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Editor’s Note: With the exception of the last section about an Anti-Racist, Culturally Competent Special Education Model, the content in this article comes from a recently accepted journal manuscript. This manuscript will be available online soon. Please use the following citation to view the full text: Bell, N.S., Collier, Z., Vélez, V., & Ford, D.Y. (2024-forthcoming). CritSEM: Advancing QuantCrit to examine racialized resegregation in special education. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness. Additionally, some of the citations have been removed in this version. Please see the full paper for the other citations.
We use the term and notion of resegregation in special education to describe the overrepresentation of Students of Color in special education, an issue that continues to persist today. After all, special education was created, in part, for this intended purpose. To frame it any other way dismisses both the historical and contemporary contexts and centrality of race and racism in decisions to remove these specific students from the general education system, forcing them into a system that suppresses their opportunities and contributes to miseducation. How? Because they are receiving unnecessary services and may not have access to the general education curriculum and classroom. In fact, these resegregated practices cause short-term and long-term harm for Students of Color (National Center for Learning Disabilities, 2020). Overrepresentation has lifelong consequences and contributes to racial hierarchies beyond schooling. Thus, our use of the term resegregation is intentional.
Further entrenching this racialized injustice is more recent research that inappropriately uses achievement covariates in statistical models to make universal problematic claims that Black and Latinx students are underrepresented in special education. Yet their statistical models fail to adequately and systematically account for structural inequities and, instead, rely on culturally-based deficit rationales. We argue that this research supports policy decisions to over-refer and over-identify Students of Color for special education; thereby, promoting white supremacy. For example, Project 25—conservative policy aims for the future—uses Paul Morgan’s research to justify policy that would eliminate federal legislative actions to address overrepresentation, signaling that resegregation in special education is lawful and justifiable.
Our dire concerns about resegregation in special education motivated us to conceptualize research with the aim to challenge and, preferably, dismantle white supremacy. Therefore, we conducted empirical research to study the extent that anti-racist teachers can disrupt resegregation in special education, using nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-2011. Our study was intended to not only counter the research of others citing underrepresentation who also used ECLS-K data, but also examine the effectiveness of anti-racist teachers in elementary schools.
We have developed a counterstory that challenges resegregation in special education and reveals the importance of anti-racist educators for promoting social and racial justice in general and special education. To do so, we developed and pioneered a new methodological approach called CritSEM (Critical Structural Equation Modeling)–an intervention for data analyses, combining the tenets of QuantCrit with structural equation modeling to tell a Critical Race Counterstory, described next.
Part 1 of Counterstory: Examining Causes of Resegregation in Special Education
The first part of the Counterstory seeks to expose this injustice, specifically the covert and normalized processes, enigmatic in education, carried out by educators lacking preparation. First, we examined teachers’ deficit-based evaluations and inappropriate usage of early assessments, during kindergarten, as predictors (causes) of resegregation in special education. These causes represent the normalized, pervasive, and racist functions of schooling that shape how teachers (mis)identify Black and Latinx students for special education; we consider this a form of miseducation (Carter G. Woodson’s Miseducation of the Negro). In these instances, teachers fail to consider the structural inequalities, masked in classrooms, that manifest as disparate outcomes, according to white middle-class norms. In fact, perceived learning difficulties may result from limited access to academic opportunities, a lack of culturally relevant teaching, low-quality teaching, and resource inequalities.
These causes, while now implicit, were once explicit when notions of eugenics became prominent in education. Proponents of eugenics relied on the convictions of educators to classify students for special education via their evaluations and use of intelligence testing, despite test bias. The APA apology to minoritized people for the history of test bias was finally issued in 2021. In our statistical models, teachers’ use of biased early assessments and academic evaluations represent the eugenics-based processes still causing resegregation in special education today.
Key Findings from Part 1 of Counterstory
Not surprisingly but very troubling, our first finding shows that, in comparison to white girls, Black boys, Black girls, Latinx boys, and Latinx girls had increased probabilities of being resegregated in special education by third grade, due to their teachers’ kindergarten evaluations in math and literacy. Similarly, our second finding suggests that kindergarten assessments predicted the resegregation of these boys and girls in special education, compared to white girls, by third grade.
These results suggest that teachers’ deficit-based evaluations and early biased assessments, during kindergarten, are determining a de facto segregated placement for Black and Latinx students. Informed by the structural and ideological framing that Critical Race Theory provides, we argue that these students are targeted for special education and separated from general education because of their racialized identities which, in turn, denies them educational opportunities – further cementing racism in U.S. public schooling. In sum, teachers are permitted to carry out these processes and students are being subjected to unjust and racialized experiences, based on the intersection of race/ethnicity and misguided notions of (dis)ability.
Part 2 of Counterstory: Anti-Racist Educators Disrupt Processes Causing Resegregation
The second part of the counterstory explores anti-racist teaching as a way to advance social and racial injustice in general and special education. Given the push to increase testing and assessment at younger and younger ages, research makes clear that preparing critical, anti-racist, and socially just teachers in early childhood is imperative for prevention purposes.
In classrooms, anti-racist teachers: (a) take action against a racialized education system inherently designed to resegregate Students of Color in special education by intentionally preventing the pervasive causes of resegregation in special education; (b) engage in justice-producing pedagogies (e.g., culturally relevant and sustaining teaching) and high-quality instruction (i.e., conceptually-based, rigorous, and equitable); and (c) create an inclusive classroom setting where all students can experience success, eliminating restrictive and segregated special education placements. Anti-racist teaching was added to our models to counter the eugenics-based processes causing resegregation.
Key Findings from Part 2 of Counterstory
Our third finding reveals that anti-racist teachers directly reduced resegregation in special education and lessened the impact of resegregation. These results underscore the critical role of anti-racist/anti-bias early interventions and emphasize the potential for significant positive outcomes through intentional anti-racist practices. Overall, consistent with many studies and theories, our research makes abundantly clear that anti-racist educators are essential to prevent resegregation.
Our Critical Race Counterstory shows that educators can push back against an unjust special education system, using anti-racist practices but, to do so, they will need to develop the requisite beliefs, knowledge, and skills of anti-racism – cultural competence. Yet, even with anti-racist practices in the classroom, Black and Latinx students still had increased propensities for being resegregated in special education, due to early assessments. While anti-racism mitigated this, educators also need supporting anti-racist, administrative leadership and policies.
Our extension of QuantCrit via CritSEM demonstrates a powerful Critical Race Counterstory to quantitative research that justifies the resegregation of Black and Latinx students in special education. We present noteworthy and empirical evidence that disputes the research of others citing underrepresentation who also use ECLS-K data and other nationally representative data sets, while also showing the power of anti-racist teachers.
Time Overdue for Anti-Racist, Culturally Competent Special Education Teachers
Preparing educators to be anti-racist consists of helping them to be culturally competent – to have the dispositions, knowledge, and skills to work equitably with culturally different students. Ford’s model is depicted in Figure 1 and briefly described. At minimal, there are eight characteristics:
(1) Democratic attitudes and values. We agree with the five values here, other than the term ‘tolerance’. Replace tolerance with acceptance;
(2) A social justice ideology. A detailed description of social justice appears here;
(3) Appreciate and respect diversity. Educators have high regard for culture and cultural differences. They are non-judgmental, open-minded, and receptive to the cultures of their students and seek to engage and gain the respect of Students of Color and their family;
(4) Recognize that we are all biased or prejudiced but seeks to change. Educators are reflective, introspective, and hold themself accountable for cultural clashes with their minoritized students and families. They are not what Ford calls ‘cultureblind’ or ‘culturally assaultive’.
(5) View society and issues from multiple perspectives. Educators are not polemic in their thinking; instead, they seek to understand cultural differences and issues from more than one perspective; even from opposing perspectives.
(6) Immerse self in diverse settings. Educators are not what Ford calls ‘driveby teachers’ – no interest in an attempt to know minoritized students and their community. Rather, educators are intentional about participating in and attending events to become more familiar with and knowledgeable about their Students of Color. Do not want to be viewed as an outsider, and endeavors to limit and avoid cultural clashes.
(7) Adopt multicultural education practices and principles (e.g. curriculum and instruction, and assessment). Despite the myriad of anti-EDI efforts, educators are committed to being responsive to the cultural interests and needs of their Students of Color.
(8) Knowledge of the stages of cultural identity. There is an important and necessary focus on socio-emotional learning (SEL). Culturally competent educators know the importance of viewing SEL (and all areas of development) through a cultural lens – racial identity development. This facilitates racial and ethnic pride among Black, Hispanic, and other Students of Color.
In this paper, we choose not to capitalize white and do choose to capitalize Black, Latinx, and Students or Communities of Color as a grammatical move toward social and racial justice. This choice is informed by critical scholarship and activism, such as that by Dumas (2016) who writes that Black is a “self-determined name of a racialized social group that shares a specific set of histories, cultural processes, and imagined and performed kinships” (p. 12), white, on the other hand, is a socially constructed category that was created for the purposes of dominance and exclusion; it “does not describe a group with a sense of common experiences or kinship outside of acts of colonization or terror” (p. 13).
References and Suggested Readings
Bell, N.S., Collier, Z., Vélez, V., & Ford, D.Y. (2024-forthcoming). CritSEM: Advancing QuantCrit to examine racialized resegregation in special education. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness.
Bruinius, H. (2006). Better for all the world: The secret history of forced sterilization and America’s quest for racial purity (1st ed.). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Ford, D.Y. (2010). Reversing underachievement among gifted Black students (2nd ed.). Prufrock Press.
Ford, D.Y. (2011). Multicultural gifted education (2nd ed.). Prufrock Press.
Ford, D.Y. (July 12, 2024a). A tribute to Dr. James A. Banks – The father of multicultural education: In these troubling anti-EDI times.
Gillborn, D. (2010). The colour of numbers: Surveys, statistics and deficit thinking about race and class. Journal of Education Policy, 25(2), 253-276.
Gould, S. J. (1996). The mismeasure of man (Rev. and expanded). Norton.
Henricks, K. (2015). Bursting whose bubble? The racial nexus between social disaster, housing wealth, and public policy. Social Justice Research, 28, 318-338.
Morgan, P. L., Farkas, G., Hillemeier, M. M., Mattison, R., Maczuga, S., Li, H., & Cook, M. (2015). Minorities are disproportionately underrepresented in special education: Longitudinal evidence across five disability conditions. Educational Researcher, 44, 278–292.
Morgan, P., Farkas, G., Cook, M., Strassfeld, N., Hillemeier, M., Pun, W., & Schussler, D. (2017). Are Black children disproportionately overrepresented in special education? A best-evidence synthesis. Exceptional Children, 83(2), 181-198.
Morgan, P., Farkas, G., Hillemeier, M., & Maczuga, S. (2017). Replicated evidence of racial and ethnic disparities in disability identification in U.S. schools. Educational Researcher, 46, 6, 305-322.
Nielsen, K. E. (2012). A disability history of the United States. Beacon Press.
Osgood, R. (2000). For “children who vary from the normal type”: Special education in Boston, 1838-1930. Gallaudet University Press.
Selden, S. (1999). Inheriting shame: The story of eugenics and racism in America. New York: Teachers College Press.
Shifrer, D., Muller, C., & Callahan, R. (2011). Disproportionality and learning disabilities: Parsing apart race, socioeconomic status, and language. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 44(3), 246-57.