Unpacking the Logic of Compliance in Special Education: Contextual Influences on Discipline Racial Disparities in Suburban Schools

Abstract

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.

The Aftermath of Disproportionality Citations: Situating Disability-Race Intersections in Historical, Spatial, and Sociocultural Contexts

“…Descriptive analyses also revealed that cited suburban districts were more racially and linguistically diverse, had higher poverty rates, and lower levels of achievement compared to suburban districts that were never cited (see Kramarczuk Voulgarides et al, 2021). In addition, suburban districts with three or more citations enrolled the highest number of students of color and suspension rates in these districts were more than three times greater than districts that were never cited.…”

“…The state determined significant disproportionality by using a risk index and relative risk ratio (see Kramarczuk Voulgarides et al, 2021). The state could cite a school district through either measurement.…”

“…Teachers in this study also regarded special education as the only resource to support struggling learners and were reluctant to discuss the role of race in disproportionality. With few exceptions (e.g., Kramarczuk Voulgarides et al, 2021), the research on the local perspectives of professionals after disproportionality is documented is virtually nil. There is even a greater knowledge gap about such perspectives in school districts with recurring patterns of disproportionality.…”

Re-setting special education for justice: An essay on the logics and infrastructure enabling deep change in the COVID-19-era

“…The compliance logic treats district and school administrators as playing roles in structuring and monitoring meetings as well as in analyzing data on programs and outcomes (Voulgarides, 2018(Voulgarides, , 2021. Voulgarides (2021) offered insights on how the compliance logic defines SpEd implementation activities as bureaucratic work. There exist weighty administrative burdens associated with the compliance model of SpEd (Klein, 2004;Moynihan et al, 2015).…”

“…These constraints tie to several deeply institutionalized aspects of SpEd, including: regulations on credentials for special versus general education teachers, using legal language in IEP meetings, and paperwork tracking minutes of services (Bray & Russell, 2018 ). Rather than justly serving students and families, many taken-for-granted aspects of SpEd reinforce ableism and racism (Annamma et al, 2013 ; Voulgarides et al, 2021 ). To elucidate how to disrupt aspects of SpEd—and implement equity-oriented SpEd—we apply the institutional logics perspective.…”