How do pervasive racial disparities in special education exist despite the myriad procedural safeguards and protections guaranteed by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)? Voulgarides (
2018) analyzes how the IDEA falls short of preventing racial disproportionality in special education programs, even despite federal and state efforts to monitor and penalize school districts that produce disparate outcomes for different racial groups in her book,
Does Compliance Matter in Special Education?: IDEA and the Hidden Inequities of Practice. Voulgarides’s experience as a special education teacher provides her with first-hand knowledge about the extent to which school districts prioritize compliance with IDEA, but she does not rely solely on her personal classroom experiences in determining that IDEA does not offer sufficient protections to prevent racial disproportionality in special education services. Rather, throughout the book, she details her research findings from a year spent shadowing special education administrators in three different school districts. She uses pseudonyms to refer to these school districts, which is fortunate because her descriptions of the practices of these school districts are overall respectful but highly critical. In addition to shadowing these administrations, her research involved analyzing data collected through the monitoring of specific indicators related to racial disproportionality. These indicators include (1) racial disproportionality in special education due to inappropriate identification, (2) racial disproportionality in specific disability categories caused by inappropriate identification, (3) disproportionality in long-term suspensions between students with disabilities and the overall student population, and (4) racial disproportionality in long-term suspensions of students with disabilities that results from inappropriate policies, procedures, or practices. Ultimately, Voulgarides concludes that IDEA’s focus on the procedural rights of individual students prevents educators from using IDEA to eliminate racial disparities in special education. …
