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AI Literacy, Tutoring, and Special Education

Methods of Deletion: Testing Displacement, State Accountability Design, and the Civil Rights of Students in Segregated Classrooms

Publisher: Real Safety AI Foundation

Working paper. Not peer reviewed.

Written
June 2026
Version
v0.3
Pages
25
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Abstract

In many self-contained special education classrooms, the delivered curriculum consists of two subjects. Reading and mathematics are taught; science, history, civics, and the rest of social studies are not offered at all. This Article argues that the deletion is the predictable product of state accountability design under the Every Student Succeeds Act, which counts performance in two subjects and thereby instructs every rational administrator which subjects may vanish, and that the deletion is actionable under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act as a method of administration that subjects students with disabilities to discrimination in access to the state’s general curriculum. The Article constructs the claim against its hardest authorities. It pleads the state’s own conduct, the design and operation of the accountability system, rather than any supervisory or funding theory, satisfying the control principle of Bacon v. City of Richmond and the Sixth Circuit’s recent boundary in Y.A. v. Hamtramck Public Schools. It answers the bad faith or gross misjudgment overlay by showing that a master schedule that omits subjects categorically embodies no educational judgment to which deference could attach. It answers Wal-Mart v. Dukes by locating the common contention upstream of individualization: no IEP team can individualize access to a subject that does not exist in the building, so the uniform absence of the offering is the classwide injury and the restoration of the offering is the single injunction. The claim concedes placement entirely. It asks only that the subjects be taught in the rooms that exist.

Keywords

  • ADA Title II
  • Section 504
  • methods of administration
  • ESSA accountability
  • special education
  • curriculum
  • Wal-Mart v. Dukes
  • IDEA exhaustion
  • Ex parte Young
  • Rule 23(b)(2)

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Suggested citation

Gilly, Travis. "Methods of Deletion: Testing Displacement, State Accountability Design, and the Civil Rights of Students in Segregated Classrooms." Real Safety AI Foundation Working Paper, June 2026. https://realsafetyai.org/research/q69m94/

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References (58)

This paper cites its sources in footnotes. Each authority is listed once, where it is first cited, with its footnote number.

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