Even if a child had a voucher the previous year, the family must go through the whole process again.And in practical terms, advocates and providers say, the relatively tight timeline is a mirage. Getting avoucher often takes months

A program called the Committee on Preschool Special Education then picks up services for childrenbetween the ages of 3 and 5, but it seems to have dropped the ball in T.J.’s case. T.J. was evaluated afew months before his third birthday and found to be well behind his peers, according to Departmentof Education records. He was recommended for speech and occupational therapy and services from aspecial-education teacher, but it’s not clear if he ever received them. Kerrin said he got no servicesafter he turned 3. (T.J.’s family does not have all of his records. The family’s lawyer first asked theDepartment of Education for records over a year ago and still has not received them all.)

So T.J.’s mother, Kerrin, called the pediatrician and asked what she could do. (T.J. and his familymembers are being identified by their middle names or initials to protect his privacy.) That call beganT.J.’s troubled journey through the labyrinthine bureaucracy of New York City’s special educationsystem. A decade later, T.J. is a friendly 12-year-old boy with a generous smile. He giggles whilewatching cartoons, always says “please” and “thank you” to his teachers, and he makes his brotherlaugh with his goofy sense of humor.Even though he has started sixth grade, T.J. still reads at a first-grade level. Instead of composingessays, he struggles with putting sentences together. He forgets to use punctuation.

The disproportionate representation of students of color in special education has been a concernabout the education of students from low-income familiesfor many years. Low-income students are more often identified in subjective disability categories, such as emotional disability and intellectual disability, and more frequently placed in separate classrooms. Further, after being identified in this manner, these pupils tend to be placed in classrooms where academic outcomes are worse, expectations for success are lower, and the stigma associated with special education is higher (Schifter, Grindal, Schwartz, & Hehir, 2019). They are also frequently placed in classrooms with teachers who have less expertise in math, English, and science. These circumstances have raised concerns about systemic racial bias because low-income children are more likely to be students of color (Tatter, 2019)

The disproportionate representation of students of color in special education is a serious concern that has lasted for forty years. Research suggests that students of color are too often not identified accurately for special education and that the programs they are placed in are frequently poor in quality. This trend contributes to a less-than-optimal learning environment that lowers their chances for future success. Some of the factors that may contribute to this problem include poverty and inaccurate teacher perceptions. To reduce this problem, teachers can be trained to be culturally responsive and the public-school system can be improved so that students from low-income households receive better services.

To provide an idea of what our lived lives are like, I will first relate a typical, though constructed, week during the winter of one elementary school year in order to make our intersecting challenges a bit more concrete. I also want to point out that despite the many challenges we face, our lives are no doubt much easier than those without our many privileges of skin color, social class, and language: we are European American, middle class, and English is our first language. In addition, as a former preschool teacher and current professor of education, I have both educational and experiential familiarity with schooling, and hence social capital on which I can and do draw.

I wish to note that I am only addressing one facet of Lydia's identity here. Identity is multiple, contradictory, and dynamic, and she, like everyone else, is a multi-faceted being with many complex overlapping identities (see, e.g., Davies, 1993; Scholl, 2001). Further, Lydia is not merely a passive recipient of an ascribed identity. She resists, but is also increasingly complicit in the active construction of her identity as a child with, as she says, "special learning needs." That she now so self-identifies speaks to the power of this discourse. However, self-identifying in this way doesn't mean Lydia has a positive view of her positioning. As I was preparing to present the first iteration of this paper, I worried I might be attributing inaccurate feelings to her so I asked her how she felt about being labeled as a child with special needs. She fired back with no hesitation, "I hate it!"

I situate my exploration in the view that distinctive ways of knowing arise out of and are tested against her lived, everyday experiences, and draw on my life story as a (single) mother and teacher educator/scholar to give "testimony" or "bear witness" (Burdell & Swadener, 1999) to her/our ongoing struggles with a society that exacts a steep toll on those who are "different." Based on my daughter's and my struggles with our "profoundly interrelated lives" (Hillyer, 1993, p. 105), I will raise some issues to ponder, and identify some implications of her/our situation. I end with recommendations for personal, educational, and societal policies and practices that would be less painful and limiting, and more inclusive, supportive, and ultimately democratic. Through auto-ethnography, I am, then, attempting to re-write the self and the social (Reed-Danahay, 1997). Greene (1998) writes about the power of the human experience to concretely and powerfully convey the depth and effects of social injustice; I hope her/our story in some small way does this.

2media portrays the coming-out experience to be, Ngo explains how the process of “exiting the closet” is pervasive and continuous across all contexts. When asked how his K-12 experience was different from that of his peers-and how his identity as LGBTQ+ affected those experiences, Ngoexplains how his coming-out experience was never a one-time thing, In terms of coming out, I suppose I never necessarily “came out” as a whole event. I feel like in the early 2010s, a lot of people viewed coming out as one huge thing in your life. I would say that perception comes out as this huge shocking thing. But when you’re actually LGBTQ+, you’re potentially coming-out whenever you meet someone new. (Ngo, 2022

Mayo is a world-renowned author who currently serves as Director and Professor of the Interdisciplinary Studies master’s degree program in the U.S. Department of Education (uvm.com). And it is through his readingsthat we’ll begin to debunk previous misconceptions about the coming-out experience, look attheissues of being LGBTQ+under an Asian American household, and explain how unfair government policies and school practices persist atremoving queer and non-binary conversations inside American classrooms.

A lot of the times when people label things to be age-appropriate or age-inappropriate, it’s not because of their genuine concern for their child. It’s because of their belief that, ‘I don’t want my kids to learn about things that I personally do not understand, or things that I do not wish to understand.’” (Ngo, 2022)

Thinking about the obstacles faced by LGBTQ youth, who experience a wide range of exclusions in their attempts to access education, may help provide a better school-based response to ensure their educational success. In addition, because LGBTQ youth may not find support at home, school-based support and advocacy for their access to education are all the more crucial.

One quarter of students reported homophobic assault at schools, and one-fifth reported gender-identity-related assault (Kosciw et al., 2020). While supportive interventions did make a difference to stu-dents (Kosciw et al., 2020), Robinson and Espelage (2012) found that bul-lying explains only some of the disparities in risk factors of LGBTQ youth compared with heterosexual youth. They warn that by focusing only on bul-lying, schools will miss other possibilities for improving the lives of LGBTQ youth. Ullman (2018) further suggests that policy that focuses on bullying intentionally avoids more systemic discussions of gender-identity-related bias that pervade schools.

hile homophobia possibly may be-at least in some places-less socially acceptable today than it was previously, it is nonetheless the case that schools are not very supportive places for most LGBTQ, questioning, intersex, and ally students.

One way to think about the roots of homophobia is to think about how gender normativity-what counts as a "normal" male or female-gets taught and learned. How do genders become understood as having particular qualities, actions, appearances, and so on? How do gen-der identity and sexual orientation, stabilized as normative, then become the foundation for the normative and normal communities and personal re-lationships? To understand these processes within schools, Thorne (1993) looks at not only adult expectations and definitions, but also the general tendency of institutions, especially educational institutions, to sort and label their members. Her work pushes us to see as well that countermoves fol-low each of these institutional moves: The elementary school students whose classroom work and playground activities she observes in her study play with gender as a border category, that is, a category whose meanings are understood but also open to challenge.

People of all sexualities and genders experience these social pressures to conform, whether they actively try to conform or they are nonconformist or they don't even know they are trying to conform.

Practices like having elementary students line up by gender or organizing teams of boys against girls, she argues, highlight the importance of gender differences to young students at a time when they also are working through different ways of being gendered themselves.

In contrast, both to the stereotype that there are few literacy resources in low-income homes and to studies such as Neuman and Celano’s (2001) that found few “reading materials” in such neighborhoods, this investigation found that the boys and their families had created rich literacy spaces that reflected their lives and interests. In addition to workbooks, worksheets, and books brought from school for homework, the families had books of their own, library books, newspapers, folders of student awards and report cards, school and city notices and questionnaires, advertising flyers, lists, cook-books and recipes, games with instructions, photo albums, Bibles and reli-gious books, televisions and TV schedules, soccer magazines, computers, videotapes, electronic games, CD players and CDs, iPods, and global posi-tioning system (GPS) devices among others.

Benny and Miguel’s school and homes were located in adjacent low-income neighborhoods in Midwest City. Benny lived in Fountains, two blocks from the school in a subsidized apartment. The neighborhood was bounded by busy streets and a transportation hub. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau (2012)4 (R. Piiparinen, Center for Population Dynamics, College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University, personal communication, September 30, 2015) indicate that a little more than half of the people living in the neighborhood were Caucasian (56%), with substantial African American (32%) and Latino (20%) populations. The poverty level was 44%, 10 percentage points higher than that of the city as a whole (34%). Miguel lived in Lorimar, several blocks away from the school on a street lined with multistory wood frame homes like his own. There, the Latino population was slightly higher (23%) than in Fountains, the Caucasian population higher (69%), the African American population lower (23%), and the poverty level was less though still substantial (31%). Both neighborhoods had about dou-ble the percent of Latinos than the city as a whole (10%), and both had low levels of educational attainment with 32% and 28%, respectively, without a high school diploma

located in a midsize city that has “some of the same characteristics and sometimes challenges as urban intensive schools and districts in terms of resources, qualification of teachers, and academic devel-opment of students” (p. 560, emphasis added). Although urban decliningrather than urban emergent might be a more accurate label today for this Rust Belt city characterized by a shrinking population and industrial base as well as efforts to reverse this trend, the identification of the district as one in flux with characteristics of the much larger city it once was and aspirations to redevelop was appropriate

we focused on the strengths and resources of the children and their families, rather than their needs and alleged deficits as often described in the dominant discourse (Arzubiaga, Ceja, & Artiles, 2000). We knew that many Latino children had rich literacy lives—often invisible to teachers in urban schools or dismissed as irrelevant to school learning—and that they and their families possessed expertise and funds of knowledge (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005; Long et al., 2007; Spencer et al., 2010) that could serve as the basis for a culturally relevant curriculum (Boardman et al., 2014; Gay, 2010)

In an article describing their “ecological study of four neighborhoods,” Neuman and Celano (2001) challenge the simplistic but common assump-tions that the characteristics of families determine children’s achievements in literacy and that all families have equal access to literacy resources. Their study investigating the affordances of low- and middle-income urban neighborhoods in terms of “access to print” looked at access to books, sig-nage, and other reading materials, as well as public places for reading and concluded tha

Ms. López respects Yamaira’s translanguaging space and acknowledges that even though the class is officially in English, Yamaira has opened a trans-languaging space that has transformed the class. Latinx bilinguals, who make up 75% of this middle school, have begun to understand that their trans-languaging is a resource, not a hindrance, for read-ing deeply about history and other content. This understanding is also now also available to stu-dents who speak languages other than English and Spanish, as well as to African American students. The class begins to understand that the way they use language and what they know is most impor-tant in making sense of reading any text.

Ms. López shows Yamaira some other strategies to bring her translanguaging abilities to bear on her reading of the English textbook. For example, Ms. López explains to Yamaira how to annotate the text, writing in Spanish in the margin or on sticky notes her interpretation of an idea or even the meaning of words. She also tells Yamaira not to be afraid to use Google Translate when she does not under-stand something in the text. Ms. López also advises Yamaira to read about the topic on the internet in Spanish before reading the English-language textbook

Ms. López begins to understand that Yamaira has an inquisitive historical mind, even though she is struggling with reading the textbook. She gives her two primary documents, written in Spanish, and asks her to read them for the following week. She also assures Yamaira that she will not be evalu-ated on her knowledge of English, but on her knowl-edge of history

Paco, Pre-Reading in a Bilingual HomeI start with Paco, the 3-year-old bilingual child whose mother is a U.S.-born Latina woman and whose father is a U.S.-born white man. The mother grew up in a bilingual home, the father in a monolingual one, but he studied Spanish in high school. The family is comfortable in a translanguaging space, where their use of English and Spanish is unbounded, dynamic, and fluid and adapts to meet the communicative expectations of the many different people who enter the hom

Most teachers in U.S. schools see their instruc-tion as being in English, and sometimes in Spanish or a language other than English. In this, most teach-ers reveal their monolingual view of literacy, insist-ing that the acts of literacy need to be performed in either one language or the other. Teachers also have a monoglossic view of literacy, as if the language of the school text is static and contains the only lin-guistic features that are valid

These resources are not equitably distributed in the population, and they are also not equally valued in society and schools. For example, in U.S. schools, English is valued more than Spanish. Almost exclu-sively, English is the language of the tests and texts. The verbal, especially its written mode, is also privi-leged over the visual or gestural among meaning-making systems. Furthermore, white middle-class English-speaking students are positioned vis-à-vis school tests and texts in ways that privilege them because the authors of those texts most often share the same socio-historical cultural legacies, as well as the same ways of using language

alone in the apartment, caring for her younger brother while her parents worked. As teenage daughters, the girls often were responsible for household chores and caring for younger siblings, which furthered their solitary and constrained feelings

Researcher positionalityMy various identities – a Japanese citizen, an Asian woman, a non-native English speaker, and a doc-toral student (at the time of my fieldwork), with a middle-class background, among other aspects of my identity and experiences – impacted the ways I understood phenomena and how I built relation-ships with the girls. I am aware of my positionality in representing the lives of the girls and producing this ethnography. I constantly reflected on my positionality, specifically thought about the privilege that I had relative to the girls, and negotiated this ‘ambiguous insider/outsider position’ (Kondo, 1990, p. 23). The girls and I had an Asian identity intersecting with gender identity and shared the marginalized experiences of being an Asian girl/woman in the uS. While our common Asian identity was salient in our relationships, I was aware of the privilege I had as a middle-class Japanese citizen compared to girls with working-class backgrounds who come from families from ‘developing countries.’ They sometimes envied my Japanese ethnicity, associating it with richness and both economic and cultural power. My Japanese language competency and nationality allowed me to build rapport with the girls, who enjoyed Japan’s popular culture and had interest in its culture and language. I was specifically mindful of the power of my adult status. I attempted to avoid coercion, for example, by not forcing the girls to talk about issues about which they were hesitant

Few scholars have focused on the sites of belonging and power that these young women construct and maintain (Maira, 2002; ngo, 2002; Shankar, 2008). For example, Maira (2002) examined the ways in which Indian American young women used Bhangra remix music and hybrid fashion to mediate between the multiple cultures in which they were embedded. ngo (2002) reconsidered the negative connotation of early marriage among Hmong American young women and revealed that they used early marriage to oppose the structural constraints they experienced in school and at home. While these studies focused on college-aged women, Shankar’s (2008) study looked at the lives of South Asian American (desis) high school students. She revealed that teen girls subjected to strong control and surveillance from their families and communities around issues of dating, marriage, and social life, actively negotiate, resist, and/or ‘quietly work around this (the) system’ (p. 168).

vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary’ (Anzaldúa, 2007, p. 25). They face a world of multiple, often contradictory, messages about who they are, what they should become, and how to navigate the world. Their parents expect them to follow and inherit their homeland traditions, beliefs, and values. There are messages inscribed in the contours of their lives, in schools and local communities that define who Asian American youth are, can be, and should be. There are messages embedded in media and popular culture that prescribe idealized versions of who Asian American girls should be and what they should look like. They negotiate this in-between terrain, which is ‘in a constant state of displacement – an uncomfortable, even alarming feeling’ (Anzaldúa, 2002, p. 1), while carving out a place to belong. Mired in a crucible of profound contradiction, alienation, and ambiguity, the girls fashion a borderland community of their own where they can affirm cultural hybridity, question and reject the mainstream values and beliefs that surround them, and imagine new possibilities for their present and future. Exploring the possibilities and constraints of the ‘Basement Group’ through the eyes of Asian American girls, this article attempts to illuminate their otherwise unseen sense of belonging, skills, and capacities of these immigrant young people who inhabit the borderlands. I explore the following research questions. (1) How do the girls navigate displacement in the uS, specifically in their family homes and school community? (2) How do they construct a community in response to mainstream spaces and homogeneous social groups at school?I first review literature on the experiences of Asian American girls and in-between s

IntroductionIt is lunchtime at Maple High. Several Asian American girls run downstairs to the school basement and gather on the floor of one of its darkest corners, joining their friends. They form a large loud crowd of about 25 students, including Asian, Latino, and black boys and girls as well as white girls. Some sit next to the Japanese language classroom door at the end of the hallway. Others sit in front of some student lockers, and a few gather in front of the janitor’s room. Some sit underneath the stairwell, which they love because it is ‘empty,’ hidden, and more ‘private.’ In this space, they share foods from various countries, talk loudly in a pan-Asian language, listen to music from around the world, dance together, use hybrid languages, tease each other, and laugh. It is where Bollywood, K-pop (Korean pop music), Japanese anime, and British boy bands are part of daily conversations. It is a community, a place where they feel comfortable, empowered, and affirmed and yet at times where they experience tensions, contradictions, and challenges. ‘We dominate the basement!’ Gina, a 15-year-old Chinese American girl, proudly proclaims. This article, based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, examines how a group of Asian American1 immigrant high school girls (Filipina, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Indian) construct this basement into a community, which they name the ‘Basement Group.’ While this group comprises students with diverse backgrounds, I specifically focus on the perspectives, voices, and experiences of a group of Asian American girls who are its founders and core members.

A struggling school, we were victim to a bevy of new reform measures; each year we scraped to make Adequate Yearly Progress for No Child Left Behind until eventually we were put into a transformation model for Race to the Top money. Because of these stresses, the administration and teaching staff constantly shifted, and this hurt the student body, which was becoming increas-ingly poor and lower skilled (in regard to what was measured by the high-stakes tests).