Special Education Became the New Segregation — And Black Boys Are the Casualties

We abolished tracking. We desegregated the schoolhouse. We passed laws and issued rulings and marched and litigated and demanded that the promise of Brown v. Board of Education be fulfilled, that Black children sit in the same classrooms as white children, learn from the same teachers, study the same curriculum, be held to the same standards. And then we invented a new system of separation, one that carries the imprimatur of medical science and the authority of federal law, one that operates inside the desegregated school building itself, behind closed doors and beneath clinical labels, and one that falls on Black boys with a precision and a consistency that would be called discrimination if it happened in any other context. That system is special education, and the data on what it has done to Black children — and particularly to Black boys — is a record of institutional failure so thorough that it should be read as an indictment.

Black students are approximately two to three times more likely than white students to be classified as having an intellectual disability or an emotional disturbance — the two categories of special education that are most subjectively determined, that carry the most stigma, and that are most likely to result in removal from the general education classroom. The National Center for Education Statistics, reporting data collected under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, has documented this disparity for decades. It has widened and narrowed in various states and years, but it has never disappeared, and in many districts it has grown more severe even as awareness of the problem has increased.

Let us be clear about what these classifications mean in practice. A child labeled “intellectually disabled” is removed from the general education classroom, placed in a self-contained special education setting, taught a modified curriculum with reduced expectations, and given an Individualized Education Program that, in far too many cases, becomes not a pathway to reintegration but a permanent assignment to the margins of the educational system. Once placed, students rarely return to general education. The exit rate from special education is vanishingly small. And the graduation rates for students classified with intellectual disabilities or emotional disturbances are catastrophic: nationally, students with emotional disturbances have a graduation rate below 60%, the lowest of any disability category.

The Legal History: Courts Saw It Coming

The courts recognized the danger long before the education establishment was willing to acknowledge it. In 1967, in Hobson v. Hansen, Judge J. Skelly Wright struck down the tracking system in Washington, D.C.’s public schools, finding that the use of standardized aptitude tests to assign students to ability groups resulted in a racially segregated system within a nominally desegregated district. Black students were disproportionately assigned to lower tracks from which they rarely escaped, and the tracking system functioned as what Wright called “a system of discrimination founded on socioeconomic and racial status rather than ability.”

In 1979, in Larry P. v. Riles, a federal court in California found that the use of IQ tests to place Black students in classes for the “educable mentally retarded” was racially discriminatory. The court noted that Black students constituted 25% of California’s school population but 66% of students in EMR classes — a disparity that the court found could not be explained by actual differences in intellectual ability. The ruling banned the use of IQ tests for placing Black children in special education in California, a prohibition that remains in effect to this day.

“Segregation was not combated in order that it might be combated; it was combated in order that the children, Black and white, might be liberated from its effects.”
— James Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers,” 1963

These rulings should have ended the problem. They did not. What happened instead was that the mechanism of separation evolved. Overt tracking gave way to special education classification. Standardized IQ tests gave way to behavioral assessments and teacher referrals that were no less subjective and no less racially skewed. The labels changed. The result did not.

The Subjectivity Problem

The key to understanding the racial disproportionality in special education is understanding that the categories where the disparity is greatest — intellectual disability and emotional disturbance — are precisely the categories that rely most heavily on subjective judgment. A learning disability like dyslexia can be identified through standardized assessments of reading ability and phonological processing. A physical disability is observable. But an “emotional disturbance” is defined by IDEA as a condition exhibiting “an inability to learn that cannot be explained by intellectual, sensory, or health factors,” “an inability to build or maintain satisfactory interpersonal relationships,” or “inappropriate types of behavior or feelings under normal circumstances.” Every term in that definition — “inability,” “satisfactory,” “inappropriate,” “normal” — requires a judgment call, and that judgment call is being made overwhelmingly by white teachers and psychologists evaluating Black boys.

Russell Skiba, whose research at Indiana University has defined the field, has documented the mechanism with painful clarity. The process typically begins with a teacher referral: a teacher identifies a student whose behavior is disruptive, whose academic performance is poor, whose conduct does not conform to classroom expectations. The student is referred for evaluation. The evaluation is conducted by a school psychologist who may or may not share the student’s cultural background, who may or may not understand the behavioral norms of the student’s community, and who is applying criteria that were developed and normed on predominantly white populations. The evaluation results in a classification. The classification results in placement. And the placement, more often than not, is permanent.

Beth Harry and Janette Klingner, in their landmark 2006 study Why Are So Many Minority Students in Special Education?, spent three years conducting ethnographic research in twelve schools in a large urban district. What they found was a system in which referrals to special education were driven not by genuine disability but by a complex interaction of poverty, cultural mismatch, and institutional convenience. Teachers who lacked the training or the support to manage diverse classrooms used the special education referral as a pressure relief valve — a way to remove challenging students from their classrooms under the legitimizing cover of clinical diagnosis. The students most likely to be referred were those whose behavior deviated most from the white, middle-class norms that defined “appropriate” conduct in most American schools.

The Cultural Mismatch

The American public school teaching force is approximately 80% white and 77% female. The students being disproportionately placed in special education for emotional disturbance are overwhelmingly Black and male. This demographic mismatch is not incidental to the problem. It is central to it.

Research has consistently shown that white teachers perceive Black boys’ behavior as more threatening, more defiant, and more disruptive than comparable behavior from white boys. A 2016 Yale Child Study Center study found that preschool teachers — preschool teachers — spent more time watching Black boys when told to look for challenging behavior, even when no challenging behavior was present. The implicit association between Black maleness and danger, aggression, and deviance operates below the level of conscious awareness, and it produces referral patterns that are racially patterned even when no individual teacher intends to discriminate.

A Black boy who is energetic is perceived as hyperactive. A Black boy who is assertive is perceived as defiant. A Black boy who expresses frustration is perceived as aggressive. A Black boy who is bored by a curriculum that fails to engage him is perceived as having an attention deficit. These perceptions are not the product of malice. They are the product of a teaching force that has not been trained to recognize and interrogate its own biases, operating within an institutional structure that has not been designed to prevent those biases from producing systematic racial disparity in outcomes.

The Consequences of Placement

The consequences of special education placement for Black boys extend far beyond the classroom walls. Students placed in self-contained special education settings receive instruction from teachers who, while often dedicated, are working with fewer resources, lower expectations, and a modified curriculum that does not prepare students for post-secondary education or competitive employment. The gap between what these students are taught and what their general education peers are learning widens with each passing year, making return to the general education classroom increasingly difficult even if the original classification was wrong.

The graduation data is damning. Students classified with emotional disturbances graduate at rates below 60%. Students classified with intellectual disabilities graduate at even lower rates. And among those who do graduate, the diploma they receive is often a “certificate of completion” or a modified diploma that does not meet the requirements for college admission or military enlistment. The special education system, as currently structured, does not merely fail to educate these students. It actively forecloses their futures by removing them from the educational pathway that leads to adult opportunity.

Response to Intervention: A Better Way

The most promising reform in special education identification is the Response to Intervention (RTI) model, which fundamentally restructures the identification process by requiring that students receive evidence-based instruction and intervention before being referred for special education evaluation. Under RTI, a student who is struggling academically or behaviorally does not immediately enter the special education referral pipeline. Instead, the student receives increasingly intensive interventions within the general education setting, and the student’s response to those interventions — not a one-time evaluation by a school psychologist — determines whether a disability classification is warranted.

The logic of RTI is elegant and devastating to the current system: if a student’s academic struggles can be resolved through better instruction, then the problem was never a disability in the student. It was a deficiency in the instruction. And RTI research has found that a significant percentage of students who would have been referred to special education under the traditional model respond successfully to targeted general education interventions and never need a special education classification at all. The students who benefit most from this approach are precisely the students who are most overrepresented in special education: low-income students, minority students, and students whose struggles reflect environmental and instructional factors rather than intrinsic disabilities.

Culturally Responsive Identification

RTI addresses the structural problem. But addressing the cultural problem requires an additional set of reforms that the education establishment has been slow to adopt. Culturally responsive evaluation means training school psychologists to understand that behavioral norms vary across cultures, that a Black boy from an urban community may express engagement, frustration, or even respect in ways that differ from white middle-class norms, and that those differences are not symptoms of pathology. It means requiring that evaluation teams include professionals who share the cultural background of the student being evaluated. It means using assessment instruments that have been normed on diverse populations rather than instruments designed for and validated on white suburban samples.

It also means something harder: it means holding teachers accountable for referral patterns. Districts must monitor referral data by race, gender, and disability category, and when a teacher’s referral patterns show racial disparity, the district must investigate whether the disparity reflects genuine disability or reflects the teacher’s inability to manage a diverse classroom. This is not punitive. It is diagnostic — an RTI model applied not to students but to teachers, identifying those who need additional support in culturally responsive pedagogy and classroom management.

Finally, parents must be empowered. The IDEA guarantees parents the right to participate in special education decisions, to review evaluations, to consent to or refuse placement, and to request independent evaluations at the district’s expense. But these rights are meaningless if parents do not know they exist, do not understand the evaluation process, or feel intimidated by the institutional authority of the school system. Parent advocacy training, provided through community organizations and school districts, must reach the families most affected by disproportionate placement — families that are disproportionately low-income, disproportionately non-white, and disproportionately unfamiliar with the legal rights that the system has given them on paper but not in practice.

The children being sorted into special education classrooms right now, this semester, in schools across this country — the Black boys being labeled, classified, removed from the general education classroom, and placed on a trajectory that the data tells us leads not to opportunity but to its absence — those children did not choose this path. Many of them do not have a genuine disability. Many of them have a cultural mismatch with a system that was not built for them, a teacher who does not understand them, a school that lacks the resources to serve them. They are being separated not because they cannot learn but because the institution has not learned how to teach them. And until we name this for what it is — not special education, not clinical intervention, not individualized service, but segregation wearing a white coat — we will continue to lose them, one IEP meeting at a time, one label at a time, one Black boy at a time, into a system that was designed to help and has become, for too many, a trap.