Unpacking the Logic of Compliance in Special Education: Contextual Influences on Discipline Racial Disparities in Suburban Schools

Sociology of Education · 2021 · 48 citations

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Sociology

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act ([IDEA] 2004; IDEA Amendments 1997) is a civil rights–based law designed to protect the rights of students with disabilities in U.S. schools. However, decades after the initial passage of IDEA, racial inequity in special education classifications, placements, and suspensions are evident. In this article, we focus on understanding how racial discipline disparities in special education outcomes relate to IDEA remedies designed to address problem behaviors. We qualitatively examine how educators interpret and respond to citations for racial discipline disproportionality via IDEA at both the district and the school level in a suburban locale. We find that educators interpret the inequity in ways that neutralize the racialized implications of the citation, which in turn affects how they respond to the citation. These interpretations contribute to symbolic and race-evasive IDEA compliance responses. The resulting bureaucratic and organizational structures associated with IDEA implementation become a mechanism through which the visibility of race and racialization processes are erased and muted through acts of policy compliance. Thus, the logic of compliance surrounding IDEA administration serves as a reproductive social force that sustains practices that do not disrupt locally occurring racialized inequities.

A Call for the Conceptual Integration of Opportunity Structures Within School Safety Research

School Psychology Review · 2021 · 33 citations

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Public relations

Few studies explicitly examine how opportunity structures impact school safety, school climate, or bullying. This article applies school-centered ecological theory as a heuristic conceptual framework that links opportunity structures and school safety. Historically, opportunity structures identified how institutional characteristics such as labor conditions, combined with factors such as geographic location, gender, race, religion, nationality, ethnicity, and family background, influence the opportunities open to individuals and shape patterns of entering the labor market. In education, the concept has been used when describing systemic racism in educational inequality. Examples are drawn from several bodies of research that have strong implications for future study of these issues. These areas include research on communities and families, creating positive school cultures and climates, and different types of educator bias that restrict opportunities and result in less safe environments. The authors suggest new research that combines school safety, opportunity, and social justice-oriented school reform.Impact StatementOpportunity gaps based on social injustice often overlap with school safety concerns. Yet most school safety studies and interventions focus on individuals or interpersonal relationships and not on structurally changing opportunity or safety gaps. This article calls for new research, intervention, and policy approaches that jointly address opportunity and school safety gaps. Examples include research on (a) school-community opportunity and safety gaps, (b) low resourced schools’ opportunity and safety gaps, and (c) racially biased classroom interactions that decrease opportunity and increase safety gaps.