(WITHDRAWN) Eligibility for IDEA Services and Parental School Involvement

Background/Purpose: Social workers provide crucial support for children who receive special education services and their families. In the 2017-2018 academic year, 6.9 million children received special education services through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)—the federal program intended to ensure students with disabilities have access to public education and receive needed services. A central premise of IDEA is codifying parents’ right to participate in decisions about their children’s education. While there is some evidence that IDEA is fulfilling its mission to increase parental school engagement, there is also evidence that parents from systematically oppressed groups feel excluded and devalued. Critical disability scholars argue that rather than mitigating challenges for students with disabilities and their families, IDEA perpetuates ableism. This underscores the need to better understand the influence of IDEA on parental engagement. Given the systematic marginalization of these families, the importance of social work in supporting them, and the limited research about this issue, I aim to provide needed evidence about the extent to which the receipt of special education services influences parental involvement in children’s educations. In particular, I ask: (1) Does receipt of IDEA services influence parental engagement in a child’s education?; and, (2) Is the relationship between IDEA and parental engagement moderated by family’s race and income?

Methods: I use data from the Department of Education’s nationally-representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey- Kindergarten 2011 Cohort (ECLS-K 2011) on a pooled sample of 87,144 households (N=17,873 households observed for up to 5 years). The ECLS-K contains detailed measures of child’s disability status, child’s receipt of special education services, parental satisfaction with child’s school, and parental engagement with child’s school, including participation in conferences. To assess the association of IDEA services and childhood disability with parental school engagement, I first use descriptive analyses and multivariate regression. To further isolate the effect of eligibility for special education services, I then employ child fixed effects and an instrumental variable approach. Following previous research, I use birthweight to instrument receipt of IDEA services.

Results: Findings from OLS models suggest that IDEA service receipt may be associated with a two percentage points decrease in parental engagement in a child’s school (p<.01). The negative association holds across grade levels and model specification types. Conversely, using both OLS and fixed-effects, I also find that IDEA service receipt increases already-high parental conference attendance rates (p<.01). There is less evidence linking IDEA service receipt and satisfaction with a child’s school overall or supports from the school. I also expected to find differences in engagement levels and satisfaction by race and income, and find only small differences.

Conclusions/Implications: Understanding whether IDEA is delivering on its promise of improving parental engagement is an overlooked, yet important, question for social work researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. Social workers are at the front lines of supporting students who receive special education services and their families; it is crucial to understand how and whether the system is empowering families or whether it may be further marginalizing these systematically disadvantaged families.