In schools around the United States, there are classrooms specifically designed to obscure disabilities such as autism from other students and faculty in K-12 schools. Public education is a right of all students. It became mandatory in the late nineteenth century to end child labor and cultivate obedient citizens. In the case of developmentally disabled students, schools have to meet the requirements of the law to educate students in the least restrictive environment (LRE). However, in many cases, schools “integrate” disabled students only in name while effectively segregating them from the general education population.
This segregation often occurs by placing disabled students in the margins by locating them in seclusion rooms and spaces that have little or no commerce with other students. The danger of such practices are: receipt of an inferior education, social isolation, and further deepening of publically held stigmas. Thus, one experiences segregation in the midst of fulfilling requirements for integration. Special education classes have increasingly turned into forms of incarceration for those with undesirable disabilities. These rooms are used to humiliate and shame students into thinking they are unproductive members of society and are automatically criminalized because they have a disability.
Segregation of this kind often leads to the school-to-prison pipeline where disabled students find themselves apart of the penitentiary system at some point in their lives. Not only are students with cognitive disabilities affected by segregation but those with physical disabilities as well, making the schools in question a part of a system of eugenics by selecting students based upon definitions of productive citizenship. Once declared “unfit to be a citizen”, they are subjected to constant surveillance not only by special education staff, but also by administrators, other teachers, counselors, and even other students.
The freedom of educational pursuit intended to occur in public schools has increasingly become the source of oppression for participants with disabilities. This chain of abuses needs to come to an end by refusing to call segregation “integration,” in relation to the treatment of many disabled students. Confinement and surveillance need to stop as instruments of compliance without access to the further benefit of a substantive education. Schools need to be made accountable for their mistreatment.
(Image credit: New York Times / Ward Zwart)
About Emma Jane Snyder Mitchell