The Intersectional, Discursive, Emotive, and Material Realities of Special Education Law, Policy and Praxis

Mitchell Yell

Dr. Mitchell L. Yell is the Fred and Francis Lester Palmetto Chair in Teacher Education and Professor of Special Education in the Department of Educational and Developmental Science in the College of Education at the University of South Carolina. He also serves as Editor of the Journal of Disability Policy Studies.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (Idea) remains one of the most influential and continually evolving federal statutes shaping the educational landscape for students with disabilities in the United States. Its principles, rooted in equity, access, and dignity, have guided decades of policy development, research, and practice. Yet, understanding the Idea in its full complexity requires more than a legal reading of the statute. It demands a nuanced, pluralistic exploration of the varied theoretical, methodological, and practical dimensions that shape how the law unfolds in real schools and in the lives of real children.

The volume by Catherine Vougarides, David Isaac Hernández-Saca, and Susan Etscheidt brings together a comprehensive and multifaceted examination of the Idea, beginning with foundational theoretical perspectives that illuminates the plurality of ways we can understand disability, schooling, and educational rights. From this broad conceptual base, the authors move into a rigorous discussion of methodological approaches that informs both scholarship and policy analysis, recognizing that no single method is sufficient to capture the full scope of the Idea’s impact.

Subsequent chapters provide an in-depth exploration of the statute’s core provisions. Chapter 3 examines the Child-Find mandate and the crucial processes of evaluation and eligibility determination. Chapter 4 turns to the heart of the Idea, the entitlement to a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE), and considers how this principle has evolved through legislation and litigation. Chapter 5 addresses the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE) requirement, exploring ongoing debates about inclusion, equity, and educational opportunity. Finally, Chapter 6 focuses on discipline and behavioral provisions, areas that continue to challenge educators and administrators as they strive to balance procedural protections with practical realities.

This book is a collaboration between the co-lead authors who care deeply about the equal educational opportunities of all K–12 children and students, but in particular students with dis/Abilities. We use the term “dis/Ability” to signal the social, political, historical, and economic construction of both dis/Ability and ability, emphasizing the strengths and capacities of students with dis/Abilities and the intersectional nature of dis/Ability as a sociohistorical construct shaped by race, gender, language, and other identity markers (Hernández-Saca et al., 2018). With a focus on historically multiply marginalized youth such as Black, Indigenous, and Youth of Color (BIYOC), we explore the barriers to equal educational opportunity (EEO) for students with dis/Abilities. We anchor this exploration through a critical analysis of the 2004 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (Idea), a federal statute enacted to ensure “equality of opportunity, full participation, independent living, and economic self-sufficiency for individuals with disabilities” [20 U.S.C. § 1401(c)(1)]). Despite this goal and intention, the Idea has failed to provide EEO to students with dis/Abilities and to remedy educational inequities and injustices, particularly for BIYOC students. We propose that the Idea statute promote ableism and fails to adequately address the intersectional identities of students with dis/Abilities, resulting in educational inequities and injustices, particularly for BIYOC students.

Ableism in this book refers to the social and structural discrimination faced by individuals who fall outside dominant notions of normalcy, resulting in prejudice, marginalization, degradation, minimization, and oppression (Bogart & Dunn, 2019). This system devalues dis/Ability while maintaining the social, cultural, and economic privilege of able-bodied people through processes of stratification, categorization, and segregation (Kattari, 2015). Within the Idea, law and policy codify and legitimize these ableist beliefs, embedding practices that assign negative value to people with dis/Abilities while positioning able-bodied and able-minded individuals as the norm and therefore superior (Annamma et al., 2013). Structural ableism in schools involves a complex system of hierarchical and discriminatory processes, policies, and institutions that privilege and prefer able-bodied people, fail to represent or meaningfully include disabled persons’ voices, and are grounded in a network of ableist beliefs and practices that maintain and reproduce unequal outcomes for disabled people and benefit able-bodied people” (Keefe, 2022, p. 122).

Intersectionality as a theoretical construct refers to the multiplicity and interactivity of social identities such as race, class, and gender in influencing life experiences, especially oppression and marginalization (Collins, 2019; Crenshaw, 1991, 2017). Intersectional ableism is particularly important to our critique of the Idea. Moradi and Grzanka (2017) suggest that “analyzing intersecting systems of power is critical not only to understanding experiences of oppression and marginalization, but also to making visible experiences of privilege” (p. 501). Intersectional disablism (Iqtadar et al., 2020) points to the way in which discrimination and oppression are amplified when the identity “dis/Abled” intersects with other identity markers such as race, ethnicity, social class, gender, ageism, sexuality, and religious affiliation. This highlights an “epistemic injustice” (Tarvainen, 2019, p. 291) and “a form of relational, cultural, and political discrimination” (Sanmiquel-Molinero & Pujol-Tarres, 2020, p. 3) across multiple identities. Dis/Ability is treated as an intersectionally neutral concept in the Idea (Blanchett et al., 2009). We argue that the statute thus fails to explicitly attend to social, contextual, historical, and normative factors that impact student’s lives at their multiple identity intersections, thereby contributing to educational inequities, particularly for BIYOC students.

We explore these educational inequities across a Macro–Meso–Micro continuum to analyze how law, policies, institutions, and individuals are reciprocally influenced. At the macro level, we examine how the Idea shapes policies and regulates educational practices through an analysis of both statutory text and judicial case law. Our meso-level analyses focus on how the provisions of the Idea were actualized in schools and educational policies for students with dis/Abilities. Our micro-level analyses explore how the adoption of Idea law and school practices influence individual students and families through their lived experiences. This MMM architecture (Dopfer et al., 2004) explored how the Idea promotes ableism and fails to adequately address the intersectional identities of students with dis/Abilities, resulting in educational inequities and injustices, particularly for BIYOC students.

To guide our MMM analyses, we adopt theoretical and methodological pluralism. The theoretical frameworks we employ include Disability Studies in Education (DSE) (Connor et al., 2008; Connor et al., 2024), Disability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit) (Annamma et al., 2013), Cultural Study of Law (Kahn, 1999), Legal Endogeneity Theory (LET) (Edelman, 2020), and critical autoethnography as Emotion-Aware Policy Prolepsis (Freiberg & Carson, 2010). Methodologically, we employed legal critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Liasidou, 2011, 2016) for the macro-level analysis, case study with vignette analysis (Priya, 2021) at the meso level, and critical autoethnography and emotion-aware policy prolepsis (Freiberg & Carson, 2010) at the micro level.

Through this lens of theoretical and methodological plurality, applied across a macro/meso/micro continuum (Hoque et al., 2013; Pitre & Kushner, 2015), we explore the ideological, discursive, emotion, and material (IDEM) realities of the Idea. We found that the ideological basis of the Idea—the beliefs, values, and assumptions embedded in the law that shape perception of dis/Ability—reflects a medicalized, deficit-oriented, and individual pathologized model of dis/Ability that legitimizes ableist norms and privileges able-bodied/minded students. This ideology creates a dual system of education that fails to advance inclusive placement (Dudley-Marling & Dippo, 1995; Smith & Routel, 2010). By also failing to address intersectional oppression, the Idea in its present form leaves intact the racialized inequities and injustices that perpetuate racial disproportionality (Valle et al., 2006).

Within the Idea, dis/Ability is treated as an intersectionally neutral construct (Blanchett et al., 2009), erasing the ways in which multiple learner identities intersect in practice. The silence on intersectional identities not only reinforces ableism but also reflects a profound failure to recognize intersectional lived realities.