IEP Resource Center

The U.S. education system has long been concerned with equity, but the recent Every Student Succeeds Act catapulted the issue to the forefront with specific reporting rules that require education agencies at every level to collect and use data to do more. As equity takes a front line position in ESSA, special education becomes especially important from a measurement and reporting perspective.

The goal of this research series is to provoke questions and provide actionable insights that encourage discussion about how states and local school districts equitably address the needs of students with disabilities. In the first brief, we investigated special education classification rates across the nation. In this second brief, we take a closer look at educators’ perceptions of how and why policy and resources contribute to over- and under-classification of special education students and explore how to identify and address barriers to special education equity.

This brief, the third in our series, further investigates contributing factors of over-and under-classification of special education students. The key finding of this investigation is that educators in different roles view discrepancies in classification rates differently. Common ground exists within same roles across the highest and lowest classifications states.