The problem of disproportionality in special education is complex and requires an investigation of multiple factors related to racial, ethnic, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds, school context, and family characteristics. Researchers have debated whether language minority (LM) students are under or overrepresented in special education, but…

Background/Context: Many states, school districts, and third-party platforms report measures of school performance. Such school ratings are widely consulted by parents and educators alike. The ratings appear to affect families' choices of where to live and where to enroll students (Bergman and Hill, 2018; Hasan and Kumar, 2019), as well as…

Approximately one in 10 children in the United States is diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a disability that can negatively affect academic achievement, yet relatively few children with ADHD are in special education. To better understand factors that determine which students with ADHD are in special education, we…

This study presents a framework that uses academic trajectories in the middle grades for identifying students in need of intervention and providing targeted support. We apply a set of academic college readiness benchmarks to rich longitudinal data for more than 360,000 students in 5900 schools across 49 states and the District of Columbia. In both…

Although it is well established that Black male students are underrepresented in gifted educational programs in the United States, due to a scarcity of longitudinal prospective research, little is known about the protective factors at the child, family, and school level that increase the probability of Black male students being identified as…