The Intersection of Race, Ethnicity, and Exceptionality: Mechanisms of the Racialized Construction of Educational Exceptionalities

• In Event: 63.018 - Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Why do more minority students receive special education services than white students, and why do more white students receive gifted services than minority students? Existing research provides conflicting explanations for racial disproportionality in exceptionalities, arguing either a) schools make biased decisions or b) confounders, such as poverty, explain racial differences. I contend that existing research is limited by its treatment of exceptionality as a natural category. I argue that exceptionality is a social construct that intersects with race, and I ask how educational institutions shape this intersection. My mixed-methods dissertation research project 1) tests whether and how school-level racial composition moderates the relationship between individual students’ race and identification with exceptionalities, 2) examines school-level variation in the effects of students’ race on teachers’ decisions to refer students to special education through an experimental audit design and 3) investigates the mechanisms creating the intersection of race and exceptionality through interviews with teachers and parents.

Study 1: Observational Data Analysis. How does school racial composition predict the relationship between student race and placement in disability categories in Wisconsin?

In the first empirical chapter, I use a Wisconsin public school dataset from 2010-2011, including 895,791 students in all 2,215 public schools, to test whether and how school racial composition moderates the relationship between student race and identified disability. I use multi-level logistic regression with cross-level interactions, predicting placement into each category of disability. I find that when students of color are surrounded by more of their same-race peers, their likelihood of placement in all categories of disability is reduced, with stronger dampening effects in the most disadvantageous, most stigmatized categories. White students appear to have similar reduced risk of placement in special education when surrounded by students of color for most categories of disability. However, being surrounded by more peers of color reduces their likelihood of placement into low-stigma, high-resource categories of disability. These findings counter the conclusions of the recent literature, which infers that school composition effects on racial disproportionality are merely frog-pond effects, in which students of color, having generally lower achievement levels, are more noticeable in higher-achieving schools. Rather, my findings, which allow for more variation by disability category than the previous research, suggest that racial/ethnic competition might facilitate racial/ethnic bias in special education placements.

Author

• Rachel Elizabeth Fish, University of Notre Dame