Disproportionate Representation

The National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems (NCCRESt), which exists to provide training, tools, and technical assistance on this topic, summarizes the extent to which disproportionality exists for students under IDEA (2005, p. 2):

The disproportionate representation of ethnically and linguistically diverse students in high incidence special education programs (mental retardation, learning disabilities, and emotional disturbance) has been a concern for over three decades (Artiles, Trent, & Palmer, 2004; Donovan & Cross, 2002; Dunn, 1968). The importance of this issue is evident in the fact that it has been studied twice by a National Research Council (NRC; Donovan & Cross, 2002; Heller, Holtzman, & Messick, 1982). Yet two NRC reports, resolutions, statements, and actions from major professional organizations such as the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) (CEC, 1997, 2002), litigation (e.g., court cases such as Larry P. vs. Riles and Diana vs. the California State Board of Education), policy and advocacy efforts (e.g., new IDEA amendments, CEC Institutes on Disproportionality), pressure from parent groups, and efforts from a relatively small group of researchers have not been sufficient to significantly reduce this problem. The recent NRC report concluded, “Twenty years later, disproportion in special education persists” (Donovan & Cross, 2002, p. 1). The phenomenon of disproportionate representation becomes particularly problematic when one considers that our nation’s school-aged population is becoming culturally and linguistically diverse at an unprecedented rate (Smith, 2003; U.S. Department of Commerce, 2000).

Source: retrieved from NCCRESt on 3/29/09:
Klinger, J.; Artiles, A.; Kozleski, E.; Harry, B.; Zion, S.; Tate, W.; Duran, G.; & Riley, D. (2005, September). Addressing the disproportionate representation of culturally and linguistically diverse students in special education through culturally responsive educational systems. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 13(38).

While a variety of factors are involved, the underlying causes for disproportionality are the existence of beliefs, practices, and policies at the institutional level that:

1. do not result in equitable levels of access to the general education program;
2. do not result in equitable outcomes for students as a result of unequal access to the general education curriculum; and
3. do not result in recognition of the ways in which the system’s movement toward entitlement decisions is based on a student deficit model as a false solution to what could be described as the system’s failed attempts at providing appropriate instruction.

Instead of looking simply at a set of scores or deficits a student may have, school-based teams receiving a request for Evaluation under IDEA to consider whether a student is eligible for services must ask several fundamental questions, such as:

• What has been the child’s true opportunity to learn?
• Did the student receive appropriate initial instruction?
• Does the student have a pattern of strengths that accompany a pattern of weaknesses?
• Did the student receive appropriate interventions after initial instruction was not successful?
• What data suggests the student did or did not respond to the intervention(s)?
• Has the team ruled out the role played by this student’s language development if English is the child’s second language?

For a teacher who differentiates, learning that what has been attempted has not worked is the kind of information that may prove to be pivotal in designing future instruction, curriculum, and even assessments. A teacher who differentiates looks for ways to make sense of the disparities between student performances. But historically, teachers operating from a traditional approach have attempted to identify students who did not respond to initial “one-size-fits-all” instruction and concluded that the cause was interior to the student. Often, lower grades were the hallmark of this type of sorting of students by deficiencies. Sometimes, labeling of the students was the result. Nowhere has this been more the case than for minority students who are also English Language Learners (ELL’s) and have subsequently been regarded as unintelligent before appropriate instructional programming has been provided. This is a significant factor in the over- and under-representation of ELL’s in special education programs.

Referrals for formal Evaluation for eligibility of services under IDEA require documentation of interventions attempted and the efficacy of those interventions, and if a disability is suspected, a teacher must be able to demonstrate that it is not as a result of that student’s never having had effective instruction in English. In other words, to make what I call the “disability hypothesis” a teacher must present a rationale, or evidence, that this is in fact the case. In reality, where students have been in the country for only two or three years, teachers often conclude erroneously that students should be further along in language development than they are and move too quickly to a disability hypothesis. DeLeeuw and Monpas-Huber (2009) point out that just knowing a student is an ELL does little to tell us the vast differences that exist between two same-grade ELL’s who are all too often regarded as a “uniform group of low achievers” (p. 8).  Complicating matters, it is very difficult for a team to present positive data to refute such a hypothesis once it has been alleged – a student’s lack of language skills is often not the result of a lack of intelligence, so alternate testing instruments must be considered to rule out the role language development plays and to simultaneously capture the student’s capabilities.