Parent Participation in Special Education: Has It Worked?

• In Event: Toward Inclusive and Equitable Education: Disrupting Deficit-Based Positioning of Families and Students Labeled With Dis/abilities

Abstract

Objectives

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, 2004) is premised on six principles and parallel substantive and procedural safeguard provisions. The procedural safeguard provisions — "parent participation” (right to participate in an IEP team decision making) and “procedural due process” (right to contest decisions in hearings and civil courts) — empower parents to hold schools accountable for complying with IDEA’s substantive provisions (Turnbull et al., 2007). The objective of this paper was to review the literature to understand: (a) what barriers do parents face in accessing the substantive provisions of IDEA? (b) How do personal factors (i.e., relationships with the teachers and administrators) impact this participation? (c) How do institutional factors impede parent participation?

Theoretical Framework

I employed institutional (Meyer & Rowan, 1978) and street level bureaucracy (Lipsky, 2010) theories to frame the literature review. While institutional theory explains how ideas of power, culture, and isomorphism shape the behavior of the organization (i.e., schools); street level bureaucracy provides a framework to understand teachers’ work. Lipsky defines “street-level bureaucrats” as frontline workers, who provide benefits to citizens under conditions in which they practice “discretionary decision-making” and have relative autonomy from administration. Given such discretion, they shape public policy through their actions under work conditions in which they are inundated by clients who they don’t have enough resources to fully serve. This leads to adopting unsanctioned “coping mechanisms” that bias policy intent and, thus, legislative goals and policy outcomes. In order to process large numbers of clients, street-level bureaucrats (i.e., teachers) develop simplified routines to ration services, control clients, and limit services. Through “stereotyping, screening, and rubberstamping” (Lipsky, 2010), they make access difficult, require clients to wait for services, and withhold information, all of which decreases service demands, thus, making their jobs manageable. Combined with institutional theory, this allowed for a powerful tool to analyze parent participation and parent access to safeguards within IDEA.

Methods and Data Sources

A systematic literature search was conducted, using hand and ancestral search methods. Inclusion criteria included: (a) the key phrases such as “parent participation”, “parent involvement”; and (b) the articles published in the special education journals since 1990. Out of a total of 51 results, 32 articles met inclusion criteria and were analyzed.

Results

The results indicate that personal factors (i.e., language, socio-economic class of a parent, and the relationship with teachers) played a significant factor in how parents accessed the procedural safeguards within IDEA. Institutional factors (i.e., teacher role, dominant culture, whiteness, and language within the school) played a role in either forcing or preventing parents from participation and subsequently accessing safeguards.

Scholarly significance

In a time like we have had over the last year with the Covid-19 pandemic, it is critical for parents to participate and ensure fair implementation of IDEA (2004) and all its provisions. This paper provides a key framework for policy makers and administrators as well as frontline workers to support parent participation and enhance the procedural features of the law.

Author

• Suman Rath, The University of Kansas