A Challenge to Popular Wisdom: The Underrepresentation of Minorities in Special Education

Facts in education are often fuzzy and contradictory. You may have heard that dual language learners are the fastest growing segment of the U.S. student population, but that’s not necessarily true. As my colleague Conor Williams recently wrote, “The picture you get of American linguistic diversity (and changes in it) depends on which...data sourc[e] you’re using.” In other words, the “facts” are only as reliable as the data.

1. State data collected by the US Department of Education indicate that minority children are disproportionately represented in special education. These data are supported by a large body of research that documents and analyzes this phenomenon. But a new study published in the journal Educational Researcher found just the opposite — that racial, ethnic and language minority children are underrepresented in special education.
   

Researchers from Pennsylvania State University and the University of California-Irvine used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) to compare differences in receiving special education services among White and minority children for one of the following disabilities: learning disability, speech or language impairment, intellectual disabilities, health impairment (e.g. ADHD), or serious emotional disturbance. Importantly, they were careful to include multiple controls for factors that could have  confounded their estimates. These allowed them to compare minority children to White children with “similar levels of academic achievement, behavior and family economic resources.”

Surprisingly, they found that Black, Latino, and language-minority children are less likely than similar White children to be identified as having learning disabilities, speech and language impairments, intellectual disabilities, health impairments, or an emotional disturbance — by a large margin. For example, Black children were 58 percent less likely to be identified as having a learning disability and Latino children were 73 percent less likely to be identified as having health impairments. Importantly, these trends held throughout elementary school and middle school.

And what about language learners? Language-minority children were less likely to be identified as having learning disabilities or speech/language impairments compared to their native-English speaking peers. While this finding may be encouraging given other studies that have found ELLs to be overrepresented in special education (see also), it rests on shaky empirical ground. In the current study, “language minority children” were defined as those students whose parents reported that a language other than English was spoken in the home. In other words, the children included in this study were not formally assessed to determine their level of proficiency in English and how this changed over time.

Even though the data have limits, the study’s findings present an interesting challenge to the status quo. The researchers explain their results by suggesting that minority children may be underrepresented in special education due to factors including: socioeconomic, cultural and linguistic obstacles, the stigma of disability, language barriers and being stuck in under-resourced schools. And the underidentification of language minority children may be due to the dearth of assessments available to diagnose disabilities of non-English speakers.

I find this argument compelling as a parent with experience navigating through the special education system. Determining whether your child qualifies for a 504 plan or Individualized Education Plan (IEP) requires multiple meetings with their teacher and a myriad of student support staff, formal screenings and a formal diagnosis of a disability. These are perhaps some of the most grueling and terrifying meetings that a parent must go through — you quickly realize that your only role in them is to fight and advocate for your child all while keeping your emotions firmly in check. And being an active participant in these meetings means knowing your child’s rights and the myriad of terms that will be thrown your way. It’s overwhelming. It’s exhausting. It’s scary.

But as a education policy professional, it’s difficult to ignore the question of how their findings stack up against the data reported by school districts. In other words, how do their conclusions resonate with what actually happens in schools? Schools located in high-poverty areas may have large numbers of minority students who have a set of cumulative risks that makes their placement into special education more likely. And high-poverty schools are often staffed by the least qualified teachers, which can have a negative impact on student learning and achievement.

We now have two, diametrically opposed arguments — based on different sets of data — for why special education placement rates are discriminatory. The first argument states that minority children are overrepresented in special education because the education system is biased against them and teachers’ racial biases influence their perspectives of what their students can learn and achieve.

The second argument offered by the study’s authors states that minority children are underrepresented in special education because educators are more responsive to the concerns of White language-majority parents and teachers’ low expectations make it easier for them to dismiss potential signs of disabilities in minority students’ behavior.

Whichever argument you find persuasive, it’s clear that the relationship between race, language and special education is based on cultural and social factors that aren’t easily changed through policy alone. So what can be done? For starters, more efforts can be made to boost the cultural competence of teachers, administrators, and student support staff.  That is educators must identify and come to terms with their own biases, resist making assumptions about what their students are capable of achieving, make a concentrated effort to learn about their students’ cultures, and find ways to integrate students’ cultures into classroom practices in an authentic and meaningful way.

As our country becomes increasingly diverse, let’s hope that cultural competence transforms from a buzzword and into a shared value and norm.

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This  post is part of New America’s Dual Language Learner National Work Group. Click here for more information on this team’s work. To subscribe to the biweekly newsletter, click here, enter your contact information, and select “Education Policy.”"