Roughly 1 out of every 7 children in public school has an identified disability, according to a recent analysis, but both traditional public and charter schools have a long way to go to provide equal opportunities for those students — which they have the right to receive.
Now in its sixth year, the Center for Learning Equity’s review of federal civil rights data found that students with disabilities face higher rates of exclusionary discipline and lower access to college preparation resources — and both measures have been slow to improve. The analysis also highlights that progress made toward equity in 2020, when the pandemic sent most students home to beam into class remotely, largely ebbed the following school year.
The brief focuses on U.S. Department of Education civil rights data from the 2021-22 school year, the most recent available.
“Over the years we’ve broadened it to really look more holistically at what the Civil Rights Data Collection shows us about the identity, traits and different intersectionalities of students with disabilities,” Jennifer Coco, interim executive director at the Center for Learner Equity, says.
About 14 percent of students in traditional public schools and nearly 12 percent of those in charter schools were recorded as having a disability during that period.
The most common disabilities among public school children are part of a category called specific learning disabilities, which includes dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia. These disorders affect students’ reading, writing and mathematical skills, respectively.
Higher Rates of Discipline
While students with disabilities made up a minority of students, they were twice as likely to be arrested or suspended as their non-disabled peers in 2021-22.
The rate of arrests and suspensions of students with disabilities was down compared to four years prior in the 2017-18 school year, but analysts were still alarmed by how those rates had dramatically increased compared to their lowest points during the first year of the pandemic during the 2020-21 school year.
“Most troublingly, the stubbornly higher instances of these practices on students with disabilities compared to their non-disabled peers continue to threaten access and opportunities for a large group of American students,” researchers wrote.
Students with disabilities were also more likely to be disciplined with out-of-school suspension, mechanical and physical restraint, arrest, and seclusion.
Coco says there’s been a tremendous investment into lowering the use of exclusionary discipline — which takes students out of their classes — as educators have accepted that it doesn’t reduce misbehavior. Long-term shortages of staff like counselors, social workers and psychologists have made it more difficult for schools to make sure they have the right resources to help students who act out.
“If our educators, our administrators, our schools, don’t have the right things in their toolkit to say, ‘Hey, I really need to surround this student with appropriate supports and access to quality interventions to help them manage their behavior and learn to navigate the typical school environment,’” Coco says, “when a student engages in challenging behavior, it’s really easy in that moment, despite everything we know, to respond with a kneejerk, ‘I gotta get them out of here for all the other kids in this building.’”
Other contributors to the skewed use of exclusionary discipline for students with disabilities come down to unconscious bias among school staff or a lack of training around responding to cultural differences among students, posits Laurie VanderPloeg, associate executive director at the Council for Exceptional Children.
“I think we have not put enough emphasis on the importance of that individualization and really understanding the cultural differences between students that we would be servicing,” VanderPloeg says, “whether it’s with the language difference or a cultural environment difference. There’s just a lack of understanding of how to interpret an individual’s behavior. Some of it can be acceptable behavior within a home, but not acceptable at school.”
Lower Levels of College Prep
The pandemic made participating in college preparation programs more difficult for all students, including those with disabilities.
While the numbers improved slightly compared to the preceding school year, high schoolers with disabilities were two to six times less likely to have access to classes and programs that help students do well in college during the 2021-22 school year.
“This is another area where I think that the data should be ringing real alarm bells for us, especially for our high school-age students with disabilities,” Coco says. “Research shows that 85 percent of students with disabilities are capable of learning and performing on grade level if they receive the right accommodations and support. They’re not accessing these opportunities, and we [should] take a step back and ask, ‘What could be the drivers of that?’”
The data highlights how many students with disabilities participated in Advanced Placement classes, International Baccalaureate programs and dual enrollment classes.
Non-disabled students enrolled in AP classes at six times the rate of students with disabilities, and they were twice as likely to take part in dual enrollment and International Baccalaureate courses.
Roughly 12 percent of students with disabilities in traditional public schools took the SAT or ACT in 2021-22 compared with 20 percent of non-disabled students. These gaps were smaller in charter schools than in traditional public schools.
The issue comes down to the mindset of the adults, Coco says. That might mean that schools make an effort to ensure special education instruction doesn’t take place at the same time as dual enrollment classes, she explains, which creates a scheduling conflict for students with disabilities who could otherwise do both.
“It requires educators to take a step back and say, ‘No, I want these students to have access because I believe that they’re capable of achieving just like their general education peers,’” Coco says.
Who Are Students With Disabilities?
The analysis found that the share of multilingual students with a disability is growing.
They made up 13 percent of traditional public school students with disabilities and nearly 15 percent of charter school students with disabilities in 2021-22.
The uptick should spur a moment of reflection for the education community, Coco says, to ensure multilingual learners are not flagged for a disability when what they actually need is more help learning English. She worries that it may become more difficult in the wake of the federal freeze of money for English learners.
“You look at that and say, ‘OK, there’s a move to further starve schools of these important resources,’” Coco explains. “Not only is that incredibly alarming, I fear that we’re only going to further drive these rates of students who might be misclassified as having disabilities when really we need to invest in quality programming to help students learn English, so that they can demonstrate their skill set in a typical classroom.”
Boys have long been identified as having disabilities at higher rates than girls, with some research suggesting that teachers’ lower academic expectations for girls and students of color lead them to being underdiagnosed.
VanderPloeg again points to a lack of cultural understanding of students’ home lives as one factor in why boys are overrepresented, particularly those who come from single-parent households.
“Many boys have the responsibility of taking care of their siblings and their mothers in homes absent of a father, so their behavioral responses are going to be very, very different,” she explains. “How the assessments are administered and interpreted could certainly play a role in [overrepresentation], as well.”
Differences in development lead boys to show symptoms of disorders like ADHD sooner than girls, some researchers have found, and Coco says that experts believe social differences play a role, too.
“The other common thing I’ve heard in the field is how boys externalize behavior versus girls,” she explains. “A student who’s really internalizing it can fly under the radar of their educators to a greater degree, whereas if you’re externalizing the fact that you have a need for additional services, it’s by its very nature going to demand that attention of educators.”
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