Special Education & IEPs During COVID: Looking Back to Plan Ahead by Brande Otis
In Ghanian Akan language and culture, there is a saying of Sankofa, which means “go back and get it”. The meaning of Sankofa is to “go back” and look at one’s past while building and planning for the future. Sankofa is the importance of looking back - retrieving all the lessons we might learn from our pasts and histories - all the while armed with the knowledge to move forward. To practice Sankofa within the current educational crisis today means that as we reopen schools with new modes of operation, we must do so while looking back - not just to March, where our world was changed forever - but to the larger, longer history of education, equity, leadership and justice in this country.
To explore and understand how issues of equity, power, and leadership play out in public education, particularly in one of several marginalized and siloed aspects of public schools, we turn attention to special education. Now that many school services have been moving to online platforms, it is no surprise that the online Individualized Education Plan (IEP) meeting (a legally binding aspect of special education) has become schools’ new favorite option for meeting with families of special education students. At the mandated IEP meeting, teams come together to discuss the progress, the goals, and the services to be delivered (as well as how and how often) for a student with a disability. While initially designed to be a collaborative and democratic space, traditional IEP meetings have not always been this way. In the tradition of Sankofa, might we look back at the history of special education and the IEP process, as we enact new ways of doing? Can we take this opportunity to transform this system into the democratic space we once envisioned it would be?
Looking Back
IEP meetings are well understood by educators, families, and students to be a time and place where negotiations, expectations, and decisions are made and shared on behalf of students who receive special education services. In the ideal IEP, schools and families agree on progress, goals, services, and accommodations, and the child in question receives what they need. And while schools will generally work to assess and provide for students appropriately, special education systems are not always set up to encourage this ideal.
Parent and family involvement within the IEP meeting is essential when it comes to supporting students with disabilities and ensuring they get their needs met. In fact, several studies show that when parents are truly involved within the IEP meeting and process, students receive better and more appropriate accommodations, placements, diagnosis, and services. To do this, schools must view parents and families as experts, provide necessary information to parents about the child before the IEP, and understand parents as true collaborators within the special education process. Yet when we look back, we see that this has not been the case for families of Color. In the IEP process Black and immigrant parents are not and have not been treated as experts or collaborators. Instead, expertise on the child in question is often placed into the hands of psychologists, special educators, and service providers, thereby increasing decision-making power for school professionals. In short, many parents - particularly Black and immigrant parents - are systematically discouraged from actively participating in the IEP meeting.
As a trained school psychologist and previous classroom special education aide, I was both a part of and witness to the procedural inequities built into the IEP meeting. For example, the IEP document itself often serves as a script, whereby a school professional reads aloud the progress made by the student, their previous goal, and their updated/new goals if applicable. In many IEP meetings, school professionals are facilitating the conversation, and speaking for (75%) of the meeting. Additionally, school professionals often discuss the IEP meeting before meeting with the parent, so that school professionals may often be on the same page, and so run the meeting as if everyone in the room understands what’s happening. School professionals don’t intend to leave parents out. But with strict deadlines and many IEPs to get through, it is often easier to present information, rather than discuss it. In IEP meetings, many educators unwittingly used jargon unfamiliar for many families, and due to the litigious nature of special education, many schools built systems that treated IEPs as rigid, bureaucratic spaces, making it difficult for families to participate. Looking back in my own experience, many of the families of children with disabilities, particularly Black and immigrant families, critiqued the IEP meeting as, at worst, an adverse space, and at best, a space where the best and most appropriate services are negotiated and considered. The litigious nature of the IEP and the IEP document itself often created environments where schools and families were positioned as legal adversaries and not as partners. I saw that the special education system, like many educational systems unfortunately, did not always view families as collaborators and experts.
Looking Forward
Looking at IEP meeting spaces as displays of and negotiations of power might be hard for some to hear, especially for educators and school professionals who genuinely value the collaborations and relationships they form with special education families. Additionally, many parents feel supported by their school staff and team, and appreciate the work of their school in supporting their child in getting what they need. These experiences are significant, and important in thinking about how we frame new procedures for engaging in special education systems. However, we must also reckon with the unfortunately large number of parents, families, and schools who are dissatisfied with engagement within special education systems. And, power, whether we want to admit it or not, plays a role in all relationships between the public servant and the public.
School professionals must recognize that the state entrustsgrants them with a set of privileges and powers that grant them the rights to make assessments, assumptions, and recommendations about other people’s children. This is not always a problem; here we are simply naming that this is a form of power. Parents also have legal rights and privileges afforded by the state, and socio-cultural norms that are to be properly included within IEP processes. What we need to think about moving forward, is how do schools and parents exercise their powers in the best interest of a child with a disability, and in the case of Black and immigrant families, we must ask whose power is most often privileged and asserted in special education systems?
We begin our look forward by asking our readers, educators, researchers, and practitioners to consider the ways that power plays a role in “everyday” schooling procedures and systems, and to reimagine the opportunities afforded through digital spaces to disrupt and transform systems of power. With the new online IEP space, what opportunities do families and schools now have to engage in more democratic and collaborative decision-making? How might the IEP process empower families to take a greater sense of ownership of the learning process for their students. Conversely, what barriers to power and justice exist for families now that schools are moving to online IEPs? And, how can schools and researchers learn from our past so that systems and procedures we build don’t perpetuate the same imbalances of power, the same inequities we see in schools and in special education today?
As we move into this new online space, we caution educators, practitioners, and researchers alike to consider the opportunities and barriers that online IEPs provide to families and to students - and to do so with an understanding of the ways that IEPs have functioned in the past. With the threat of COVID-19, and the economic, structural, and health challenges that it both illuminates and creates, we must be willing to “go back,” as we create new procedures and systems of operation, being mindful of the ways that we enact, sustain, and disrupt inequity in education.