Special education services are crucial for enhancing outcomes and well-being among autistic students. Unfortunately, many racially and ethnically minoritized and girl autistic youth face challenges in timely and accurate identification. National-level data reveal autism prevalence rates differ across student gender, race, and ethnicity hindering…

The Second Chance Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act encourage juvenile justice personnel to collaborate with not-for-profit organizations, employers, and community schools to provide incarcerated girls with disabilities transition support to reenter their community after incarceration. The "Career and College…

Special education labeling ignores historical, emotional, spiritual, sociocultural effects of labeling Black and Brown students with disabilities. Utilizing critical disability studies, critical race theory and spiritual paradigm, we interrogate construction and expression of differences of Learning Disability and Speech and Language Impairment.…

Equality and equity are often mischaracterized as interchangeable terms in public education. This may explain why efforts towards reform and restructure are often not met with any real measure of success. "Equity, Equality, and Reform in Contemporary Public Education" provides emerging research on the reformation of education curriculum…

In this twenty-first century there is a disproportionate amount of African American males in special education in the U.S. This is a factor happening day by day affecting the achievement gap between Black and White students, especially males. The purpose of this study is to point out factors that contribute to the overrepresentation of African…

African American disproportional placement and underachievement are national trends, and both are problematic because stigmatizing labels lead to diminished opportunities in education and employment. A gap exists in the literature regarding the efficacy of Response to Intervention (RTI), a new educational initiative designed to reduce…

One of the field's most enduring problems is the overrepresentation of students of color in special education. A less acknowledged challenge is the overrepresentation of students with disabilities in juvenile incarceration. Quantitative studies have documented the overrepresentation of students with disabilities in juvenile justice. Yet,…

Recent criticism of the over-representation of minority students in special education do not adequately account for gender, despite the fact that urban special education classrooms in the USA are largely populated by young men of colour. In fact, we know very little about how being female shapes the experiences and understandings of young women of…

While research has documented the predominance of boys in US special education programmes, similar attention to girls' under-representation has been rare. Recent research suggests that there may be just as many girls in need of these services, but for various reasons they are less likely to be identified through the referral process. Girls who…

The scope of this article is to discuss the impact of underrepresentation of girls in separate, self-contained special education classes for preschool children in a large school district in the southeastern United States. On a regular basis, preschool girls identified with special needs are being placed in self-contained classes where there they…