Proposal for Final Paper

Planning for our final assignment has left me at a crossroads. For that reason, I am using this post to pitch four potential ideas that are bouncing around my brain. To those of you that read this post, I want to thank you in advance for taking the time to read through my proposal. While reading, I ask that you read with the purpose of helping me select an idea to move forward with for my final paper. In an attempt to help you (and myself) nail down an idea, I ask that you consider the following questions:

1. Would I actually read this paper?

2. Is the topic interesting?

3. Does the topic have the potential to influence others, be it through providing a new way of thinking about the topic and/or by providing suggested actions people could take after reading the paper?

To be clear, I welcome any and all feedback that any reader of this post intends to provide, however, I am posing these questions as a way to ensure that whatever I end up writing is something of substance and not just another end-of-term paper. So, in no particular order here are my four pitches for my final paper: 

Idea #1: The aim of this paper will be to compare the management of positive COVID-19 cases in public and private schools in Rhode Island. More specifically, I plan to hone in on two specific schools: Mount Pleasant High School (public high school) and LaSalle Academy (private high school). Although only down the road from one another, both schools appear to be handling the management of positive COVID-19 cases very differently. To be sure, I intend to use my personal experience as a teacher at Mount Pleasant High School as well as additional information from local news articles about La Salle Academy. Through this comparison, I plan to argue that there are systems in place that enable inequitable handling of school closures due to positive COVID-19 cases. To support this claim, I plan to use the following sources from class: “When Blackness is a Pre-Existing Condition” by Kimberle Crenshaw, ““Thinking About Racial Disparities in COVID-19 Impacts Through a Science-Informed, Early Childhood Lens” by Jack P. Shonkoff and David R. Williams, “Devastated Budgets and Widening Inequities: How the Coronavirus will Impact Schools” and the TedTalk ‘How we’re priming some kids for college and others for prison” by Alice Goffman. By putting these sources in concert with one another I plan to demonstrate how the disparities in the management of school closures (or lack thereof) are decisions that are embedded in race and class structures that inevitably lead to very different outcomes for youth who attend schools within the same zip code.

Idea #2: The aim of this paper will be to spotlight the nonprofit organization, A Leadership Journey (ALJ) and outline the ways in which this program is addressing the mental health of students of color from Providence through mentorship and travel opportunities. I will utilize the following sources, We Want To Do More Than Survive by Bettina Love, “This IS America: The political economy of education reform against the public interest by Pauline Lipman, and “Hope Required When Growing Roses in Concrete” by Jeffrey M.R. Duncan-Andrade. With these sources as a framework, I intend to demonstrate how ALJ is an organization that is attempting to address what Love calls “the educational survival complex”  by providing what Duncan-Andrade describes as “audacious hope” for the youth of color in Providence, RI (Love 27-34; Duncan-Andrade189-191). Essentially then, by writing this paper I hope to promote ALJ to a wider audience as well as create a potential resource for folx who work with youth of color to consider the ways in which we can positively influence young people’s mental health and overall wellbeing. 

Idea #3: The aim of this paper is to re-imagine public schools without special education services as we know them. To be more specific, I plan to theorize what a school could look, sound, and feel like without the current labelling and scheduling practices that make up special education as it currently exists. In essence, I aim to present what a school system could look like if special education was abolished. To be clear, this does not mean I am advocating for public schools to no longer service students who have been historically labelled as having “special needs” but rather I am advocating for a complete overhaul of the way we educate and evaluate our youth who are labelled as “disabled”. Just as an education professor once told me that “all teachers are teachers of literacy” I plan to posit that all teachers can and should teach all students of varying abilities without relying on resources that oftentimes lead to restrictive outcomes and limited opportunities for students who are labelled differently than their “general education peers”. To build this new universe, I plan to utilize the sources “Dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit): Theorizing at the intersections of race and dis/ability” by Annamma et al, “Sunaura Taylor and Judith Butler Walking”, and We Want To Do More Than Survive by Bettina Love. With these sources, I plan to structure my essay in a way that shows how past special education practices have been more restrictive rather than inclusive and have historically led to disproportionate rates of students of color and low socioeconomic backgrounds being labelled as “disabled”. My overall hope is that by envisioning a school system without special education as an entity that has to both identify and educate youth who are considered “disabled” (really just different) we can instead create a system that relies less on labels and more on viewing students with an asset-based mindset (i.e. they can do this) versus the current deficit mindset (i.e. they cannot do this).

Idea #4: The aim of this paper is similar to my third idea, except rather than radically dreaming up a whole new system, I an instead plan to analyze the initial qualification and re-qualification process for specialized services in public education for students who are labelled as having either a Specific Learning Disability (SLD) or Other Health Impairment (OHI). I am choosing to limit my scope to students who are labelled as having a SLD or OHI label because they are the most common labels given to students and, in my opinion, are oftentimes heavily influenced by subjective thought of those completing the (re)qualification process. For this paper, I plan to pull from the same sources listed for Idea 3. With these sources I aim to argue that the (re)qualification process is a process steeped in power structures that inevitably lead to an unfair and disproportionate identification of students with disabilities who are from low socioeconomic backgrounds and are students of color. Through this analysis I will identify people and organizations that benefit from these practices as well as identify who is harmed by these practices. Along with identifying these parties, I also aim to put forth potential recommendations for how this process can be improved so that it is more equitable and responsive to the diversity of communities that utilize these practices and materials.