In 2004, the Texas House Public Education Committee released a report making recommendations to the Texas state Legislature on how to discourage over-identifying students with disabilities. This led to a decrease in the number of Texan students receiving special education from 11.2 percent in 2004 to 8.6 percent in 2016 (NCES Fast Facts, 2017). The decision to monitor and discourage over-identification of disability came partly in response to longstanding nationwide concern that students of color were disproportionately and inappropriately placed in special education (e.g., see Skiba et al., 2005; Losen & Orfield, 2002). Yet this concern had been based on largely descriptive evidence without controls for prior achievement and background characteristics. In other words, existing evidence had largely failed to isolate how student race/ethnicity predicted special education placement net of other characteristics that could precede and cause placement, such as exhibiting poor academic achievement or behavior. More recent and rigorous empirical evidence that does take into account these potentially confounding factors suggests instead that students of color are less likely to receive special education services in the United States than otherwise similar White students (e.g., Morgan et al., 2015, 2017; Fish, 2019). In 2018, the US Department of Education released a report following 15 months of investigation finding that this regulation had illegally incentivized Texas school districts to deny needed special education services to students with disabilities. Yet, to date, no studies have rigorously examined whether racial disproportionality worsened in Texas during the timeframe that the cap was in effect.

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