Distinguishing Disability: Parents, Privilege, and Special Education

I’m torn on this one, since Colin Ong-Dean is a colleague and it’s bad form to rip into someone’s dissertation. That said, while this book ticks off all the boxes of a good scholarly work (surveys, data, theories, results), it doesn’t really say anything surprising or novel. Ong-Dean proposes that parents with a high degree of ‘cultural capital’

(wealthy, educated, white) are better able to navigate the special education system. Unsurprisingly, that turns out to be correct.

Unfortunately, the work doesn’t go much beyond that. I only have the slightest idea of what an Individualized Educational Program entails. The most interesting part is in Chapter 3, when Ong-Dean sketches out a “high road to disability” that elites can use to aid their children, and a “low road to disability” used by institutions to control and discipline problem children. Unfortunately, he doesn’t go much beyond that.

I see scholarship as a work of excavation and translation. This isn’t a bad book, per se, but it’s very fragmentary. The other side of the story, the creation and maintenance of disabilities by an expert bureaucracy, is treated as a blank canvas against which the drama of parents happens. This is a major flaw in the work.