Mislabeling kids in school
February 17, 2021
I’ve heard a few stories about how students learned a little differently in class, and this prompted the teacher to suggest labeling the kid and involving them in special education. This comes from the misuse of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The application of the act disproportionately affected children of color.
Black youth and American Indian youth are overrepresented when identified with disabilities. They receive harsher punishments than their peers, such as suspension and expulsion.
According to ThoughtCo, black students are less likely to be identified as gifted or talented. They are more likely going to be recommended for special education services, due in part to their talents being largely overlooked by white teachers.
According to former Secretary of Education Rod Paige, “[O]ur educational system fails to teach many children fundamental skills like reading, then inappropriately identifies some of them as having disabilities, thus harming the educational future of those children who are misidentified and reducing the resources available to serve children with disabilities.”
The child may have a quirk, or misunderstand something in the classroom. These instances are treated as a defect, potentially grounds for disorder label.
A good example of this is dyslexia. Dyslexia is a learning disorder, not a learning disability. Children who are dyslexic, may otherwise be developing at a normal pace, and end up being productive adults.
They may encounter problems with reading and math, but dyslexic kids are just as capable of learning like everyone else, they just learn differently.
Through arbitrarily labeling children with a disorder because a kid does not learn the same way as everyone else. This discards the opportunity to focus on a child’s individual strengths and forms their educational experience on subjective weaknesses.
This practice can lead to a stigma attached to the children and lower their self-esteem as they are looked at and treated differently by their teachers and peers in ways that ostracize them. In certain cases, teachers mislabel kids because they are not used to how one kid learns, but the kid is no more or less intelligent or capable of learning.
Due to the lack of faith by the teacher, and sometimes the lack of attention to the child’s strengths and weaknesses on the parents end, the kid may be mislabeled with a learning disability or be held back academically.
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You may want to look up the definition of ableism. As many as 1 in 5 individuals in the USA have some level of Dyslexia, and yet most districts only identify 1 to 3 per hundred. These children, as you say, do not learn the same way as the other 80% of individuals. However, school districts still use repackaged “whole language” programs calling themselves “balanced literacy” that is anything but balanced. They define “evidence” for their programs as “what successful readers do.” Which unamusingly ignores what the struggling readers need, as well as the science of how children learn to read. Unfortunately, in the USA, the only way for a Dyslexic individual to receive the type of educational programming they need is to have them identified. The only way to do this is through the Special Education system. As such, if the testing is scored and interpreted correctly, the Dyslexic child gets an IEP. An IEP isn’t a label, it is a PLAN designed to help children catch up to where they should be so they CAN achieve their full potential. Special Education isn’t a place, it is a plan. The only way to get a plan is to be officially identified as needing one. No label means no plan. The remaining 97 to 99 out of 100 individuals who never got identified just go through their lives thinking they are dumb, stupid, or broken. They don’t know why they can’t seem to do what comes naturally to others. They get labeled anyway – lazy, unmotivated, not the brightest bulb in the box, not cut out for higher education, the world needs ditch diggers too. These are the labels they get from their teachers and peers and they internalize them. How is that any better than being labeled Dyslexic? If we know what the issue is, like Dyslexia, we can teach them and others to value the beauty of a mind that sees and does things differently. If they go through life with everyone thinking they are simply unintelligent, we do them a far greater disservice. Studies show that as much as fifty percent of individuals in prison have Dyslexia, and most of them were never identified before the study. How is it better to let people with Dyslexia not get the services they need because we are afraid to label them with Dyslexia and use the very system designed to help them, thus putting them in the school-to-prison pipeline? Allowing a child with a hidden learning disorder to struggle and fail academically and/or socially because we don’t want to label them is like denying a child with spastic quadriplegia a wheelchair because we don’t want others to label them or to see the wheelchair and stigmatize them. It makes no sense. Neither does being afraid to identify why a child is struggling and use the means at our disposal to correct the situation. We can’t cure Dyslexia. The individual will always have it. But through IDEA and the Special Education system, we can give them the support necessary to meet their full potential and teach others to accept those who are neurodivergent. Saying we shouldn’t label them is the height of ablism.