Abstract
Racialized and historically produced disparities and disproportionalities in emotional/behavioral disorders are addressable, but only when their cultural nature and contextual complexities are examined through lenses accounting for racism, ableism, bias, and bureaucratic professionalization. We synthesize knowledge about racial disparities in identification, discipline, exclusion, and services, situating patterns within dynamic cultural, spatial, legal, and policy contexts. We argue that dominant research paradigms overly rely on psychological and medicalized framings that treat behaviors as static traits rather than dynamic phenomena embedded in culturally infused, relational, and historically situated contexts. Starting from the premise that behavior and emotion emerge through dynamic relationships, we build on the science of learning and development to advance a frame-shifting research approach—one that examines moment-to-moment classroom interactions, longitudinal experiences across settings, and macro- and microlevel forces, including racialized histories, policies, and resource distribution. Because disparities are rooted in cultural and historical conditions, technical solutions cannot eliminate them. By advancing a situated, dynamic approach, we address individual and contextual heterogeneity that national analyses of racial disparities obscure, illuminate mechanisms sustaining disparities, and stimulate interdisciplinary inquiry to inform just and equitable policy and practice. Absent such transformation, these entrenched disparities will foreclose opportunity and perpetuate harm for our most marginalized students.
Introduction
The disproportionate over and under identification, segregation, exclusion, and punishment of Black, Native American, and Latine students, as well as of other minoritized students, both reflects and drives education and other inequities and generates harmful consequences for students (Gregory et al., 2010; LiCalsi et al., 2021), their peers (Del Toro & Wang, 2023), and their families (Bell & Craig, 2023). Disproportionality contributes to the large disparities among rates of referral to law enforcement and youth incarceration (Osher, Woodruff, & Sims, 2002) and undermines achievement, behavior, mental health, and physical health (Duarte et al., 2023; Krause, 2024). These disparities occur and are reinforced in both general and special education, including the underidentification of Black students for gifted and talented programs and underrepresentation or underidentification in some other disability categories (Ford, 1998; List & Dykeman, 2021).
This manuscript presents a critical review of research on racial disparities in emotional/behavioral disorders (E/BD) and outlines an alternative research approach. For this purpose, we summarize the history and magnitude of this problem and outline the limits of the traditional research approach on disparities and its profound consequences. Our alternative research approach calls for frame-shifting research (DiPrete & Fox-Williams, 2021) that expands our understanding of problems and their causes. This line of inquiry will likely stimulate new deliberations about this persistent predicament and the causes and consequences of racial disparities in E/BD.
A key argument in our critique is that traditional approaches to studying racial disparities related to E/BD have substantial limitations that must be addressed if we want to transcend the current myopic paradigm that recycles the same questions. These limitations can be addressed through a situated approach grounded in sociocultural and sociohistorical analyses that include local data. Sociocultural analyses are grounded in research indicating that human behavior is cultural and has histories situated in the everyday routines of groups and communities, while sociohistorical analyses offer evidence that inequality is ubiquitous in the United States and its educational system. Moreover, such pervasive inequality has material, cultural, historical, ideological, and ecological underpinnings (Artiles, 2022; Cantor & Osher, 2021). We propose advancing frame-shifting studies (DiPrete & Fox-Williams, 2021) to produce descriptive evidence about the contours of this problem, which have often been overlooked.
The focus of this journal issue on the disproportionate identification and treatment of students of color in E/BD is particularly relevant because the disparities experienced by students identified as having E/BD are persistent and more pronounced than those experienced in other special education categories and by their racially/ethnically specific peers in general education. For example, the most recent National Longitudinal Transition Study (Lipscomb et al., 2017) indicates that students with E/BD, who as a group were disproportionately Black, attended low-performing schools, and were less happy at school, and more likely to be suspended or expelled—compared to all students with disabilities (Lipscomb et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2018). These patterns are further documented in national suspension data (Losen et al., 2015). A 2021 report, Disabling Inequity, based on data from every district in the nation, more generally highlights the much higher risk for lost instruction for students with Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) compared to their nondisabled peers and further breaks down the risk for being suspended by race and disability. Notably, 24% of Black students with disabilities at the secondary level were suspended out of school at least once in 2017 to 2018, compared with 11% of their White peers (Losen et al., 2021). The report also documented large disparities in referrals to law enforcement for Black students with disabilities (Losen et al., 2021). The 2023 Annual Report to Congress on the Implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act indicates that these patterns persist.
Our review of the empirical research largely focuses on Black students, for whom the data are particularly dismal and whose experiences have roots in slavery, segregation, and antiblackness. While this article will focus on Black students, it is important to note that the data for Native American students are equally bleak, with roots in colonization and cultural genocide (Davidson, 2012; Kingston, 2015), and that although the aggregate data on Latine students is lower, disparities are pronounced in different locations and among different subgroups that reflect disparate national origins: ancestral backgrounds (e.g., Indigenous and/or European and/or African and/or Asian), language, and colorism.
What We Know About Racial Disparities Related to E/BD
This section addresses five interrelated areas: the patterns and dimensions of disparities, how schools create and sustain disparities, disparities in identification and services, disparities in exclusionary discipline, and the role of historical factors.
Contours of Disparities
While labels vary over time and place, racial disparities related to E/BD are long-standing and ubiquitous. The NLTS I (1985–1986; 1990–1991) findings document chronic patterns that already existed 10 and 15 years after the implementation of Public Law 94:142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EAHCA), later renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The NLTS findings were nuanced and expanded by two contemporaneous national studies that included phenomenological data. In Classrooms for emotionally and behaviorally disturbed students (Steinberg et al., 1992), pedagogies and curriculua of boredom, apathy, passivity, and control to which students with E/BD were subjected were documented. The National Agenda for Improving Results for Children and Youth with Serious Emotional Disturbance (Osher & Hanley, 1996, 1997; US Department of Education, 1994) documented the poor experiences of Black students with E/BD. Chronic patterns include: imprecise identification and labeling processes that stigmatize (Hobbs, 1975); segregation in separate classes or schools (Osher, Woodruff, & Simms, 2002); restricted opportunity structures, including limited curricula (Knitzer, 1990); surveillance, punishment, and exclusion (Muñiz, 2021); and law enforcement referrals (Losen et al., 2015, 2021).
Each racial disparity has its own specificity and complexity and plays out differently for intersectionally diverse Black and other marginalized students (e.g., Artiles et al., 2011) and in diverse geographies (e.g., Glock & Klapproth, 2017; Lopez, 2020). Community-related factors and school zoning in these localities reflect how localized de jure and de facto segregation, job-related discrimination, and disparate opportunity structures for wealth accumulation contribute to spatial injustices that affect schools and the social services that children and families access (Chetty & Hendren 2018; Jones et al., 2015). These factors include reliance on local property taxes, which limit resource availability, and clustering of schools by neighborhood designations, which sustain segregation (Asson, 2024). Racial disparities permeate health, human services, child welfare, and juvenile justice and exist in community social and opportunity structures as well.
Disparities exhibit characteristics that vary across domains, contexts, groups, and individuals (Lerner & Bornstein, 2021). However, disparities interact and accumulate longitudinally (Shollenberger, 2015; Skiba, 2015). System-specific disparities have many common components and root causes that include structural factors such as segregation; cultural factors such as racism, ethnocentrism, and victim blaming (Cantor & Osher, 2021); institutionalized policy and procedural bias and cultural incompetence (Osher, Poirier, & Jarjoura, 2015); provider bias mindsets and social, emotional, and cultural incapacity (Osher et al., 2012); and cumulative disadvantage (e.g., Brislin et al., 2024; Osher et al., 2002). For example, Owens and McLanahan (2020), using a longitudinal sample of nearly 5,000 children in 20 U.S. cities, found that differential treatment—not behavior or school sorting—accounted for nearly half (46%) of the Black/White suspension gap by age nine. Black students displaying the same behaviors as White students were disciplined more harshly, compounding over time and increasing future risk of suspension and academic setbacks (Marchbanks, 2015; Shollenberger, 2015).
Racial and Demographic Disparities in Identification and Outcomes
There are significant racial, gender, and disability-related disparities in special education identification (National Research Council, Committee on Child Development Research and Public Policy Panel on Selection and Placement of Students in Programs for the Mentally Retarded, 2002; Nowicki, 2018). These disparities reflect the combined effects of school leadership, disciplinary climate, and, most importantly, teachers (Andrew & Blake, 2023; Osher et al., 2022). Teachers’ perceptions of exceptionality are culturally grounded and influenced by students’ race, ethnicity, and gender. White males are more likely to be referred for academic challenges earlier in their academic careers and Black males for behavioral issues (Fish, 2017). Social psychological evidence indicates the importance of teacher and principal bias (Dovidio et al., 2017; Owens, 2022) and of racialized perceptions that lead to overidentification, misidentification, and exclusion from services (Chin et al., 2020; Gaddis et al., 2024). Teacher–student racial synchronicity seems to have effects. Black teachers are less likely to suspend students and to identify Black students as needing services under E/BD than White teachers (Fish, 2019; Hart & Lindsay, 2024) and are more likely to improve Black student social, emotional, and academic learning and outcomes (Gershenson et al., 2021).
Students identified with E/BD, particularly if they are Black, male, poor, and/or and/or multilingual learners, experience poorer school, graduation, and postsecondary outcomes, (Gage et al., 2019; Losen & Martinez, 2020; Osher & Hanley, 1996). For example, Black students with disabilities constituted 19% of all students with disabilities but 50% of students with disabilities in correctional facilities, 46% of whom were classified as E/BD (Quinn et al., 2005; United States Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR), 2023, p. 37). Differential treatment and support account for a significant portion of the Black/White gap in suspensions, more than between-school sorting or differences in student behavior (Osher et al., 2002; Owens & McLanahan, 2020). The NLTS I data (Valdes, 1990) indicate that students with E/BD experienced more restrictive services and received less helpful supports. They were less likely than their White peers to take regular academic classes, participate in vocational education, and receive counseling or occupational therapy/lifecycle training or job training, and when they did receive counseling and training, it was at a lower dosage. Black students were less likely to attend schools where students with disabilities could not be suspended and more likely to attend schools where they could be expelled (Valdes, 1990, tables 16a, 17a, 30a, 12a, and 12b). The NLTS I’s robust statistical appendices document stark disparities, which recent studies still find: only 27.5% of Black students with E/BD graduated compared to 46% of White students with E/BD and 56% of all students with disabilities. Over half (58%) of Black students with E/BD dropped out, and 9.4% exited due to suspension or expulsion—nearly double the rate of their White peers with E/BD (5.2%; Valdes, 1990).
Discipline and Exclusion
School and community effects contribute to and sustain discipline disparities (Osher et al., 2022; Owens & McLanahan, 2020). Schools are low on both structure and support, and those with poor racial climates exhibit the largest racial discipline gaps (Gregory et al., 2010). Schools can buffer community effects through culturally responsive environments and teacher support (Moore et al., 2023; Okonofua et al., 2022) or amplify risk through disproportionate surveillance, exclusion, and weak teacher support (T. A. Collins et al., 2023; Office for Civil Rights [OCR], 2025).
The color line (Douglas, 1881; Du Bois, 1903) still flourishes in America’s schools and E/BD, and it is combined with the socially created “ability line” (Broderick & Leonardo, 2016). Black students experience higher rates of school suspensions compared to White students, and these suspensions are more likely to be for minor and subjective infractions (Losen et al., 2015; Wallace et al., 2008). Suspension disparities drive the achievement gap (Gopalan, 2019; Gregory et al., 2010) through lost instructional time (Losen et al., 2021), harmful behavioral and emotional effects that undermine attendance and learning (Barbadoro, 2017; LiCalsi et al., 2021), and differential support (Freidus, 2020; Musto, 2019). Exclusionary discipline limits educational opportunities and increases the risk of negative life outcomes in a racist society (Cohen et al., 2023; Osher et al., 2002). Suspension compromises learning, well-being, and the opportunity to thrive (Bell & Puckett, 2023; Chu & Ready, 2018). Harmful effects include school disconnection, less college-going, dropping out, and arrest (Cohen et al., 2023; Rosenbaum, 2020). The risk of these outcomes is greater for Black students with E/BD, particularly when students experience the emotional, physical, and economic consequences of racism and trauma (Osher et al., 2002; Sanders et al., 2024).
For example, Black males, particularly those with disabilities, face disproportionately high suspension rates (Losen and Martinez, 2013). Disparities persist when controlling for student socioeconomic factors (Fabelo et al., 2011) or behavior (Barrett et al., 2017; Fadus et al., 2020). Suspension disparities reflect teacher incapacity and dispositions (Osher et al., 2022). Educators who come from different geographic life spaces than students may feel unsafe among students and more disposed to support school hardening (Diamond & Lewis, 2019).
State, district, and school contexts affect identification, discipline patterns, and exclusion rates (Smith et al., 2023; Stiefel et al., 2022), including extremely high and disparate rates of lost instruction due to out-of-school suspensions among Black students with disabilities in California and in certain districts nationwide where harm from disparate discipline was especially high (Losen et al., 2021). Community- and county-level racial bias have been empirically linked to disciplinary referrals in the office and out-of-school suspensions (Chin et al., 2020; Girvan et al., 2021). These patterns reflect geography; state and local history; demographics and political culture; state, district, and school policies and structures (Edwards, 2016; Hughes et al., 2017); school-level characteristics (Camacho & Krezmien, 2019); state, district, and school disciplinary policies (Welch & Payne, 2010); and school racial climate (Fisher et al., 2020; Rodriguez et al., 2024). The concept of racial threat is relevant here: the likelihood of Black student suspension increases as their proportion in the school population grows, while the opposite is true for White students (Eitle & Eitle, 2004; Hughes et al., 2017).
Although disproportionate identification and discipline are influenced by factors external to classrooms, they are more likely to be triggered in classrooms (Osher et al., 2022) where insufficiently trained and supported teachers are pressured to produce quick test results as they interact with “other people’s children” (Delpit, 2014) for whom they have low expectations and who they view as hard to teach and/or disrespectful and/or troubling (Harry, 2014). These interactions are influenced by student–teacher relationships, teacher pedagogy, and classroom management (González et al., 2019; Spilt et al., 2011). These interactions reflect historical factors that fuel punitive and exclusionary mindsets and cultures (Ladson-Billings, 2006). Understanding history helps explain why technical and race-neutral solutions do not eliminate disparities (Barclay et al., 2022; Gregory et al., 2021).
Historical Context
Racism (Kendi, 2016), classism, ableism, heterosexism, and sexism have long affected schools (Butchart, 2010; Givens & Ison, 2023), which enact and institutionalize explicit and de facto policies based on race, culture, and class, which courts have legitimized (Carter, 2012; Hinton & Cook, 2021). Corporal punishment, which continues to be legal in many Southern states and is disproportionately applied to Black males (Gagnon et al., 2014; Gershoff & Font, 2016), provides an example. Corporal punishment roots include both the whipping of slaves and free Black males and lynching, both of which controlled behavior and space (Blackmon, 2009; Ward, 2019). Black students and students with disabilities experience the greatest risk for corporal punishment (Losen & Whitaker, 2016). Ward and colleagues (2021), linking county-level lynching data to school discipline, found that each additional historic lynching corresponded to significantly greater increases in corporal punishment for Black students than for White students.
E/BD disparities are rooted in ableism, classism, and opportunity hoarding (Artiles et al., 2016; Fish, 2017), as well as historical concerns with social control (Butchart et al., 1998; Tropea, 1997) and the bureaucratization and professionalization of schools (Blume, 2003; Winzer, 2009) and the professionalization of special education (Brantlinger, 2010). These factors fuse with White supremacist beliefs and continue to flourish in a society structured by the history of racial segregation and social control (Bonilla-Silva, 2021; Eberhardt, 2020). This fusing shaped patterns of racial disproportionality in special education identification, placement, services, and racial disparities in discipline, punishment, and exclusion as a way of addressing the impact of court-mandated integration (Ferri & Connor, 2005). Racial integration struggles prompted new ways to exclude and control that included labeling Black students as intellectually disabled or emotionally impaired and segregating them in classes or schools (Eitle, 2002; Hobson v. Hansen, 269 F. Supp. 401 (D.D.C.)). Black students were “push[ed] out” through suspension and expulsion and by subjecting them to “intolerable hostility” (Robert F. Kennedy Memorial & Southern Regional Council; Parks et al., 2016). This pattern of resistance is called “legacy discrimination” because it continues to exclude in a manner that provides a facially neutral basis for doing so (Donelan et al., 1994; McClellan, 2024). Resistance was not just a Southern phenomenon. New York City’s integration efforts drove the expansion of “600 Schools” for students with behavioral problems, and similar patterns emerged in Los Angeles, Boston, and Milwaukee (Centanino, 2021; Kafka, 2011). These dynamics continue in diversifying rural communities and gentrifying urban areas (Aylward et al., 2021; Pearman, 2023). For example, Black student suspensions increased at a faster rate in court-mandated integration districts than in comparison districts (Chin, 2021, 2024).
Traditional E/BD Research Paradigm
Advancements
Research has advanced since two important reviews were published, “The Miner’s Canary” (Waitoller et al., 2010) and “Justifying and Explaining Disproportionality” (Artiles et al., 2010). We now have a rich body of statistical analyses of numerous national, state, and local databases that include racial and other demographic indicators (Cruz & Rodl, 2018; Fix et al., 2021), empirical local studies (LiCalsi et al., 2021; Rodriguez & Welsh, 2022), pivotal syntheses (Bal et al., 2014; Skiba et al., 2014), and rigorous intervention studies and evaluations (Gregory et al., 2021; Okonofua et al., 2022). A rich interdisciplinary body of research confirms and deepens prior findings on racial disparities and provides actionable insights into the effects of teacher bias, socioeconomic status, school policies, and cultural misunderstandings. These studies help us understand school and classroom contexts that generate and amplify disparities (Osher et al., 2022; Stiefel et al., 2022).
Limitations
Most studies are underconceptualized, undertheorized (Cruz et al., 2021), and underaligned within and across studies. Definitions and indicators vary over time and context, and measures vary across studies (Losen & Whitaker, 2017, Losen et al., 2021; Sullivan, 2017). Studies are limited by vague definitions of E/BD, which compromise the reliability of observational student data and can be influenced by local politics and educators’ and assessors’ biases (Scardamalia et al., 2019). Available data are not sufficiently granular or localized to address the specifics of disparities and intersectionality. Studies often focus on one or a small number of factors, privilege behavioral outcomes to the exclusion of affective and phenomenological ones, and are inattentive to individual variability, outcome heterogeneity, and how disparities affect the whole person and their environment, with reverberations across relationships, institutions, and systems over time.
Contextual, cultural, and historical factors are often ignored (e.g., Lewis et al., 2019) or underspecified. When cultural and contextual issues are addressed, research describes the culture of the individual or group, rather than the array of cultural factors that permeate schools and affect, as well as are affected by, educator behavior. Cavendish and colleagues (2020) identified key epistemological limits in current research: uncritical reliance on positivist paradigms that ignore researcher positionality, failure to engage race as sociohistorically constructed, continued norming of whiteness, and deficit-based perspectives that dehumanize children experiencing disparities.
The study of disproportionality is frequently compromised by jingle-jangle effects—measurement errors that occur when different constructs are mistakenly treated as the same because they share a name (jingle), or when the same construct is treated as different because it goes by different names (jangle; Flake & Fried, 2020). These effects are compounded by related measurement problems: construct misattribution, in which environmentally produced outcomes are coded as individual deficits (e.g., categorizing a student’s predictable response to structural exclusion as “low grit”), and differential item functioning, in which the same behavioral label—such as “disruption”—carries analytically distinct meanings depending on the racialized context in which it is applied. Together, these measurement failures reflect the sociopolitical assumptions embedded in our instruments, assumptions that are rarely made explicit and are therefore rarely corrected. When such errors are aggregated in meta-analyses and evidence-based registries, they can coalesce into a distorted research consensus—one that conflates institutional racism with objective psychological fact and lends scientific legitimacy to deficit-oriented policies (Artiles, 2022).
There are other conceptual and data limitations. Students and adults are “whole people” (Osher et al, 2020); their minds, bodies, and brains, including their stress levels, emotions, perceptions, and meaning-making, influence how they think, learn, act, and experience punishment, exclusion, and segregation (Immordino-Yang et al., 2023; Osher et al., 2025). Most studies ignore the important influence of the larger school context (Darling-Hammond et al., 2021; Osher et al., 2020, 2022). Researchers often ignore the specificity of individuals, groups, contexts, and findings (Lerner & Bornstein, 2021; Nesselroade, 2019), as well as the multidimensional nature of disproportionality (Fish, 2025; Skiba, 2015).
There are also insufficient studies addressing the experiences of minoritized groups, particularly studies that examine the dynamic nature of culture, subgroup variation, and intersectionality. Findings for minority students are rarely, if ever, disaggregated and compared with those for majority students with Learning Disabilities or Emotional and Behavioral Disorders. “The assumption is that the performance of minority students with disabilities is comparable to that of majority students with disabilities” (Donovan & Cross, 2002, p. 329).
There are dynamically interrelated factors, including harmful intervention effects, that contribute to, obscure, and/or legitimate disparities (Okonofua et al., 2016; Osher et al., 2022). Many factors that contribute to disparities and disproportionalities can be trivialized or oversimplified by studies that focus on one or a few contributing factors, without addressing root causes and dynamic connections among factors, or that view them as confounders or ecological noise (Lee et al., 2023). Complexity is frequently ignored, as are coinfluential processes and stress contagion (Lee et al., 2023; Oberle & Schonert-Reichl, 2016), which are affected by racial and job stress and can influence disciplinary outcomes (Osher et al., 2022). Dynamic systems concepts of emergence and embodiment are relevant: disparities cannot be understood by examining race, class, school quality, or geography in isolation—these factors share common roots and dynamically interact (Jacobson & Kapur, 2012; Shores et al., 2017) as individuals experience these dynamics through integrated body-mind-social processes (Immordino-Yang et al., 2023).
These research limitations are consequential: problematic studies continue to be weaponized by opponents of inclusive environments, ignoring racist processes connected to economic disadvantage and inappropriately controlling for potentially discriminatory school and district effects (Collins et al., 2016; Skiba et al., 2016). As Carter and colleagues (2017) observed, disciplinary disparities cannot be addressed without acknowledging how race shapes adult-student interactions in segregated or underresourced schools.
Reframing the Study of Racial Disparities in E/BD
An overview of the limits of the traditional research paradigm for studying racial disparities in E/BD makes the case for reframing this long-standing problem. Reframing should start with revisioning how E/BDs are defined. There have been major definitional debates over the decades, and the fields of psychology and psychiatry have exerted significant influence on these deliberations. These fields offer important insights into emotional and behavioral difficulties, but they lack systematic attention to dimensions that are critical to the analysis of human behavior and emotion. As stated in the previous section, the traditional unit of analysis in the E/BD field is the individual, and the roles of contextual and cultural factors have been underspecified. For instance, E/BD has been organized around two broad categories, externalizing (e.g., disruptive and aggressive) and internalizing (e.g., depression and anxiety) kinds of behaviors. There are various diagnostic categories within each cluster. Diagnostic guidelines stipulate that students must exhibit persistent symptoms to a pronounced degree, including learning problems not derived from other factors, interpersonal difficulties, inappropriate behaviors or feelings, depression, and fears or physical symptoms related to school or personal problems (Vanderbilt Kennedy Center, n.d.).
Students may experience learning difficulties, interpersonal conflicts, or emotional responses deemed ill-suited for reasons other than psychopathology—whether circumstantial (e.g., family crisis and peer conflict) or due to contextual and cultural factors that mediate behavioral expression. The temporal requirement (“persistent”) is useful but insufficient to capture these dynamics. Consider also that there might be chronic school organizational conditions in schools that differentially affect minoritized students’ behaviors and emotions. In such scenarios, observations of learners are narrowly focused on behaviors detached from the social ecologies of classrooms and schools, which could lead to diagnostic misinterpretations, inappropriate categorization, and/or misunderstandings.
Anthropology and sociology of education scholarship have produced research evidence of the analytical affordances of situating students’ behavioral and emotional processes in sociocultural and historical contexts (McDermott & Raley, 2009; Sengupta-Irving, 2021). This work complements critical disability scholarship that documents these same dynamics in school practice (Voulgarides et al., 2021). Boonstra (2021), for example, documented “how racialized and ableist discourses mediated processes of surveillance, escalation, and physical restraint, leading educators to disproportionately position Black students, particularly boys and those with disabilities, as ‘behavioral problems’” (p. 1). For these reasons, we argue for a paradigm expansion in the study of racial disparities in the E/BD field.
Study Human Behavior as a Cultural Phenomenon
Racial disparities research must shift the frame traditionally used in the E/BD field, which assumes only certain groups have cultures, and White middle-class behaviors represent the norm. Instead, research on racial disparities must be grounded in the assumption that human behavior is cultural and has histories rooted in the everyday routines of groups and communities. From this perspective, the study of how different groups are identified in the E/BD field must account for contextual conditions and examine, through a cultural lens, the interactional processes in classrooms and schools where disruptive behaviors occur (Artiles, 2022; Osher et al., 2004).
A foundational premise is that students and staff bring cultural beliefs and identities into their everyday interactions, which mediate the emergence of behavioral conflicts and disruptions. But such cultural work is not limited to the psyche, talk, behaviors, and emotions of children and adults. There are enduring institutional cultures, as discussed in the second section, that underlie daily school interactions, prescribing rules and norms, indexing assumptions and values, and delineating the architecture of permissible behaviors and emotions in the everyday life of schools (Artiles, 2015). These include how students are expected to show respect for authority, how to narrate stories, or how to participate in group conversations (e.g., classroom discussions). This is what Gallego et al. (2001) described as the canonical school/classroom culture. Importantly, these institutional cultures may align differently with some groups of students who are socialized from an early age into how to “do schooling,” thereby creating disadvantages for others. In this way, a cultural lens for examining human behaviors, emotions, and interactions will illuminate neglected dimensions of our understanding of what counts as disorderly behavior or maladaptive emotion. We note that these cultural differences and processes are not benign.
Account for Ideology and Power in Behavioral Analyses
Indeed, hierarchies and power structures permeate human activities. Research on racial disparities in E/BD must start with the presupposition that inequality is ubiquitous in society and the educational system. A wealth of evidence supports this assumption (Chetty et al., 2020; Galster & Sharkey, 2017). This is reflected in multiple dimensions, ranging from historical structures of racism to racial school funding inequalities and the racialized distribution of socioeconomic and educational opportunities. These facts remind us that inequality and oppression are baked into the fabric of teaching and learning, as well as school routines (Nasir et al., 2021). Unfortunately, research in the E/BD field tends to undertheorize inequality and has treated race as a background variable devoid of cultural, historical, and ideological underpinnings (Artiles, 2022).
Furthermore, most E/BD research has assumed that inequality is a “normal” fact in U.S. society and education. This is exemplified by researchers who contend that research on racial disparities can account for differential academic performance without attention to context and history (Hosp & Reschly, 2004; Morgan et al., 2017). This argument assumes lower achievement among underserved students is a “normal” fact that explains racial disparities in disabilities. Despite a robust empirical knowledge base documenting the roots of achievement gaps, this line of reasoning overlooks the historical and structural conditions that produce differential outcomes, including opportunity gaps, funding inequities, and unequal access to well-prepared teachers. By normalizing disparities in achievement while neglecting the roles of bias and unequal learning conditions, this scholarship reinforces a deficit discourse that casts marginalized learners as inherently deficient or damaged (Cantor & Osher, 2021; Darity, 2011). For this reason, research on racial disparities should incorporate contextual factors and indicators of opportunity to generate a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of the problem (Losen et al., 2021).
The consequence of a deficit logic is a narrow representation of underserved students, particularly those with disabilities, as individuals who are low performers and behaviorally disruptive. Absent from this simplistic representation is the role of ideology and power. Following Bonilla-Silva (2009), we define ideology as “meaning in the service of power” (p. 25). The conceptualization of “racial storylines” (Nasir et al., 2012) offers analytical tools for tracing ideologies and power. Racial storylines treat race as discourse—the totality of cultural symbols, institutional policies, and their interconnections. They function as vehicles through which individuals make sense of race and position themselves and others in everyday activity, and they are inherently relational, shaping how racial identities and hierarchies are constructed and maintained in school contexts.
Racial storylines create and reproduce racial hierarchies (Nasir et al., 2012). The next generation of racial disparities research in E/BD must interrogate the potential role of racial storylines in teacher–student contentious interactions that result in disciplinary actions. This is particularly pressing considering that “The prevalence of negative storylines about Black students in general and Black male students in particular as unintelligent, lazy, inclined towards criminality, and as constituting an endangered species is overwhelmingly supported by the research literature.” (Nasir et al., 2012, p. 286). Moreover, social psychological experimental research has documented that (general and special) educators like other members of their communities have implicit negative racial biases (Dovidio et al., 2017; Morehouse & Banaji, 2024) that affect their perceptions of students, their families, and their communities, which mediates their differential treatment of marginalized learners in the context of disciplinary actions (Chin et al., 2020; Girvan et al., 2021).
We ought to remember that E/BD has enduring historical entanglements with race. Compounding these inequalities is the evidence on discipline practices that are systematically associated at the nexus of race and disability (Losen et al., 2021). For example, students with E/BD have been historically placed in more segregated settings for a substantial proportion of the school day (Losen et al., 2021; Osher & Hanley, 1996). This functional segregation limits access to the general education curriculum and socialization with nondisabled peers, just as it does to disproportionate suspension, limited academic, and social opportunities. These facts are a stark reminder that we should examine the knotty associations of race, E/BD, racial bias, discipline practices, and the multiple layers of reduced opportunities for Black and other underserved learners in the study of racial disparities.
Use a Situated Analytical Perspective Across Timescales
A major implication of the foundational assumption that human development and behaviors are cultural phenomena (as described above) is that racial disparities must be examined from a situated perspective. This means that the study of racial disparities in the E/BD field should transcend the narrow focus on outcomes (e.g., identification rates by race or discipline metrics by race) or input-outcome models (predictors of E/BD identification rates). Racial disparities research should also examine interactional processes in classrooms and schools that produce disruptive behaviors, while accounting for historical, situational, and organizational conditions (Osher et al, 2022). This will create opportunities to analyze the contextual and institutional factors underlying behavioral infractions and racial disparities in identification.
At the same time, this new research program on racial disparities needs to be pursued across time scales. The most immediate time scale is at the interactional history level: the moment-by-moment history of student-student or staff–student interactions in which disciplinary problems crystallize. These microanalyses focus on talk and nonverbal language while accounting for broader influences—what Erickson (2004) described as “relations of influence that appear within talk but derive from places in the social world far removed from the immediate scene” (p. 107). Such influences include participation in linguistic communities (e.g., speakers of African American English) and understanding of institutional pragmatics (e.g., how students communicate engagement during lessons).
The study of talk and nonverbal language during school interactions opens analytical windows understudied in the construction of behavioral problems. For instance, researchers would need to unpack interactions to trace the roles of “genre conventions concerning what should be said explicitly and what should be kept tacit or avoided entirely, the politeness conventions for saying things appropriately and effectively, and the institutional features of the social situation within which the interlocutors find themselves” (Erickson, 2004, p. 107). Misalignments or misunderstandings in these considerations of talk during interactions can lead adults to misinterpret students’ talk and actions, potentially resulting in disciplinary sanctions. For example, cultural psychologists have documented the dense interactional traffic that is orchestrated during classroom activities. Mejía-Arauz et al. (2012) documented “nonverbal conversations”—multiparty reciprocal communication carried almost entirely without talk—that children with indigenous histories deployed during classroom work. School staff unfamiliar with such communicative repertoires might misread these interactional practices as disengagement, resistance, or off-task behavior that warrants disciplinary action.
The adjacent temporal level is what Mike Cole (1996) described as the life history of individuals. This is the timescale most closely examined in fields like developmental psychology—that is, changes in development over time. As patterns are identified at the moment-to-moment scale, developmental shifts in these patterns could be examined (Dobeck et al., 2023; Lee et al., 2023). Like the microanalysis of behaviors, this line of research has been scarcely pursued in the study of racial disparities in E/BD.
The life history timescale is situated next to the cultural-historical temporal scale of groups, communities, or institutions. Disparities research often emphasizes this timescale when reporting discipline rates across racial groups or school types (e.g., urban/suburban and high-/low-poverty). The analytic focus is on student groups or types of communities or institutions. Racial disparity E/BD studies examining this timescale could also target schools situated in communities or schools with histories of racial tension or segregation or in sites committed to programs that emphasize abolitionist or culturally responsive approaches. Importantly, researchers can target two adjacent time scales in studies to shed light on the nested temporal scales of this complex problem (Artiles, 2003).
A program of research across teams of investigators using a situated perspective will illuminate the contextual dimensions of racial disparities of E/BD. This new generation of studies will broaden the framing of this scholarship beyond child traits, thus affording a more nuanced understanding of behavioral problems. Moreover, a coordinated approach to studying racial disparities across embedded timescales promises to produce a multidimensional understanding of this problem, ranging from the idiosyncratic everyday circumstances of students and staff in classrooms and schools to macrolevel representations.
Conclusion and Implications of a Cultural-Historical Framework
The goal of this manuscript is to present a critical review of research on racial disparities in E/BD (including discrepancies in discipline) and outline an alternative research approach. A key argument in our critique is that traditional approaches to studying racial disparities in E/BD have substantial limitations that must be addressed if we expect to transcend the current paradigm that recycles the same questions over time: Do disparities exist? Is the problem over- or underidentification? Are disparities due to student deficits or adult biases?
We propose advancing frame-shifting studies (DiPrete & Fox-Williams, 2021) that produce evidence about the contours of this problem that had not been illuminated before. Frame-shifting research can also expand our understanding of the causes of problems. This line of inquiry will likely stimulate new deliberations about this persistent predicament and the causes and consequences of racial disparities in E/BD. For instance, frame-shifting research will inspire research committed to mapping pathways of change (DiPrete & Fox-Williams, 2021). That is, a new generation of intervention studies that is informed by a cultural-historical paradigm (Artiles, 2022; Ko et al., 2024). This new generation of inquiries will indeed stimulate alternative ways to examine inequality in this field. Our hope is that the proposed line of research will shift the analytic gaze from framings that narrowly blame biased teachers or underserved students or argue that racial disparities stem solely from individual differences.
To make the implications of our arguments clearer, we clarify two interrelated issues that were somewhat implicit in the preceding sections. First, the recommendation to conduct research from a situated perspective while also building a knowledge base with attention to a macro temporal scale requires an interdisciplinary understanding of culture. In this view, researchers will need to trace the cultural repertoires of, say, Latinx learners or White teachers, while they also document heterogeneity within these groups (Artiles, 2003). Similarly, researchers can map schools’ cultural practices alongside their ideologically laden assumptions, artifacts, and routines. In these milieus, we must not assume that individuals would not only submit to the socializing force of institutions but also act or think according to their cultural group membership or enculturation. Instead, researchers also need to document how students and/or school staff improvise, resist, strategize, or innovate depending on situational circumstances. In other words, this cultural perspective leaves analytical spaces to examine people’s agency and cautions against cultural stereotypes.
Consider Multi-tiered System of Support (MTSS) implementation: school teams need the capacity to use interpretive case-study approaches to understand students’ behavioral difficulties through this situated cultural lens. Key questions should guide data collection: What cultural repertoires (beliefs, values, and goal orientations) and linguistic practices do students bring to schools, and how does the school culture engage with those repertoires? Students are not mere replicas of stereotyped cultural communities; in fact, students and staff are individuals with intersectional identities. In this sense, all individuals embody hybrid cultural repertoires. Thus, a student would have a strong cultural foundation from their families and communities but also would affiliate with and use linguistic and cultural practices from other groups (e.g., peers, popular culture, and mentors). Situated cultural-historical analyses of student behaviors require attention to the heterogeneity within the groups in which students are affiliated, the intersectional affinities they have with myriad cultural and linguistic groups, and the cultural and ideological nature of institutional policies and practices.
Methodologically, researchers need to align frameworks, identify common indicators, and accelerate knowledge accumulation through meta-analyses and systematic reviews that incorporate context and mixed-methods approaches. Measurement should be rigorous and consilient while addressing epistemic biases (Dixon-Roman et al., 2020) and the conflation of distinct constructs (Flake & Fried, 2020). Studies should include consequential measures such as educational opportunities and intersectionality (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [NASEM], 2019, 2023), specify service intensity and quality, incorporate phenomenological data, examine individual and contextual variation, and attend to dynamic processes (Lee et al, 2023).
Second, our cultural-historical framework incorporates spatial analysis. Soja (1996) reminded us that “we are, and always have been, intrinsically spatial beings, active participants in the social construction of our embracing spatialities” (p. 1). Space mediates human experiences and shapes inequality (Galster & Sharkey, 2017; Tate, 2008). Although space shapes and maintains disproportionality (Artiles, 2011; Tefera et al., 2023), E/BD racial disparities scholarship emphasizes temporal over spatial considerations. Racial disparities have been documented for decades in urban spaces (Losen & Orfield, 2002) and increasingly in suburban spaces (Voulgarides et al., 2021). The cultural-historical model we advance assumes that the social and cultural dimensions of educational policies and practices are grounded in spatial layers (Osher et al., 2022; Tefera et al., 2023). Interdisciplinary studies on educational inequalities cannot afford to ignore this fact. As shifts are observed in the social and cultural configuration of spaces (e.g., changes in the racial and linguistic make-up of school enrollments across areas of cities), it is critical to account (theoretically and methodologically) for the mediating role of space. This is important because, as Tefera et al. (2017) explained, “policies often reify inequities given the lack of consideration for the relationship between educational inequities and space” (p. 193). For instance, researchers have documented that school districts cited for disproportionality exited citation status in disparate ways, in part depending on their location—that is, districts with large enrollments and located in urban areas had a longer citation status history than rural and smaller school districts (Voulgarides et al., 2014). How did spatial structures shape these patterns? How did enabling and disabling geographies mediate these changes? (Soja, 2010; Tate, 2008).
Tefera et al. (2017) made the following recommendations to examine spatial dynamics in analyses of disproportionality:
Rely on alternative and robust datasets (ideally longitudinal) that afford access to distinct dimensions of educational policies and practices. This will allow researchers to analyze school, community, and neighborhood dimensions that shape opportunity structures across groups. To illustrate, Pearman and McGee (2022) relied on Civil Rights Data Collection, the Education Opportunity Project, and the Race Implicit Association Database to report that county-level rates of anti-Black bias predict Black–White disparities in gifted and talented enrollment, with gaps being largest in counties with elevated rates of anti-Black bias and virtually nonexistent in counties with low levels of anti-Black bias (p. 359).
Conduct analyses of school data systems to understand support systems for racialized students as well as identification policies, practices, and procedures. Complement these analyses with interviews of school staff, parents, and students. Tefera et al. (2023), for example, documented how spatialized histories of race relations in a suburban school district and a community and spatial opportunity structures (e.g., access to special education and language programs) were associated with disability and discipline racial disparities.
Interview data can also be used to understand the lived experiences of families, students, and staff in general and special education settings (Bal et al., 2018). Developments in spatial analyses enable researchers to embed qualitative data in GIS maps (Elwood & Cope, 2009).
Document the enabling and disabling geographies in schools and districts. This includes attention to resources and opportunities across space (district, school, and programs, as well as neighborhoods and communities). Quantitative and qualitative evidence can be integrated to juxtapose how families and students experience or perceive school and neighborhood spaces with the official views of policies, practices, and school staff. Voulgarides et al. (2021), for instance, found that, “educators interpret [repeated disproportionality citations] in ways that neutralize the racialized implications of the citation, which in turn affects how they respond to the citation. These interpretations contribute to symbolic and race-evasive IDEA compliance responses. The resulting bureaucratic and organizational structures associated with IDEA implementation become a mechanism through which the visibility of race and racialization processes are erased and muted through acts of policy compliance” (p. 208). See also Bal et al. (2018).
To conclude, we have the opportunity in the E/BD field to advance a new way to study the dual nature of disability, which sometimes serves as an object of protection and at other times as a resource for marginalization (Artiles et al., 2016). This dual nature is often operationalized in patterns of racial disparities. A core argument in this paper is that a situated, dynamic approach is needed to understand the critical variation surrounding this phenomenon, which is masked by national analyses of racial disparities. A situated approach enables us to ask critical (understudied) questions, such as Who is impacted? Where? How? To what consequences? (Artiles, 2022). We have provided guidelines to develop this research approach and noted key assumptions about culture and space that must inform this program of scholarship.
Practice Implications
Research synthesizing the science of learning and development and the cultural foundations of learning indicates that learning and behavior are fundamentally shaped by relationships, identity, culture, and context, particularly for students experiencing individual and sociocultural challenges (Lee et al., 2023; Osher et al., 2025). Effective practice begins with creating conditions that support belonging, safety, engagement, and relational trust for all students and with building adults’ capacity to provide strong social and emotional conditions for learning.
Research on persistent racial disparities underscores the importance of centering equity, cultural and linguistic competence, and responsiveness in addressing the systemic factors that underlie disparities. Technical and culturally or racially neutral approaches cannot eliminate disparities, particularly when they ignore ecology, embody deficit mindsets and research traditions, or fail to attend sufficiently to relational and phenomenological factors. When relational and sociocultural factors are minimized, behavioral differences are more likely to be pathologized or punished, especially for students from historically marginalized communities.
Addressing disparities requires embedding equity within developmentally and culturally grounded practice, rather than adding equity as a separate initiative or relying solely on evidence-based programs. From a root-cause perspective (Osher, Fisher, et al., 2015), this entails examining and addressing how the school and classroom policies, routines, practices, and norms normalize deficit explanations, obscure bias, or overlook how stress, power, and organizational conditions shape everyday decision-making. Even well-established interventions are unlikely to disrupt inequitable outcomes if these underlying conditions remain unaddressed.
Culturally and linguistically responsive practice is central to this work (Artiles et al., 2010; Nasir et al., 2021; Osher et al., 2004). Interpreting behavior within students’ cultural and linguistic contexts, engaging families and youth as full partners, and attending to relational dynamics help counter deficit-oriented approaches and strengthen the fit between students and school expectations, thereby supporting engagement and reducing misidentification.
Educator well-being and connectedness are likewise foundational to equitable implementation. High levels of stress, isolation, and burnout undermine relational capacity and increase reliance on reactive and exclusionary responses. Supporting adult collaboration, reflection, and well-being enables educators to enact culturally responsive, developmentally informed practices more consistently and equitably (Osher et al., 2025).
Taken together, these implications underscore that reducing disparities requires systemic and relational change grounded in the cultural foundations of learning, rather than in technical fixes or isolated evidence-based programs. Practical guidance for this work is available through tools such as Addressing the root causes of disparities in school discipline: An educator’s action planning guide (Osher, Fisher, et al., 2015) and Supporting student well-being and learning in challenging times: A transition tool (Fullan et al., 2022) and publications such as “Good Intentions Are Not Enough” (Gregory et al., 2021) and Building Supportive Conditions and Comprehensive Supports to Enhance Student and Educator Well-Being and Thriving (Osher et al., 2025), which collectively emphasize examining conditions, relationships, and systems while centering equity and confronting deficit orientations and bias. In our framing, equity is achieved not by doing something different for some students, but by doing what works for all students—while explicitly addressing the root causes of inequity embedded in everyday practices, relationships, and organizational conditions.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Google Gemini 3, Claude Sonnet 4.6, ChatGPT 5.2, Perplexity, and Mistral were employed by the first author to assist with synthesis, summarization, translation, drafting refinement, formatting, and limited cross-verification of language and structure. All AI-assisted material was critically reviewed by the first author, revised as necessary, and approved by the authors, who assume full responsibility for the content of the manuscript. The second author acknowledges the support of the Stanford Graduate School of Education and the Research Institute of the Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.