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Students with disabilities
Growing Up in Disability-Dense School Districts: Long-Term Impacts of Childhood Exposure on Educational Attainment
This study examines whether growing up in a district with a higher share of people with disabilities shapes long-term educational attainment for children with and without disabilities. Using administrative data on more than 170,000 children from six Texas kindergarten cohorts (1994–1999) who… more →
The Politics of Administrative Ease: Public Access to Local Special Education Information
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceWhat political and administrative resources contribute to the realization of rights in the United States? We examine this puzzle in the context of rights to education for students with disabilities by measuring the administrative ease of accessing local special education information: the extent… more →
Title I and IDEA as Complementary Federal Responses: Distinguishing Opportunity-Mediated and Opportunity-Independent Underachievement
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceTitle I and IDEA are complementary federal responses to different sources of low achievement. Title I targets opportunity-mediated underachievement, while IDEA targets persistent underachievement for which deficits in ordinary educational opportunity are not the primary explanation. A simple… more →
IDEA-Aligned Estimates of Racial Disproportionality in Special Education versus Conventional Approaches: A cautionary note on included-variable bias when achievement and socioeconomic status proxy for special education need
Topics: MethodsTags: Equity, Students with disabilitiesRacial disproportionality in special education is a contested policy space. Federal oversight has traditionally focused on minority over-representation through IDEA’s significant disproportionality framework. However, observational studies report that Black students appear under-identified based… more →
School-Based Disability Identification Varies by Student Family Income
Nicholas Ainsworth, Christopher Cleveland, Leah R. Clark, Jacob Hibel, Quentin Brummet, Andrew Saultz, Emily Penner, Michelle Spiegel, Paul Yoo, Juan Camilo Cristancho, Paul Hanselman, Andrew Penner.Topics: Student LearningCurrently, 18 percent of K-12 students in the United States receive additional supports through the identification of a disability. Socioeconomic status is viewed as central to understanding who gets identified as having a disability, yet limited large-scale evidence examines how disability… more →
The Early Intervention and Early Childhood Special Education Workforce: Descriptive Evidence on Demographics and Turnover from Oregon
Early intervention (EI) and early childhood special education (ECSE) services for children with disabilities have expanded substantially across the U.S. over the past few decades, necessitating efforts to recruit and retain a qualified workforce to meet their needs. Despite widespread reports of… more →
Leveraging IEPs to Understand Special Education Services at Scale
7.5 million (15%) U.S. public school students have Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) that guide $14 billion in special education services. However, the content of IEPs remains unexplored, primarily because they have been historically inaccessible to researchers at scale. In this study, we… more →
A Critical Appraisal of the Evidence on Racial Disproportionality in Special Education
Topics: MethodsThis essay provides a two-pronged critical assessment of a subset of the literature on racial disproportionality in special education: that which aims to estimate racial disparities among otherwise similar children. This body of research has shown that Black students are less likely than… more →
Weighing Risks: How Families of Disabled Children Made School Choices During the Pandemic
Topics: School ChoiceIn this paper, we show how positionality shapes caregivers’ decisions about children’s schooling, by expanding on research on Black families’ educational decision-making (Cooper, 2025; Posey-Maddox et al., 2021) to examine the positions from which families of disabled and multiply-marginalized… more →
The Correlated Proxy Problem: Why Control Variables can Obscure the Contribution of Selection Processes to Group-Level Inequality
Topics: MethodsWhether selection processes contribute to group-level disparities or merely reflect pre-existing inequalities is an important societal question. In the context of observational data, researchers, concerned about omitted-variable bias, assess selection-contributing inequality via a kitchen-sink… more →
Did Mathematics Achievement Gaps for Students with Disabilities Widen after the Introduction of the Common Core and its Aligned Assessments?
This study addresses the important yet underexplored question of whether the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics, which emphasize critical thinking and problem-solving, as well as the computer-based assessments aligned with the Common Core, have facilitated or hindered learning for… more →
IncreasED: How Court Rulings Impact Special Education Identification
Topics: Student Well-BeingHealthcare services outside of school impact the likelihood of receiving a school-based special education classification and services. Using Massachusetts administrative data on public school students, this paper employs difference-in-differences to examine the impacts of expanded Medicaid… more →
From School to School: Examining the Contours of Switching Schools within the Special Education Teacher Labor Market
The United States is facing growing teacher shortages that may disproportionately affecting schools serving high proportions of students of color, low-income students, and those in rural or urban areas. Special education teachers (SETs) are particularly in demand. Each year, nearly half of all… more →
The Effects of Response to Intervention on Disability Identification and Achievement
Topics: Student LearningCurrently 15 percent of U.S. students receive special education services, a widespread intensive intervention with variable effects on students. Spurred by changes in federal policy, many states and districts have begun adopting the Response to Intervention (RTI) approach to identifying students… more →
Impact of States' Adoption of Response to Interventions (RTI) on the Identification and Placement of Students in Special Education
Topics: Student LearningTags: Students with disabilities, EquityThis study investigates the impact of states' adoption of Response to Interventions (RTI) on the identification and placement of students in special education. RTI, adopted by the reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 2004, is designed to improve the… more →
Understanding Individualized Education Program (IEP) Goals at Scale
Topics: Student LearningStudents with disabilities represent 15% of U.S. public school students. Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) inform how students with disabilities experience education. Very little is known about the aspects of IEPs as they are historically paper-based forms. In this study, we develop a… more →
Label to Help: The Effects of Special Education on Student Outcomes
Topics: Student LearningThis study examines the impact of special education on academic and behavioral outcomes for students with learning disabilities (LD) by using statewide Indiana data covering kindergarten through eighth grade. The results from student fixed effects models show that special education services… more →
Disability as Discipline? Effects of the New York City Suspension Ban on Identification of Students with Disabilities
Topics: Student Well-BeingAcross the United States, suspension bans have become a popular policy response to address excessive and inequitable use of suspension in schools. However, there is little research that examines what strategies school staff employ when suspension is no longer permitted. I examine the effect of New… more →
Teacher Preparation, Classroom Structure, and Learning Outcomes for Students with Disabilities
Topics: Student LearningAmple research investigates returns to teacher preparation and other instructional inputs for the general student population, yet evidence is lacking for students with disabilities (SWDs). This study uses North Carolina data to estimate achievement returns to teacher preparation by classroom… more →
Where are the Gifted English Learners and Students with Disabilities?
Prior research has documented substantial inequity across, racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines within the population of students identified as gifted. Less attention has paid to the equity of gifted identification for student learning English or those with disabilities and what effect state… more →