Abstract

Excerpted From: LaToya Baldwin Clark, Cultivating Motherwork: Gender, Race, and Rights in Special Education Advocacy, 111 Iowa L. Rev. 1903 (July 2026) (Full Document)

On January 20, 2020, nine Black mothers (and one Black father) gathered for a virtual discussion about special education advocacy. These parents populating the ethereal space of the Zoom room were middle-class professionals: nurses, counselors, and special education advocates. Some of them led organizations dedicated to helping Black parents navigate special education. Some of them had been parenting within the confines of special education for years.

The title of the discussion was, “Tactics Used by Schools to Retaliate Against Black Parents Who Advocate for Special Education.” The specificity of the title was striking. “Tactics” suggested intentionality and strategy. ““Retaliate Against” suggested a reaction and a desire for revenge. “Advocate” suggested zealousness. And perhaps most importantly, “Black” indicated that these tactics were perceived to be intimately connected to race.

The moms discussed how they felt an additional burden as Black mothers to secure the law’s entitlement to education for their children with disabilities. They told narratives of David and Goliath, battling against a foe that is powerful, strategic, reactionary, and systemically racist. These moms shared confessional stories of general and specific battle fatigue, sharing their experiences not only as parents of a child with a disability but as Black mothers parenting Black children in the painful context of anti-Blackness.

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Although Black children nominally won the right to be educated equally to White children in 1954, it would be another twenty years before schools openly greeted children with disabilities. In 1975, a landmark disability civil rights statute, the Education for All Handicapped Children-- now the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (“IDEA”)--formally welcomed millions of children into public schools who were otherwise deemed incompatible with general education. In this era of the mid-1970s, and on the coattails of the legal developments of the Civil Rights Movement for Black lives, the law for this disfavored minority of children promised an education and integration with non-disabled students. The IDEA was passed in the aftermath of state litigation brought by parents, and parents insisted upon legal tools they could wield to protect their and their children’s rights.

Special education law, through its myriad of statutes, doctrines, rules, and interpretations, projects parental rights as the anti-ableist shield to protect their children with disabilities from discrimination by public schools. Who the law claims to protect, which rights it grants, the substance of those rights, and the enforcement of those rights are interactions that form the basis for the “parental rights” as discrimination shield narrative. ““Parent” and “child” are unraced, unclassed, and ungendered. Parental rights implicitly assume a White middle-class baseline under which all parents share the same experience of rights. The law largely relegates non-White middle-class families to the margins. This Article presents an effort to move a parent’s race, class, and gender from the footnotes to the main text.

Federal law requires schools to serve and educate children from three to twenty-one years old under thirteen disability categories. The IDEA guarantees these children with disabilities a “free appropriate public education” (“FAPE”). FAPE’s foundation is the Individualized Education Plan (“IEP”), a document crafted by educators, education professionals, and parents that is tailored to a child’s unique needs. The team meets to develop the IEP collaboratively, consulting psychological, educational, and behavioral assessments as data encapsulated in standard bell curves to identify a child’s needs and set goals. Parents monitor the IEP implementation with regular progress reports and can convene an IEP meeting anytime to discuss matters requiring the entire team’s contributions. If a parent chooses to legally object to the IEP or force implementation through the statute’s due process mechanisms, parents can also have legal representation, and courts may require schools to reimburse legal fees if the parent prevails. Parents deploy rights and work with schools to cultivate the child in the context of the substantive guarantee of FAPE. To grow in special education, children depend on their parents’ rights to realize their own.

But not all children are being equally protected. Congress recognized (and continues to acknowledge in subsequent reauthorizations) the subordinating experiences of Black children in special education, especially in predominantly White schools. The statute recognizes that significantly disproportionate representation--too many Black students receiving special education services as compared to some population baseline--is problematic. The findings explicitly note that Black children are overrepresented in the most stigmatizing categories of “intellectual disabilit[y] and emotional disturbance.” Crucially, the statute noted that these are acute problems in predominantly White schools where Black children are a distinct minority. It is in these schools that the subordinating of disparate treatment is felt most acutely.

In a previous paper, I argued that special education resources come to be unequally distributed because parents, in their advocacy role, enter the bargaining process with unequal levels of economic security, advocacy skills, and dispositions. I argued that the law fails to account for race and class differential access to important “capitals” a parent needs to mobilize to advocate effectively. Access to money (economic capital) and networks (social capital), as well as knowing “the rules of the game” (cultural capital), makes it easier for White middle-class parents to navigate the morass of special education law and get the resources and services they desire for their child. Although I did not specifically focus on Black class-privileged parents, arguably, middle-class Black parents should have many of these same resources and should be able to advocate as effectively as a White middle-class parent. But the disproportionate representation of Black children and overall negative experiences in special education suggest that having these capitals is necessary but insufficient, or that another force is at play.

Race, class, gender, and disability collide in special education in ways that uniquely position the class-privileged Black parent, specifically a mother, who nevertheless lives under the subordinating pressures of race. The general experience of Black children in special education, general education, and overall society differently positions class-privileged Black parents as advocates. Their experience of intersectional oppression of gender, race, and association with disability--together with class privilege--shapes their understanding of advocacy and the entitlement guaranteed to their children.

In part to aid class-privileged Black parents, an industry of non-attorney parent advocacy businesses run by Black mothers has emerged over the last ten years or so. These paid mother-advocates fill the gap left by a dearth of affordable special education legal advocacy. Most special education lawyers require a hefty retainer and moderate their fees depending on whether a parent succeeds in a due process complaint, which by law is reimbursed by school districts. A non-attorney parent advocate can, for a cost that is much lower than an attorney, assist parents in preparing for IEP meetings, contribute to IEP discussions, help parents monitor the IEP implementation, and in some states, represent a family in a due process legal proceeding.

In this Article, I conceptualize the work these mother advocates do under Black feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins’s framework of “motherwork.” In this Article, motherwork describes the distinctive racial motivations, tactics, and practices that define Black mothers’ orientation toward educational advocacy. It pushes back on some White feminist theorizing about motherhood that separates the world of work from the sphere of the family: These women bridge the two.

Motherworking advocates, given their training and experience as repeat players advocating for children and their families, especially Black families, carry the knowledge of Black children’s experience in schools, as well as the racial experience of parenting Black children in a world that is hostile to them. These advocates know that although a non-Black mother may have many reasons to worry about their child with a disability, they need not contend with the racial reality of how education can be a potent space of racial subordination.

Why have Black mothers taken on this cause? Mothers shoulder the work of childcare and rearing, and mothers predominate in educational advocacy in K-12 education. Black mothers have also been blamed for the ills of the Black community, encapsulated in the infamous Moynihan Report, decried as an attack on Black women.

This Article proceeds as follows. In Part I, I describe motherwork as a theoretical frame by which to understand how these non-attorney parent advocates work on behalf of Black families in special education. Motherworkers must simultaneously consider both the specific parent-child client and the racialized space in which she is advocating. For their Black clients, she advocates for the individual needs of the child and family through a deep understanding of the collective experience of anti-Blackness, racial hostility, and the unique experience of being a Black person in a predominantly White space interacting with a law that ignores how race and disability are co-constructed. Her work proceeds from the understanding that her client’s experience is intimately intertwined with the general experience of Black people. Their collective experience sits in the forefront of her advocacy.

In Part II, I describe the legal terrain in which these motherworkers advocate: the IDEA’s parental rights provisions. This is a legal space in which parents fiercely advocated for strong rights and have more rights than in any other area of education law. Through these rights, this civil rights law imagines children being adequately protected against ableist discrimination. But not all children are equally protected, as the IDEA tackles racial discrimination not through parental rights, but through other mechanisms like monitoring and giving technical assistance to reduce disproportionality. These Black motherworkers take a different tack, engaging in direct services that use the law as the IDEA suggests--and their class privilege--to resist not just ableist discrimination, but intersectional discrimination on disability and race, as well as intersectional oppressions that accompany being a Black woman.

These motherworkers advocate in spaces that seem to be designed for lawyers deploying rights, despite not being lawyers themselves. Nevertheless, in Part III, I introduce the reader to five motherworkers, Black mothers who are non-attorney parent advocates, and show how they deploy parental rights rhetoric strategically to ensure that school districts provide the services and resources they are legally obligated to provide to a child with a disability. In this space, parents and schools often distrust each other in the litigious world of special education. I argue that their work gives new life to a decades-long debate about the efficacy of civil rights to access progressive gains. Although deploying rights rhetoric is not their initial default tactic, motherworkers will deploy rights talk when trust is low and a child’s needs are not being met in the informality of school. If not engaging in rights-talks, these motherworkers will deploy their class-based privilege, in the form of professional expertise, to signal their authority to shape a child’s situation.

In Part IV, I describe three concrete ways these Black motherworkers advocate. First, these mothers translate their experiences into a profitable business that advocates for other Black families. She is a literal mother-worker: Her firsthand experience in mothering a Black child with a disability gives her a unique position from which to advocate broadly. Second, these Black mothers engaging in special education advocacy do so with a deep understanding of the co-constitutive nature of race and disability by which school officials in majority White schools may perceive Black children. Given her experience, she knows the lens of negative stereotypes about intelligence and behavior wrought from Black children’s subordination. Third, in her motherwork advocacy, she must “work” her race and gender identity and that of her clients to effectively advocate by strategically employing credentials and codeswitching while navigating the IEP’s formal-informal norms that are laden with cultural norms that posit Black women as angry, aggressive, and incompetent. Part V concludes with thoughts about how to consider motherwork in special education advocacy.

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This Article brings together three contributions. First, it reveals the words of motherworkers, a group of civil rights workers who have been overlooked. Through motherwork, we can see how Black parents who are not lawyers work the law to the benefit of their families, and families that look like them. Second, it highlights the tensions between effective advocacy and formal rights. Simply knowing special education law is not enough to effect equal rights for all Black children because how parents are received by schools differs by race and class. Black parents, and in particular Black mothers, cannot move through the advocacy space the way many White mothers could. Third, it brings to the forefront the co-constitutive nature of race and disability and how advocates take the theory of intersectionality and incorporate it into their advocacy work.

LaToya Baldwin Clark is Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law.