Welcome

The National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems and the National Institute for Urban School Improvement have developed this interactive data website to help states and school districts examine their special education data. Both the National Academy of Science and the Harvard Civil Rights Project have recently examined the degree to which students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds are disproportionately represented in particular disability categories and in particular kinds of special education placement.

In this website, interactive maps and tables present the distributions of students with disabilities across various disability categories by ethnic/racial category and teacher qualifications to help practitioners and policy makers at the local and state levels understand their own status in relationship to disproportionate representation in special education. As NCCRESt and NIUSI help to uncover the various elements that converge to create local and state level conditions in which students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds may be disproportionately represented, the data maps and tables will be become more complex.

About This Site

This website has been developed jointly by two federally funded projects: (1) the National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems and (2) the National Institute for Urban School Improvement. This website has been developed to help states examine their own special education data in terms of the distributions of students with disabilities across various disability categories by ethnic/racial category. In addition, cities who partner with the National Institute for Urban School Improvement can elect to have their student data mapped on this site to track their progress in ensuring that students are placed in the least restrictive environment as well as the racial and ethnic patterns of referral and placement.

We encourage visitors to this site to consider these data as results of complex circumstances that need serious attention that include family, teacher, school, district, state and federal policy and practice variables.