LM: Practitioner Research

The “school-to-prison pipeline” is not just about discipline; it’s about how racism and ableism combine to push disabled students of color out of learning spaces and into cycles of punishment. In many schools, behavior is seen through a lens of control rather than care. For Black and Latino disabled disabled students, that lens often leads to exclusion, restraint, suspension, and, far too often, incarceration.

This module invites you to look beyond individual behaviors and examine the systems that criminalize disability. Using Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Disability Studies (CDS), you’ll explore how policies, labels, and mindsets reproduce harm—and how restorative, culturally responsive practices can disrupt these patterns.

Anti-ableist teaching and research begin with you—your story, your assumptions, and your relationship to the communities you serve. Every educator and researcher enters the classroom carrying experiences, privileges, and bias that shape how we see disability, race, and learning.

Bhattacharya (2017) reminds us that qualitative inquiry is never neutral; it is always ethical and political. To study or teach about disability without acknowledging your standpoint risks repeating the very hierarchies you seek to undo. This module invites you to reflect on your own positionality and recognize how your identity, power, and experiences influence your practice.

QuantCrit invites you to look at numbers not as neutral truths, but as reflections of the systems that create them. In education, data often claims to be “objective”—but when you look closely, it frequently mirrors the racism and ableism built into our schools. Data walls, standardized charts, and performance color codes may seem harmless, yet they can quietly label and rank children, reinforcing deficit-based stories about who belongs and who needs to be “fixed.”