Opinion: Special Education and Race

Oped from today's New York Times by Paul L. Morgan, an associate professor of education at Pennsylvania State University.George Farkas, a professor of education at the University of California, Irvine.

More than six million children in the United States receive special-education services for their disabilities. Of those age 6 and older, nearly 20 percent are black.
Critics claim that this high number — blacks are 1.4 times more likely to be placed in special education than other races and ethnicities combined — shows that black children are put into special education because schools are racially biased.
But our new research suggests just the opposite.