Addressing Disproportionality with Response to Intervention

Fifty years ago, the United States’ educational system began a transformation to accommodate the large increase in background diversity resulting from the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision. Large-scale studies, like the Moynihan (1965) and Coleman (1966) reports, were conducted to better assess and evaluate the health of this transformation both inside and outside school systems, and programs such as Head Start and Upward Bound were created to increase the probability of success for people of color. Efforts were noble, but results were found to be less than ideal because poor students, ethnic minorities, and/or non-native speakers of English were found to be more likely to be placed in special education programs than their white peers (Dunn, 1968). This trend of disproportionate representation of minorities in special education has continued for the next 40 years (Chinn and Hughes, 1987; Heller, Holtzman, and Messick, 1982; Hosp and Reschly, 2004; MacMillan and Reschly, 1998; Skiba, Poloni-Staudinger, Simmons, Feggins-Assiz, and Chung, 2006). Disproportionality in special education is concerning because of the effects of labeling, segregation, and low exit rates from special education services. Consistent with the classic research on the power of labels (Rosenthal and Jacobsen, 1968), students identified as having behavior problems are perceived and addressed in a more negative manner by teachers regardless of whether or not there is a difference in behavior compared with their peers (Mehan, Hertweck, and Miehls, 1986). They may suffer from a diminished self-concept (CampbellWhatley and Comer, 2000), and poor postsecondary outcomes (Malmgren, Edgar, and Neel, 1998). Despite the least restrictive environment provisions of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, 2004, 2006), students of color receiving special education services are more likely to be taught in segregated environments than Caucasian students (Donovan and Cross, 2002; Hosp and Reschly, 2002). These realities have pushed educators to examine the disproportionate representation of minorities in special education more closely. Research examining disproportionality has generally been conducted at the district level, or occasionally the state level (i.e., comparing identification rates among districts or states). Although this is important work to establish the presence or severity of a problem, it has not been fruitful at identifying solutions to the problem (Chinn and Hughes, 1987). One reason for this could be that this research has focused on placement rates rather than reasons for identification for special education services or the outcomes from their provision. Some scholars have examined methods of predicting disproportionality (cf., Finn, 1982; Oswald, Coutinho, Best, and Singh, 1999), but these have not yielded educationally relevant solutions perhaps because most of the identified predictors are inalterable variables (Hosp and Reschly, 2004). While this research is important from a civil rights perspective, it has failed to yield solutions to inequitable education outcomes among different groups of students. In recent years, some have called for studies that extend the literature to the individual level (i.e., looking at what variables specific to individual students might predict disproportionality) so that more sensitive analyses can be conducted regarding the