Law, Culture, and Children with Disabilities: Educational Rights and the Construction of Difference

proach to the protection of the rights of children with "handicapping conditions" made the law's implementation unusually sensitive to local values, perceptions, and practices.Rather than detailing the substantive rights of children with disabilities, the EHA created a novel relationship between their parents and school district personnel and developed a set of procedures to regulate that relationship.Thus, in school districts across the United States, the fate of millions of children with disabilities came to depend upon the peculiar dynamics of interaction between parents and local educators.The EHA created a "continuing relationship" between parents and educators rather than a particularized set of substantive educational rights. 2Continuing relationships have long interested those who study law in its social context. 3 Generally, researchers have assumed that such relationships are guided by informal norms and are resistant to the influence of formal law.Participants are thought to draw upon communitybased understandings and perspectives to guide their behavior in ways that may defy or simply ignore the mandates of official law. 4 Analysis of the continuing interactions between parents and educators provides an explanation for why the actual consequences of the EHA diverge so markedly from its stated goals.Within their social and cultural contexts-drawing on available categories, ideas, and valuesparents and educators construct a place for children with disabilities in American society.Cultural conceptions of "handicap," of public education, of professionalism, and of power and authority all shape the thoughts and behavior of the central actors within their community settings."Culture," writes Clifford Geertz, "is not a power, something to 2. See