Faculty, “One of the most complex issues in the field of special education today, disproportionality refers to the ‘overrepresentation’ and ‘under-representation’ of a particular demographic group in special education programs relative to the presence of this group in the overall student population” (NEA, 2008, unnumbered p. 1); and, “[t]he disproportionate representation of minority children is among the most critical and enduring problems in the field of special education” (Skiba et al., 2008, p. 264). The Disproportionality Technical Assistance Tool (DTAT: Algozzine, Wang, and Wang, 2017) was developed to assist state, district, school, and other education agency personnel in documenting the extent to which disproportionality is occurring as a base for it as a problem. The DTAT methods for calculating disproportionality are those included in resources available from the IDEA Data Center funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) to provide technical assistance to build capacity within states for collecting, reporting, analyzing, and using high-quality IDEA data (cf. Bollmer and Bitterman, 2016; Bollmer, Bethel, Munk, and Bitterman, 2014; U.S. Department of Education, 2017).
