Before working at the CSDE I was a special education teacher at a charter school in Brooklyn that primarily served Black and Latinx students. Many of my students struggled to stay focused in the busy classrooms of 30 or more students or struggled to regulate what the school saw as distracting behaviors. Many were also receiving accommodations through their Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) and were placed into disability categories such as emotional disturbance or intellectual disorder.

This is not uncommon. In the United States, 15 percent of Black students in the U.S. are identified as disabled compared to 13 percent of white students, despite that Black students constitute 15 percent of the public school population while white students make up 46 percent. Not only are Black students overrepresented in special education, when students of color are evaluated and given a disability classification, it tends to be either emotional disturbance or intellectual disorder. These categories are more subjective when compared to other classifications like deafness or speech and language impairment. In fact, Black students are two times as likely as white students to be labeled as having ED and one and a half times as likely to be labeled as having ID. Classifications that are open to interpretation leave space for the implicit biases of the evaluation team and systems of oppression to bias the evaluation. A teacher’s interpretation and subsequent evaluation of a student’s behavior could be biased by the teacher’s own background and experiences, explicit and implicit prejudices, educational pedagogy, years of experience, cultural norms, and their relationship with the student.

The consequences of overrepresentation are widespread and unfurl across time. For example, students of color tend to be taught in separate settings than the general population more often than their white peers who receive support to stay in the classroom. This means that students of color with disabilities are more often segregated from their peers and left out of informal opportunities for social-emotional skill building. Teachers and schools must be aware of these systemic trends and bring them into their conversations with students and parents about moving through the identification and placement processes.

By Anika Lanser, Research Assistant at the Center for Social Development and Education