Abstract
Part I of this comment provides an overview of IDEA provisions and implementation regulations followed by a review of judicial interpretations in landmark IDEA service delivery cases, specifically the Supreme Court's Rowley ruling. Drawing upon both le-gal and educational scholarship, this analysis then assesses how IDEA's aspirational equality goals ultimately devolved into de facto segregation in special education. Part II considers factors resulting from the Supreme Court's tuition reimbursement rulings that trend away from IDEA's original equality purpose and integration preference to compromise equality in four ways: creating a means-based bias in private school placement; undermining IDEA's cooperative paradigm and promoting litigation; contravening IDEA's inclusion preference; and inviting discriminatory special education resourcing practices. Part III evaluates social factors and educational perspectives that compound the adverse consequences of tuition reimbursement rulings and practices that both inform and challenge any measures to reinvigorate the IDEA equality premise. Part IV critiques how IDEA's procedural protocols and enforcement practices inadvertently or subversively introduce class-based inequities into special education programs and services, thereby creating an excessively adversarial climate that particularly disadvantages families without means. Recognizing the breadth of statutory, judicial, and societal factors that have impeded, stalled, or even reversed equality goals of disability education, the analysis concludes in Part V with recommendations for various resourcing, advocacy, and structural reforms to reintroduce prospects for equity in special education services.
Recommended Citation
Kerrigan O'Malley,
From Mainstreaming to Marginalization?--IDEA's De Facto Segregation Consequences and Prospects for Restoring Equity in Special Education,
50
U. Rich. L. Rev.
951
(2016).
Available at:
https://scholarship.richmond.edu/lawreview/vol50/iss3/8