IDEA at 50: Is Policy Compliance Enough to Address Disproportionality?

In this episode of DiveIn, host Federico Waitoller sits down with scholar Dr. Catherine Voulgarides to unpack one of the most persistent—and politically charged—issues in special education: racial and linguistic disproportionality.

Fifty years after the passage of IDEA, states are still required to identify and address significant disproportionality. But is compliance with federal rules enough to move the needle on long-standing inequities? Drawing on her multi-state research project and upcoming book Beyond Compliance: Reclaiming Agency in Special Education, Voulgarides offers a rare systems-level view of how monitoring actually works—across federal, state, district, and school levels—and why the current approach often falls short.

This episode takes listeners inside the often-invisible policy machinery that shapes educational equity—and asks what it will take to move from compliance to actual change, providing recommendations for state and school administrators, practitioners, and researchers.

Episode Transcript