In the review, we examine what is known about disproportionality with the intention of informing the direction of policy and practice remedies. We outline the definition, contours, and characteristics of disproportionality and examine some of the prevailing explanations as to why the issue persists. We then pivot the review to consider how policy, through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), has sought to address disproportionality in special education and disciplining of students with disabilities. We question why a legally sound civil rights law like IDEA has been unable to abate disproportionality for nearly 40 years. We then turn our attention to review interventions embedded in IDEA that have been recommended to address disproportionality and question why they have not improved outcomes for “nondominant” students in special education. We conclude with some recommendations for disrupting disproportionality.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act ([IDEA] 2004; IDEA Amendments 1997) is a civil rights–based law designed to protect the rights of students with disabilities in U.S. schools. However, decades after the initial passage of IDEA, racial inequity in special education classifications, placements, and suspensions are evident. In this article, we focus on understanding how racial discipline disparities in special education outcomes relate to IDEA remedies designed to address problem behaviors. We qualitatively examine how educators interpret and respond to citations for racial discipline disproportionality via IDEA at both the district and the school level in a suburban locale. We find that educators interpret the inequity in ways that neutralize the racialized implications of the citation, which in turn affects how they respond to the citation. These interpretations contribute to symbolic and race-evasive IDEA compliance responses. The resulting bureaucratic and organizational structures associated with IDEA implementation become a mechanism through which the visibility of race and racialization processes are erased and muted through acts of policy compliance. Thus, the logic of compliance surrounding IDEA administration serves as a reproductive social force that sustains practices that do not disrupt locally occurring racialized inequities.
This chapter examines how studies focused on the same topic—disproportionality in special education—can generate vastly different conclusions about its sources and causes. By analyzing existing disagreements in the field, we explore essential questions about what constitutes high-quality and relevant evidence when seeking to understand how, when, for whom, and why disproportionality occurs. Using a holistic review of the empirical literature on disproportionality, we illustrate how differing epistemological and ontological views inform research around the topic of disability in schools and argue that to develop high-quality evidence around disproportionality, researchers need a shared framework that describes how school-based disabilities and classification processes intersect. A shared framework will enable researchers to evaluate whether their findings are expected or unexpected, connect to other related research, and build and rebuild paradigms around issues of equity in special education, rather than disregard one set of findings over another.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.