Ideological and Legal Determinants of U.S. Courts of Appeals Judges' Voting in K-12 IDEA Reimbursement Cases Involving Children with Learning Disabilities

Abstract

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is the seminal federal legislation entitling children with disabilities to a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE). The law permits parents who contend their child was denied a FAPE to contest the education offered the child by removing their child to a private school, paying tuition for that education, and then seeking to recover those payments from the district. Under the IDEA, parents may prevail in such proceedings where they show the child was denied a FAPE by the school district, and the private program they selected met the child’s special needs. Legislation amending the IDEA in 1997 appeared to make it more difficult for parents to recover tuition mainly because of procedural bars placed in their path by Congress.

This study examined the influence of: (1) judges’ political ideology as measured by party-of-the-appointing president and DW-nominate scores and (2) legal precedent, as measured by voting which occurred before or after the 1997 IDEA amendments, on judges’ voting in favor of, or against the parents who sought the reimbursement remedy in cases decided between 1975 and 2016 at the United States Courts of Appeals in cases involving children classified as having a “learning disability.” A total of 219 votes, 94 from Democratic appointees and 125 from Republican appointees, were analyzed in this study, using binary logistic regression as the main statistical tool.

Results for the entire group of 219 individual votes revealed that: (1) ideology, as determined by party-of -appointing president, is an effective predictor of judges’ voting in K-12 IDEA tuition reimbursement cases decided at the U.S. Courts of Appeals when all other variables are held constant … the odds of a Democrat-appointed U.S. Court of Appeals judge voting in favor of the parents are significantly greater than the odds of a Republican-appointed U.S. Court of Appeals judge voting in favor of the plaintiff in these cases; (2) ideology, as determined by judges’ DW-Nominate score, a continuous variable running from -1 (most liberal) to + 1 (most conservative), is an effective predictor of judges’ voting in K-12 IDEA tuition reimbursement cases at the U.S. Courts of Appeals when all other variables are held constant… the odds of a U.S. Court of Appeals judge with a DW-Nominate score below 0 (liberal) voting in favor of the plaintiff are significantly greater than the odds of a U.S. Court of Appeals judge with a DW-Nominate score above 0 (conservative) voting for the plaintiff in these cases; (3) pro-parent and pro-school district voting before and after the IDEA amendments did not differ significantly from each other.

These results suggest that ideology is an important factor influencing courts of appeals judges’ voting across K-12 IDEA tuition reimbursement cases where the needs of learning disabled children are in issue. The limitations of this study were discussed and suggestions for future research proposed.