Intersectional Effects of Race and Gender on the Age of Special Education Service Receipt for Autistic Children

Early diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is important to provide early intervention for children, which significantly improves outcomes and future functioning. Race and gender have each shown to correlate with differential age of diagnosis for children with ASD. The male-o-female ratio of autistic individuals in the US is about 4.2:1, and studies have indicated that females often have a later Age of Diagnosis (AOD) than male counterparts. However, there have been conflicting results in previous studies regarding the effect of race on AOD. Additionally, most previous studies looked primarily at White/male samples. This study examines race and gender to identify if these variables have an intersectional effect on the age of special education service receipt for autistic children. Data was drawn from the Miami School Readiness Project (MSRP), a longitudinal, large-scale, and ethnically diverse study of children that attended Miami-Dade County Public Schools that spanned 14 years. In a subsample of students that had received autism as a primary exceptionality classification in their Individualized Education Program (n=851), 741 students were male and 110 students were female. 114 of these students were White/Asian, 595 were Hispanic/Latinx and 142 were Black. The grade/year of schooling that each student first received an autism exceptionality was recorded. ANCOVA analyses controlled for poverty status, English Language Learner (ELL) status, and assessment scores for cognitive and behavioral functioning at age 4.
No main effects of race or gender nor any intersectional effects were found in the ANCOVAs. However, it was found that ELL status did have significant effects on the first grade of autism exceptionality attainment, ELL students receiving the exceptionality at a lower grade level than non-ELL students. This work suggests that there is no evidence of bias towards race and gender in terms of assessing and assigning children with an autism exceptionality.

Hello my name is Maharun Mia And I did my honors thesis on the intersectional effects of race and gender on the age of Special Education Service receipt for autistic children So having an early age of diagnosis for autism is very important as it is ensures that the child gets early interventions and therefore better outcomes down the line we do know for the literature that males tend to get diagnosed earlier than their female counterparts with girls being diagnoses about a year later than boys

there also has been some research looking at racial differences in age of diagnoses but these results have been mixed and there isn’t really a clear consensus on what that relationship might be and it really depends on like what variables the studies have been controlling for

For this study I’m actually looking at Special Education Service receipt because although this isn’t age of diagnosis this is also an important indication of when students are actually receiving services for autism. in this case Special Education Service receipt refers to when a student is receiving a primary exceptionality for autism, a primary exceptionality being the code that a student must receive in their individualized education program in order to be given accommodations and services

One thing that’s significant is that autism research has historically involved mostly Advantage white and male samples which does not reflect entirety of the autistic population which kind of brings us to the importance of this study which is looking at a primarily low-income Hispanic in Black sample and looking for race and gender differences And the timing of primary exceptionality classification attainment

These are my research questions.

We used data from the Miami School Readiness project which primarily composed of low-income students who had received Child Care subsidies for community-based child care or attended a Miami-Dade Public Schools pre-k programs at age four

The final sample composed of 851 MSRP students who had received autism as a primary exceptionality at some point between kindergarten and 12th grade

The table here shows the race and gender breakdown of the sample, Which shows that the sample was 70% Hispanic 16% were black and 87% of the sample was male

The dependent variable is the first year or grade that the students received ASD as a primary exceptionality the covariates were poverty status English language learner status cognitive functioning at age 4 which was measured through the scores that these students received on the LAP-D, ELAP, or DIBELS
As well as behavioral concerns at Age 4 via their DECA scores.

I performed a series of ANCOVAs first without any covariates than adding in poverty status and ell status, And then finally with different combinations of the different cognitive functioning scores we had and the DECA scores.

We actually found no significant differences between any of the groups in terms of the average grade of first time ASD exceptionality no matter what covariates we added. I have a little graphic here that shows that while there are some small group differences between all of the groups none of these were significant. The overall average grade that students received their ASD exceptionality was between first and second grade.

The last thing we looked at was to see if any of the students had received a different exceptionality code before autism as we thought that well if they had received some other exceptionality prior to autism just might have created a delay in the receipt of services. Around 27% of the sample had received something other than autism.this table here shows the breakdown of what these other exceptionality codes were the top three were specific learning disability developmental delay and speech / language impairment. There were no significant gender effects but there was a significant race effect in that white/Asian students were More likely to have received a different exceptionality code prior to autism compared to Hispanic and black students.
I also found out while Hispanic black students had the same top three categories as the overall sample white asian students were more likely to have received a gifted status compared to the other race categories Giftedness being an exceptionality code given to students who are receiving Services accommodations for Accelerated classes such as in reading or math

so in conclusion Despite the literature there weren’t any evidence of race or gender-based delays in autism service received within schools within this predominantly Latino and black sample in Miami which is great news since this means that all students are receiving ASD services on time
however it’s important to note that this might not generalize to other communities or school systems that are not majority Latino and black as there could just be like other resources or factors in Miami not found in other parts of the US.