Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Special education is the primary mechanism through which students with disabilities are provided supplementary education services. Despite legal frameworks that seek to limit racial and economic gaps in the provision of these services, substantial gaps remain.  However, it is largely unclear the extent to which these gaps reflect differences in actual disability incidence or other factors such as economic constraints and discrimination. In this study we use unique data from the State of Florida that links education records to birth certificate records to examine these gaps. The birth certificate data contains a wealth of economic and health data not typically available in administrative data, which provides us with the ability to examine this issue in unprecedented detail. Through a series of Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions, we observe a few patterns in the data that are potentially important for education policy and explaining lingering economic inequality. First, economic characteristics and birth anomalies explain very little of the gaps, suggesting that the identification gaps are largely independent of economic and health endowments at birth and generally racial minorities are under-identified relative to similar whites. Second, these gaps close with the age of the child on average. Third, there are large differences in these patterns by the racial composition of the school. Minority students tend to be over-identified in whiter schools while they are under-identified in heavily minority schools.  These findings indicate that disparate special education treatment of minorities may be a larger problem than initially thought.