“In some cases, and for some children, having that information could be life-saving,” said Lauren Rivera, a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management.
But discrimination keeps families from getting that important information, according to a new study by Rivera and Andras Tylsik of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Their study found that public school principals are less responsive to parents of children with disabilities when it comes to providing information about schools. This is especially true when the parents of children with disabilities identify as black.
“We know that people with and without disabilities are treated differently, but as much of the literature on disability in education shows, the impacts are highly racialized,” Rivera said, creating a series of barriers for Black students with disabilities.
Of course, the reality of discrimination against people with disabilities is not new. Previous research has shown that people with disabilities face significant obstacles in the labor market: they earn less than their non-disabled peers and are underemployed based on their qualifications. Rivera and Tylsik’s new research shows that these challenges begin long before people enter the workforce.
“Disability discrimination doesn’t just hurt people in the labor market,” Rivera said. “It starts much earlier and really impacts students’ educational opportunities and options, especially in the context of school choice.”
Underfunded special education mandates
In the United States, the rights of children with disabilities are protected not only by the Americans with Disabilities Act, but also by the Individualized Education Act for Children with Disabilities (IDEA), which states that school districts must provide a “free and appropriate public education” to students with disabilities, with the specific supports each child needs outlined in a legally binding document called an Individualized Education Program (IEP).
When Congress reauthorized IDEA in 1990, it set a goal of covering 40 percent of the act’s costs, but it never reached that mark. As a result, states and school districts foot the bulk of the bill for special education, with each state allocating funds slightly differently. With limited federal aid, funding for children with disabilities is often in short supply and appears to compete with all other funding schools need.
Rivera and Tilchik decided to focus their study on principals because, while school districts are responsible for writing IEPs, principals are responsible for actually implementing the IEPs and making difficult choices about how to allocate precious resources within their schools.
“Principals control many resources that directly affect the fates of students with and without disabilities,” Rivera says. “Principals are the gatekeepers. They control who gets which classroom space on which floor of the building, staffing, whether to spend money to satisfy one child’s IEP or invest in programs that serve the majority of students.”
Discrimination against people with disabilities at the school gates
Rivera and Tylsik designed an experiment to explore how having a disability affects the school search process, and because racism and ableism have historically been intertwined in the United States, they also decided to study race in this context.
They sent emails to more than 20,000 public school principals in four states, inviting fictitious prospective parents to tour their schools. There were multiple versions of the emails, which varied in the gender of the fictitious child, the disability status (indicated by whether the parent mentioned an IEP), and the race of the parent who wrote the email. Half were signed by Tyra Williams (a name widely perceived as black, according to pre-tests of the experiment), and the other half by Amy Williams (a name widely perceived as white), both names perceived as being of a similar social class.
Rivera and Tilchik decided to focus on school tours, which Rivera said is “one of the most common ways parents, across class and race, research schools and see if they’re a good fit for their child.”
School tours are especially important for parents of children with disabilities because schools often provide little public information about what special education services they offer. Seeing the school and speaking one-on-one with staff during a tour is one of the best ways for parents to understand whether their child will receive the right supports.
For the purposes of this study, email responses offering a tour or other meeting were considered positive responses, while no response or responses declining a meeting were treated as negative responses.
The results of the email audit showed a clear pattern: Principals were less responsive to parents of children with disabilities. Principals responded to 53.5% of emails that did not mention an IEP, but only 41.8% of emails that did mention an IEP. Of the emails that mentioned an IEP, 44.1% of “Amy’s” emails received a positive response compared to 39.5% of “Tyra’s” emails.
Understanding the principal’s reaction
The email survey found that principals treat parents of children with disabilities, particularly black parents, differently, but “we don’t really understand why,” Rivera explained. So to understand the causes of this effect, the researchers conducted a second survey of a new group of 578 principals.
This time, the principals were surveyed to gauge their opinions on various issues for the research project. In fact, the researchers included a series of questions about children with disabilities and their parents, which was the real focus.
As part of this section of the survey, principals viewed one of the same eight emails used in the previous survey, which either described their son or daughter with a disability or their son or daughter without a disability and were signed by either Amy or Tyra Williams. We then asked them if and how they would have responded if they had actually received the email, as well as several other questions about the principal’s perceptions of both the parent and the child from the email.
The findings replicated those of the email audit, showing that principals were significantly less likely to respond to emails mentioning IEPs, and the effect was stronger when the parent was perceived to be Black.
The study also sheds light on why principals react the way they do. Overall, “discrimination on the basis of disability stems from a perception that educating a child is more difficult and burdensome,” Rivera explains. Of course, it’s unfair and unacceptable, but Rivera says these feelings likely stem from the fact that “schools are responsible for educating their students, both financially and in terms of staff time.”
While ableism was driven by children’s perceptions, Rivera and Tylsik were surprised to find that an element of racism was driven by parents’ perceptions. Black parents of children with disabilities were perceived to be less valued members of the school community than white parents of students with and without disabilities. “They were less likely to volunteer in the classroom, less likely to participate in fundraising activities, and there was also evidence that they were perceived as more difficult to work with,” Rivera says.
In other words, discrimination stems from multiple, interacting prejudices. “It’s not just that multiply marginalized groups experience more discrimination,” Rivera says. “Discrimination can come from multiple places.” So the discrimination that black parents of children with disabilities face stems from a combination of negative stereotypes about disability and negative stereotypes about race.
Building and funding a more equitable system
Rivera said he finds the findings disheartening, but that “schools should never have been put in this position in the first place” — forced to address complex needs with inadequate resources.
Rivera believes bigger-picture reforms, like getting Congress to fund IDEA at the promised level, are needed to alleviate discrimination against ableists in schools. With better school funding, he argues, educating kids with disabilities wouldn’t be seen as taking something away from non-disabled students. What’s needed is more support for everyone. “How do we provide more resources to schools so that it’s not seen as a zero-sum game?”