Abstract
Over fifty years ago, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) promised that students with disabilities would attend school alongside their nondisabled peers in the least restrictive environment. Yet today this pro-inclusion educational vision remains unrealized. School districts nationwide continue to place many students with disabilities in segregated educational settings, including disability-only public schools. These schools frequently function as stops along the school-to-prison pipeline or as dumping grounds for low-income students of color who have disabilities that affect their behavior.
Congress originally intended for the IDEA to dismantle this type of disability segregation, but courts have made a series of doctrinal choices to prioritize individualized procedures and remedies that have made challenging segregated disability-only public schools extremely difficult. Although laudable in many respects, the Supreme Court’s recent string of unanimous pro-student decisions, under the IDEA and other disability laws, have reinforced these individualized procedures and remedies. These individualized procedures and remedies historically have allowed well-resourced families to enroll their students in private schools, while less-advantaged students languish in low-quality programs, including some in disability-only schools. Some scholars critical of segregated disability-only public schools have suggested abandoning the IDEA, staking their hopes on claims brought under the Americans with Disabilities Act. But courts have begun to neutralize this strategy.
To disrupt the cycle that sustains segregated disability-only public schools, this Article argues for using the IDEA as a tool for structural change and challenges the prevailing interpretation of the law’s least restrictive environment provision as solely an individual right. This Article is the first to locate a “systemic right” to inclusion in the statute. The text, history, and purpose of the statute demonstrate that the right to inclusion should be interpreted as a systemic right, such that systemic reform may be needed to fulfill an individual’s right to inclusion. This Article does not call for an end to individualization for students with disabilities. Instead, it argues that enforcing the right to inclusion as a systemic right would require schools to establish structures to meet all individual students’ needs, in addition to the individualized but qualified right to be placed in the least restrictive environment. The shift towards a systemic framework for enforcing the right to inclusion is particularly urgent given the Trump administration’s recent efforts to abolish the United States Department of Education and abdicate the federal government’s role in disability law enforcement.
Volume
110
Issue
5
Page
2165
Year
2026
Recommended Citation
Seth E. Packrone,
Dismantling Disability Segregation,
110
Minn. L. Rev.
2165
(2026).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/minnlrev/vol110/iss5/3
Rights
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/
Publication Abbreviation
Minn. L. Rev.
