14 - The Role of Socioeconomic and Ethnic Disparities for Dyslexia and Dyscalculia

Summary

The ‘overrepresentation’ of racially/ethnically marginalized and socioeconomically disadvantaged children in special education has been of concern to researchers, policymakers, and practitioners since at least the late 1960s (Dunn 1968; Mercer 1973; Coard 1971). The prevailing wisdom has long been that racially/ethnically and socioeconomically marginalized children are both at higher risk of disability due to cognitive and social–emotional–behavioural effects of structural inequalities, and that schools make racially/ethnically and socioeconomically biased decisions to qualify students for special education services (e.g., National Research Council 2002). Newer research has identified more nuanced and complex mechanisms in racial/ethnic inequalities in particular, in which racially/ethnically marginalized students are more likely to need services due to structural inequality, but are largely less likely to gain access to those services when they need them than their White peers (Shifrer and Fish 2020).