Striving to remove barriers that prevent us from building Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities!
In a 2020 brief, the National Center for Learning Disabilities describes significant disproportionality: compared with their classmates, students from some racial and ethnic groups are far more often found eligible for special education, moved into more separate classrooms and punished. Bias in schools, in tests and in policies, leads staff to label some students of color as requiring special education when they do not, and children from families with low incomes meet the same pattern. Wrong labels, separate classrooms and frequent punishment damage how these students do in school and after.
The numbers are stark. Children who are American Indian or Alaska Native get special education twice as often as students overall, and Black students face a 40 percent higher chance than other students of being labeled with a disability; Asian students are the one group of color not overrepresented. Separation deepens the gap: among White students with disabilities, 55 percent spend over four fifths of the school day in regular classrooms, while only about one in three Black students with disabilities do. Inclusion pays off. In Massachusetts, students with disabilities in fully inclusive classrooms finished high school on time five times as often, and another study found an employment gain of 11 percentage points after high school for students who had been fully included.
Discipline falls hardest. Black students face suspension or expulsion three times as often as White students, and among disabled students who are Black, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaska Native, or multiracial, a quarter of boys and almost a fifth of girls are suspended out of school. Black students are 19 percent of the students with disabilities served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), yet 36 percent of those held still with equipment at school. Students placed in special education without cause also lose the demanding coursework that leads to success, a pattern of systemic ableism joined with racism. The Equity in IDEA rules of 2017, delayed by the Department of Education and then ordered into effect by a federal court in March 2019, give states one method to measure the gap.
The brief asks districts to train staff to identify disability with attention to language and culture, to review their discipline rules and special education procedures for bias with outside experts, and to build open relationships with families. It favors culturally responsive teaching and restorative practices over pushing students out, and it calls for a more diverse teaching staff: in the 2017 to 2018 school year, 79 percent of public school teachers were White, and Black and Latinx students face less exclusionary discipline where more of their teachers share their background. Districts, state governments and Congress all have a part to play.
We should ask how the schools and programs in our community identify, place and discipline disabled students of color, and press for an audit where the numbers differ. Anyone who works with families should listen to parents and bring what they know into every decision about their children. Schools held to these practices would make room for Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities for People with Disabilities.
Fair schooling begins with fair decisions about each child.
Read the Full Article: Significant Disproportionality in Special Education: Current Trends and Actions for Impact.
By: the National Center for Learning Disabilities
Questions for Reflection
- Do we know how the schools in our community identify, place and discipline disabled students of color?
- Which students in our schools spend most of the day apart from their classmates, and who decided that?
- How do our schools handle a child’s behavior: by suspension and restraint, or by restorative practices that keep the child in school?
- When a school evaluates a child for special education, are the child’s language, culture and family background part of the decision?
- Do the teachers in our schools reflect the students they teach, and what is being done to change that where they do not?
- How can we bring parents’ knowledge of their own children into the decisions schools make?
