Are Minority Students Under- or Overrepresented in Special Education?

Recently in a "New York Times" op-ed entitled "Is Special Education Racist?" Morgan and Farkas (2015) confront conventional wisdom that there are too many minority students in special education stating, "The real problem is that Black children are underrepresented in special education classes when compared with White children with similar level of academic achievement, behavior, and family economic resources." This bold statement was made because on the same day they published an article in the "Educational Researcher" (Morgan er al., 2015) with data that they interpreted to indicate that there are not enough minority students in special education. In translating their findings to policy recommendations, they note that: "For policymakers, results suggest that current federal legislation and policymaking designed to minimize overidentification of minorities in special education may be misdirected (Government Accountability Office, 2013; U.S. Department of Education, 2014), including the reallocation of Part B funding to early intervening services designed to reduce minority overrepresentation in special education. How could they come to this conclusion given five decades of research to the contrary? The purpose of this article is to summarize the findings of this and previous research, to discuss the methods used to reach the conclusion, and to outline implications for school psychologists.