A group of researchers is challenging the long-held notion that students of color are identified as having learning disabilities at a greater rate than white students – a controversial finding that undercuts a key assumption of the Obama administration and could lead to significant changes in how the federal government requires states to spend their special education dollars.

A paper published Aug. 27 by researchers at Pennsylvania State University and the University of California at Irvine found that among children of the same gender who have similar levels of academic achievement, come from families with comparable economic standing and English-speaking abilities, students of color – including black students – were consistently less likely than white, English-speaking students to be identified as having disabilities.

The new research comes as Education Department officials under the Trump administration are requesting input on any current regulations that "may be appropriate for repeal, replacement, or modification," and that includes the way in which the department requires states to address this very issue.

"Secretary DeVos believes every student deserves to learn in a safe and nurturing environment and to receive an education that meets their unique needs," a spokesman for the department says. "Protecting the civil rights of all students remains the department's top priority. We are reviewing all ways the department can best serve every student."

The new paper's conclusions mirror previous studies by the team, which has been panned by critics who argue that the researchers' methods are too simplistic and that they do not take into account a large enough number of students, among many other things.

This time, though, the researchers used a significantly larger data set that includes more than 200,000 students from fourth, eighth and 12th grades. They also take into consideration more types of disabilities across more races and ethnicities and compare students who are similarly situated along economic, academic and gender lines.

"With this study, what we tried to do is respond to some of the criticism of that prior work by analyzing a much larger data set that included data collected beyond middle school," says Paul Morgan, one of the authors of the paper and a professor of education at Pennsylvania State University.

"What we get is an incredibly consistent finding across all the survey and all the disability conditions and across racial and ethnic groups, and that is that we find no evidence of overidentification when we're comparing similarly situated students," he says. "We find very consistent evidence that, all things being equal, schools are more likely to identify white, English-speaking students as having a disability."

But that finding runs counter to beliefs about students with disabilities that date back to at least 1997, when Congress updated the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and directed school districts to first assess the issue of how students are identified as disabled.

And it has major implications for how education funds are distributed. When the law was updated in 2004, Congress included a new mandate that any district with a significantly disproportionate number of black students identified as having a disability must spend at least 15 percent of the federal dollars they receive for special education on intervention services in the early grades.

School districts, the law says, cannot use that money on students already identified as having a disability. Instead, school officials must spend it on those who need additional academic or behavioral support before they are classified as learning-disabled – the goal being to prevent students who truly do not have a disability from ever being labeled as having one.

Notably, states are allowed to define on their own the threshold at which the percentage of black students classified as disabled becomes a "significant disproportionality."

The Obama administration, which ramped up its oversight of civil rights issues, was alarmed by the very small number of school districts that reported having that problem. They saw an inexplicable discrepancy between federal statistics on the high proportion of black students diverted into special education programs and the low number of school districts that said they reached the threshold at which the disproportionality became significant.

Data from the Office for Civil Rights showed black students – and, in particular, black boys – were two to three times more likely to be enrolled in special education classes than their nonblack peers. But a 2013 report from the Government Accountability Office – the federal government's nonpartisan watchdog group – found that only 2 percent of school districts in the 2010-2011 school year reported a disproportionality significant enough that it required them to use some of their federal funds for the early intervening services.

Moreover, officials underscored, there are lasting impacts on children when they are misidentified at having a disability, including being taught in classrooms separate from their peers and subjected to more frequent and more severe disciplinary action.

The authors of the GAO report recommended that the Education Department develop a standard method for measuring the disproportionality in order to more accurately identify racial overrepresentation in special education. In considering how to address the issue, department officials heeded GAO's advice.

"Children of color with disabilities are overrepresented within the special education population, and the contrast in how frequently they are disciplined is even starker," former Education Secretary John King, now the president and CEO of The Education Trust, said at the time.

By December 2016, just as the sun set on the Obama White House, education officials did just that, publishing final regulations establishing a more standardized method for calculating significant disproportionality.

If it's not first repealed by the Trump administration, the new regulation will be put to use beginning this school year.

According to an analysis from the Education Department's Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, about half the school districts in the entire country – more than 8,000 – are expected to get dinged for "significant disproportionatilty." That includes about 20 percent of the school districts in Connecticut, Maryland and Rhode Island, as well as about 15 percent of the districts in California, Illinois, New York and Texas.

Morgan maintains that his team's research questions the underlying need for the Obama administration's effort and challenges the premise that motivated it.

"This is all predicated on what the department sees as evidence of widespread misidentification based on race," Morgan says. "We don't find any evidence of that. At this point, it's our 10th study to replicate the finding again and again that the problem instead seems to be that schools are, amongst otherwise similarly situated students, overidentifying students who are white and English-speaking."

Morgan's biggest issue with how the Education Department is asking schools to identify disproportionality is that it doesn't take into account important factors other than just race, like the fact that students of color are disproportionately raised in poverty, born with low birth weight or exposed to lead and other environmental toxins.

"Poverty in and of itself results in disability," he says. "It's important to take into account alternative explanations before inferring racial basis, and that's not what the Education Department has been doing. Their regulations, as far as I can tell, don't take into account any alternative explanations."

But those who have criticized Morgan's past research push back on his methods of identifying students with disability by their status of enrollment in a special education class.

"That's hugely flawed thinking because there are many kids who have been diagnosed with a disability who are in general education classrooms or even advanced classes," Ivory Toldson, the president and CEO of the Quality Education for Minorities Network and professor of counseling psychology at Howard University, says. "There are also children in special education classes who don't have a formal diagnosis."

Toldson has been a vocal critic of Morgan's past research but says he hasn't had an opportunity to fully vet the most recent paper.

To be sure, there is agreement in the field that black students are typically underidentified when it comes to hearing and vision disabilities, as well as overidentified as having emotional issues.

"If we're talking about getting children the right services for the particular issues they have, whether it's a disability or any other issues, then we're all on the same page," Toldson says. "If [Morgan] knows anything about the way most special education programs operate in public schools, particularly those with a predominately black student body, he'll know that special education classes are usually not a good remedy for most disabilities."

Students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, for example, need a more enriching learning environment with more stimulation and project-based learning – things often only offered in advanced or honors classes.

For Morgan, his continued findings are about more than simply proving the previous administration wrong or contesting a widely held belief.

"To me, this suggests inequity and a social justice issue that students of color who have disabilities are not accessing the services to which they have a legal and civil right," he says. "And we just keep on finding this again and again."

Morgan points to the Houston Chronicle's recent investigation that found tens of thousands of students have been denied special education services because of arbitrary quotas set by the state.