Composition, Context, and Institutional Practices: School Organizations and Racial Disproportionality in Special Education

• In Event: Context and Special Education Disproportionality: A Look at Racial Equity Policies in Special Education

Abstract

Disproportionate racial representation in special education has amassed research from a variety of epistemological and ontological traditions (see Ahram et al., 2021). Theorists have increasingly considered school context as a mediator of disparate special education risk, and quantitative researchers have employed hierarchical models to consider students as nested within schools. Yet few studies using multivariate nested models have interpreted school-level variance or included school-related covariates beyond racial composition, leaving the impacts of school context and institutional practices underexamined.

Objective/Purpose
The purpose of this study is to foreground how context shapes special education inequities, how special education can function as a system of racialized social control, and how policy is filtered through racialized practices in schools that extend far beyond racial composition. As racialized institutions (Ray, 2019), a variety of compositional, contextual, and institutional features influence students’ experiences in schools. A variety of school features may impact a student’s risk of special education placement, including composition, context, and institutional practices, which are related to non-random, racialized student sorting. We answer the following research questions: How do composition, context, and practices impact disproportionality in special education? How does specifying these constructs impact the interpretation of model coefficients?

Racialized Organizations
Ray’s (2019) theory of racialized organizations frames meso-level organizations as spaces through which policy and individual attitudes are filtered, often in ways that limit the agency of marginalized racial groups and magnify that of the dominant group. Ray contended that quantitative research must move beyond including race as a demographic variable in statistical models toward explorations of the meso-level mechanisms that reproduce racial inequalities and the relationships between racialized structures and agency.

Method
We merged three datasets to answer our research questions. We obtained student-level data from the California Department of Education. This dataset included demographic variables for the 2019 school year, which we averaged by school to create school-level composition variables. We combined this dataset with publicly available school-context data from the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System and the Elementary/Secondary Information System. We then collected survey data from a random sample of administrators, in which they rated school climate and efficacy of school-wide programs at their sites.

Analytic Plan
We examined three related outcomes: (a) placement in special education for different racial groups, compared to white students; (b) placement in each disability category for different racial groups; and (c) school-level features in explaining disproportionate placement patterns. The dataset featured a two-level structure (i.e., students nested within schools), and we used random intercept, multilevel logistic regression models.

Results, Conclusions, and Significance
We identified school composition and racial distinction as salient factors associated with disproportionality. We also found that African American students in schools implementing RtI were less likely to be given an IEP. Based on these findings, we articulate the need for researchers to define context, composition, and practice constructs in theoretical frameworks and to define these variables in mathematical models to inform equity-centered policy.

Author

• Rebecca A. Cruz, Johns Hopkins University