It’s time for Hub administrators to “question their assumptions about poor kids,” a top special education expert said yesterday, after the release of a report showed young black and Latino males in Boston are designated special needs and placed in separate classrooms at a startlingly higher rate than whites.
“It’s indefensible,” said Thomas Hehir, who ran Boston’s special ed program in the 1980s before taking the national post under President Clinton. “I think there are some entrenched practices that have gone on for decades, and some assumptions people make about children, that people need to challenge.”
Hehir, today a Harvard professor who studies special education statewide, said evidence shows poor students — who, Hehir said, are most apt to be black — are categorized too quickly as disabled and assigned to segregated settings simply because they don’t respond to instruction in the expected way.
“The real issue is not special ed, the real issue is what happens in general education that fails to meet these kids’ needs,” Hehir said.
“This is true in Boston, often kids get placed by their label, not their individual needs.”
A report entitled “Opportunity and Equity” — released yesterday by Boston Public Schools, the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, and the Center for Collaborative Education — found that nearly 40 percent of young black males with disabilities at the elementary level are being taught outside of mainstream classrooms.
It also found black male students were placed in separate classrooms at almost twice the rate of white males, and Latino males at 1.6 times the rate of whites.
Hehir said there is clear evidence that shows special education students who are kept in mainstream classrooms perform better on standardized tests and are more likely to graduate.
Eileen Nash, special ed chief of Boston Schools, said the district is shifting more of its focus to how special needs students are served, not what disability the child has.
