Overrepresentation of Minority Students: The Case for Greater Specificity or Reconsideration of the Variables Examined

Abstract

The topic of overrepresentation certainly commands attention in the literature on “judgmental categories” of disability (e.g., ‘learning disabilities, mild mental retardation), yet the evidence reported to date bearing on the issue are less than precise. Clearly, the issue is broader than simple overrepresentation, given that far more egregious examples of overrepresentation in Head Start and Chapter I have yet to be criticized, let alone taken to court. In this article the authors distinguish between the percentage of category or program by group and percentage of group in category or program which provide quite different perspectives. Futhermore, the authors caution drawing causal inferences from what are descriptive data relating “race/ethnicity” to “placement in disability category.” Caution is in order because the data reported by OCR represent aggregated data on race/ethnicity from sources that use different approaches to recording a child's race, fail to account for biracial children, and fail to consider the possibility that social class rather than race/ethnicity may be implicated. The second variable considered is placement in state-sactioned disability categories. The variability in rates across states reported in Annual Reports to Congress, coupled with research data demonstrating the lack of decision reliability, raises serious doubts concerning the validity of these designations. Cross-tabulating two categorical variables so fraught with measurement problems com…