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Emory Law Journal

Abstract

Although the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (“IDEA”) has long aimed to extend what it calls a “free appropriate public education” to all students with disabilities, one demographic group—students from lower-income homes—has consistently been left behind. Securing a remedy under the IDEA’s highly technical rules and impermeable evidentiary standards increasingly requires the assistance of both lawyers and experts, neither of whom are easily accessible to lower-income families. This inaccessibility subverts Congress’s original intent. Congress infused the IDEA with robust procedures to ensure two equally important substantive ends. First, procedures were meant to ensure meaningful parent participation and provide parents with the power to hold schools accountable. Second, Congress believed that forcing schools to adhere to strict procedures dictating the design and content of a child’s educational program would establish the substantive adequacy of that program. In short, Congress’s guiding principle was that process mattered.

This Article demonstrates how courts—by ignoring school districts’ procedural violations and demanding evidence that only experts can provide—have closed the IDEA’s remedies off to all but the wealthiest students and families. By diminishing the impact of procedural defects and requiring evidence of educational harm, courts have essentially elevated the evidentiary standard for IDEA violations and impeded lower-income families’ ability to vindicate their children’s rights under the law. To rebalance the playing field toward the IDEA’s original intent, this Article proposes a burden-shifting framework that would place the evidentiary and remedial burden back on school districts once parents establish a violation of the law. The framework introduces objective factors for courts’ consideration that help shift the focus back to the law’s ultimate purpose––ensuring appropriate educational opportunities for all students with disabilities.

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