Substantively Immaterial? How the IDEA Enables Special Education Labels to be Used as Tools of Inequity

The IDEA’s highly individualized process of disability identification and IEP development allows families with greater financial resources and more cultural capital to secure more advantageous labels for their children—and consequently to reap the benefits of individualized services. At the same time, such insistence on individualization leaves students who receive disadvantageous labels without legal recourse. If plaintiffs claim that they have been identified under an inappropriate disability label, they face an uphill battle: even if they do successfully file a mislabeling complaint, the same financial, informational, or social disadvantages that kept them from securing a more advantageous label in the first place may again hinder their legal claim. In pressing their claim, plaintiffs face courts that sever these labels from their social meanings and fail to consider the broader context of disproportionality surrounding their claims. Ultimately, mislabeling claims demonstrate that given the way the IDEA’s disability categories are conceptualized, applied, and litigated, these categories act as tools of inequity, wholly at odds with the law’s purported goal of individualization.In what follows, I survey a set of mislabeling cases, where students claim that they were identified under an inappropriate disability label and examine their implications for ongoing debates about the underlying causes of disproportionality and the IDEA’s focus on individualization. In Part I, I introduce the problem of disproportionality, emphasizing that many scholars understand disability labels like those used by the IDEA as social categories, as well as educational and medical ones. In Part II, I argue that the IDEA’s promise of individualization ultimately allows families with greater resources and cultural capital to secure labels that they understand to be more advantageous and that lead to a superior educational experience. In Part III, I trace the narrow legal path available to plaintiffs who believe they have been mislabeled, finding that courts fail to consider the social context underlying these claims and consequently enable these labels to be weaponized by well-resourced families. Finally, in Part IV, I briefly suggest ways to disentangle the IDEA’s laudable goals of individualization from its effects in practice.