ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the adverse consequences of welfare reform policy on children and its intersection with school as a gate-keeping dispensary of identities of disability, using an ethnographic case study of a family on welfare. The study examines the economic and educational structures wherein disabilities are hatched, and the policies that underwrite the power of those institutions to ascribe policied identities to children of poverty. As a structural gatekeeper determining and dispensing identities of disability, the school stands in the center of the production of disabled identities for children like Mo and Marcus. The consignment of children of poverty to a tenuous childhood begins at their assignation of an at-risk identity that ushers them into policied programs, such as intervention and childhood special education. Studies in special education have not critically deconstructed the at-risk label nor have they interrogated the school’s role in the hatching and burgeoning of children identified with disabilities while in school.
