for instructional and intervention decisions is formidable, but the history of the practice of formative assessment is spotty. Even with the pressures of high-stakes accountability, its definition is fuzzy, its adoption is inconsistent, and the prognosis for future use is questionable. A historical and organizational perspective explores plausible explanations for that inconsistency. These possible explanations include the standard literature in the research-to-practice gap and must also include the current policy environment surrounding educational accountability. A number of organizational and historical/cultural hypotheses suggest potential limits of structured formative assessment. From several perspectives, the practical question that may shape the future of special education is the identity of individuals at the school level who are responsible for coordinating the collection of formative-assessment data, for analysis, and for responses to the data.

Objects of Protection, Enduring Nodes of Difference: Disability Intersections with "Other" Differences, 1916 to 2016.

The purpose of this chapter is to contribute a cultural–historical analytical perspective on disability and its intersections. We assume that disability is socially, historically, and spatially constructed. This standpoint enables us to understand and disrupt disparities in education that affect students living at the intersection of disability with race and other identity markers. We trace the evolution of disability as an object of protection and injustice from before 1916 to 2016. The chapter is divided into three sections: disability constructions and intersections before 1960, consolidation of the intersections of difference with disabilities between 1960 and 1990, and the protean nature of disability intersections and fragmentations in contemporary history between 1990 and the present. We review legal, social, and academic discourses and offer interdisciplinary conceptual tools to understand the technical and sociopolitical anatomies of disabilities. We end with a brief discussion of future interdisciplinary research programs, including attention to a biocultural dimension in the study of this complex phenomenon.

Introduction Schools as Imagined Communities

We often envision schools as communities. Some of us picture a little red schoolhouse where all the children in the neighborhood came to learn and play together. Others have memories of a school down the road they could not attend because they were shipped off to other neighborhoods far away. And, finally, there are those who remember a school that denied them access and made no other educational provisions. This last type of memory makes imagining schools as communities problematic. At first glance we would like to see a school as a place where children, teachers, and parents gather with a shared sense of purpose. The image of everyone working together has been an ideal. In an 1899 lecture, John Dewey said, “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy” (emphasis added). In the midst of industrialization and the growth of bureaucracies within schools, Dewey was trying to justify humanitarian treatment of children by reference to supposedly bygone communal values.1

Prophet or fool? The professional position and role of historians of education

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the professional dilemmas of historians of education in the USA. Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses historiographical analysis. Findings – While some aspects of both “prophet” and “fool” cultural archetypes fit some historians of education, neither archetype is a useful model for discussing the possible professional positions and roles of new scholars. Instead, “border-crossing” is an appropriate metaphor for new scholars in the history of education. Originality/value – This manuscript addresses a topic of concern to many historians of education in multiple countries. It moves beyond material concerns of intellectuals to discuss the cultural archetypes that may be at play.

Origins of Urban Public-School Delegitimation

Kathryn Neckerman’s Schools Betrayed: Roots of Failure in Inner-City Education effectively uses a combination of archival sources and census microdata to undercut popular explanations of student failure in urban schools. Focusing on Chicago schools between 1900 and 1960, her goal is to explain the development of hostile relationships between teacher and students in innercity schools. She takes Kenneth Clark’s word at face value, that in 1965 teachers and students treated each other as enemies: “The dominant and disturbing fact about the ghetto school is that the teachers and students regard each other as adversaries. Under these conditions the teachers are reluctant to teach and the students retaliate and resist learning” (Clark 1965, 137). Neckerman then tackles the three most common explanations of that hostility with a range of evidence. Neckerman’s argument begins with three common explanations of the modern achievement/attainment gap and innercity school ineffectiveness: the deindustrialization of major cities, labor-market discrimination, and the development of a culture within working-class African American communities that denigrated academic achievement, known as the oppositional-culture thesis. The first half of the book is devoted to testing these explanations with evidence from Chicago’s public school documents, newspapers, contemporary accounts, and census microdata from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample collection at the Minnesota Population Center (available to all researchers at www.ipums.org). In each case, Neckerman marshals persuasive evidence that the common thumbnail histories of urban education do not account for the post–World War II rise of hostility

Imagined Communities and Special Education

As other chapters in this book describe, schools have often been at the symbolic and real center of communities, a notion that is both powerful and problematic. Other chapters have discussed the ways that imagined communities of schools have interacted with race and ethnicity as well as the position of teachers as employees and community members. In other contexts as well, community building through schools have raised issues of both exclusivity and the cognitive awareness of common interests and experiences. The two are intimately linked, as Lois Weis has argued in her analysis of working-class identities in upstate New York. In hard economic times, Weis claimed, working-class white youth defined themselves in reference to a collective (racial and social-class) identity.1 But social class and race are not the only areas where an awareness of commonality is important to the definition of community. In special education, advocates maintain the notion that parents and students with a wide variety of conditions share common interests, even if what students face in their everyday lives is very different. From World War II through the passage of federal legislation in the 1970s, a growing if shaky disability-rights movement built a political coalition out of just such disparate elements.