The Unteachables
Disability Rights and the Invention of Black Special Education
The Unteachables examines the overrepresentation of Black students in special education over the course of the twentieth century. Excavating the deep-seated racism embedded in both the public school system and public policy, it 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.
The Unteachables offers a bold, highly insightful, and meticulously documented analysis of the racist underpinnings of special education. Keith A. Mayes shows how special education grew from white attempts to ‘protect’ white children from a racially integrated education. Drawing on his extensive background in African American history, Mayes brilliantly peels back the layers of an education system that purports to advance rights, even while it thwarts those of Black and Latinx students. The Unteachables should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand how special education came to be structured as it is.
Christine Sleeter, coauthor of Transformative Ethnic Studies in Schools: Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Research
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 emotional behavior 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 on 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.
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Cover alt text: Color photo from behind black students in a classroom looking toward a chalk board. One has hand raised.
Awards
History of Education Society: Outstanding Book Award — Finalist
The Unteachables offers a bold, highly insightful, and meticulously documented analysis of the racist underpinnings of special education. Keith A. Mayes shows how special education grew from white attempts to ‘protect’ white children from a racially integrated education. Drawing on his extensive background in African American history, Mayes brilliantly peels back the layers of an education system that purports to advance rights, even while it thwarts those of Black and Latinx students. The Unteachables should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand how special education came to be structured as it is.
Christine Sleeter, coauthor of Transformative Ethnic Studies in Schools: Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Research
As I read this brilliant and troubling book, I found myself nodding in agreement and grimacing in sadness. Prior scholarship on racial issues in special education has assumed that the underlying science of disability and the accompanying ideology of helpfulness are basically sound. In The Unteachables, Keith A. Mayes shows how a distinctly American brand of racism was baked into the conceptual and practical foundations of special education from the very start.
Scot Danforth, Chapman University
Mayes offers a thoroughly researched historical perspective of the disproportionality of Black students in special education.
CHOICE
Attentive readers, especially those open to re-encountering their ways of thinking about disability, Blackness, and education will appreciate the teacher that Mayes makes of the unteachables.
Historical Studies in Education
Contents
Note on Terminology
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Who Are the Unteachables? A Genealogy of Race, Retardation, and Intelligence
2. The Road from Mental Retardation: Civil Rights, Disability Rights, and Equal Educational Opportunity
3. Disabling Black Poverty, Supporting White Underachievement: Race and the Construction of Federal Special Education Policy
4. Challenging Special Education from Above and Below: Contestations of the 1970s and 1980s
5. Emotional Behavior Disorder and Other Conduct Problems: The Intersection of Race, Research, and Policy
6. The Implications of Unteachability: Special Education into the Twenty-First Century
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Policy Summaries
Notes
Index
