Policies on ethnic disparity awry compared to research
A recent article published in Educational Researcher underscores what many of us have long suspected – that our measures for ethnic and linguistic disproportionality have discounted crucial factors leading us to erroneous, even damaging, conclusions.
The carefully constructed study suggests that when eligibility rates in high incidence categories are examined in a cohort with adjustments for covariates – such as socioeconomic status – minorities are not over-represented in special education but, in fact, are under-represented. The article flies in the face of the perspective that has been advanced by the U.S. Department of Education for almost a decade and, ironically, comes to light as the national discussion on race has intensified in the wake of the Charleston tragedy and Ferguson shooting.
In 2007 Alexa Posny, then Director of the U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education Programs wrote a memorandum to State Directors of Special Education saying, in part, “greater efforts are needed to prevent the intensification of problems connected with mislabeling minority children with disabilities; African-American children are identified as having mental retardation and emotional disturbance at rates greater than their white counterparts;…studies have found that schools with predominately white students have placed disproportionately high numbers of their minority students into special education.”
These statements take their cue from the 2004 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act wherein various procedural and financial mechanisms were put in place to prevent and correct the disproportionate over identification of ethnic groups in special education.
The language in the law and Posny’s subsequent statements imply that special education has been used as a vehicle in an implicitly biased educational system to wherehouse children of color apart from the mainstream.
But the article, entitled, “Minorities Are Disproportionately Underrepresented in Special Education: Longitudinal Evidence Across Five Disability Categories” was posted online late last week, indicates the opposite conclusion. That is, that certain ethnic groups, when compared to the general population, have had not fully utilized the protections and supports offered through special education and that the disparity is due to socio-economic and environmental factors unrelated to race.
In other words, there is an equity issue but it has to do with lack of full access to specialized services rather than the use of those programs for segregation.
The results bring to the surface many of the other re-occurring issues about disproportionality and concomitant legal guidelines that have been part of an undercurrent of skeptical observation for years now.
One glaring contradiction, that reflects the findings in the aforementioned study, is that federal regulation of disproportionality only applies to over identification, not its equally evil twin, under identification. This willful neglect stands in contrast to federal regulations that require educational agencies to maintain a “comprehensive child find system.” The policy is even more glaring in light of the 2001 Compton Unified School District v. Addison decision by the Ninth Circuit Court essentially declaring that a failure to properly identify a child was equivalent to denial of a free appropriate public education.
Nevertheless, in 2012 the Education Department announced that it would no longer collect information about the underrepresentation of ethnicities in special education, the rationale, being in part, that it obscured the focus on overrepresentation, which, of course we now know, could be fallacious.
Equally disconcerting is the improper identification of English learners in programs for Policies on ethnic disparity awry compared to research :: SI&A Cabinet Report :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet: