Breaking taboo: Investigating race and ethnicity, special education, and disability

One of the longest standing concerns in the area of special education stems from the continued over and under representation of children with disabilities in the special education system. Research has consistently documented past and continued disproportionate outcomes (e.g., graduation rates, employment rates) for students with disabilities and particularly students of color with disabilities (National Research Council, 2002). The objective of this study is to investigate how special education, disability, and race and ethnicity interact at a national level with individual States as the unit of analysis. More specifically, this research aims at investigating whether racism impacts the relationships between race and ethnicity, special education, and disability, and leads to over and under representation of children of color in special education. A three-step process is used to investigate this relationship. The initial step involves developing a model using statewide socio-demographic variables in one year to predict the number of European American children classified in each disability category in a subsequent year. The second step involves using the above model (the European American model) to predict disability classification rates for students of different races and ethnicities. Since variation occurs in the predictive power of European American model across these groups, the third step involves developing a second model (the racism model) to predict the rates for these groups. This study does not address the issue of causation, but instead the predictive models address correlations between dependent and independent variables.; The results support the rejection of the null hypothesis and the acceptance of the research hypothesis that racism impacts special education classification. In the study, the European American model is a moderate to good predictor for European Americans across classifications, but a poor to moderate predictor for the other racial/ethnic groups. The racism model more strongly predicted the model special education classification/disability for the different racial/ethnic groups.