Excluded By Choice

Through powerful narratives of parents of Black and Latinx students with disabilities, this book provides a unique look at the relationship between disability, race, urban space, and market-driven educational policies. Offering significant insights into complex forms of educational exclusion, the text illustrates the actual challenges and paradoxes of school choice faced by today’s parents. Included are explanations for the kinds of injustices students with disabilities face every day, as well as resources that can be helpful for engaging in collective action aimed at improving educational services for all children. This accessible resource offers recommendations to help policymakers, charter school administrators, teachers, and families tackle the challenges of school choice while dealing effectively with the new generation of inclusive schools. Book Features: Presents a first-of-its-kind look at how Black and Latinx parents of students with disabilities experience market-driven approaches to education. Identifies the consequences of push-out practices in charter schools and how families experience and resist these practices. Situates school choice amid historical and compounding forms of exclusion associated with geographical (neighborhood) and social (disability, race, and class) locations. Provides lessons learned and valuable guidance for creating a new generation of inclusive charter schools.

"It is the first book examining the experiences of Black and Latinx students with disabilities and their families with market-driven educational policies. It offers a unique theoretical contribution examining the relationship between disability, race, urban space, and market-driven educational policies. It uses powerful and emotional narratives that unveil the collateral damages of market-driven policies. It explains how Black and Latinx parents of students with disabilities experience and resist pushout practices in charter schools. It identifies the consequences of pushout practices in charter schools that are more severe that forcing parents to move to another school"--

Excluded From School exposes the reasons why, despite many national and local initiatives, large numbers of children continue to tax the education system to such a degree that they become permanently excluded from school. Sue Rendall and Morag Stuart draw on their experience in psychology and education to demonstrate the need for a more thorough exploration of the underlying root causes of the problem. Based on a systemic framework, their approach allows the inclusion of a vast range of possible contributory factors: within the child, within the family, within the school, and within the complex interrelations between these three systems. By demonstrating the need for inter-discipline and inter-agency collaboration, the authors succeed in presenting a persuasive challenge to the blame culture which exists between schools, parents and educational professionals and policymakers in relation to school exclusion. The original research presented here, along with the inclusion of the experiences of children, parents and teachers, provides a valuable new perspective on the problem of school exclusions that will be welcomed by all professionals working in this field.

While many feminist and queer movements are designed to challenge sexism, they often simultaneously police gender and sexuality—sometimes just as fiercely as the straight, male-centric mainstream does. Among LGBTQ activists, there is a long history of lesbians and gay men dismissing bisexuals, transgender people, and other gender and sexual minorities. In each case, exclusion is based on the premise that certain ways of being gendered or sexual are more legitimate, natural, or righteous than others. As a trans woman, bisexual, and femme activist, Julia Serano has spent much of the last ten years challenging various forms of exclusion within feminist and queer/LGBTQ movements. In Excluded, she chronicles many of these instances of exclusion and argues that marginalizing others often stems from a handful of assumptions that are routinely made about gender and sexuality. These false assumptions infect theories, activism, organizations, and communities—and worse, they enable people to vigorously protest certain forms of sexism while simultaneously ignoring and even perpetuating others. Serano advocates for a new approach to fighting sexism that avoids these pitfalls and offers new ways of thinking about gender, sexuality, and sexism that foster inclusivity rather than exclusivity.