Leadership and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA): Is Compliance with IDEA a Path Toward Educational Equity?

The paper explores the equity concerns that arise from the intersection of special education systems and educational leadership at the district level, examining how three district-level special education leaders and their teams comply with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in the pursuit of racial equity in special education. The central research questions guiding the paper are: How do educational leaders and their teams enact compliance with IDEA in the pursuit of educational equity in varying social contexts? And what are the equity implications of these understandings of policy compliance? Data for the paper come from a comparative ethnographic project that the author conducted in the 2011–2012 school year. The data analysis revealed that administrators leverage a contextually bound logic of compliance ( Kramarczuk Voulgarides, 2018 ) that, despite their best intentions, (re)produces racial disparities within their local contexts. The paper concludes with a discussion about how social-justice-oriented leadership must consider the effects of the logic of compliance as educational leaders work to address complex equity concerns in special education.