THE RIGHT TO THE CLASSROOM: THE GEOGRAPHY OF SPECIAL EDUCATION IN BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

Abstract

In 1984, Plaintiffs filed a lawsuit—Vaughn G. v Mayor and City Council of Baltimore—in U.S. District Court alleging that the school district was failing to deliver on new federal special education requirements. The case was immediately contentious, and its scale and scope quickly expanded beyond the fulfillment of legislatively mandated instructional requirements and the court’s initial solutions centered on bureaucratic practices and institutional priorities. Thirty years later the case came to a final, if uncertain, resolution that unevenly addressed the demands of students, families, and legal advocates that motivated the initial filing of the case. This dissertation explores the history of this sprawling, three-decade litigation, seeking to understand what transpired and, in doing so, explore the prospects and limits of court-based solutions to problems at the intersection of disability and public schooling. To do so, this dissertation situates Vaughn G. in historical contexts of institutional behavior, namely that of educational, medical, and political institutions in shaping special education policy and practice and analyzes those conditions by embracing what scholars have termed a “spatial turn” in educational research. Litigation remains a common path for families and students to pursue justice in education. While a great deal of scholarship has been published to understand school litigation in the context of racial desegregation and school finance, fewer pieces have addressed the impacts of special education litigation, particularly the the local impacts of special education consent decrees. The formative era of special education legislation and case law in the 1970s and 1980s is subject to increasingly creative scholarly historical treatment, as well as analyses that embrace what scholar Alfredo Artiles referred to as a “historical epistemologies.” Such cross-disciplinary approaches have opened new pathways to understanding relationships between historical schooling conditions, markers of identity including disability and race, and notions of justice. This dissertation situates Vaughn G. in a century of disability history in Maryland, proceeding on the understanding that special education law, like other legal fields, is inseparable from the historical, political, social, and spatial ecosystems in which the cases are filed. This dissertation seeks to understand institutional answers to a) What does a spatial framework reveal about relationships between law, disability, and public schooling? b) How is disability defined spatially in Baltimore’s schooling history? c) How was space constructed in the Vaughn G. case? and d) Who in Baltimore and Maryland asserted authority to define students? From the perspective of students and schooling, it seeks to understand who counts as a student in Baltimore schooling history and how students are defined in this case? To answer these questions, I analyzed a plethora of archival materials—including city and state documents and popular press reporting—with the case records of the Vaughn G. proceedings serving as the primary source. Six main findings emerge from my historical investigation. First, policies in Maryland related to disability and schooling were subject to institutional turf wars between state education and health executives as well as private medical institutions between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These conflicts led to a second finding, that while there were forms of “special education” that pre-date the turn of the 20th century in Maryland public schools, the state nominally granted authority to its medical establishments, primarily through its racially segregated state hospital system, to provide education for disabled youth. However, these facilities never truly operated as educational spaces, as they were bereft of academic resources, and largely focused on instructing young, institutionalized people to labor rather than to read. Third, while the Vaughn G. case was premised on legal advocacy for individual rights for disabled youth long denied equitable educational opportunities, the case turned on state-centered bureaucratic solutions as a solution and, in turn, rarely addressed the unique needs of individual learners. Fourth, analysis of archival records in this case affirms what is becoming a consistent finding in educational research, that the increase in accessibility of public schools borne of legislation and judicial rulings did not necessarily result in just experiences and outcomes within schools. Fifth, the settlement of this case was as much about the political skill of key educational leaders as it was of the influence of policy development on the disposition of teachers and principals. Finally, this case significantly impacted the shape and structure of the school district. This finding is visible through the creation of a parallel bureaucratic structure of legal experts and a host of court appointed monitors and experts over its decades, in its influence on reshaping the structure of the city’s school board, and in the costliness—fiscal and educational—that defined it. This case reveals, among other implications, how spatial frameworks enhance historical analysis by illuminating individuals and groups whose decision making authority are legitimated in defining and deploying disability labels, and in the ways that relevant publics make sense of those definitions. It demonstrates opportunities for teaching practice, particularly in the importance of school leadership from the perspectives of district headquarters or from principals’ offices. It offers opportunities for preservice, novice, and veteran educators to foster a place-conscious pedagogy, and a critical perspective for prospective educators to embrace the possibilities and limits of the law to address conditions of educational injustice. Finally, there are implications for understanding stories that laws may tell beyond the arguments of plaintiffs and defendants. In particular, this case reveals the host of individuals, institutions, and offices who were positioned as authorities and experts of the conditions of students, to the near exclusion of children, families, and guardians in its proceedings.