Minority Overrepresentation in Special Education Programs

Introduction and Background

The field of special education continues to develop as new efforts raise increasingly detailed and thorough questions about the efficiency of the contemporary system in the United States and elsewhere. What was once a largely unorganized and underexamined field is now shedding new light on the nature of disabled learners and on how existing systems serve their unique needs. However, this growing attention to detail does not always reveal clear positive improvements in practice. Much contemporary research instead focuses on the inefficiencies of the system, which is often criticized for being biased and directly ineffective. This is where the concept of overrepresentation of minorities enters the modern discourse, highlighting the racial constructs that tend to negatively impact special education strategies in today's schools.

Students with a wide variety of disabilities are often placed within special education programs in order to facilitate learning in a more tailored environment. Urban education systems frequently find themselves shaped by still-existing racial hierarchies that cater to outdated but powerful stereotypes within larger society. This occurs in an environment where all students—disabled or not—are supposed to have guaranteed equality in educational opportunities, in accordance with the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 and the desegregation legislation that emerged from the Civil Rights movement (Thorsen et al., 2011). Despite these legislative efforts, categories for labeling students as having special needs continue to isolate minorities.

In many urban schools around the country, there is a clear overrepresentation of minority groups within special education programs relative to white students with similar learning, behavioral, or developmental issues. Beginning in the 1960s, calls emerged to address this issue and understand why it constitutes such a persistent problem within contemporary special education programs. Today, the data show that the trend is continuing, despite a growing perception that the United States is reducing its racial hierarchy.

There are a number of serious problems embedded within this phenomenon, many of which have significantly negative influences on the lives and education of the students affected by external racial hierarchies. Many of these students are negatively impacted and "fail to receive a quality and life-enhancing placement as a result" of the stereotype of needing special education (Patton, 1998, p. 25). Moores-Abdool et al. (2008) argue that the overrepresentation of minorities can undermine the effectiveness of special education teachers. Because so many culturally different students are present, many educators fail to immerse themselves in the cultures of these racial groups. This produces an approach to education that is devoid of cultural sensitivity, which can hamper an educator's ability to relate to a minority student and develop the most effective educational strategies (National Education Association, 2007).

Nature and Significance of the Problem

The purpose of this paper is to emphasize that race is one of many factors through which researchers and practitioners might begin to understand and respond to the complex ways in which the institutional cultures of schooling and the cultural histories and trajectories of students and families collide, are conflated, and are often essentialized. Rather than use race as a substitute for all these complexities, this research applies a structural theory framework—one that locates the basis of racial inequity in the structure of society and racialized social systems—to understand the roots of disproportionality and the mechanisms through which it occurs. This exploratory study adds a current perspective that applies a structural theoretical lens as a means of understanding racial inequity in special education across analytical scales, racial groups, and disability categories. These social subsystems appear to follow a pattern that is dynamic, hierarchical, and socially constructed, resulting in racial ideology—or racism—that influences the behaviors of individuals within the system. There are no universal indicators of inequity, and the nature of relations in any given locale is dependent on its socio-historical context.

Based on the nature and background of the problem, several research questions guide further analysis:

1. What racial structures are contributing to the overrepresentation of minorities in special education programs?
2. What minorities are most overrepresented, and why?
3. How does location impact the overrepresentation of minority groups in special education programs?
4. Are there common patterns occurring on a larger scale, or is this phenomenon dependent on regional differences?
5. What types of conditions facilitate the greatest overrepresentation rates?
6. How can research expose this phenomenon and help facilitate reform movements that will better serve minority students from a non-racialized perspective?

Several hypotheses guide this research. First, overrepresentation will be more apparent in the more subjective disability categories used to place students in special education programs. Second, African Americans will constitute the largest overrepresented group because of the volatile position this racial group occupies within the racial hierarchy of the United States. Finally, the research expects to find that larger district size is associated with less racial competition due to an increase in available resources—meaning that overrepresentation of minorities in special education programs will be greatest in smaller districts and least in larger ones.

Disproportionality refers to the concept of various groups being misrepresented in particular categories relative to other groups. Thorsen et al. (2011) define disproportionality as the "over or underrepresentation" of a group within a given context. This analysis focuses specifically on overrepresentation—that is, how a particular group is reflected in terms of its enrollment in special education programs (Murtagh, 2003).

Literature Review: Overrepresentation and Segregation

Racial minority signifies groups of races other than White or Caucasian. The most referenced group is African Americans, although Native Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans are all considered racial minorities as well. These groups are typically positioned at various levels within the racial hierarchy of the United States, but all carry the stigma of being below the white majority.

Mental retardation is a neurodevelopmental disorder "associated primarily with the functioning of the neurological system and brain" (Environmental Protection Agency, 2011, p. 2). It has a number of causes, including physical trauma at an early age, genetic conditions, and environmental toxins (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2007).

Learning disabilities are another controversial category because of their subjective nature. These are neurodevelopmental disorders that impact a student's ability to learn and focus on educational content (Environmental Protection Agency, 2011). It is estimated that over 12% of children in the United States under the age of 18 are affected by these types of conditions.

Emotional disorders are observed in students who have difficulty interacting with fellow students or educators due to a volatile emotional state. The relational dimension is therefore central to determining the presence of such disorders (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2007). As with the previous two categories, this classification is considered highly subjective in that no medical diagnosis or visible physical symptoms are required for placement.

Stratification is essentially the ranking of individuals within a hierarchy based on the structures present in a functioning society. Sullivan and Artiles (2011) define stratification as "the patterned and differential distribution of resources, life chances, and costs/benefits among groups of the population" (p. 1529). One's rank on this hierarchy determines quality of life and opportunities relative to the structures and the groups those structures serve.

According to the research, there are much higher rates of overrepresentation of minorities in what are known as high-incidence categories, such as learning disabilities, emotional disabilities, and mental retardation (Sullivan & Artiles, 2011). Sullivan and Artiles (2011) state that "these categories are regarded as the most subjective of the educational disabilities due to the reliance on professional judgment in identification as opposed to physical markers or medical diagnoses" (p. 1527).

These more subjective categories become major sources of disproportionality because they rely so heavily on comparison with others in determining the presence of abnormalities (Anyon, 2009). As such, these categories are the most dominant in terms of how they "serve particular interests of individuals, institutions, and society" (Anyon, 2009, p. 46). These mild categories of learning disabilities and related conditions have drawn a strong negative response from researchers who view them as tools for the further subjugation of racial groups in contemporary American society. This leads Blanchett (2010) to posit that "the American educational system has used mild disability special education categories to sort students on the basis of perceived disability, race, culture, language, and social class."

The general consensus in current discourse is that minorities are much more represented in special education programs than their white counterparts. Various studies have focused on which particular minority group tends to be overrepresented in more specific areas. For example, African American students are most often overrepresented in mental retardation and emotional disorder categories, whereas Native American students more frequently face issues with learning disabilities, and Latino and Asian students are often found to be underrepresented in these high-incidence categories (Sullivan & Artiles, 2011). Not only do Native Americans face the challenges of being a minority group, they also suffer from some of the worst cultural discrimination and misunderstanding, which makes life for students in special education programs even more difficult—particularly in small districts with fewer resources (O'Connell, 1987).

Still, African American students tend to experience the worst overrepresentation in subjective categories. Oswald et al. (1999) show that nationally, African American students made up 16% of the student population in 1990 but over 21% of the student population in special education programs. This is clearly disproportionate relative to the general population of school districts across the country. Additional research by Patton (1999) shows that African American males are the most severely affected subgroup and make up the largest majority of minority students enrolled in special education programs. Research by Ladner and Hammons (2006) shows that "in Virginia, African Americans represent 20% of the state's population but 28% of its special education students, including 51% of those labeled educable mentally retarded" (p. 86). There is clearly a need for greater cultural consideration for students within the African American community (Hollins & Spencer, 1990). Additionally, several studies have identified a growing correlation between minority poverty rates and increasing overrepresentation in special education programs. MacMillan and Reschly (1998) suggest that mental retardation rates among African American students rose in correspondence with rising poverty rates for the group.

Conclusion and Implications

The significance of this project lies in its aim to bridge major gaps in the research by applying a structural theoretical lens that transcends the analytical scales limiting previous studies. With a stronger theoretical foundation, more meaningful assumptions can be made about why this trend continues and how advocates can best address the problem at its source, rather than simply documenting that a problem exists. As the National Education Association (2007) has emphasized, greater cultural sensitivity is needed not only in teaching minority special education students but also in how such students are classified as needing special education services (Kagan, 1992). This research could generate the evidence needed for reform in both areas.