A North Carolina mother knew her 8-year-old son who has autism had been having difficulty in school—and asked that he receive additional support. Instead, while undergoing a functional behavior assessment, he ended up in a cop car.
The boy was ultimately taken by a school resource officer to a local hospital. It was the second time in one week this had happened. The second time, he was transported to the hospital to be assessed for placement in a psychiatric facility due to the behaviors he exhibited, his mother alleges. The incident occurred in early March. Education Week is not naming the family to protect the child’s privacy.
“I’m furious,” the boy’s mother said in a Zoom interview. “And I want something in the system to change. My son has just as much of a right to an education and to live in his home and community as any of us. … And he has the right to a free and appropriate public education, not what they have available.”
The number of students identified as having a disability—and therefore eligible to receive services as required by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act—has been steadily rising for the past few years. Advocates and experts worry the overburdened K-12 special education system, which has faced staffing shortages and trouble with retention, isn’t able to properly support the students identified as needing services. Instead, situations like what happened in North Carolina could continue to unfold, with students with disabilities facing steeper punishment in the absence of staff who are trained to de-escalate behavior.
“Unable to receive that [special education services] during COVID, they come back to school, and rather than the support they need to be caught up, they are instead handcuffed and pushed out of the classroom,” said Tyler Whittenberg, deputy director of the opportunity to learn program at the Advancement Project, an organization that focuses on racial justice.
Identifications have surged after the pandemic, with 7.5 million students qualifying under IDEA in the 2022-23 school year, up from 7.1 million in 2019.
Students with disabilities were among the most severely affected during the pandemic, with schools struggling to provide accommodations and therapies remotely. Their academic recovery in the years since has been slower than their peers. Experts say that students are being more readily identified for special education due to behavioral challenges, which educators say have increased after the pandemic.
In the mix, too, are long-held concerns that some students, particularly Black students, are overidentified for services—putting them at risk of receiving fewer opportunities and more disciplinary action. But contradictory research shows that those students may in fact be underidentified, locking them out of supports their white peers receive and ultimately causing more harm.
Students are over- and under-identified for having disabilities
When IDEA was reauthorized by Congress in 2004, lawmakers were concerned about a disproportionate amount of students of color in special education. The law was updated to direct states with significant over-representation to spend a portion of their federal special education funds on “coordinated, early intervening services” to help students succeed in the general education environment.
Obama administration-era directives also sought to rectify historical civil rights concerns in education through guidance targeting discipline and special education identification. But stark racial disparities persist.
When students with disabilities aren’t properly identified, that means they aren’t getting access to services and protections they’re legally entitled to, said Amanda Sullivan, a professor at the University of Minnesota who studies disproportionality.
But when students—particularly marginalized ones—are incorrectly identified, they’re getting blocked from certain educational opportunities by being removed from general education settings, and are more likely to see exclusionary discipline practices, she said.
“There isn’t any one thing that contributes to disability identification, there’s not any one thing that fixes it either. The greatest impact is in really zooming out and thinking about what happens well before special education even comes up with a concern,” Sullivan said. “It’s not that disability identifications have to be prevented or hindered, but rather just, are we providing appropriate educational opportunities and support for everybody? And one manifestation of inappropriate decisions, and inappropriate opportunities and supports, is in the inappropriate identification of disability.”
A majority of students served under IDEA attended general education classes most of the time, with numbers increasing from 61 percent in fall 2012 to 67 percent in fall 2022. Meanwhile, those who spent about 40 to 79 percent of their time in general education shrunk from 20 to 16 percent, and those who spent less than half of their time in general education fell from 14 to 13 percent, according to data from NCES.
In the 2022-23 school year, about a third of children were identified as having specific learning disabilities—the most common disability identification, followed by speech or language impairments (19 percent), other health impairments (15 percent), and autism (13 percent). The largest percentage of Black students served under IDEA were identified as having an intellectual disability, according to 2019-20 data from the Office of Special Education Programs.
For decades, researchers have found that students of color are over-referred into special education, ending up classified as emotionally disturbed, or having an intellectual disability, said María Hernández, a professor at New York University who has studied disproportionality.
Most teachers are white women, Hernández said, creating what can be a “cultural dissonance” between them and students of color. Research has shown, she added, that when Black students have Black educators, they’re less likely to be classified into special education.
“The idea is that IDEA’s a protection for our children, and at the same time, we continue to see the same pattern around who continues to be excluded once they actually have an IEP/are classified as having a disability,” Hernández said.
But researcher Paul Morgan, a professor in the school of public health at the University at Albany, SUNY, contends the opposite: that Black students are actually under-referred to special education, and that’s detrimental to equity. Though the research has drawn criticism from others in the field, he argues that his and his colleagues’ findings have been replicated.
“We don’t want kids to be identified as having disabilities just because of their race or ethnicity, but we also don’t want kids who have disabilities not to be helped because of their race or ethnicity,” said Morgan, who has a background as a special education teacher. “There does seem to be evidence that the way the system is operating is advantaging white and English-speaking students in terms of who’s receiving services.”
There’s evidence, he added, that special education can positively impact student achievement.
“We could do better in terms of understanding the potential positive impacts of special education and ensuring that those services are well resourced—which typically they have not been—through enhanced federal funding and funding through state and localities, because there is evidence to suggest receiving the specialized services through special education can be of benefit to kids,” he said.
The criminalization of disabilities, and inadequate services
In Arizona, advocates working to target the overuse of discipline for Black students led to examining how students of color were faring in special education, said Janelle Wood, the CEO of Black Mothers Forum, an education advocacy group. In talking with parents, Wood and her team found students with disabilities weren’t receiving full protections or services. She cited reductions in staff, a lack of resources, and difficulty finding qualified special educators as reasons why.
“Sometimes the teachers don’t have the capacity or the resources or the skillset to do it, and they’re placed in an awful position at times when they have high numbers [of students with disabilities] in their classrooms,” she said.
Whittenberg, from the Advancement Project, said trained specialists and teachers are prepared to help students with disabilities navigate disruptive behaviors. But police officers, he cautioned, aren’t. Research has found that when police are on campus, arrests are twice as high compared to demographically similar schools without police.
“When we bring in these outside actors under the false guise of security, and the individuals respond, they come in arms with weapons, and they come in with training to dominate, to control—not to listen, not to de-escalate,” he said. “When these are the people we’re putting in our schools and putting them around students with disabilities, it is no wonder that these students are assaulted on a regular basis by police officers who are not trained to deal with them.”
The North Carolina mother, whose son was taken out of school by a school resource officer, said she was told her son had been having behavioral trouble the second day he was taken to the hospital. The child allegedly was physical with a staff member, when the school resource officer passed by outside the classroom and intervened, ultimately taking him out of the school.
The mother cited a lack of funding to hire qualified staff. She said the school has relied on high use of restraint and seclusion to deal with his behavior. At home, the family has removed his bedroom door, she said, so he doesn’t feel like he’ll be locked in his room.
Since the incident in March, he has displayed school avoidance, she said, adding that she has been charged with truancy. In a lawsuit against the district, the family is hoping for their son to be placed in a private school with appropriate resources for a year, before transitioning back to public school. The school district did not respond to three requests for comments via phone and email.
“I’m not going to tell you we never see a behavior at home,” she said. “We do. He has autism. We definitely have seen, since going through training ourselves, about how to proactively approach behaviors—how to use visuals, target sensory needs—as parents. We definitely have seen that it can be done. He can be successful.”
