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Low-Income Students and Special Education: A Report from the Century Foundation

In a recent article from Usable Knowledge, a Harvard Graduate School of Education publication, writer Grace Tatter examines a new report from the Century Foundation. According to researchers from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, and SRI International, low-income students are disproportionately assigned to special education.

While the current administration claims that “racial disparities in the identification, placement, or discipline of children with disabilities are not necessarily evidence of, or primarily caused by, discrimination,” referencing a greater need for special education services and supposing that the correlation is related to poverty rather than racial discrimination, the new findings in the Century Foundation study confirm “that low-income students are overrepresented in special education and warn that the potential for systemic discrimination should not be thrown out.”

In fact, Laura Schifter, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, believes that the ramifications of discounting systemic discrimination in special education placements are nefarious:

“The problem in assuming that the disproportionality among low-income students is appropriate is that you’re ignoring potential school-wide and more systemic factors that be impacting the higher rates of identification among low-income students.”

According to the article, “In their analysis of data from three states, the researchers found that low-income students were more likely to be identified for special education than their more affluent peers — specifically in subjective categories, like an emotional disability, compared to more objective categories, like hearing impairment.”

As such, low-income students diagnosed with a disability are more likely to be taken out of the general education classroom than their “affluent peers.” When students are taken out of a general education classroom, teachers are less likely to be content specialists and learning expectations are often lower.

Though there is no clear correlation as to why students in poverty are diagnosed with disabilities at higher rates, Schifter states that “it’s worth noting that behavior problems or being behind in terms of certain skills, like word recognition, might be misdiagnosed as a disability when, if given the proper supports, when they in fact just need some extra instruction or support in their current classroom.”

To help classroom teachers and school administrators monitor this fine line between poverty and special education, this article offers three salient suggestions. These suggestions come directly from the article itself:

  • Break out special education data by income. The federal special education law, called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), requires only that states break down special education data by race and ethnicity. The racial breakdown is an important, but the federal government and states should also ask schools and districts to look at the data by family income, so that researchers and policymakers can learn more about the experiences of low-income students in special education.
  • Build capacity for earlier intervention. To meet the needs of low-income students in general education classrooms, schools and policymakers should seek to support teachers’ capacity to address different learning needs. The report’s authors identify multi-tiered systems of support, in which all students receive the same core instruction, but some students receive supplemental instructions depending on their needs — to ensure students’ needs are addressed in the appropriate way, and that special education is reserved and structured for those who need it, rather than a catch-all. Wraparound services, including counseling and mental health support, can also help ensure that the effects of poverty don’t result in children being diagnosed with disabilities they don’t actually have.
  • Help families stay involved. Every child has a right to learn in the “least restrictive environment,” according to IDEA. Make sure that low-income families know their children’s rights and feel empowered to advocate for them. Ask policymakers to continue to support the Community Parent Resource Centers funded by the federal government.

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TWIN-CS

TWIN-CS advances the Catholic tradition of academic excellence by empowering Catholic schools to systematically transform from a monolingual to multilingual educational model in the service of vibrant culturally diverse populations.

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