Fairclouth, Susan C., Farkas, George, Hibel, Jacob, “Unpacking the placement of American and Alaska Native Students in Special Education Programs and Services in the Early Grades: School Readiness as a Predictive Variable” Harvard Educational Review: Fall 2008, Vol, 78, No 3, pp 498-528

Susan Fairclouth, George Farkas, and Jacob Hibel investigated the question of whether or not Alaskan Natives and American Indians were placed into special education classrooms at higher rates than other ethnic groups. Fairclouth, Farkas, and Hibel interrogated the prior research which showed Alaskan Natives and American Indians to be placed consistently in special education classrooms and special education schools at higher rates when compared to other ethnic groups. However, they found that Alaskan Natives and American Indians were actually just as likely to be placed in special education classrooms as non-Hispanic white students. The information Fairclouth, Farkas, and Hibel needed to conduct this research is organizational data to find out the ethnic backgrounds of students placed in special education classrooms within schools. They compared national data for students in kindergarten and third grade. The data-gathering method used was public and private records. They found their data in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study which was public data. They used interval/ratio data to analyze results and compare numbers of students ethnic backgrounds in schools. This research seems well done. The researchers dug deep into pre-existing research to discover that Alaskan Natives and American Indians were placed into special education at higher rates than other ethnic groups, and then challenged that by doing their own research. Their findings did not in fact mimic that of the researchers who had previously explored the topic. They also seemed to account for many confounding factors. Some of these factors included socio-economic status and test scores. It was only when these factors were controlled that they found their results. They concluded that “the strongest predictor of special education placement is a student’s academic readiness on entering kindergarten as measured by the student’s pre-reading and pre-mathematics scores”.