Editor's Note: With the exception of the last section about an Anti-Racist, Culturally Competent Special Education Model, the content in this article comes from a recently accepted journal manuscript. This manuscript will be available online soon. Please use the following citation to view the full text: Bell, N.S., Collier, Z., Vélez, V., & Ford, D.Y. (2024-forthcoming). CritSEM: Advancing QuantCrit to examine racialized resegregation in special education. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness. Additionally, some of the citations have been removed in this version. Please see the full paper for the other citations.
We use the term and notion of resegregation in special education to describe the overrepresentation of Students of Color in special education, an issue that continues to persist today. After all, special education was created, in part, for this intended purpose. To frame it any other way dismisses both the historical and contemporary contexts and centrality of race and racism in decisions to remove these specific students from the general education system, forcing them into a system that suppresses their opportunities and contributes to miseducation. How? Because they are receiving unnecessary services and may not have access to the general education curriculum and classroom. In fact, these resegregated practices cause short-term and long-term harm for Students of Color (National Center for Learning Disabilities, 2020). Overrepresentation has lifelong consequences and contributes to racial hierarchies beyond schooling. Thus, our use of the term resegregation is intentional. 
Dr. Nicholas Bell
Further entrenching this racialized injustice is more recent research that inappropriately uses achievement covariates in statistical models to make universal problematic claims that Black and Latinx students are underrepresented in special education. Yet their statistical models fail to adequately and systematically account for structural inequities and, instead, rely on culturally-based deficit rationales. We argue that this research supports policy decisions to over-refer and over-identify Students of Color for special education; thereby, promoting white supremacy. For example, Project 25—conservative policy aims for the future—uses Paul Morgan’s research to justify policy that would eliminate federal legislative actions to address overrepresentation, signaling that resegregation in special education is lawful and justifiable.
Our dire concerns about resegregation in special education motivated us to conceptualize research with the aim to challenge and, preferably, dismantle white supremacy. Therefore, we conducted empirical research to study the extent that anti-racist teachers can disrupt resegregation in special education, using nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-2011. Our study was intended to not only counter the research of others citing underrepresentation who also used ECLS-K data, but also examine the effectiveness of anti-racist teachers in elementary schools.
