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Challenging Disparities in Special Education: Moving Parents from Disempowered Team Members to Ardent Advocates

Year: 2008
Type: article
Abstract: In 1975, when Congress passed legislation 1 that later became the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), 2 it intended to create a groundbreaking antidiscrimination law that would open school doors to millions of previously excluded children with disabilities and guarantee each of them an appropriate education.3 Today, more than seven million children with disabilities receive special education services as a result of the IDEA. 4 The IDEA guarantees these children a free appropriate public education in an educational setting that, to the greatest extent possible, includes children without disabilities.5 However, the extent to which children with disabilities experience this guarantee varies greatly across income and racial lines.In low-income and minority communities, children with disabilities are consistently denied appropriate educational services and excluded from an education with their nondisabled peers within the schools.6 For many children with disabilities, the IDEA remains an unfulfilled promise. ¶2The IDEA remains unenforced for many students because inherent problems exist with its three main enforcement mechanisms.7 Federal enforcement fails because the mechanism mandated by the IDEA is not utilized with any regularity.8 State enforcement is ineffective because it relies too heavily on self-reporting at the local level.9 Parental * JD Candidate, Northwestern University School of Law, 2008.I would like to thank Professor John Elson for his encouragement in the development of this Comment, Silvana Naguib for her valuable policy suggestions, and the editorial staff members of the Northwestern Journal of Law and Social Policy for their
Language: English
Subfield: Law
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1491369002
FWCI:
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Cited by: 30
Related to: 20