Race, Disability, and Policy: Examining the Boundaries of Legal Compliance When Pursuing Equity in Education

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: Examining Methodological and Conceptual Complexities in the Study of Racial Disproportionality in Special Education

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
We seek to understand why educator’s compliance with IDEA hasn’t resulted in racial equity in special education. Using mixed methods (Creswell & Clark, 2017) we ask: What district factors are associated with a citation through IDEA for racial disproportionality? How and in what ways do sociocultural, historical, and contextual factors affect stakeholders’ responses to receiving and addressing a citation?

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
We use an interdisciplinary framework to show how the dualism of disability (Artiles, Dorn, & Bal, 2016) relates to IDEA compliance and to educational stakeholders’ attempts to address racial inequities. We also draw upon legal endogeneity theory (Edelman, 2016) to examine how civil rights based laws like IDEA relate to equity outcomes.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
We analyzed sequence data derived from an Event History Analysis of district data from a northeastern state. We also conducted interviews with educators in one suburban school district within that state—Jones School District (JSD) (Table 1). We focused on suburban school districts because suburban locales, as compared to rural, town, and urban locales, evidence the most unstable citation patterns for disproportionality over time (Blinded for Review).

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
Quantitative Results: In the state, 93 of 215 suburban districts were cited at least once during the study period. The most common pattern was one citation; however, 39 districts were cited for three or more years (Table 2). The multiply cited districts had distinct sociodemographic characteristics as compared to the average district in the state, effectively illustrating how a constellation of contextual variables relate to multiple citations for disproportionality via IDEA[1] (Table 3). We used the sequence data analysis to identify a multiply cited district for qualitative inquiry.
Qualitative Results: The social context of JSD affected how disproportionality was locally understood and addressed. There is a racialized divide between the public and private schools in JSD. Private school parents (mostly white) used classification to argue that their child could not be properly served in the resource constrained public school system, consequentially placing their children in the private schools. This affected how a disproportionality citation was understood, and how educators made sense of who and what were at fault for the citation. Also, educators superficially complied with IDEA, effectively justifying the inequity and the public-private school divide through the language of compliance.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
Given this, the paper shows how the dualism of disability is contextually determined and how the equity impact of the dualism of disability is solidified through seemingly benign acts of technical policy compliance that just happen to result in the maintenance of racialized outcomes in special education.

Authors

• Catherine Kramarczuk Voulgarides, Hunter College

• Alexandra Aylward, Montana State University

• Adai A. Tefera, The University of Arizona

• Alfredo J. Artiles, Stanford University

• Sarah Lopez Alvarado, Arizona State University