Students from Low-Income Families and Special Education

• Published in: Policy File 2019
• Main Authors: Schifter, Laura A, Grindal, Todd, Schwartz, Gabriel, Hehir, Thomas
• Format: Report
• Language: English
• Subjects: Children & youth/Families & family life; Education; Government; Poverty; The Century Foundation

This past July, the Department of Education under the Trump administration made a controversial move to delay regulations to address disproportionality for students of color in special education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Now, with the delay from the Trump administration, several organizations and policymakers are concerned that school districts will do even less to address equity in IDEA. To justify the delay, the Department of Education claimed that racial disproportionality can be appropriate because of "correlatives of poverty" that students of color should have higher rates of identification in special education because students of color are also more likely to come from low-income households and children from low-income households are more likely to have disabilities. This logic relies on two assumptions: (1) Low-income students are and should be disproportionately represented in special education and (2) Any disproportionality that occurs for students of color occurs among low-income students of color. To determine the accuracy of these assumptions, policymakers must first understand the experience of low-income students in special education. However, little research currently exists examining the identification and placement of low-income students in special education, in part, because states are not required to report special education data by students' income status. To be clear, the purpose of this paper is not to wave away racial disproportionality and the underlying bias that may contribute to it; we believe these dynamics exist and are problematic. Rather, the purpose is to better understand the disproportionality that occurs for low-income students. In this report, we focus on the first assumption focused on low-income students and describe the identification and placement patterns for these students in special education across three states.