As a New York City AP Biology Teacher, I witness firsthand how special education’s schedules, labels, and placements shape which students sit in my classroom and how they interact with the material. I am a teacher at a Title 1-designated charter school that serves a 95% Black and Hispanic student population. In Grade 9, 20% of students have an Individualized Education Plan, but these students were not distributed evenly across subjects. For Grade 9 students they are placed in either AP Environmental Science or AP Biology. At the start of the year, I found that 30% of the students in Environmental Science classes had IEPs, while 11% of students in AP Biology had IEPs. Even with race and socioeconomic status largely held constant, opportunities to access advanced coursework are stratified by disability labeling from the very first day of high school.

The Research Alliance’s policy brief, Special Education in New York City: Understanding the Landscape, makes clear that this is not just my anecdotal impression. Nearly one in five NYC public school students has an IEP, and students with disabilities are disproportionately Black, Latino, male, and concentrated in high-poverty neighborhoods. Within that large population, Black and Latino students are more likely to be assigned to stigmatized categories such as emotional disturbance and to be educated in more restrictive settings. They are more likely to be chronically absent or suspended (Fancsali, 2019). In the nation’s largest school system, special education has become a central mechanism through which race, disability, and place intersect.

This paper analyzes the overrepresentation of minoritized students in special education by drawing on Fish (2019), Skiba et al. (2008), Annamma, Ferri, and Connor (2018), Cruz and Firestone (2021), and Fancsali’s (2019) policy brief on the NYC landscape. I argue that New York City’s special education data clearly show racialized and classed patterns of identification, placement, and discipline that mirror national concerns. I further contend that current policies have improved access to inclusive settings but have not fundamentally disrupted how racism and ableism structure labeling, timing, and discipline. To ensure high-quality education for all students, policymakers and school personnel must adopt a Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) lens, redesign referral and evaluation practices, strengthen early supports, and explicitly link special education reform to racial justice.