Dr. Paul Morgan, a noted scholar in the field of education whose work focuses on disparities in disability identification and treatment during childhood, discusses the University at Albany's Institute for Social and Health Equity, or ISHE, a new research and training hub that provides a home for multidisciplinary research collaborations across the university, with regional partners in academia, government and the nonprofit and private sectors. ISHE brings together researchers exploring topics such as disparities in maternal and childhood health, healthy aging, emergency management, risk factors for cardiovascular disease, exposure to environmental toxins, as well as social services that support vulnerable populations. Dr. Morgan also discusses his latest study, "Racial and Ethnic Disparities in School-Based Disability Identification," published in June 2025.
Institute for Social and Health Equity (ISHE)
A study by Dr. Paul Morgan released in June 2025:
Morgan, P. L., Hu, E. H., & Oh, Y. (2025). Racial and Ethnic Disparities in School-Based Disability Identification. Educational Researcher, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X251347279
UAlbany News Center, Feb 22, 2024: UAlbany Launches the Institute for Social and Health Equity
College of Integrated Health Sciences
Global Center for AI in Mental Health
Center for Social and Demographic Analysis
Center for the Elimination of Health Disparities
The Engagement Ring, Episode 29: Building A Hub for Multidisciplinary Research
[Lively, upbeat theme music plays as program host Mary Hunt introduces the program and plays excerpts from the program.]
ANNOUNCER /MARY HUNT:
Welcome to the Engagement Ring. Your connection to an ever-widening network of higher education professionals, scholars and community partners working to make the world a better place. I'm Mary Hunt. Today on the podcast…
PAUL MORGAN:
My background is in education, but over the time of my career, I've borrowed and benefited from collaborations with colleagues from a range of different disciplines, and I've tried to understand the topics that I'm investigating broadly across different fields.
ANNOUNCER/MARY HUNT:
I'll talk with Dr. Paul Morgan of the University at Albany about a recent study he published on disability identification among elementary school students and about his work as director of UAlbany’s Institute for Social and Health Equity, or I.S.H.I., a new research and training hub that provides a home for multi-disciplinary research collaborations across the university, with regional partners in academia, government and the nonprofit and in private sectors.
PAUL MORGAN:
We're trying to support researchers to come together, collaborate in ways that are informed through social and behavioral sciences, to help individuals across the life course thrive.
ANNOUNCER/MARY HUNT:
A noted scholar with a distinguished record of impactful research in special education, Dr. Morgan's work exemplifies I.S.H.E.’s mission to drive interdisciplinary research that fosters equity and improves lives.
PAUL MORGAN:
It's a blessing and a curse, but I'm curious in a lot of things intellectually…
[Mary and Paul laugh together.]
PAUL MORGAN
… so, I engage, I think, with scholars across a number of fields to try and support their investigations.
ANNOUNCER/MARY HUNT:
Here’s my conversation with Paul Morgan.
MARY HUNT:
Paul, thanks for joining me for the podcast.
PAUL MORGAN:
Sure.
[Music fades out.]
MARY HUNT:
I know we had some issues trying to find a good date for both of us.
PAUL MORGAN:
That's fine.
MARY HUNT:
I know you have a busy calendar…
PAUL MORGAN:
No, that's all right. You too. I'm sure you do too.
MARY HUNT:
But it was a happy accident, because when we originally scheduled the podcast, we were planning on talking about the Institute for Social and Health Equity, but as I say, it's a happy accident, because just a few days ago, you published a new study which I want to talk about. The study has to do with disparities in identifying disability issues in elementary school students. But let's start with a discussion of the Institute itself. So, the Institute for Social and Health Equity, an institute that you direct, tell me what the mission of the institute is, and tell me about the origins of it.
PAUL MORGAN:
Sure. The mission is to understand and address social and health inequities that are occurring locally, regionally, nationally, even globally. We try and understand a wide range of issues that may be affecting social, economic, health opportunities and well-being, and we do that by supporting research that's taking place here at the University at Albany, particularly that which is interdisciplinary and so cuts across multiple fields, say, sociology and psychology, public health, atmospheric sciences… a wide range of different fields, and so we're trying to support researchers to come together, collaborate in ways that are informed through social and behavioral sciences to help individuals across the life course thrive. In terms of the origins, the Institute is leveraging a lot of wonderful success here at the University of Albany, particularly around trying to understand and address health disparities, so differences by, say, social demographic groups in terms of health conditions, again across the life course, and how those might be ameliorated and addressed in ways that all can thrive. It is a university-wide research Institute. You can think of it as just a hub for interdisciplinary collaborations. So, it's not within a particular department or school. I have a faculty appointment that's within the College of Integrated Health Sciences, but the Institute actually is comprised of faculty affiliates across the university.
MARY HUNT:
Are there particular health issues, social issues, that you are interested in studying? Or are you open really to a wide variety?
PAUL MORGAN:
The Institute's open.
MARY HUNT:
Yeah.
PAUL MORGAN:
So, we're trying to support research that has a public health focus, but has other sorts of foci as well, and not just around health. So, one of the projects they're trying to support is trying to understand K through 12 achievement differences or gaps. Another is trying to understand traffic-type of incidences, including accidents and fatalities, using sort of integrated approaches that cut across multiple fields. So, the Institute, in and of itself, doesn't have a specific topic area other than a broad mission around trying to understand and address social and health inequities. And then, of course, I have my own research interests too.
MARY HUNT:
Yeah, that's… and you are an education scholar. So how does your work as an education scholar inform your work as the director of this institute?
PAUL MORGAN:
Sure, so, my background is in education, but over the time of my career, I've borrowed and benefited from collaborations with colleagues from a range of different disciplines, and I've tried to understand the topics that I'm investigating broadly across different fields. So, I feel like my work… our investigations are informed by both expertise in education, but also public health and sociology, psychology, additional fields. And because of that, and because of my attempt to sort of borrow and benefit from the knowledge generated across multiple fields in my own investigations, I think it's helped me adopt a very interdisciplinary, broad mindset to investigations. And, you know, it's a blessing and a curse…
[Paul and Mary laugh together]
PAUL MORGAN:
… but I'm curious in a lot of things intellectually. So, I engage, I think, with scholars across a number of fields to try and support their investigations.
MARY HUNT:
Is this interdisciplinary approach to research among scholars something new? Has it been something that has been going on a long time, and what are the advantages of taking that kind of an approach?
PAUL MORGAN:
It's been around, and it's something that fields, universities, organizations, funding agencies, have tried to incentivize because I think there's a recognition that oftentimes our investigations, our scientific inquiries can benefit from insights from across a range of different fields. And so, it's been around for a while, but there's reasons why the emphasis continues, both because the knowledge that can be gained from interdisciplinary collaborations, I think, is of high quality and better than when the investigations are just coming from a single discipline. And the other thing is there's a lot of barriers to this. So oftentimes, the way that universities tend to be structured. It’s usually by a program, within a department, within a school or a college within a university. And so, the organizing structures for faculty tend to be within their discipline. Now that can… within itself there can be a lot of topics, a lot of fields within a discipline, but the way that faculty are organized within universities, tends to act as a little bit of a headwind to interdisciplinary collaborations. And so, the University of Albany is doing an amazing thing. It's really trying to break down barriers and silos and trying to support faculty from a range of disciplines and to support them through the Institute's resources and supports.
MARY HUNT:
How do you do that? How do you break down those barriers? Or how do you take a scholar who's used to working independently and help them to develop maybe a more collaborative mindset or perspective? What kind of training or support can you give them to help them?
PAUL MORGAN:
The Institute’s activities are voluntary for faculty to involve themselves in, and some faculty may not want to be a part of these collaborations, and that's perfectly fine, but for those who are who are interested in trying to work with others across different disciplines to advance their investigations, that's when our supports and attempts to sort of break down silos comes in. So, we'll organize meetings, convenings of faculty and we’ll sustain them across time through staff supports and incentives for the faculty to engage in those kinds of collaborations. And what oftentimes happens is that the faculty in the School of Education or the College of Integrated Health Sciences may not know the faculty over in the School of Criminal Justice or in Psychology, and what we're trying to get to happen is those faculty across the different disciplines to come together, you know, meet at a table and talk about it, a shared topic that they have expertise in but sort of from different angles and aspects, and once those conversations start to occur, they tend to be very fruitful. And also, what can happen is data that can be in one area may not be known to another area. So, if there's data on traffic accidents collected at one part of the university, faculty in the School of Criminal Justice may not know about it until we help bring those faculty together or across other sort of topic areas. And then, when we bring those faculty together, that kind of starts to leverage collaborations, conversations that then can fuel good science to happen?
MARY HUNT:
Are you open to external stakeholders or partners coming and bringing you issues that you would like to see research or solutions to?
PAUL MORGAN:
Yes, and absolutely we're particularly interested in trying to connect with state agencies here. And it's so great that the university is located right next to state offices, and we really want to be a resource to state agencies who oftentimes have a lot of data, a lot of information they've been collecting that it's hard for them to always investigate or analyze on their own, and there's a lot of faculty here that we're trying to support who would be interested in working with stakeholders across the state, as well as more broadly in the U.S. or globally. But a particular line, a theme that we're trying to support is enhancing collaborations with university faculty and state agencies.
MARY HUNT:
Are there current external partners outside of the state agencies? Are there nonprofits or their other universities you're working with? Other scholars?
PAUL MORGAN:
Yeah, so we've started interacting with faculty at other SUNY campuses. One of the centers under the Institute is a joint collaboration between the University of Albany and SUNY Downstate around… it's called the Global Center for AI in Mental Health, and so faculty across the two campuses are collaborating to leverage expertise in psychiatry or trying to address mental health challenges, including across different populations, and support those investigations, including by using AI resources. And so that's one example, and then we have, excuse me, other collaborations that are emerging with other campuses, SUNY Buffalo, and some discussions with Stony Brook.
MARY HUNT:
And there are other centers under the Institute. Can you talk a little bit about what those centers are.
PAUL MORGAN:
Yes, so we're sort of the umbrella organization from an infrastructure standpoint, and our staff support for centers here at the university, Global Center for AI in Mental Health, Center for Healthy Aging, which are relatively new centers, and then the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis and the Center for the Elimination of Health Disparities, which are centers with sort of a longer history here at the university.
MARY HUNT:
There are probably a lot of scholars who want to become more community-engaged, and being a community-engaged scholar requires a certain set of skills. It requires that outlook and that perspective and willingness to collaborate. How would you help encourage or support… maybe it's a junior, junior faculty member who does not have a lot of experience in this area. How would you encourage them to develop those skills, or help them to develop the skills it might take to become more community-engaged or to incorporate that into their work?
PAUL MORGAN:
Well, there are a number of community-engaged collaborations that are already happening here, including with the Center for the Elimination of Health Disparities so I would encourage those faculty to contact us. We have an email account: ishi@ualbany.edu. They can email us to start that outreach and then we can help connect them with other scholars that are doing community-engaged work and support them as best as possible.
MARY HUNT:
Let's talk a little bit about your new study. Just a few days ago, you published a new study related to disparities in disability identification among elementary school students. What was the question you were asking, and what was your methodology for answering that? And what were your findings?
PAUL MORGAN:
Sure. We were interested in trying to understand how school-based disability identification works and who's more or less likely to be identified as having a disability. There's been concerns in the educational field in particular that the way that children are identified as having disabilities may be biased or discriminatory in some type of way, but the evidence base for that has been fairly limited to know one way or the other how selection into special education or being identified has a disability may work within educational settings. And so, we tried to understand that process. A particular facet of our investigation is we tried to account for what might be characterized as clinically relevant factors for disability identification. So, for example, a clinically relevant factor for being identified as having a learning disability would be you seem to be academically struggling, or a clinically relevant factor for an autism diagnosis or identification might be you're struggling socially in terms of your communication. So, what we tried to account for were clinically relevant factors that relate to being identified as having a disability, and then examine the risks associated with clinically nonrelevant factors. So, it really shouldn't matter what your… the language spoken in your home, or your race, ethnicity, or your income, economic background in terms of being identified if we have a system that's operating fairly. And so, we tried to account for those clinically relevant factors and then evaluate the associations with the clinically nonrelevant factors, like race, ethnicity, economic background, language use in the home. We analyzed a longitudinal cohort that was followed from kindergarten to the end of fifth grade. The cohort is nationally representative. It includes many measures of both clinically relevant and clinically nonrelevant factors, and then we tried to analyze disability identification over time, including using what's called lagged variables here, where we're controlling for the clinically relevant factors prior to the disability identification taking place in schools. The takeaway finding is clinically relevant factors matter. So, if you're academically struggling, if you're behaviorally struggling in schools, that increases the likelihood that you'll be identified as having a disability, which makes sense. Conditional on that, we find repeated evidence that clinically-non relevant factors matter in terms of being identified as having a disability. So again, conditional on those clinically relevant factors, if you're white or from an English-speaking family, you're more likely to be identified as having a disability throughout elementary school than if you're nonwhite or from a household where English is not the predominant language being used. We find that across disability conditions generally. and then we also find it across eight specific disability conditions that we examine: learning disabilities, autism, intellectual disabilities, behavioral disorders, other types of health impairments and other types of disability conditions, as well as speech language impairments, and probably a couple others that I can't think of at the moment. But across eight specific disability conditions, we find repeated evidence of socio-demographic disparities in terms of identification as well as for disability in general. And to us the implications of the findings are that disability identification does not seem to be operating in an unbiased, nondiscriminatory manner. Clinically nonrelevant factors seem to play a role in your likelihood of being identified, particularly your race or ethnicity and your language background, and that we should be trying to ensure that the way that children are being identified as having disabilities is operating in a fair, unbiased, equitable manner. One of the reasons that's important is there's consistent, quasi-experimental evidence that's emerged indicating that the receipt of services in schools for disabilities are beneficial, including in terms of increasing your academic achievement. And a number of scholars have hypothesized that these disparities in disability identification might be leading to inequitable outcomes across children's early and later life course, such that as a result of not being appropriately identified when you indeed have a disability, that's resulting in you experiencing more hardship as you age. And we don't want that.
MARY HUNT:
Where does the bias come from? Is it on the part of the teachers or the evaluators or the system? Is it a built-in bias?
PAUL MORGAN:
Okay, that's a good question. The short answer is that we don't know. We don't know from our study. What we know is these initially observed differences are not the result of differences in differential rates in the clinically relevant factors. By accounting for the clinically relevant factors, we've obtained stronger evidence of bias and discriminatory practices than has previously been known, including with more recently collected data that we've analyzed here. Why those biases are occurring, or what's resulting in those disparities that result in White and English-speaking children being more likely to be unified is unclear. We can't report on it from our study. Some of the mechanisms that have been hypothesized or reported on by other researchers include difficulties in accessing information about disability across different demographic groups, lack of access to developmentally… providers that show developmental concerns across all populations, teachers who might be less likely or less inclined to consider a child's academic difficulties as resulting from an underlying disability across all populations equally. Others have hypothesized that racial and ethnic segregation across schools and economic disparities in schooling might play a role as well, and there's some evidence for that. So, there's school-based mechanisms that have been hypothesized to result in this, including teachers being less inclined to recognize disability across all population groups. There's also federal policy around this issue that's really designed to monitor for a problem we're not observing, which is over-identification based on race, ethnicity or language use. We're not finding that that is occurring, such that children who are Black, Hispanic, of other racial and ethnic backgrounds, or who are E.L.L. (English language learners), are being widely and systematically over identified as having disabilities while attending schools. That's not what we're observing. We're observing the opposite issue, which is it seems to be that the way the system is operating in terms of disability identification privilege is White and English-speaking students. So, a mechanism that's been hypothesized to result in this identification is federal policy that's incentivizing schools to not identify children of color, for example, as having disabilities.
MARY HUNT:
And your study dealt with elementary school students.
PAUL MORGAN:
That’s right.
MARY HUNT:
Did you look at high school at all? Or is that the next step or is that of interest?
PAUL MORGAN:
Of course, yeah, it's of interest. We didn't look at disparities in this study beyond elementary school because the data set that we're using here, the data collection stopped at fifth grade. We do have findings from other work that that indicate that under-identification is also happening in middle and high school.
MARY HUNT:
How can your findings affect policy, or will they? Do policymakers look at these kinds of studies? Will they make decisions, will they make changes based on what scholars in the study have found?
PAUL MORGAN:
I'm hopeful. You know, we should be trying to design policies that are evidence-based. There is concern about inequities in disability identification, and our findings are reinforcing those concerns. What they're indicating, though, is that the way disability identification is happening is not, doesn't seem to be operating as we would like. We don't want children to be identified as having disabilities because of their race, ethnicity or language use, but we also don't want a situation where children with disabilities are not being recognized because of their race, ethnicity or language use. And our findings indicate across the U.S., because we're analyzing nationally representative data again and again and again, that the problem is that schools don't seem to be recognizing, for reasons that we or we can't report ourselves, but it does seem to be the case that you're much more likely to be identified as having a disability if you’re White or English-speaking, and so if we're serious about trying to design systems in which all children have equal opportunity, this would be an area that we would seem to want to target to lessen any headwinds that are operating, that are disadvantaging some of our children and their families.
MARY HUNT:
And we are about three years, I guess three, four years after COVID, and still coming out of COVID, if seems like. What kind of impact did COVID have on children with disabilities in school? Was it different? Was it harsher than their counterparts who weren't having the same educational and behavioral challenges?
PAUL MORGAN:
That’s a good question. I think the um… it's a relatively new area of research. I haven't done a lot of COVID-specific research, so I'm just relying on what I understand the field to be reporting.
MARY HUNT:
Sure.
PAUL MORGAN:
What I what seems to be the case is that the pandemic has resulted in large learning losses for children in terms of academic achievement, particularly as experienced by children from historically marginalized communities, or children who are attending schools with relatively fewer resources. So, the pandemic seems to have, you know, had negative effects, but children who are being raised in two-parent families where both parents can provide a lot of support for their children, those contexts seems to have buffered the effects of the pandemic on children's learning, whereas children who are attending schools and they're being raised by a single parent who's working two jobs and unable to provide as much direct ongoing support for the child that children from those groups seem to have been more impacted. Over time, academic achievement gaps have been increasing, particularly for children who are from lower achievement groups. So, in other words, the groups that seem to be falling off in terms of their academic achievement gains across time are those who are from the lower achievement group, which is not always children with disabilities, but many children with disabilities are more likely to struggle academically. There's also been concerns that the shift to remote learning was difficult for children who might struggle, say, with attention or impulse control or some kind of difficulty that makes it harder for them to attend to remote… the shift to remote learning. And I think there's some indication that disability identification was impacted as well, such that fewer children were being identified as having disabilities, particularly as children were out of school more and not around educational professionals who might pick up or notice, relative to other children, that the child is struggling.
MARY HUNT:
Where did your interest in the field of education, and particularly with regard to disability identification, come from? Is it something that's been a lifelong interest, something… just curious where your interest came.
PAUL MORGAN:
Yeah, I've always been interested in advancing opportunity. And I've always felt like, you know, we want to try and get things right. We want to equal the playing field as much as possible. And there's so many reasons why that's a good thing to do. It helps that child; it helps our society. And so, I think I've always just had an interest in trying to understand how systems operate and how they can be improved to enhance opportunity for all.
MARY HUNT:
If you could, I guess you do this all the time as a researcher… you look for topics that are of interest to you, but if you could identify one question, one study that you could embark on next, and you'd have all the resources you could to investigate that question, what would that be?
PAUL MORGAN:
Okay. That's a great question. One of the things that I think I would be very interested in is if developing systems where we have long-term understandings of children's development. So, um, so the data that my colleagues and I have analyzed typically follows kids from, say, kindergarten to fifth grade, or maybe beyond into middle school. We oftentimes don't know much about what happened to the children before they arrived in school and the educational field oftentimes doesn't know much about what happens grade to grade, or beyond, say, elementary school or the particular focus of the investigators, say whether it's middle school or high school, and we certainly don't have much of a good understanding of what happens to children across the life course, so, you know birth to old age. And if we can understand those processes better, including how they might be affected in terms of intergenerational transmission, you know, what happened to your parents and how that's affecting you as a kid, and how is it affecting you as a kid, as you age. If we had a better understanding that in the U.S., I think it would really behoove us in terms of targeting resources. We're entering a time when resources seem to be more scarce, which argues for trying to be as efficient as possible, and understanding how we can allocate our resources, including through federal and state government, and if we could better understand what's affecting children's development, and then target our interventions to optimize children's trajectories, we're only going to benefit as a society, and it's only going to save us money down the road. So, the educational case for investing and understanding children's development is a solid one, as is the business case, and I would love the opportunity to analyze data that expanded the time frame in which we were understanding children's development, particularly from birth up until later adulthood.
MARY HUNT:
Yeah, so important. I hope you will get the opportunity to do that.
[Mary and Paul laugh together.]
MARY HUNT:
If I could, I would help
PAUL MORGAN:
I appreciate that.
MARY HUNT:
Well, best of luck with your important work. Thanks for being my guest. Paul. I really enjoyed the conversation.
PAUL MORGAN:
My pleasure. Thank you. Mary
ANNOUNCER/MARY HUNT:
Paul L. Morgan is an Empire Innovation Professor and Social and Health Equity Endowed Professor in the Department of Health Policy, Management and Behavior at the College of Integrated Health Sciences, and the inaugural director of the Institute for Social and Health Equity at the University at Albany. Dr Morgan's work investigates disparities in disability identification and treatment during childhood, including ADHD, learning disabilities, speech language impairments, and autism. Additionally, his work examines school children's mental and behavioral health. Dr Morgan's work has appeared in Pediatrics, Journal of Pediatrics, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Psychiatry Research, Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, and the Journal of Learning Disabilities. Dr Morgan's findings on health and educational equity have been reported on in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and World Report, Politico, CBS News, NPR, NBC News, Fox News, USA Today, Forbes, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, Kaiser Health News and Salon, as well as repeatedly cited by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
For more information on the Institute for Social and Health Equity, visit the resource page for this podcast online at the dash engagement dash ring dot simplecast dot com. The Engagement Ring is produced by the University at Albany's Office for Public Engagement. If you have questions or comments or want to share an idea for an upcoming podcast, email us at UAlbany O P E at Albany dot E D U.
[Music fades out.]gether on the calendar. Thanks for sticking with it, and we finally got to chat.
PAUL MORGAN:
Thanks, the pleasure’s been mine. Thank you so much. Mary
ANNOUNCER/MARY HUNT:
Paul L. Morgan is an Empire Innovation Professor and Social and Health Equity Endowed Professor in the Department of Health Policy, Management and Behavior at the College of Integrated Health Sciences, and the inaugural director of the Institute for Social and Health Equity at the University at Albany. Dr Morgan's work investigates disparities in disability identification and treatment during childhood, including ADHD, learning disabilities, speech language impairments, and autism. Additionally, his work examines school children's mental and behavioral health. Dr Morgan's work has appeared in Pediatrics, Journal of Pediatrics, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Psychiatry Research, Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, and the Journal of Learning Disabilities. Dr Morgan's findings on health and educational equity have been reported on in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and World Report, Politico, CBS News, NPR, NBC News, Fox News, USA Today, Forbes, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, Kaiser Health News and Salon, as well as repeatedly cited by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. For more information on the Institute for Social and Health Equity, visit the resource page for this podcast online at the dash engagement dash ring dot simplecast dot com. The Engagement Ring is produced by the University at Albany's Office for Public Engagement. If you have questions or comments or want to share an idea for an upcoming podcast, email us at UAlbany O P E at Albany dot E D U.
[Music fades out]