Snow Day Bonus Post

In her article Blaming Mothers: A Disability Perspective, Ruth Colker posits that special education is currently designed to label parents, and mothers, specifically, as either too aggressive or too negligent in advocating for their children. She claims that “[s]pecial education laws are modeled on a cooperative parent participation model in which we presume that parents’ views are being taken seriously, but there are few safeguards to make sure that actually happens.” Colker identifies four main “blame the mother” stock stories that districts, schools, and teachers utilize to dismiss, repress, and disempower mothers with children who receive special education services:

• Blame the mother for incompetence
• Blame the mother for being too assertive
• Blame the mother for being too passive
• Blame the mother for working outside the home.

She also disagrees that we should have to work within the artificial definitions of disability to get students the services they need, and claims that despite limited time and resources we can be doing better. Colker, a lawyer, ends the article with a call to action for educators who witness mistreatment of parents to report the incidents and speak up in their school communities.

As an ESL teacher who has four students with IEPs in my room, and in my experiences as a sister of a child who grew up with a learning disability, I have seen many parents, including my own mother, mistreated and disrespected in team meetings in a variety of school contexts. During my childhood, I watched my mother be swiftly characterized under the “too assertive” narrative. She was considered pushy and bossy, and teachers warned each other about her as my sister moved through the grades of our rural school district. Luckily, a very supportive principal and friend at the elementary level helped my sister to get what she needed and defended my mom’s advocacy and behavior to her colleagues, but we were not so lucky at the middle and high school levels. My mom was not only characterized as bossy and pushy, but also as uneducated and ill-informed, since she does not hold a formal college degree. This gross mischaracterization and slander of my mother and her abilities reached a breaking point during my sister’s high school career, and I had to attend IEP meetings with her several times in order to give “credibility” to her claims. It was asinine and insulting that my mom had to bring along her 19-year old daughter who was only a teacher candidate in order to be heard as a credible voice in those spaces.

In my experiences as an educator, especially as a teacher of emergent bilinguals, I have seen these narratives and stock stories at play on a daily basis. The resource teacher who works with my four students is quick to judge and slander those students’ families about how little they are engaged, how little they understand, how they work too often, listen too little, and generally lack the knowledge they need to successfully support their children in school. There have even been incidents where the special educator “forgot” to book an interpreter for our meetings, and has hoped to just improvise to get as much of the message across to the parent as possible. On other occasions, I have even been pulled out of my room during instructional time, as one of the only multilingual staff members, to quickly interpret at meetings for other students who are not in my class. The lack of infrastructure to support non-English speaking students with IEPs is alarming, and the ways in which the narratives about emergent bilingual and immigrant families paint parents as chronically passive workaholics is troubling at best.