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AI Literacy, Tutoring, and Special Education

Deserts by Design: Accountability Architecture, Manufactured Hermeneutical Injustice, and the Vanishing Curriculum in Segregated Special Education

Publisher: Real Safety AI Foundation

Working paper. Not peer reviewed.

Written
June 2026
Version
v0.4
Pages
13
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Abstract

Students in segregated special education classrooms in the United States routinely receive instruction in two subjects, reading and mathematics, while science, history, civics, and social studies disappear from their school day entirely. This paper argues that the disappearance is a designed outcome of federal and state accountability architecture rather than a pedagogical judgment about what these students can learn. Test based accountability counts performance in reading and mathematics; subjects that are not counted are triaged out of the instructional day, and the triage falls hardest on self-contained programs whose institutional standing depends on tested subject scores. The paper names the resulting condition a curriculum desert and analyzes it through an extension of Fricker’s concept of hermeneutical injustice: where Fricker describes gaps in collective interpretive resources that disadvantage a group, the curriculum desert is a manufactured gap, produced by an identifiable administrative design, in a specifiable population, on a knowable schedule. The subject most reliably deleted, civics, is the subject through which a student would learn the legal protections that govern his own education, so the design manufactures a class of people structurally prevented from recognizing their own situation. The paper then documents that the deletion cannot be defended on feasibility grounds: states publish alternate academic achievement standards for the deleted subjects, peer reviewed research demonstrates engagement effective delivery methods at consumer prices, and informal instruction by untrained caregivers produces measurable content knowledge in the affected population. A concluding section sketches the policy implication: a public investment in accessible curriculum delivery whose per student cost rounds to a fraction of one percent of existing annual special education spending.

Keywords

  • special education
  • curriculum narrowing
  • accountability policy
  • hermeneutical injustice
  • epistemic injustice
  • self-contained classrooms
  • game based learning
  • disability rights
  • ESSA
  • IDEA

Plain language slides

First slide of the plain language summary of Deserts by Design: Accountability Architecture, Manufactured Hermeneutical Injustice, and the Vanishing Curriculum in Segregated Special EducationOpen the 17-slide summary (PDF)

Suggested citation

Gilly, Travis. "Deserts by Design: Accountability Architecture, Manufactured Hermeneutical Injustice, and the Vanishing Curriculum in Segregated Special Education." Real Safety AI Foundation Working Paper, June 2026. https://realsafetyai.org/research/deserts-by-design/

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