Kelsey Morris

(Dis)ability and Ableism OP #6

June 1, 2018

I currently am observing a seventh grade math classroom at Simon Gratz Middle School,
which is a part of the network of Mastery Charter schools across the Philadelphia and Camden
school districts. Although I am in Ms. Mahoney’s math class for most of the day, I have had the
opportunities to go visit other classrooms, with different teachers, different grade levels, and
different subjects. I am so grateful for the faculty allowing me to observe multiple classrooms
because from these experiences I have come to understand how Mastery’s mission is enacted by
each and every member of its staff. Mastery’s Mission is: All students learn the academic and
personal skills they need to be truly prepared for postsecondary success and able to pursue their
dreams. Simon Gratz is full of smart, capable children and the staff here does everything they can to
demonstrate and reinforce that belief. Gratz has a particular emphasis on breaking the system of
educational inequity and a goal to create a model urban school district that serves all students with
excellence. This includes children of all backgrounds, races, and abilities.
One of the most incredible teachers here, is the special education teacher, Ms. Schloss. Not
only does she recognize how her students’ race and gender have affected their success and role in
academics, but works individually with each student to break down the wall that has been put up in
front of them because of a cycle of teachers’ perception of their (dis)ability. She leads each child
towards different and personalized achievement. For the first week, I truly had this positive
reaction to Mastery’s “inclusion and belief in all”. However, during the second week I spoke to my
mentor teacher in more detail about Mastery. She informed me that Simon Gratz Prep Middle
School was one of the only charter schools in the area that does not cap the amount of students with
IEPs, totaling their student population in special education at about eighty percent. This was very
surprising to me given that Gratz has all inclusive classrooms and I had never even thought about
any of the kids as disabled. I started to become more observant of the students in my classroom,
and engaged in deep conversation with a student, Desiree, from The College of New Jersey whose
mentor teacher was Ms. Schloss. Desiree started to mention how she didn’t think that a lot of the
students in the special education classes belonged there. They had behavioral issues, but when she
sat down with them and built a relationship with them, they performed equally as well as other
students at the same grade level. This was incredibly discouraging and interesting to me.
So many points in our conversation with Dr. Ervelles made me think of this issue,
particularly the issue I saw commonly in Ms. Mahoney’s classes. I started to notice how the kids that
were the most misbehaved were always seated in the back. For actions like standing up out of their
seats, talking during the lesson, tapping pencils on desks, and humming, these kids were sent to the
back, asked to leave, or had their papers taken away from them. Although I agree they are
disrespectful behaviors, I think my mentor teacher enacted the exact phenomenon that Dr. Ervelles
explained: disability gets used to justify oppressive systems. Whether these students truly do need
IEPs or not, I made an attempt to sit down with as many of those children as possible, and had
success with almost every single one, given a little extra attention and insistence. But regardless of
those successes, they had grown up in a system where “bad behavior” was justified as reasoning to
sometimes get these trouble-making students out of teachers’ classrooms. They were using
(dis)ability as a social construct to segregate in their schools, and will be even more prominent in
the enforcement of tracking next year. These students got lost in a cycle of enforced labels upon
themselves, and most fell to believe their label.
This is disheartening as an educator because I know it is happening in schools across the
country, and especially urban schools. It is my role and commitment as a teacher to anti-ableism to
take the pledge for life, to recognize the scope of every, whole person, to not stereotype, to not box-
in, and to commit to love. I wonder how those specific students felt in the classroom environment. I
wonder if peers’ perceptions of these students had more of an impact than their teachers. It is my
job to build a space in which everyone in my classroom feels at home and able.