"The Unteachables offers a bold, highly insightful, and meticulously documented analysis of the racist underpinnings of special education. Keith A. Mayes shows how special education grew from white attempts to ‘protect’ white children from a racially integrated education. Drawing on his extensive background in African American history, Mayes brilliantly peels back the layers of an education system that purports to advance rights, even while it thwarts those of Black and Latinx students. The Unteachables should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand how special education came to be structured as it is."—Christine Sleeter, coauthor of Transformative Ethnic Studies in Schools: Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Research

"As I read this brilliant and troubling book, I found myself nodding in agreement and grimacing in sadness. Prior scholarship on racial issues in special education has assumed that the underlying science of disability and the accompanying ideology of helpfulness are basically sound. In The Unteachables, Keith A. Mayes shows how a distinctly American brand of racism was baked into the conceptual and practical foundations of special education from the very start."—Scot Danforth, Chapman University