A critical study of Black parents' participation in special education decision-making

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA 2004) emphasizes the expectation that parents be actively involved in developing and monitoring the educational decisions that impact their children with disabilities. Research has long established that a positive relationship exists between parent involvement and student achievement. Yet at the same time that Black students in special education programming often experience markedly worse academic and social outcomes than their dominant culture peers, research evidence demonstrates that Black parents display lower participation rates when compared with White parents. Unfortunately, research regarding low parent involvement in special education decision­ making tends to focus on Black parents from low socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds, using low SES as a proxy for minority status. This trend perpetuates the deficit perspectives with which Black parents are characterized, and silences the voices of Black parents from middleto highSES backgrounds who are involved in the special education process. Ultimately, educational decisions made on behalf of students of color are manifested within an array of negative academic and social expectations and outcomes that include disproportionality in identification for special education. This study, which was situated in a critical humanism paradigm, examined the sociocultural contexts, processes and experiences that shape middle-class Black parents’ perceptions of and attitudes toward their involvement in special education decision-making. Critical race theory (CRT) tenets that establish the permanence of racism, Whiteness as property, interest convergence, and a critique of liberalism created the research lens through which the indepth interviews of four parents, plus three local educational agency representatives (LEAs) and three practitioners from the schools in which the parents’ children were enrolled, were analyzed. The study’s results centered around three primary findings, the first of which identifies power differentials in which professionals possess markedly more decision-making power than parents, shaping interactions between parents and professionals throughout the special education process. Second, school district-based structural issues were noted that compromised the parents’ ability to ensure provisions of a free and appropriate public education (FAPE) and the least restrictive environment (LRE) for their children with disabilities. Finally, study results showed that the parents’ view of themselves and the professionals with whom they interacted shaped parent-professional partnerships in pervasive ways. The results of this study illustrate that in order to truly understand the extent to which Black parents are engaged in the special education decision-making process, one must acknowledge that parents and education professionals approach the decision-making arena within multiple and often conflicting dimensions of their own socially imposed identities, conflated with compromised assumptions about power differentials that are rooted in perceived racial and professional identities of self and others.