| The research is an ethnography of the privileged parents of a 14-year-old boy, who attends a private school for children with learning disabilities (LD), at which I am a reading specialist. While the research draws on many data resources (e.g., tape recorded interviews with teachers and administrators, tape recordings of meetings at the school, notes and reports from multiple school years), the primary resources are videotaped conversations/interviews that took place in the participants' home and centered on the parents' experiences of the three years their son spent in a mainstream private school. Analyses of these conversations afford a phenomenological understanding of participants' experiences of the conversations and the events they describe. The key issues discussed include but are not limited to: the place of families and schools in the reproduction of privilege; the interactions of LD discourse and the ideological assumptions of schooling; and the place of school structures in the construction of academic failure.;The parents' experience of their and their son's symbolic and physical segregation and incremental exclusion from the school evoked negative emotions and inspired personal transformations. Their shared habitus with the school community did not prevent them from being driven out. Their son's learning differences threatened the collective investment in normality, his academic failure threatened the underlying assumptions of schooling, his impaired performance and his difficult behaviors triggered symbolic binaries, such as normal/abnormal and able/disabled, his parents' advocacy challenged the symbolic authority of school professionals, and the spectacle of his difference inspired the spontaneous organization of degradation ceremonies.;This study has implications for further research on the nexus of privilege and disability. The research has provided many untapped data resources that can be employed to address issues such as the intersection of disability and the formation of habitus and the effects of academic failure on family life. Other related topics that merit research are the disparity of resources between public and private special education, the difference between private and public policies toward and practices of inclusion, and the differences and similarities among the special education experiences of privileged, middle-class, and poor parents. |
