Annotated Bibliography

Word Count: 2405 words


  1. (December 7, 2020). Children with disabilities. Theirworld. Retrieved September 07, 2020 from https://theirworld.org/explainers/children-with-disabilities

This article addresses the educational challenges of children with disabilities in developing countries such as Bangladesh, Zambia, and Bangladesh. Few emerging nations collect data on children with disabilities and those that can do not know how to effectively integrate disabled students into their exclusive education systems. This source suggests that students with disabilities are the most vulnerable group of students in developing countries during times of crises, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The author proposes that countries implement policies that introduce inclusivity standards in order to protect disabled students in the education systems. These policies should pressure schools to make structural improvements to their school and seek funding for inclusive learning tools. The funding could go towards curb cuts, braille books, eyeglasses for visually impaired students, iPads for nonverbal communication, buses that can accommodate students with wheelchairs, etc. Making the schools physically accessible is the first step to inclusion, as disabled students cannot fully benefit from an inclusive educational system if they cannot be physically present.

Theirworld employs data from stratified samples by country to compare the amount of disabled students attending school among developing countries. Using this data, the author investigates education and the freedom to learn especially in developing countries. The goal is to first bring awareness to the lack of educational opportunities for children with disabilities and put pressure on countries to implement policies that hold their educational systems to a higher standard. Beyond implementing policies and receiving help from non-profits, Theirworld is still researching how to most effectively improve schools in developing countries and abide by the policy standards. Giving neurodiverse students access to an education is necessary to enable their individual freedoms, beginning with their freedom to learn, which thus gives them the freedom to socially interact with peers and to be properly educated and prepared to enter the workforce.


  1. Cooper, M., Ferguson, R., & Wolff, A. (2016, April 25). What Can Analytics Contribute to Accessibility in e-Learning Systems and to Disabled Students’ Learning? Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology, 99-103. Retrieved September 08, 2020 from http://oro.open.ac.uk/45313/

E-learning has gained momentum during the pandemic making it more accessible to minority students. Children with disabilities can particularly benefit from e-learning as they can specify their weaknesses, strengths, and skills that they seek to improve while preserving confidentiality. This helps the instructor better understand the student and their abilities. The authors explore education for disabled students in the United Kingdom and where the country’s policies fall flat. For example, the wording in UK education legislation is very vague, making it easy for schools to avoid meeting their standards due to a lack of specificity. Students, especially college students, are severely underrepresented in the UK. There is a plethora of data on general education college students by “age, gender, ethnicity, family background, and study habits,” yet there is no differentiation in the data for students with disabilities. There are many efforts to ensure the wellbeing of other minority groups, but not the neurodiverse students.

Open University collected data on neurodiverse students by having all students take online modules. They compared the completion rate of these modules between non-disabled and disabled students and found that the disabled students were slightly less likely to complete the module. The goal of this data analysis was to identify which modules were the least accessible to disabled students so the university could identify what issues there are with e-learning for disabled students. The authors concluded that disabled students are less likely to complete a module, but it depends on the module. Some of the reasons why a disabled student might not finish the module include experiencing “difficulty with reading material on screen, and lack of subtitles on videos from external providers.” The authors suggest that allowing disabled students to identify themselves can allow the creators of modules to ask what accessibility issues they normally experience with e-learning, then accommodating these limitations, making it easier for the disabled students to complete a whole module without being excluded due to their mental or physical disability.

Amartya Sen argues that development is an expansion of freedom, to include the freedom to learn and be educated. To allow these disabled students to learn without experiencing difficulties is to better develop a schooling system. This is a social change to be more inclusive, rather than the physical changes in schools that are required of the developing countries in order to develop their educational systems. E-learning could be more inclusive by merely asking disabled students about their struggles and adjusting. This is a relatively low budget fix and has an almost immediate solution, rather than the costly and time consuming construction that developing countries would endure to be more accommodating to disabled students.


  1. Editorial Projects in Education. (2019, December 17). Special Education: Definition, Statistics, and Trends. Education Week. Retrieved September 07, 2020 from http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/special-populations/

This article discusses the flaws of special education in the United States. It points out how in some cases the students are overidentified while in others they are underidentified. There is a huge emphasis on how including children in general education programs is a sign of development and improvement in this section of education. There is a graph juxtaposing the amount of disabled students spending most of their time in general education classes in 1989 and 2017.

As it stands today in the United States, which has one of the most impressive special education programs in the world falling behind European natitons, the schools are often criticized for collapsing the amount of cognitive levels they separate the students into. Children with extremely different abilities are put in all of the same classrooms because of a specific ability that they are lacking. For example, a blind and immobile child might be in the same classroom as a remarkably high-functioning child with Down Syndrome, simply because neither of them can be left without an attendant. There are many ways to differentiate cognitive levels and their corresponding classes, and while whether or not the student needs an attendant is a convenient differentiator for the staff, it would be much more appropriate to separate the children based on academic abilities, so they are able to progress academically. I agree with the overwhelming amount of American special education teachers who find it quite troubling that inclusion is a sign of development. Rather, the students should have the opportunity to join these classes if they are at the proper cognitive level to succeed. This individual freedom to choose to enroll is a sign of development in itself according to Amartya Ssns.

Over the past few years there has also been an increase in the student to teacher ratio in the special education community. It has even exceeded the general education student to teacher ratio. This data can be somewhat explained by the dramatic increase of disabled children over the past few years. The disabilities that are becoming more common tend to be behavioral, such as Autism, rather than Dyslexia, a learning disability, which has declined over the past few years. This is a structural change that the article is proposing, to rewire the special education system to prioritize inclusion rather than prioritizing accommodations. The data used in the article was collected from the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act which requires states to provide annual data to Congress about their school’s special education programs. While this article mainly highlighted the flaws of American special education systems, that data used to support the statistics was easily accessible to them due to the government’s legislation. It focuses primarily on the current state of special education in the United States rather than seeking strategies for future improvement. While this source did not extend beyond stating statistics, it is important because it contextualizes the special education inclusion crisis in a developed country and shows the unmatched amount of data that the United States has on its special education population.


  1. Koplewicz, S. (2020, May 27). I Would Like to Go to School. Human Rights Watch, 1. Retrieved September 08, 2020 from https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/03/22/i-would-go-school/barriers-education-children-disabilities-lebanon

Students in Lebanon are not only underrepresented in the country’s figures, but they are struggling to receive access to the basic human right of education. Human Right Watch interviewed disabled children and their families in Lebanon and they all struggle to find a school. Schools will deny disabled children admittance for a variety of reasons- the campus is not equipped to accommodate wheelchairs, the parents of general education students will take their kids out of school so their children do not have to learn with disabled students, or because the teaching staff is not academically equipped to teach students with disabilities. Lebanon has laws put into place to prevent the discrimination of neurodiverrse students, but they are not enforced. If a school happens to follow the laws and can provide an inclusive education, they require “special charges” of the families because the children require extra training of the staff and different equipment even for something as basic as a pencil. The families can rarely pay these extra charges as they already have financial troubles due to the child’s condition and the extra medical attention they require.

However, Human Rights Watch found that there are a few exceptions to this education crisis in Lebanon. There are a handful of public schools that provide an inclusive education where both disabled and general education students learn together in the same classes. They do not receive any extra money from the government so the head of the school has to come up with the money somehow in order to keep education accessible for these children. In one particular school, the principal requested from the Minister to have financial support for the inclusive education he is providing, and he still has not heard back after 3 years. This article simply sheds light on the severity of the exclusion in education within developing countries by employing personal anecdotes and statistical evidence of Lebanon’s education crisis.

This situation is unique because the people of Lebanon already have strict policies put in place to prevent this discrimination, but they are not enforced. The people of Lebanon need a different solution. Human Rights Watch is suggesting a thorough plan to reach the goal of inclusive education in Lebanon. The Ministry of Education and Higher Education would be responsible for devising a plan and implementing it into their school systems. This would include a push for training teaching staff to be able to teach children with disabilities. Lastly, Lebanon could improve greatly if the government could publicly ackownledge the extreme discrimination against this marginalized population, showing the public that is a real issue that extends beyond a few districts.

Human Rights Watch selected five out of twenty-six districts in Lebanon to study. They did not choose them at random, but rather, carefully selected diverse regions to ensure a variety of “population density, socioeconomic levels, religious affiliation, level of urbanization, and distance from major health care service centers.” They personally interviewed 105 children and their families, 6 public schools, 5 private schools, and 17 government funded institutions. They also interviewed many disability rights experts. They were very careful in their sampling and had to personally interview their subjects due to the severe under representation of diabled children in Lebanon.

Human Rights Watch is trying to include political figures and government organizations in the fight for rights for neurodiverse students. Since policies protecting this group of students are already put in place, they want implementation and enforcement from those in charge. There are a few solutions HRW outlines. These include bringing awareness, training teachers to be inclusive, ratifying new non-discriminatory legislation, and considering education when allocating financial resources.

This article takes a distinctive approach on explaining the inequalities in education. Rather than posing the freedom to learn as a basic freedom, they emphasize the exclusion of disabled students as an unfreedom. This is the only source that approaches the crisis from this point of view. This relates to Amartya Sen’s suggestion to remove the unfreedoms of a society in order to let the people access their freedoms. In this case, removing the exclusive characteristics of public school in Lebanon will give disabled children the freedom to learn, eventually participate in the economy, and live well rather than live to merely survive.


  1. (2020, May 27). Students With Disabilities. National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved September 09, 2020 from https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cgg.asp

This source studies the number of disabled students who receive special education services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in the United States. The amount of data provided by the National Center for Education Statistics proves that the United States is relatively well-informed on its disabled population. This data differentiates the disabled population from general education students in the way that Open University struggled to in the second source of this annotated bibliography.

The first figure in this dataset displays by disability the amount of children who benefit from the IDEA. Children with “specific learning disabilities” are the largest population under the IDEA and these are the children who typically need the most individual help rather than being assimilated into regular education courses. This is the exact section of disabled students that the IDEA was intended to protect and support, showing that legislation for neurodiverse students can be effective if it is actually implemented and enforced. The second figure divides the disabled students by race/ethnicity to demonstrate that with effective legislation, racial minority groups can be just as academically included if not more included than white students. The data show some minority groups benefiting from the IDEA more than white students. The third figure shows that there has been an increase in the amount of time that disabled students spend in general education classes. The last figure demonstrates why students of different races/ethnicities left school- they either graduated or received an alternative certificate.

The data set in this source came from all 50 states as they are required under the IDEA to submit annual support to congress on their disabled population up to 21 years old. While the figures are not separated by state and are condensed to represent the United States special education under the IDEA as a whole, the public has access to each state’s assessment by year since 2012 due to the ratification of the IDEA. The representation of these students exercises their right to be identified and freedom to be recognized as equally important in education systems. Even identifying the amount of these students is a step towards human development that some countries have not made. The IDEA has given freedom to many disabled students throughout the United States beyond the freedom to be identified. Incentivizing the states to collect data on disabled people above the age of 21 is a feasible goal to improve the freedoms for neurodiverse citizens. Identifying older disabled people might inspire a push to prioritize their freedom to participate in the market as they have outgrown their public school ages, and are therefore excluded from the annual census.