Disproportionality Definition

 Due to various factors, many school districts did not have in place a current curriculum and/or agreement on

instructional approaches that would be appropriate for a widerange

of learners. As a result, students that persistently could not

attain proficiency on the state exam were promptly considered for

special education services. Additionally, some districts were continuously

changing or adding curriculum, assessment, and instructional

strategies from year to year. Although every school district

contends with such changes, we found in our districts such structural

changes affected struggling learners the most. For example,

practitioners tended to comment that they lacked the ability to

adequately service students at the lowest quartile of performance.

Therefore, instructional staff go through a steep learning curve

regarding a new curriculum and/or assessment, feeling inadequate

to address skill deficiencies with students, even based on the prior

curricula or assessment.

School districts are generally good at ensuring they abide by special education

regulations, including referral timeframes, involvement of practitioners, etc. However, the RCA process also found school districts maintained inconsistent pre-referral information, as well as

different forms for each school building in a district. Again, much of these system inconsistencies were not intentional, but rather reflective of the bifurcation existing in the district between special

education and general education. In many instances, special education directors would describe how they could only suggest to building

administrators adopting one common referral form or insisting

on general education teachers to complete the specifics of the prereferral

strategies.

Special education is viewed as fixing struggling students. In most

school districts, the general and special education staff rarely interact

with each other. The RCA process brought together cross-district

teams that included general and special education teachers, administrators,

content specialists, etc., and more often than not conversation

was interrupted due to a limited understanding among

practitioners regarding what is a disability. General education

teachers tended to express the belief that special education maintains

the “magic fairy dust” that will “fix” the learning capacity and

outcomes of students. Some of this belief may be due to the reality

that prior to the addition of RTI in IDEA 2004, the special education

process was perceived as organized to provide services to students

outside of the normal curve of academic performance. Though RTI

is part of conversation in most school districts, some practitioners

viewed RTI as the new process for “getting student classified” and

not a process for ensuring quality instruction and interventions.

More specifically, school and

district staff perceived at times the cultural practices of the home environment as making low-income and racial/ethnic minority children unable to learn, or contradicting school practices. For

example, in one district, many of the participants rallied around the

concept of “urban behavior” as a driving force of why the Black

students were in special education. In another district, Multi Language Learners were overrepresented in special education with

speech/language impairment because in “Latin culture, they listen

to music loud”; this was hypothesized by an ESL teacher. And yet another district hypothesized the Latino and ELL students are such a distraction in the classroom that they can be better served with

other disability groups. Such perspectives are not solely found in school districts cited for racial/ethnic disproportionality anymore;

in fact, such perspectives can be found in many urban, suburban,

and rural districts as well. Part of the difficulty with such a belief is

its distraction from engaging how teaching matters in learning outcomes.

That is, the belief sessions found practitioners were willing

to cite the family and community (i.e., poverty, limited reading

materials at home) as the reason why poor/low-income and racial/

ethnic minority students were struggling academically, while attributing

the academic performance of proficient students to their teaching practice. So there needs to be a paradigm alignment

regarding the connection between teaching and learning, as well as

an understanding of how to harness the types of knowledge students

demonstrate.

Some of the patterns that emerged in the root cause included schools and at times districts adding behavioral intervention

services to “fix” problem behaviors and limited identification of how climate contributed to behaviors. For example, one school district decided to provide one-on-one behavioral aides for “problem”

kids which resulted in walking into any school and seeing mostly Black boys being shadowed by college-age White or Asian males. Such practices emerge from a focus of addressing an urgent

issue but not identifying the causal factors or function of the factor and the ways in which the environment may contribute to the problem behavior.