The promises and pitfalls of mandating racial equity in special education

Civil rights for Black Americans and for Americans with disabilities have long been closely linked. In 1968, Lloyd Dunn, who was then a former president of the Council for Exceptional Children, argued that racial inequity in special education was a civil rights concern, adding that it was “morally and educationally wrong” (p. 5) to continue referring students of color for special education services that would not serve them. Unfortunately, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), as it has evolved over the years, has done little to address the problem. In fact, it comes with a set of unintended consequences that choke the pursuit of educational equity. Most important, IDEA has become a behemoth bureaucracy that is primarily focused on ensuring compliance with its mandates — and this compliance-based approach has failed to meet the needs of many students with disabilities.

Approximately 7.5 million students currently receive special education services in the United States (U.S. Department of Education [USDOE], 2020). Today, as in past decades, disproportionate numbers of those students are Black, Indigenous, and Latinx — the magnitude and extent of the disparities varies by such factors as locale, disability category, and ethno-racial identity (Ahram, Voulgarides, & Cruz, 2021; Fish, 2019; Shifrer & Fish, 2020). Note also that students of color who are placed in special education are more likely to be suspended than their white counterparts (USDOE, 2014, 2020). Further, and for students of all races, placement in special education has been associated with higher rates of involvement with the criminal justice system (Kim, Losen, & Hewitt, 2010); lower employment levels (Wells, Hogan, & Sandefur, 2003); and other negative consequences. And so, more than 50 years after Dunn’s call for reform, racial inequity in special education remains a significant civil rights issue (Skiba et al., 2008).

The civil rights victories of marginalized groups in the 1960s galvanized the disability community to pursue access and opportunity through the U.S. court system. Relying on the legal reasoning behind the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision (Minow, 2010), advocates argued that the segregation and exclusion of students with disabilities from educational services was a violation of equal protection and due process (Ong-Dean, 2009). The strategy proved to be effective, and not just in the courts — eventually, it led to the passage of the 1975 Education for All Handicapped Children Act, which served as the legislative basis for IDEA.