Excavating Borders, Envisioning Futures: Reimagining State Policy Guidance for Multilingual Learners with Disabilities

• In Event: Unsettling the Present: Multigenerational, Interdisciplinary Dialogues on the Past, Present, and Futures of Inclusive Education

Abstract

Objectives
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) promises students with disabilities a free and appropriate public education. However, for multilingual learners (MLLs) with disabilities, IDEA’s implementation often produces systemic contradictions that undermine this foundational promise (Ortiz et al., 2020; Voulgarides, 2018). These contradictions manifest as ideological, institutional, material, and policy-driven borders that historically have (re)produced the marginalization of MLLs through inappropriate referrals, exclusion from bilingual support, and fragmented services (González et al., 2024; Kangas, 2017). This study examined how five states with the highest percentage of MLLs frame IDEA mandates for these students across key service areas and re-envision equity-oriented policy changes for MLLs with disabilities.

Theoretical Framework
This study adopts an interdisciplinary framework grounded in CBT (Nail, 2016) and Critical Policy Analysis (CPA) in education (Diem et al., 2019) to examine how historically rooted ideological and sociopolitical borders continue to marginalize MLLs with disabilities. CBT enables analysis of how border-making practices reproduce inequity and obscure the unique educational needs of MLLs. CPA allows to analyze how policy language and implementation reproduce power structures and silence marginalized voices. Together, these frameworks guided the analysis of how policy discourses shape the educational experiences of MLLs with disabilities and how systemic inequities are embedded in the framing and operationalization of IDEA.

Methods and Data Sources
We conducted a critical policy analysis of eight state-level guidance documents from the five states — California, Texas, New Mexico, Illinois, and Nevada — with the highest percentages of English learners (NCES, 2024). These documents were analyzed across six IDEA-related domains: (pre)referral, placement, evaluation, service provision, family engagement, and professional collaboration. Our analysis focused on how these policies mediate federal mandates and how they may reinforce or disrupt systemic borders through their explicit language, silences, and contradictions.

Results
Despite rhetorical commitments to equity, the documents largely adopted compliance-based approaches, framing equity as procedural adherence rather than addressing the broader historical, sociocultural, and political conditions shaping disparities. While most documents call for collaboration between English language development and special education services, they often fail to outline mechanisms for integrated practices, maintaining institutional silos. Family engagement was emphasized, yet typically framed as procedural — limited to consent and information-sharing — rather than recognizing families’ cultural knowledge or challenging power hierarchies in decision-making. None of the reviewed documents guides postsecondary transition planning, reflecting a systemic failure to envision meaningful futures for dually identified students and integrate families’ funds of knowledge and community cultural capital.

Significance
State guidance documents are not neutral. They reflect and reinforce entrenched racial, linguistic, and ableist power structures. This study shows how even equity-oriented policies may reproduce systemic borders through narrow compliance framings, institutional fragmentation, and exclusionary assumptions without examination of historical roots of educational inequities. By applying CBT and CPA, we exposed these tensions and advocate a shift from procedural compliance to transformative, equity-driven policy design. States must center cultural knowledge, institutional integration, and future-oriented support for MLLs with disabilities.

Authors

• Lingyu Li, Lehman College - CUNY

• Yehyang Lee, Syracuse University

• Inna Stepaniuk, Simon Fraser University

• Dian Mawene, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Dosun Ko, Santa Clara University