Author ORCID Identifier
Rachel Elizabeth Fish: 0000-0002-5720-021X
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-1-2025
Publication Title
Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Abstract
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.
Keywords
disability, education, gender, intersectionality, race
Volume
11
Issue
3
First Page
370
Last Page
393
DOI
10.1177/23326492251328905
ISSN
23326492
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Rights
Licensed to Smith College and distributed CC-BY 4.0 under the Smith College Faculty Open Access Policy
Recommended Citation
Fish, Rachel Elizabeth, "Multilevel Intersectionality and the Deployment of Disability in Schools" (2025). Education and Child Study: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/edc_facpubs/29
Comments
Peer reviewed accepted manuscript.