Evaluating the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act Using the Groups Centered Effects Framework

• In Event: The Turbulence of Special Education Policy: Juvenile Detention, Funding Models, and Group-Centered Effects

Abstract

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, 2004) is a federal statute governing state and public agencies’ provision of early childhood intervention, special education, and related services to eligible infants, toddlers, children, and youth with disabilities. The legislation was first passed in 1975 as the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EAHCA, PL 94-142) in response to demands from disability rights activists, parents, and teachers who organized around the exclusion of 1.8 million students with disabilities from public schools throughout the late 1960s (Lazerson, 1983). EAHCA established the right to Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) for all students with disabilities, earning it acclaim as an emancipatory civil rights policy. However, as the law has been reauthorized on a roughly fifteen-year cycle over the past fifty years (first in 1990 as IDEA; most recently in 2004), the focus of debate around special education has shifted from issues of civil rights to technical issues of assessment, pedagogy, and curriculum. Over the past five decades, evidence has amassed suggesting that the provision of FAPE happens for some, but not all, students with disabilities (Kleinert et al., 2015; Morningstar et al., 2017; Sailor & McCart, 2014; Wehmeyer et al., 2020), sparking debate among special education scholars about whether, to what extent, and for whom IDEA has served its emancipatory intent.

The purpose of the present analysis is to examine IDEA’s comparative efficaciousness as a civil rights policy using the Group Centered Effects (GCE) Framework (Pedriana & Stryker, 2017). Pedriana and Stryker assert that the relative success of civil rights policies can be attributed to the extent to which they incorporated a GCE approach to statutory regulation and enforcement. A GCE approach focuses on (1) systemic group disadvantage rather than individual harm, (2) discriminatory consequences rather than intent, and (3) substantive group results rather than individualized administrative, procedural justice. The extent to which IDEA embodies a GCE approach to statutory regulation and enforcement is considered, and implications for future iterations of IDEA which are more groups-centered and in turn, more efficacious, are discussed.

The analysis reveals both strengths and weaknesses in the policy. IDEA demonstrates some groups-centered aspects by recognizing systemic issues like disproportionality and exclusion, but its processes primarily focus on individual nondiscrimination. Enforcement relies on procedural compliance rather than systemic outcomes, resulting in varied student outcomes and limited accountability. Implications for future iterations of IDEA are discussed, emphasizing the need for a more aggressive groups-centered approach and effective enforcement mechanisms. Namely, I consider the implementation of a statistical trigger model of enforcement which mirrors those of other successful civil rights policies, including what this may look like, and how groups may be defined in the implementation of such a model.

Author

• Julia Leigh Taylor, University of Kansas