Federal special ed review calls for uniform ‘disproportionality’ standards
A federal watchdog analyzing state management practices under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act is recommending the U.S. Department of Education adopt a standard approach for identifying overrepresentation of racial and ethnic groups in special education classrooms across the nation.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office concluded that the discretion given states to define “significant disproportionality” has resulted in a wide range of benchmarks that tends to diminish the federal government’s ability to ensure there isn’t overrepresentation of certain subgroups in special education.
The report, released earlier this month, found that about 2 percent of all school districts in the U.S. were found to have high enough rates of disproportionality to set aside funds for early intervention services in an effort to address over representation issues.
That’s a total of 356 districts, about half of which are located in five states – 73 of them in Louisiana.
The GAO found that California ranked among states with the lowest rates of disproportionality, with less than 5 percent of districts being cited for spending sanctions.
As part of the 2004 reauthorization of IDEA, Congress adopted requirements that school districts take actions aimed at addressing the issue of racial or ethnic overrepresentation in special education. Specifically, districts identified with “significant disproportionality” are required to spend 15 percent of their IDEA funds to provide early intervening services