Civil Rights Commission Takes on Issue of Minorities in Special Education
December 8, 2017
By: Christina Samuels
Source: Education Week
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights—an agency with no policymaking power but with a potent megaphone—took on the complex issue of minority students and special education at a day-long session Friday.
The name of the session, “The School-to-Prison Pipeline: The Intersections of Students of Color with Disabilities,” offered a clue to the stance of some panelists who spoke before the bipartisan commission: That too many students with disabilities are being placed in special education, and once there, they face punitive discipline that puts many of them on a rocky path to incarceration.
“We can’t afford to ignore this problem,” said Eve Hill, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s civil rights division. “We’re wasting the talents and skills of tens of thousands of children every year.”
But that wasn’t a view shared by every panelist, nor by every commissioner. Peter Kirsanow, the only Republican on the commission, said that efforts by the federal government to reduce suspensions and expulsions have led to “unlawful quotas.”