Educational Risks Versus Health Risks: Family Decisions About Special Education Services During COVID-19

• In Event: Rethinking "Learning Loss": Family, Community, and Educator Perspectives on Equity and Learning During COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and exacerbated the marginalization of students with disabilities, prompting widespread concern over learning loss in this population (Zimmerman et al, 2020). Yet even under non-pandemic circumstances, the relative risks and benefits of special education are complex: these services can provide crucial supports and legal protections, but they can also stigmatize and segregate students, lower teacher expectations, and reduce access to high-level coursework (Metzger and Hamilton, 2020; Schwartz et al., 2019; Shifrer et al., 2013). As families consider whether to return children to in-person instruction, these risks and benefits have been amplified, forcing families to weigh the educational risks of lost in-person instruction against the health risks of potential COVID exposure.

Disability is a major axis of social inequality (Maroto et al., 2019), and disabilities qualifying for special education have a particularly complex relationship with educational inequalities. Some disability categories offer more inclusive instruction, lower levels of stigma, and increased access to high-level content; the hierarchy of disability status aligns with race and class hierarchies (Fish, 2019). Even within disability categories, special education services are unequally beneficial by student race (Schwartz et al., 2019). Parents’ perceptions of special education services as helpful or harmful, together with inequitable opportunities for advocacy (Blum, 2015; Ong-Dean, 2009; Owens, 2021), likely inform their assessments of in-person instruction and potential learning losses.

We conducted follow-up interviews with 25 families from a larger project with 207 racially diverse students that were being identified with disabilities in Wisconsin public schools. Our interview protocol asked families to describe their child’s schooling experiences from the beginning of the pandemic through the re-openings of school occurring in Fall 2022, as well as their decision-making process regarding in-person schooling. We are analyzing data by applying index codes based on the interview protocol, writing analytic memos, and applying analytic codes (Deterding and Waters, 2018).

Preliminary results suggest racially and socioeconomically advantaged families used social and cultural capital during the pandemic to pressure teachers and administrators to provide more educational services and to monitor remote instruction. Interactions between racially minoritized and lower-income families with teachers appear to be characterized by more distrust; families were wary of schools’ ability to keep their children safe and teachers pressured families to send children to school in-person. Educational services for students, as well as interactions between families and school staff, were largely characterized by an emphasis on compliance with policy mandates (Kramarczuk Voulgarides et al., 2021) rather than student growth. Future analysis will examine how parents made sense of their child’s safety, as well as the relative benefits and risks of special education, to make decisions about in-person learning.

The pandemic provides a lens that amplifies families' consideration of the risks and benefits of special education services, their children's vulnerability to learning loss, and their trust in schools to protect and support their children, ultimately contributing to our understanding of the meaning of special education and the mechanisms through which it shapes social stratification.

Authors

• Rachel E. Fish, New York University

• Alexandra J. Freidus, University of Connecticut

• Erica O. Turner, University of Wisconsin - Madison