Multilevel Intersectionality and the Deployment of Disability in Schools

Teacher perceptions of and decisions about students’ academic ability and behavior are key to the micro-level production and maintenance of inequality at the intersection of gender, race, and disability in schools, yet we know little about how these micro-level processes relate to meso-level features. Using an experimental survey design of 369 factorial vignettes, I tested for racial and gender differences in 276 teachers’ ratings of referral to begin disability evaluations—what I call the deployment of disability—across 115 Wisconsin schools with varying racial compositions. Findings show that teachers in schools with low proportions of White students were less likely to deploy disability for White girls than all other students; these disparities closed or reversed as teachers’ schools increased in proportion White. Results also suggest that White boys with academic difficulties were perceived as more likely disabled than their male peers of color—only in schools with more Black students. These results provide mixed evidence that “racial distinctiveness” triggers teachers’ racialized and gendered deployment of disability. School composition effects provide empirical evidence of the social construction of disability, its intersection with race and gender, and that this construction emerges as an aspect of context as well as through individual teachers’ behaviors.