Special Education and School Discipline: A Precarious Balance

Abstract

The 1997 Amendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act brought together, for the first time, all of the disciplinary provisions pertaining to students with disabilities, attempting to guarantee a free and appropriate public education (FAPE) for students in special education while preserving a safe school environment for all students. Yet the discipline of special education students has continued to create controversy, with critics suggesting that those provisions create a dual system that limits the options of school administrators with respect to school discipline. A review of the literature reveals little or no evidence that suspension and expulsion make any contribution to reducing disruption or violence and some evidence that those procedures target certain populations disproportionately. Seeking to move toward a unified system of discipline that implements effective and accountable disciplinary options will be more likely to preserve FAPE and guarantee safe and civil schools for all children.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 117 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.