Teacher perceptions of student disabilities

A common trend in special education in the United States is the overrepresentation of minority students among those receiving services. These disparities raise concerns about whether millions of students are identified correctly for services and the impact of these decisions on student learning. Research in this area has focused on the role of teachers, often using vignettes to probe for biases in referrals for service and how disability labeling may impact perceptions of students. These studies, however, do not represent adequately how teachers would view their own students in terms of disability. In two separate studies that comprise this dissertation, I analyze data from two large-scale nationally representative surveys of high school students and their teachers to further understand racial disparities in special education and the impact of disability labeling. In the first study, I investigate whether there are disparities in teacher perceptions of disabilities by student race. In the second study, I examine whether teacher perceptions of student disability lead to teachers holding lower educational expectations of those students and students reporting lower engagement in the classroom.

I found in the first study that the odds of teachers perceiving minority students as having a disability were 1.1 to 2.2 times higher than the odds for White students. However, controlling for background differences resulted in either parity or under-identification. My analyses in the second study using a student fixed-effects strategy revealed that the odds that a teacher expected a student who is perceived to have a disability to attend college is 0.40 times the odds of a student who was not perceived to have a disability. Lastly, when a teacher perceived that a student possessed a disability, the classroom confidence of the student was lower by about 0.19 standard deviations. Overall, since teachers are less likely to perceive minority students as having a disability, when background characteristics are controlled, this means teachers may need additional training in detecting disabilities. Furthermore, since teacher perceptions of student disability impacted their expectations of students and their students' classroom confidence, schools may need to better monitor how teachers and students respond to disability labels.