Mixed-Methods Data Integration to Understand Disability Policy Reverberations Across the Educational Ecosystem

• In Event: Context and Special Education Disproportionality: A Look at Racial Equity Policies in Special Education

Abstract

In this paper, we explore how policy research may apply joint display analysis (Haynes-Brown & Fetters, 2021)—a mixed methods approach to systematic data integration—to generate new understandings through the merging of qualitative and quantitative data. Such an approach holds potential in combining big-data-derived quantitative analyses with the nuanced contextual perspectives of qualitative findings to understand policy impacts. We situate our argument with illustrative examples focused on the over-60-year-old inequity of racial disproportionality in special education, including inequitable suspensions, classifications, and placements (e.g., Cruz & Rodl, 2018; Fish 2019; Hibel et al, 2010) of Black, Indigenous, and Youth of Color (BIYOC). Through an exploration of technical policy mechanisms' influence on disproportionality, we demonstrate how this mixed methods approach supports the generation of meta-inferences, or understandings beyond those achieved through either mono-method approach (Guetterman et al., 2021), regarding the ways in which policy directives move from federal to local contexts via educational federalism (Robinson, 2015) and influence local outcomes.

We frame our analysis in an educational systemic lens, which acknowledges constituents who work to improve student outcomes across the educational ecosystem (e.g., Woulfin, 2021). As we relate it to policy, the metaphor derives from Bronfenbrenner’s (1977, 1979) ecological systems theory. This provides a framework for examining the dynamic relationships among federal-policy directives, state and local interpretations and implementation mandates, LEA and school-level factors that influence a particular educational outcome, and caregivers' and learners' perspectives as they interact with policy in local contexts. Through this framework, we connect interrelated and mutually influential variables across contexts to examine cross-systemic influences on policy implementation and impact across contexts while accounting for stakeholders' agency as they work within educational ecosystems.

In this paper, we illustrate how joint-display analysis, as a methodological approach, generated new understandings of effectiveness, feasibility, appropriateness, and meaningfulness of connections across quantitative and qualitative findings (Haynes-Brown, 2022; Guetterman et al., 2021). We show how the analytic process can be used to account for the ways in which power, privilege, context, and history interact and are evident across the multiple layers of the educational ecosystem. In the analysis we describe, we integrate quantitative and qualitative findings from 15 studies on this topic, focused on IDEA policy and racial disproportionality, to illustrate how engaging in this methodological approach illuminated how policy reverberates across the educational ecosystem to facilitate—or hinder—change. We present a joint display that illustrates how integrating quantitative and qualitative findings can foreground transformative equity solutions to entrenched problems.

The paper is significant because it illustrates how joint displays can be used to generate new understandings of systems-level change focused on equity outcomes. Meta-inferences from this methodological approach can be an important analytic tool for transformative, policy-oriented equity research.

Authors

• Catherine Kramarczuk Voulgarides, Hunter College - CUNY

• Allison Firestone, San Francisco Unified School District