Discriminated and disadvantaged: Disability discrimination shows up before children enter the classroom

For parents, bringing children to school for the first time can be a thrilling but nerve-wracking experience. Parents need access to crucial information to decide on the right school setting that will enable their child to thrive academically and socially. This information is important for any parent, let alone for parents with children with a disability. Yet in a recent study, researchers find that access to information about schools is not equal for all parents.

Parents’ attempts to find information pertaining to their child’s disability might come with harder toil, as discrimination happens even before the child has a chance to enter into the school system.

Researchers Lauren Rivera and András Tilcsik find in their recent study that public school principals are less responsive to providing information about their schools to parents who have children with a disability. Black children with a disability face an additional disadvantage – parents of Black children are less likely to receive information from school principals when asked about a prospective school tour.

…parents of Black children [with disabilities] are less likely to receive information from school principals when asked about a prospective school tour.

The researchers sent emails from fictitious prospective parents asking for school tours to 20,000 public school principals in four states. The emails differed in terms of the child’s gender and whether the email mentioned the child’s disability. The email also differed based on the signature sign-off, which indicated the parent’s perceived race. The outcome measured was on the responsiveness of the principals to the parents’ request for a school tour – a positive outcome was an affirmative response to a tour (or equivalent meeting) and a negative outcome was a negative response to a tour or no response.

Positive email responses were lower for the emails that indicated the child had a disability, and there was a particularly negative effect for parents of children with a disability who are Black.

As a follow-up, the researchers also surveyed over 500 principals and found that principals viewed students with disabilities as imposing a greater burden, such as through the need for more academic or behavioural resources. Black students with a disability faced an additional disadvantage stemming from the principals’ perceptions of their parents: they unfairly believed that these parents lacked knowledge about their child’s disability, would offer fewer potential contributions to the school community (e.g., volunteering, fundraising duties) and would be less warm than their white counterparts.

This research has significant implications for policy areas such as education, disability, and racial discrimination. It suggests the need for governments to provide sufficient funding to assist schools to support disability programs in schools. The researchers note that while the US government promised to cover 40 percent of the cost to provide special education services through law, that number has not been met to this date.

Tilcsik notes that “as a first step towards greater equality, it is important to have resources available at the fully promised levels so that principals do not have these difficult choices to make about who to provide information to. Principals are also trying to do their best under funding constraints, with a very limited number of resources.” He also notes that other interventions to educate principals, such as professional development activities, can be another intervention to address intersecting discrimination of race and disability. Schools can also change the barriers to accessing information by having more information online for parents.

“…it is important to have resources available at the fully promised levels so that principals do not have these difficult choices to make about who to provide information to.”

This research has further implications for how parents find balance in career and family, especially women who are negotiating professional career advancements and caring for children.  The authors note that previous studies have found that, across race and class backgrounds, the burden of researching and gaining access to school information disproportionately falls on mothers, regardless of the disability status of their children. Barriers to gaining school information for children with disabilities can have spillover effects into career choices of their mothers, This might in turn perpetuate gender inequalities. Tilcsik suggests that employers might need to better understand that some parents of children with disabilities might need time off in order to maintain balance of both their professional and work needs.

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Research brief prepared by:

Laura Lam