Does Advocacy Perpetuate Inequity?
Before retiring last year, I spent more than three decades working inside public education: as a substitute teacher, classroom teacher, professor of teacher education, researcher, consultant, and administrator. I worked in juvenile justice programs, residential treatment centers, public schools, district offices, county offices, colleges, and universities. Across all of those settings, I saw many dedicated people working hard for students. I also saw a system that routinely failed the very students it claimed to serve.
For most of my career, I believed those failures stemmed from resource, staffing, or leadership problems that could be corrected by people within the system making better decisions. I believed that advocating for students and protecting the district were aligned goals. If schools followed the law, listened to educators, and responded honestly to student needs, everyone benefited.
After beginning advocacy work ten months ago, my perspective changed. I started attending trainings and seminars for advocates and attorneys, and I was shocked by the level of blatant animosity they had toward school districts and administrators. The moment people learned I had been an administrator, I was treated as part of the problem. At first, I resisted that characterization. I had spent years pushing for student supports, arguing for compliance, and damaging my own career prospects and professional relationships by refusing to stay quiet when students were being mis-served. Unfortunately, the longer I work alongside families in districts not my own, the more I understand where that anger comes from.
The biggest issue I now see in public education is not a lack of caring people. It is a system that consistently rewards self-protection over student advocacy. (Which I did see while I was an administrator but mistakenly thought was the exception rather than the rule.)
Too many administrators quickly learn that the safest career path is to avoid conflict, protect budgets, and keep complaints from reaching the superintendent or school board. Administrators who push too hard for students, challenge questionable decisions, or insist on compliance when it is inconvenient often pay a professional price. They lose opportunities, get reassigned, or forced to leave entirely. Over time, systems push out the people most willing to make noise on behalf of students and keep the people who know how to manage optics. The incentive to “keep everyone happy” further entrenches the cultural and socioeconomic inequities that are already so pervasive in our public schools.
Much too often, I see districts give in to demands from families with social and economic capital, not necessarily because the requests are educationally appropriate but because those families have influence. They know how to escalate concerns, contact board members, threaten legal action, or hire advocates. Districts often respond quickly because those families are visible and politically risky to ignore.
This disproportionate amount of time and money districts spend on “high-profile” parents, leads to denying or delaying supports for families without that same access or leverage. In those cases, cost containment and damage control become more important than student need. Teachers and service providers may document concerns for months or years, but services are postponed, minimized, or avoided altogether until the situation becomes impossible to ignore. The result is the same either way, educational decisions stop being driven primarily by student need.
That has been one of the hardest things for me to watch - how much money matters, both family socio-economic status and district budget.
Families with money, time, education, flexible work schedules, or knowledge of the system have a completely different experience navigating special education than families without those advantages. Parents who can attend every meeting, write detailed emails, hire attorneys, or pay for private evaluations are treated differently. Districts know those families can create pressure, and pressure changes outcomes.
Meanwhile, families working multiple jobs, families who do not speak English fluently, families unfamiliar with special education law, and families who cannot afford outside help often end up waiting. They are told to be patient. They are reassured instead of informed. Their concerns are delayed until the gap becomes large enough that outside intervention is unavoidable.
The inequity is not subtle. For example, the state database – which is publicly accessible – shows us multiple districts in which schools are disproportionately placing white students in out-of-district placements. At first glance, an observer would invoke the old assumption that poor students of color were being placed in “special schools”; these days, it is wealthy white families advocating for expensive non-public placements that would otherwise cost them tens of thousands of dollars a year. Lower-income students of color are still sitting in public school classrooms, waiting to fail badly enough to get noticed and helped.
For years, I believed the solution would come from inside institutions but I no longer think that is possible. I know there are good people working in schools, and many teachers, psychologists, counselors, and administrators care deeply about students and are trying to do the right thing. But I now realize that individuals cannot consistently overcome incentives built into the system itself. A structure that rewards appeasing adults will continue to protect institutions before students.
I spent decades believing the system could correct itself from within. What I understand now is why so many families stopped waiting for that to happen.
I am aware of the contradiction in my own position. As a paid advocate, I am part of a system that funnels better outcomes to families who can afford to hire someone like me. The very inequity I am describing — that resources and leverage determine whose children get served — is one I participate in every time I take a case. This is a genuine hypocrisy, and I believe advocates who do not acknowledge it are not being honest with themselves or the families they serve. I work on a sliding scale and take cases pro bono. That helps at the margins but it does not fix the underlying problem. A handful of families getting access to advocacy they could not otherwise afford is not equity; it is charity operating inside an unjust structure, which is a different thing entirely.
The real solution is not more advocates and attorneys. The real solution is a system that does not require them. That means fundamentally restructuring how schools measure success and how they are held accountable for it. Right now, the metrics that matter most in public education are the ones that keep adults comfortable: parent satisfaction, teacher morale, administrator job security, budget preservation, and the absence of complaints loud enough to become political problems.
A system that was actually built around students would define success in terms of individual student growth, skill acquisition, and goal attainment — not whether the adults in the room feel good about how a meeting went. It would require schools to track and respond to each child’s progress in a meaningful, documented, and transparent way, with real consequences when a child stagnates or regresses. It would treat a family’s frustration as diagnostic information rather than a public relations problem to be managed.
That kind of system would not need advocates standing between families and institutions, translating law and applying pressure to extract what children are legally entitled to receive. The presence of a robust advocacy industry is evidence that the system is failing in a predictable, chronic, and well-documented way, and that enough people have accepted that failure as the normal cost of doing business.
I will keep doing this work because the families I work with need help now, not after the structural reform that may never come. But I will not pretend that helping individual families navigate a broken system is the same as fixing it. The goal has to be a public education system in which every child’s progress is visible, every child’s needs generate an honest response, and the measure of a good school is not whether parents and teachers are happy, but whether students are actually learning, growing, and being served. Until the incentives change, the outcomes won’t.
