Catherine Kramarczuk Voulgarides: Does Compliance Matter in Special Education?: IDEA and the Hidden Inequities of Practi
- PDF / 294,710 Bytes
- 3 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 7 Downloads / 127 Views
BOOK REVIEW
Catherine Kramarczuk Voulgarides: Does Compliance Matter in Special Education?: IDEA and the Hidden Inequities of Practice New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 2018, 163 pp, ISBN: 9780807759011 Heather L. Migdon
1
1234567890();,:
1234567890();,:
Received: 19 October 2020 / Accepted: 21 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
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,
* Heather L. Migdon [email protected] 1
Indiana University Maurer School of Law, Bloomington, IN, USA
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. Voulgarides begins the first chapter of the book discussing the historical timeline leading up to the passage of the IDEA. The historical overview importantly places IDEA within the context of the civil rights of students with disabilities, the development of which started with the passage of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Students with disabilities had few protections before this important legislation. Voulgarides describes how, bef
Data Loading...
