How Systemic Racism Shapes Access to Assistive Technology

By Maya Kendall

For a student who is nonverbal, a tablet-based communication system can provide a voice. For a student with dyslexia, text-to-speech software can make written material accessible. Assistive technology, or AT, can also be a pencil grip, a visual schedule, enlarged text, an adapted keyboard, or another tool that allows a student with a disability to participate more fully in school.

Under federal special education law, these tools are not supposed to be luxuries. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) requires an Individualized Education Program (IEP) team to consider whether a student needs assistive technology when developing, reviewing, or revising the student's IEP. If AT is necessary for the student to receive a free appropriate public education, the school district is responsible for providing the technology and related services the student needs to use it [1].

Yet students still go without the technology they need.

Sometimes a school explicitly rejects a parent's request. But denial can also be far less visible. A student's need may never be identified. An educator may not know that an appropriate technology exists. An IEP team may technically “consider” AT without adequately evaluating which tools could benefit the student. A 2025 Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation found that staff in all eight school districts it examined identified limited knowledge of assistive technology as a challenge. District staff also cited insufficient training time, staffing problems, technology issues, and funding constraints [2].

These weaknesses in the special education system do not affect every student equally. For decades, researchers and the federal government have documented racial disparities in how students of color are identified, placed, disciplined, and served within special education. Federal law now requires states to examine their data for significant disproportionality based on race and ethnicity [3].

The question is therefore not only whether assistive technology is legally available. It is whether students of different races have the same opportunity to actually receive it.

Historical Racial Inequality in Special Education

Race has long influenced access to education in the United States. Before Brown v. Board of Education declared legally mandated public-school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, Black children were deliberately separated from White children in schools that were frequently unequal in resources and educational opportunities [4].

Children with disabilities faced a parallel history of exclusion. As recently as 1970, U.S. public schools educated only one in five children with disabilities, and many states still allowed schools to exclude certain disabled children entirely. Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975 to establish educational rights for children with disabilities. The law was later renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA [5].

However, the creation of special education did not eliminate racial inequality. Students of color, especially Black students, became disproportionately represented in some disability classifications, particularly categories involving greater subjective judgment [6].

The 1979 federal case Larry P. v. Riles provides an important example. Black families challenged California's use of intelligence testing to place students into special education classes since Black students made up approximately 10 percent of California's student population, but about 25 percent of students in those classes [7].

Overrepresented in Identification, Underserved in Support

At first, the racial inequality in special education can seem contradictory. If Black students have historically been overrepresented in certain disability categories, it might seem reasonable to assume that they would also receive more disability services.

But being labeled as disabled and receiving appropriate support are not the same thing.

The federally funded National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 (NLTS2) examined a nationally representative population of students receiving special education services. Among those students, 7.9 percent of White students received assistive-technology services through their schools in the preceding year, compared with 6.0 percent of African American students, 5.6 percent of Asian/Pacific Islander students, and 2.7 percent of Hispanic students [8]. 

The same data source revealed another disparity in how services are obtained. Among families whose children received services in the past year, 32.3 percent of African American parents reported expending "a great deal of effort" to secure those services, compared with 15.5 percent of White parents [8].

These findings illustrate the distinction at the center of the issue: students of color can be disproportionately placed into certain special-education categories while still encountering barriers to obtaining the services and resources intended to support students with disabilities.

The problem is therefore not simply who gets labeled as disabled. It is also what happens after the label is given.

From a Disability Label to Assistive Technology

Receiving an assistive-technology device is rarely a single-step process. A student must first have a need recognized. Someone must determine what the student is struggling to do, consider whether technology could help, involve professionals with appropriate expertise, evaluate possible tools, include the necessary support in the IEP, obtain the technology, and train the student and educators to use it effectively.

Each step creates another decision point.

This is particularly important because special education services are not distributed identically among students of different races once they enter the system. Sturm, Williams, and Kasari analyzed administrative records for 76,428 students receiving special education services in a large urban school district. The researchers examined not only whether students were enrolled in special education but also the quantity and types of services they received, comparing outcomes across racial groups. They found that White students received a greater allocation of services than their peers of color, with this racial disparity most pronounced among students eligible for special education under an autism classification [9].

That finding helps explain why overrepresentation in special education does not necessarily translate into greater support. Two students can both have IEPs and still receive very different levels and types of services.

Racial Disparities in Communication Technology

Some of the clearest evidence of a racial disparity involving assistive technology comes from research on augmentative and alternative communication, or AAC.

AAC includes methods and technologies that supplement or replace spoken communication. It can range from picture boards and communication cards to tablet applications and sophisticated speech-generating devices. For a child who cannot rely on speech, AAC may be the primary means of asking questions, communicating needs, participating in classroom discussions, and interacting with teachers and classmates.

In 2022, Lauramarie Pope, Janice Light, and Amber Franklin examined AAC interventions received by Black and White preschool children with developmental disabilities and complex communication needs. They found that Black children received significantly less AAC intervention per week than White children, both when the study began and two years later [10].

At the beginning of the study, 63 percent of White children received 90 minutes or more of AAC intervention each week, compared with only 29 percent of Black children. Two years later, the figures were 52 percent of White children and 25 percent of Black children. By the conclusion of the study, 75 percent of the Black children were receiving less than 60 minutes of AAC intervention per week [10].

This is especially important because all of the children in the study already had significant developmental and communication needs. The disparity was therefore not simply about whether Black children entered special education. It concerned how much intervention they received once their disabilities and communication needs were already known [10].

A racial disparity does not automatically demonstrate that an individual speech-language pathologist or teacher intentionally withheld technology from a Black child.

It does, however, raise a larger systemic question: why are children with comparable needs receiving different levels of intervention based on race?

Systemic Racism Does Not Require an Explicit “No”

When people hear the word racism, they may imagine an individual intentionally refusing to help someone because of their race. Systemic racism operates differently.

It can occur when ordinary policies, practices, professional judgments, and institutional structures repeatedly produce unequal outcomes for different racial groups, even without a person explicitly saying, “I am denying this student because they are Black.”

IDEA's own regulations recognize this distinction. When significant racial disproportionality exists, federal law requires schools to examine the policies, practices, and procedures that may be contributing to the disparity. Potential contributing factors identified in the regulations include cultural or linguistic barriers, inadequate access to diagnostic screening, and institutional policies or practices that lead to inappropriate or missed identification of students [3].

Assistive technology depends heavily on precisely these kinds of institutional processes.

A teacher must recognize that a student's difficulty might be addressed with technology. An IEP team must meaningfully consider AT. Someone must have enough knowledge to identify appropriate options. Specialists may need to evaluate the child. Staff must know how to implement the technology after it is provided.

As noted earlier, the GAO found that staff across all eight districts struggled with limited AT knowledge, training gaps, and staffing shortages [2].

Those barriers can affect any student. But they exist within a special education system in which racial disparities are already documented in identification, service allocation, and AAC intervention.

That is why an AT denial does not necessarily begin when a parent formally requests a device and receives a written rejection.

For some students, the request may never happen at all.

The Missing Data

There is still a major limitation in understanding racial inequity in assistive technology. The United States does not currently have comprehensive national data showing exactly which students are evaluated for AT, which technologies schools provide, and how those decisions differ by race.

The GAO emphasized this problem in its recent investigation. Although IDEA requires schools to consider assistive technology for students receiving special education services, GAO concluded that little is known about how schools implement that requirement locally [2]. Its investigation, therefore, relied on eight selected districts rather than a national dataset capable of measuring AT decisions across racial groups.

Existing national data, such as the NLTS2, are valuable, but they are now more than two decades old. More recent AAC research demonstrates that racial disparities continue to warrant concern, but it involves a much smaller group of children.

This absence of contemporary national data is itself significant. If schools and federal agencies do not consistently track who is evaluated for assistive technology, who receives it, what type they receive, and whether outcomes differ by race, disparities can remain hidden.

Schools cannot correct inequities they do not measure.

Conclusion

The history of students of color in special education is not simply a story of exclusion from services or a story of overidentification. It contains both.

Students of color have historically been disproportionately identified in certain disability categories, particularly intellectual disability and emotional disturbance. But being identified for special education does not guarantee equitable access to the services and tools intended to make education accessible.

Assistive technology can give a child a voice, access to written language, greater independence, and the ability to participate meaningfully in class. IDEA says that a student's individual educational needs should determine whether that technology is provided.

Making that promise truly equal requires looking not only at who is placed in special education, but at who receives the resources that special education is supposed to provide.

References

[1] U.S. Department of Education, "Myths and facts surrounding assistive technology devices and services," Jan. 22, 2024. Accessed: Sep. 15, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://sites.ed.gov/idea/files/Myths-and-Facts-Surrounding-Assistive-Technology-Devices-01-22-2024.pdf

[2] U.S. Government Accountability Office, "Students with disabilities: Assistive technology challenges and resources in selected school districts and schools," GAO-26-107506, Dec. 30, 2025.

[3] U.S. Department of Education, "34 C.F.R. § 300.646: Disproportionality," Individuals with Disabilities Education Act Regulations, last updated Sep. 11, 2026. Accessed: Sep. 15, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-34/subtitle-B/chapter-III/part-300/subpart-F/subject-group-ECFR4f9a33f19162f53/section-300.646

[4] Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

[5] U.S. Department of Education, "A history of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act," last updated Feb. 16, 2024. Accessed: Sep. 15, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://sites.ed.gov/idea/IDEA-History

[6] U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs, "OSEP Memo 07-09: Disproportionality of racial and ethnic groups in special education," Apr. 24, 2007.

[7] Larry P. v. Riles, 495 F. Supp. 926 (N.D. Cal. 1979).

[8] SRI International, "Wave 1 (2001) parent survey: Services table 187 (item Np1H1a) and services table 192 (item Np1H4)," National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 (NLTS2), Office of Special Education Programs, U.S. Department of Education, 2001. Accessed: Sep. 15, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://nlts2.sri.com/data_tables/

[9] A. Sturm, J. Williams, and C. Kasari, "Who gains and who loses? Sociodemographic disparities in access to special education services among autistic students," Autism Research, vol. 14, no. 8, pp. 1621–1632, 2021, doi: 10.1002/aur.2517.

[10] L. Pope, J. Light, and A. Franklin, "Black children with developmental disabilities receive less augmentative and alternative communication intervention than their White peers: Preliminary evidence of racial disparities from a secondary data analysis," American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, vol. 31, no. 5, pp. 2159–2174, 2022, doi: 10.1044/2022_AJSLP-22-00079.