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 Urban education systems frequently find themselves shaped by still-existing racial hierarchies that cater to outdated but powerful stereotypes within larger society.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.

Nature and Significance of the Problem

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).

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.

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