Black students in elementary school, particularly Black boys, are less likely to be identified for special education when their teachers are also Black, according to a new report published by the American Educational Research Association (AERA).
Dr. Cassandra Hart
The report, Teacher-Student Race Match and Identification for Discretionary Educational Services, analyzes administrative data from North Carolina elementary schools from 2008 to 2013 to determine whether having Black teachers would affect the rates at which Black students – and those of other races – are designated for either gifted or special education programs.
While gifted programs are meant to recognize exceptional academic ability, special education programs aim to address potential academic shortcomings that a student may have due to disabilities. But the latter, though meant to be helpful, can come with distinct drawbacks, the report noted.
“On the one hand, receiving special education services may be beneficial to students to the extent that students genuinely need those services to keep up with peers academically,” the report noted. “On the other hand, some scholars have argued that special education use stigmatizes children and can cause them harm, even as it is intended to serve protective functions.”
Past research has shown that Black students are less likely to be identified for gifted programs than white or Asian students.
“Black kids are underrepresented in gifted services and overrepresented in special education services,” said report co-author Dr. Cassandra Hart, an associate professor of education policy at UC Davis. “That can be problematic, to the extent that both of those placements are kind of associated with longer-term student trajectories.”
And according to the report, having a teacher of the same race as a student has been shown to be related to a trove of positive student outcomes, including test scores, behavior, high school drop out rates, and college matriculation, especially for Black boys who are economically disadvantaged during their elementary and middle school years.
