Continued efforts to improve educational equity in our school systems has led to taking a careful and measured look at special education disparities. When I did fieldwork at a school in Phoenix – a place with fairly substantial achievement gaps and stereotypical educational disparities – I noticed that the special education classroom had a higher proportion of minority students. I began to wonder why this was the case, and attempting to answer that question has spurred me to research this issue further here at the College of Education and Human Development (CEHD).