For almost five decades, school districts in the United States have been required by federal law to integrate disabled students into mainstream classrooms. Many educational agencies, however, have also done the opposite: They have included nondisabled students in special education settings. This practice, now known as “reverse mainstreaming,” has historical roots in nineteenth-century educational programs and is still used across the country.
This Article is the first to investigate reverse mainstreaming as a form of integration. Drawing on a historical account and a systematic analysis of hundreds of administrative decisions, this Article documents the circumstances that gave rise to this practice and analyzes its normative underpinnings. In doing so, this Article exposes a conundrum: On the one hand, educators and judges have long justified reverse mainstreaming by pointing to its potential to reduce prejudice through structured interactions between disabled and nondisabled students. On the other hand, reverse mainstreaming often treats disabled students as inferior to their nondisabled peers and imposes mainstream norms at the expense of disability culture. Thus, rather than reducing prejudice, such structured interactions may perpetuate the very stigma and misconceptions they are designed to eradicate. Moreover, as this Article details, reverse mainstreaming can lead to an inequitable distribution of scarce resources.
Combining insights from social psychology and disability studies, this Article proposes guidelines for legal and policy reform aimed at ensuring that intergroup interactions in educational settings take more egalitarian forms. As policymakers continue to grapple with desegregating America’s schools along race and class lines, these insights have important implications that extend beyond the disability arena.
* Postdoctoral Fellow, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Tel Aviv University; J.S.D. Candidate, Columbia Law School. For helpful conversations and comments, I thank Angela Addae, Kayum Ahmed, Sania Anwar, José Argueta Funes, Erin Blondel, Ruth Colker, Doron Dorfman, Elizabeth Emens, Frank Giaoui, Adi Goldiner, Anat Greenstein, Kaaryn Gustafson, Jasmine Harris, Alex Hindes, Kaitlyn Hoover, Valerie Seiling Jacobs, María Emilia Mamberti, Adi Marcovich Gross, James Liebman, Rony Oliva, Amanda Parsons, David Pozen, Stephen Rosenbaum, Kate Sapirstein, Michael Ashley Stein, Salomé Viljoen, Mark Weber, Nofar Yakovi Gan-Or, and Lihi Yona, as well as participants in the Society for Disability Studies Annual Conference (2021), Law and Society Association Annual Meeting (2021), Law and Society Association Graduate Student & Early Career Workshop (2021), and Columbia Law School’s Fifth Annual Human Rights Paper Symposium (2021). For excellent research support, I thank the reference librarians at Columbia Law School, especially Mariana Newman. Finally, I am indebted to the editors of the Stanford Law Review for their insightful and helpful edits.