“Once I Left Here, I Began to Recognize It”:

My clearest understanding of myself came not in the United States, but in Morocco.

During my two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Marrakech, I experienced something I had never felt before: the ability to move through the world without being racially categorized, evaluated, or second-guessed. I was not “a Mexican American man” or “a person of color” or whatever identity U.S. society might have projected onto me. I was simply myself — a volunteer learning a new language, building relationships, and discovering what I was capable of without the constant pressure of other people’s expectations.

In that freedom, something opened up. I took risks I might not have taken back home. I imagined possibilities I had never allowed myself to consider.

During my second and final year of service, I applied to graduate school. Before the Peace Corps, invisible barriers — rooted in stereotype threat — had quietly shaped my sense of what institutions were “for someone like me.” Living outside the American racial script gave me space to think differently. I applied to Harvard and Teachers College, Columbia University. My Harvard application never made it through the international postal system, but Teachers College did — and I was accepted into their master’s program.

Years later, when I encountered James Baldwin’s reflections on leaving the United States for France, I recognized my own experience in his words. Baldwin described how distance from America allowed him to better understand the forces that shaped him. For me, leaving the country created a similar shift. It helped me recognize which parts of my identity were truly mine and which had been formed in response to constant racial surveillance.

When I returned to the United States, I felt as though my sensibilities had been recalibrated.

I became newly aware of the microaggressions I had once normalized — the comments, the assumptions, the subtle policing of identity. The everyday signals that tell a person of color to be careful, think smaller, stay within expectations. I had lived under those signals for so long that I no longer recognized their weight. Living in Morocco had loosened their grip. Coming home made them visible again.

After more than a decade teaching in elementary schools serving predominantly Black and Brown students, I stepped into school leadership. Almost immediately, I recognized that the same pressures I had experienced as a child were being placed on students — especially Black children — as early as kindergarten.

I saw how quickly schools decide who a child is. I saw how discipline referrals often become the first chapter in a narrative a student never wrote. Behaviors interpreted as “normal” or developmentally appropriate for some students were labeled “defiance” or “noncompliance” for others. These interpretations quietly shaped which students were referred for student support team meetings, which students were assessed, and which students ended up in special education with labels that followed them for years.

One Black 4th-grade boy was repeatedly written up for defiance because he frequently asked to use the bathroom during daily math. Over time, he shared that math class triggered intense anxiety, and leaving the room was his attempt to regulate himself. Instead of curiosity or care, his requests were interpreted as avoidance and disrespect. A Black 2nd-grade girl was consistently removed from class for “talking back” when she asked clarifying questions in a direct tone. These were ordinary children navigating their worlds, yet their behavior was interpreted as threat rather than communication.

These were not acts of conscious racism. Most teachers I have worked with are deeply committed and compassionate. But they, like all of us, inherited a system shaped by anti-Blackness — one that trains educators, explicitly and implicitly, to view Black children through a lens of suspicion, correction, or concern before seeing them as children. While I also witnessed bias affecting other children of color, including Latinx students whose experiences mirrored my own growing up, the most persistent and urgent disproportionality in my schools centered on Black children.

I saw how quickly schools decide who a child is. I saw how discipline referrals often become the first chapter in a narrative a student never wrote.

A discipline referral often becomes the first domino in a long chain of decisions that can lead to the misidentification of Black students for special education.

The process typically begins with a referral for subjective behaviors like “defiance” or “noncompliance.” The report, often written in a moment of frustration, becomes part of the student’s official record. Soon, an SST meeting is recommended. Because Tier I classroom supports and Tier II interventions are frequently inconsistently implemented or poorly documented, teams may recommend psychoeducational testing “just to be sure.”

Once testing begins, assessment tools — largely designed around white, middle-class norms — often interpret cultural differences in communication, movement, and expression as deficits. A student’s high energy becomes “hyperactivity.” Assertiveness becomes “oppositional behavior.” A need for relationship and reassurance becomes a “social skills deficit.” Before long, the student is found eligible under categories such as Specific Learning Disability, Emotional Disturbance, or Other Health Impairment for ADHD.

Pull-out services follow. Time away from the classroom increases. Expectations quietly lower. A child’s identity as a learner shifts. A story that began with a subjective discipline referral ends with a label that can shape an entire academic trajectory.

None of this begins with a test. It begins with perception. With interpretation. With the daily messages that tell Black children who schools expect them to be.

What I learned in Morocco — and what Baldwin helped me articulate — continues to guide me: Although none of us can fully step outside systems of racial meaning, distance can make those systems visible. Once you recognize how powerfully they shape identity, you cannot ignore their impact — especially when they press down on children.

Disproportionality in special education is not solely a technical or instructional problem. Instructional strategies matter, but they operate within systems that assign meaning, worth, and risk to students before instruction ever begins. At its core, disproportionality is a question of identity, dignity, and belonging.

It reflects a foundational truth: Public schools in the United States were not designed with Black children in mind, and without deliberate intervention, they continue to reproduce the biases embedded at their creation.

Recognizing this is not an argument for hopelessness. Educators are not powerless. We can intervene at every point in the system — by strengthening early supports, redesigning referral processes, critically examining assessment practices, and making placement decisions grounded in equity rather than convenience.

Teachers can question school practices together, and administrators can create the time, space, and expectation for those conversations. That is our responsibility — and our opportunity — as educational leaders.

Most importantly, we can choose to see Black children differently — before the system tells us who they are.

The work begins not with programs or compliance plans, but with a shift in perspective: a refusal to accept inherited assumptions; a commitment to seeing the child before the behavior, the possibility before the deficit, the humanity before the label.

Because the real question is not whether disproportionality exists. The real question is who do we allow our children to become?