Free, appropriate, public, and educational? Screen-schooling U.S. children with disabilities during the 2020 pandemic

Abstract

I was born in 1969, the year Sesame Street debuted. I love and respect educational screen media. However, screens exist in environments that modify the effectiveness of screen-delivered education far more than I could have imagined pre-COVID-19, especially for children with disabilities. In the U.S., kids with disabilities were granted the right to a public education in the 1970s. The national shift to online instruction was a metaphorical time machine sending them back to the 1960s. My goal in this essay is to explain how even an extensively privileged white family headed by two COVID-free parents with health insurance, the economic security of tenure, the option to work from home, and home ownership in a district that loans a laptop to every student, still failed to adequately educate our own children with disabilities. Kids like ours whose parents have fewer options and resources may be receiving no education at all.