The central obligation under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act is to provide each eligible student with a free appropriate public education (FAPE). In "Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District RE-1" (2017), the U.S. Supreme Court revised the prior substantive standard for determining FAPE that the court had developed in…

Restraint and seclusion (R/S) are practices employed by schools to address severe student behavior. Although the use of R/S has been shown to have harmful impact for students, staff, and schools, there is no federal law that addresses its use in schools. A lack of a universal approach leaves each state to determine its own legislation and policy.…

The formula used to allocate federal funding to states for special education is one of IDEA's most critical components. The formula serves as the primary mechanism for dividing available federal dollars among states and represents policy makers' intent to equalize educational opportunities for students with disabilities nationwide. In this study,…

In the U.S. education system, students of color experience multiple forms of marginalization at the intersection of markers of difference. These injustices manifest in multiple forms, such as higher rates of inappropriate referrals to special education, misidentification, conferring stigmatizing labels, and subsequently placing students of color…

How do special education-related professionals parenting children with disabilities experience the special education system? This qualitative exploratory study delves into the experiences of 25 mother-educators who are special education-related professionals navigating the special education system for their children with disabilities. Through…

Little is known about how the expansion of state pre-kindergarten (pre-k) programs affects low-income children with disabilities in Head Start. Using almost 30 years of administrative data of all Head Start programs and a differences-in-differences design, this study tests the possibility that, as state pre-k differentially draws relatively more…

In this study, we examined college and career readiness (CCR) support for students with and without disabilities using data from the National Longitudinal Transition Study 2012. We selected variables relevant to CCR and focused on the interaction of disability, race and ethnicity, and household income across a range of disability categories,…

Although the Individuals With Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA) mandates parent participation in their children's education programs, the implementation of IDEA results in parent effort beyond participation, specifically, an expectation of advocacy. To date, research on the advocacy expectation is mixed, with some parents perceiving…

Federal policies have aimed to improve access to grade-level curriculum for students with disabilities (SWD). Current conceptualizations of access posit that it is evidenced by students' academic outcomes. In a meta-analysis of 180 effect sizes from 23 studies, we examined access as outcomes by estimating the size of the gap in reading achievement…

We used time-varying effect modelling of two very large samples of fourth-grade students (N[subscript reading] = 148,240, N[subscript mathematics] = 152,220) to investigate associations between adoption and over-time implementation of a de facto cap on special education service receipt and over-time likelihoods of disability identification from…

To examine whether special education racial risk ratios reported by U.S. school districts are explained by district-level confounds, particularly, racial achievement gaps, we analyzed merged data (N = 1,952 districts for Black-White comparisons; N = 2,571 districts for Hispanic-White comparisons) from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of…

The overrepresentation of youth with disabilities in the juvenile justice system is a persistent concern, but estimates of their involvement vary dramatically due to differences in how disability is conceptualized and when involvement in juvenile justice is measured. This study linked juvenile court and educational records for 230,760 students in…