Disability and Educational Justice: Exploring Intersectional ways to Disrupt the Logic of Compliance

Globally, rights-based approaches claim adherence to human and civil disability rights while also recognizing that cultural, linguistic, racial, and ethnic disparities in special education outcomes remain unaddressed. We seek to understand why while demonstrating how a particular disability education policy in the global north—the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (idea), purportedly rooted in a civil rights framework, has not assured equitable outcomes and justice for Black, Indigenous, Latine and other minoritized students of color (bilmsoc) labeled with a disability. Our approach elevates a complexified notion of justice, foregrounding agentic notions such as rightful presence, emancipatory learning and radical solidarity to open possibilitarian spaces of actionable systems change. Through counterstories, we illustrate how racist and ableist ideologies undergird disability policy and micro-level implementation by educators, other school and external system actors, showing the need to move beyond policy compliance towards disability justice, transformative agency and rightful presence.