Ethnoracial Identity and the Identification of Reading Disabilities: Unexpectedness Impacts the Identification of Minoritized Students

Background. Researchers and practitioners have spent decades attempting to operationalize reading disability without an official consensus. With uniform criteria to assess reading disability, we ensure that this process is standardized across person and place, enabling practitioners to appropriately intervene, and individuals to receive intervention. A unified definition for reading disability would also act to address concerns about ethnoracial disparities in identification practices. Thus, the need for a standardized operational definition persists. Methods. Reading data for 27,000 children in first grade across the state of Florida were obtained from Florida’s Progress Monitoring and Reporting Network (PMRN) maintained by the Florida Center for Reading Research. The present study evaluated six operational definitions of reading disability in terms of their potential differential identification based on students’ ethnoracial identity. Results. Data indicated that when the definition of a reading disability included the idea of “unexpected low performance” based on performance on other benchmark measures, such as vocabulary, then Black and Hispanic students were identified at a much lower rate than White or Multi-Racial students. However, if the definition only used low performance as a criterion, then the opposite was true, with White and Multi-Racial students being identified at a much lower rate than Black and Hispanic students. This phenomenon will always occur when there are group differences on the benchmark used to measure unexpectedness. Conclusions. The varying definitions of reading disability currently used within the field will continue to differentially identify individuals, particularly along ethnoracial lines. A consensus is necessary for an operational definition to ensure that those who require reading interventions receive them.