'Through a Thorough Individualized IEP Process': A Genealogical Policy Study of Special Education, Race, Disability, and Whitenes

This project explores American special education policy by juxtaposing two recent Supreme Court actions---Allston v. Lower Merion School District (2015) and Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District (2017)---to explicate how special education policy remains troubled by intersections of race and disability and the logics of whiteness and neoliberalism. Beginning with John Locke's reflections on education and concluding with the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA), this genealogical inquiry traces the mediation of special education policy by legal protections that function biologically and through scientific descriptions that operate juridically. At the center of this project is an inquiry into present-historical configurations of special education and the ways race and disability move in and out of each other to create conditions that delimit educational opportunities for students of color. Of specific interest, is the historical development of indeterminate disability labeling schemes that continue to extend legal protections for some lives, while leaving other lives exposed to risk. This project problematizes present-historical configurations of special education from within three overlapping theoretical perspectives: a racecraft of disability labeling, extrapolated from the work of Barbara Fields and Karen Fields; a biopolitics of special education based on Michel Foucault's theorizing of the relation between life and politics; and an immunization paradigm of educational life, which reads Cheryl Harris' study of whiteness as property together with Roberto Esposito's reformulation of biopolitics as an immunity/community relation. Mapping this relation, this project analyzes the uses of classificatory science in debates over how to properly measure intelligence, parental lobbying efforts behind the passage of the EHA, and the limitations of framing special education policy in terms of equity and excellence. Against historical efforts to classify children according to intelligence, this project concludes by turning to John Dewey and Walter Benjamin's reflections on childhood to posit childhood as a philosophical method with the capacity to affirm present educational life.