Does compliance matter? Special education law and racial disproportionality

My dissertation is a comparative ethnography which explores the educational paradox between extensive legal regulation of special education and the persistence of racialized disparate outcomes in special education, known as disproportionality. The central question of my dissertation is: In what ways does legal compliance to federal and state special education law relate to the occurrence of disproportionality? I used neo-institutional theory to understand how compliance with IDEA relates to disproportionality. Neo-institutionalism acknowledges schools exist in a legal and policy environment that affects the delivery of education as much as the ecological context (Arum, 2000) and provides a conceptual bridge between the macro intent of policy and the micro application of it to practice. I also relied upon a theory of fragmented harm (Payne, 1984) which connects individual's everyday actions within schools to broader inequalities. I used the extended case method (Burawoy, 2009) as my primary methodological approach in order to remain conceptually focused on the legal and organizational forces shaping practice while also recognizing the agency practitioners have on their environments. Fieldwork occurred during the 2011-2012 school year and involved approximately 1200 hours of observations and interviews in three suburban school districts that had varying sociodemographics yet all experienced a citation for disproportionality. Data analysis revealed a citation had manifest effects on practice but didn't shift latent norms and biases in the local context. Disproportionality persisted despite legal compliance with IDEA because of three factors. The first was the influence local racial and class dynamics had on practice. The second consisted of how leadership engaged with these dynamics and the third was a complex mechanism whereby local context and practitioners engagement with it, coalesced around policy mandates which inadvertently reified existing inequities. The dissertation suggests the historical intent of equality in policy and law, embedded in IDEA, has been flawed when applied to practice and assuring equal opportunity through IDEA does not sufficiently challenge structures of inequality and thus never truly addresses the root causes of disproportionality in practice. The dissertation concludes with recommendations for addressing disproportionality through alternate means beyond compliance.