Disproportionality in Special Education with Eddie Fergus ~ 807

Eddie Fergus:
I hear often from practitioners when they are recommending kids for supports. They see it from the vantage point of, “I can’t do very much with this kid. I can’t do any more. Somebody else has got to help this kid. Let’s just give them some extra support.” They’re coming from a place of, “I can’t do any better, so let’s just hand them over to somebody.” The concern that we have to, and the research has painted, is what is used in the imagination of that practitioner to make that determination. What are the anchors or the hallmarks that they’re using to frame that?

Tim Villegas:
Hello and welcome to Season Eight, Episode Seven of the Think Inclusive Podcast presented by MCIE. I’m your host, Tim Villegas. This podcast features conversations and commentary with thought leaders in inclusive education and community advocacy. Think Inclusive exists to build bridges between parents, educators, and disability rights advocates to promote inclusion for all students. That’s right, y’all—ALL means ALL. To find out more about who we are and what we do, go to thinkinclusive.us, the official blog of MCIE, and check us out on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Tim Villegas:
Guess what, y’all? We did it. Our patrons are in double digits. Let’s keep it going and add some more. It is super easy. Go to patreon.com/thinkinclusivepodcast to become a patron today. Your contribution helps us with the cost of audio production, transcription, and the promotion of the Think Inclusive Podcast. Thank you for helping us equip more people to promote and sustain inclusive education.

Tim Villegas:
So today we talk with Dr. Eddie Fergus of Temple University. We discuss the disproportionate number of students of color being identified in special education and what we can do about it. We review how restorative practices might be used in inclusive schools and how the biggest barrier to inclusion might be who we think can teach students with disabilities. Be prepared to unpack those shopping carts of our minds. Stick around—after the break, our interview with Dr. Eddie Fergus.

Tim Villegas:
Alright, today on the podcast we would like to welcome Dr. Eddie Fergus, an associate professor of urban education and policy at Temple University. Eddie is a former high school teacher, program evaluator, and community school program director. His current work is on the intersection of educational policy and outcomes with a specific focus on Black and Latino boys, academic and social engagement outcomes, disproportionality in special education, and suspensions and school climate conditions. Dr. Fergus, thank you for being on the Think Inclusive Podcast.

Eddie Fergus:
Thank you so much. Thank you for the invite. I’m excited about this.

Tim Villegas:
We were really excited to have you on because disproportionality is a complicated topic, and I certainly haven’t researched it for a decade. When I asked our staff at MCIE, “Who can we talk to about disproportionality?” they said, “Eddie Fergus at Temple.” Our listeners are mostly educators, but we also have parents and disability advocates who may not know the ins and outs of the term. How would you describe “disproportionality”?

Eddie Fergus:
At its core, disproportionality is the absence of proportional representation of a group. If a population is 10% Latinx, we should expect roughly 10% representation in a given area—housing, for example—assuming equal opportunity. In special education and suspensions, we look for overrepresentation and underrepresentation. If Black students are about 16–17% of national enrollment, we should see a similar proportion in special education, again assuming equal opportunity and that disabilities are not bound to any racial or ethnic group. Everyone is differently abled; there’s nothing inherent to a group’s genetics that would create a preponderance of disability. Disproportionality helps us see when those proportional expectations aren’t being met.

Tim Villegas:
In inclusive education, we talk about natural proportions. If a school has about 10% of students with disabilities, we wouldn’t want one classroom to have an overrepresentation—such as a self-contained class where 100% of students have disabilities, or “inclusion classrooms” where about 50% of students have identified disabilities. I’m excited to talk about the intersection between disproportionality affecting Black and Brown students and disability. Why has it been this way, and can we fix it?

Eddie Fergus:
There are intersecting realities. First, we have historically imagined what it means to be differently abled and the conditions from which we think those differences emerge. Bias lives inside that imagination. Second, bias surrounds race, ethnicity, language, and gender. There’s a long global history of eugenic thinking—the notion that certain groups are predisposed to lower cognitive abilities. Add in bias around language, and it becomes a perfect storm: bias about ability braided with racism and ethnocentrism. People sometimes draw conclusions from their lived experiences—“I keep seeing Black boys in self-contained classrooms or Latinx kids over-identified”—and then they braid those observations into explanations about groups rather than questioning the systems producing those patterns. Addressing disproportionality requires dismantling both ability bias and biases related to race, ethnicity, gender, and language.

Tim Villegas:
Can you speak to the lens through which we view differences? Conversations about racial equity are tightly connected to conversations in the disability community, yet those communities haven’t always worked together to dismantle biases. Is this mostly mindset, or is there something else at play?

Eddie Fergus:
I think of equity as a conceptual terrain—a sandbox that lets us examine how isms (racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism) manifest in institutions like education. In this sandbox, we can practice recognizing how these dynamics intersect and braid together. My work on disproportionality in special education, suspensions, and also gifted/AP/honors is about using this sandbox to see how the isms show up in practice. Special education reveals the tension between bias about ability and bias about race, ethnicity, and gender. The system is organized in ways that can support and reproduce those biases unless we intentionally disrupt them.

Eddie Fergus:
Part of the organization is mindset. Practitioners often recommend supports from a vantage point of, “I can’t do any more; someone else needs to help.” The question is: what informs that decision? What anchors or hallmarks are they using? I use the shopping cart analogy: practitioners bring their lived experiences into school—how they understand behavior, language use, social interactions—and they use those to interpret what they see. Faced with an abrupt outward behavior, one person’s cart might prompt, “What’s wrong with you?” instead of, “Tell me what brought you to that behavior.”

Tim Villegas:
That’s a very different point of departure. We also organize practices around those mindsets. One important element in the 2004 IDEA reauthorization was Response to Intervention. It gave permission to stop using a wait-to-fail approach and to provide scientifically grounded, well-resourced supports.

Eddie Fergus:
RTI was an opportunity to disrupt a system that essentially waited for sufficient failure before referring students to another system. Yet I still meet practitioners who say, “Did you hear about this new thing called RTI?” It’s been on the books for years, but systems have been organized around particular mindsets, and those take real work to shift.

Eddie Fergus:
My applied research focuses on dismantling both the institutional practices and the mindsets that sustain them. Schools don’t need external examples of bias; we create our own data. Every time we keep seeing the same groups—say, boys—in self-contained classrooms, we feed our own bias. That’s why the equity lens must be a place to practice seeing how isms show up in institutions and practices. And that mindset work is the hardest part. I can help districts reorganize systems; the long-term work is changing mindsets. It’s not one diversity class or a keynote. We have to unpack and replace what lives in people’s shopping carts. Folks are often attached to those contents—“My parents told me not to see color”—and reworking that takes time.

Tim Villegas:
This conversation has flown by. I want to ask about restorative practices. If you asked me, “What’s restorative practices?” I’d say it’s probably good, but I couldn’t define it cleanly. How does that fit within equity work in schools?

Eddie Fergus:
My working understanding of restorative practices and restorative justice is that when transgressions occur between people, we don’t focus only on the behavior and its discipline. We must recognize that harm has happened. There should be clarity about the harm and a process to repair it so both people can move forward. Without that, development can get stuck. I think of a colleague doing restorative work in a prison system where individuals who caused harm met with family members and worked to repair what they could. It’s powerful.

Eddie Fergus:
In schools, the significance of restorative practices is the potential to reorient how we support kids when misbehavior occurs. Rather than defaulting to punishment—detention, exclusionary suspension—we ask, “What brought you to that behavior?” We work to repair what the harmed person experienced and help the student who caused harm develop skills to express underlying concerns differently. Restorative practices can do that. At the same time, practitioners worry about restorative practices being instituted primarily in Black and Brown schools, effectively codifying them as a strategy for those populations. Given history, I understand the concern.

Eddie Fergus:
We’ve seen special education identification categories informally codified by group: differences in who is labeled with autism, who is identified with emotional disturbance versus ADHD, and the criteria used for whom and how. That’s alarming. We need to be mindful about where and how restorative practices are implemented.

Tim Villegas:
It seems like a tool under the larger umbrella of multi-tiered systems of support, blurring the lines between special and general education into just education: how we support kids, IEP or not.

Tim Villegas:
What do you think is the biggest barrier to inclusive education?

Eddie Fergus:
We need to keep framing inclusion as necessary—everyone is differently abled, period. A major barrier is the presumption that only certain adults can work with certain populations. Many processes reinforce the idea that differently abled students must be treated and thought about separately. In teacher preparation, there often isn’t a strong requirement to take multiple special education courses. When a course is required, it’s often a one-off focused on legal frameworks rather than practice and methodology. Students say, “I understand the law, but what does this mean for pedagogy?” By the time they’re teaching, the bifurcation is entrenched: general education teachers versus special education teachers.

Eddie Fergus:
Another issue is the perception that inclusion takes away from what’s happening in schools. I recall a district that offered extra dollars to principals who added inclusive classrooms. I understand the push, but incentivizing it like that can reinforce the idea that inclusion is an added burden rather than a core expectation for serving students.

Eddie Fergus:
And you have this presumption of “magic dust” that special educators have. Special educators say, “We don’t have anything special. We just got targeted training that everyone could have.” That distinction between general ed and special ed keeps inclusion from being normalized.

Tim Villegas:
Alright. Fantastic. Everyone, follow Eddie—Eddie Fergus—on Twitter: https://twitter.com/EddieArcia.

Eddie Fergus:
Yes. There you go.

Tim Villegas:
Thank you for being on the podcast.

Eddie Fergus:
Thank you.

Tim Villegas:
That will do it for this episode of the Think Inclusive Podcast. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, or on the Anchor app. While you’re there, give us a review so more people can find us. Have a question or comment? Email us at podcast@thinkinclusive.us. We love to know that you’re listening. Thank you to patrons Pamela P, Veronica E, Kathleen T, Mark C, and Sarah C for their continued support of the podcast. This podcast is a production of MCIE, where we envision a society where neighborhood schools welcome all learners and create the foundation for inclusive communities. Learn more at http://www.mcie.org/.

Tim Villegas:
We will be back in June with two episodes. We’ll talk with Wyatt Oroke, 2020 Maryland Teacher of the Year, and Melissa McCullough, the director of an inclusive public preschool program in Illinois. On the blog, check out “Five Ableist Phrases You Need to Stop Using Immediately.” As always, thanks for your time and attention. Until next time, remember: inclusion always works.