Top Highlights

• notably family income and achievement—into account, racial and ethnic minority students are less likely to be identified for special education than white students
• To answer this question, we must compare the likelihood that a black student participates in special education with that of an otherwise identical white student
• we want to know if black students are too likely to be in special education—or, as it turns out, not likely enough.
• While individual-level models controlling only for race and gender showed blacks more likely to be identified, adding a family socioeconomic status variable eliminated the effect of race for blacks, while Hispanics and Asians were significantly less likely to be in special education
• black students remain more likely than others to be identified for special education; they did not include student achievement as a covariate.

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