Weighing Risks: How Families of Disabled Children Made School Choices During the Pandemic

In this paper, we show how positionality shapes caregivers’ decisions about children’s schooling, by expanding on research on Black families’ educational decision-making (Cooper, 2005; Posey-Maddox et al., 2021) to examine the positions from which families of disabled and multiply-marginalized children make educational choices. The families of disabled children in our sample made holistic, ongoing risk assessments and weighed trade-offs based on their positions during a period of time marked by multiple, on-going “choice moments” (Posey-Maddox et al., 2021): the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic. We show that disability and ableism—intersecting with racism and socioeconomic inequality—increased the frequency, ongoing nature, and complexity of choice moments, as well as the risks embedded in each educational option. This intersectional marginalization constrained the options available to families, forcing them to choose between school settings that caused different kinds of harm. Our findings extend beyond the pandemic by revealing how ableism and special education structures complicate and stratify school choice for families of disabled students.