Identification and Placement of Students with Serious Emotional Disturbance. Part I

Abstract

Research on students with serious emotional disturbances (SED) suggests that these children are significantly underidentified. National special education data bear out this conclusion to a large extent. However, the rate at which U.S. public schools identify children as SED varies considerably across states. The relationships between those rates of identification and a set of demographic and economic variables that have been found to be important in earlier work were examined in this research. Significant correlations were found between SED identification and several state economic variables. A regression analysis indicated that variation in per pupil revenue explains about one fourth of the variance in identification rates. Significant differences were found among groups of states based on region, elementary and secondary expenditure, per pupil revenue, and per capita income. Regional differences were maintained, even when the effects of per pupil revenue were removed. The implications of these findings for public policy and special education planning and service delivery are discussed.