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Legal issue
The IDEA requirement that children with disabilities be educated with non-disabled peers to the maximum extent appropriate, alongside the FAPE standard requiring an education reasonably calculated to enable appropriately ambitious progress (Board of Education v. Rowley; Endrew F. v. Douglas County).
Verified passages where courts have addressed this issue. The citator badge reflects each case's overallsubsequent treatment by later courts — not doubt about the quoted passage — and any “N citing” figure is that case's global citation count, not specific to this issue.
For students with disabilities, inclusive placement in general-education settings is associated with academic and access outcomes at least equal to — and for some groups better than — segregated special-education settings, with no consistent harm to social-emotional outcomes or to classmates without disabilities; but the evidence is observational, heterogeneous, and confounded by selection, so effects are small and depend heavily on the quality and support of the setting rather than placement itself.
Peer-mediated interventions — training typically developing peers to model and prompt social interaction — reliably increase the social interaction of autistic students in inclusive settings and are among the better-supported social interventions, though effects are strongest for increasing interaction frequency and weaker for child-initiated social bids, with generalization and maintenance less consistently demonstrated.