Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College

On April 30, 2026, Texas executed James Broadnax, a Black man who was sentenced to death for the robbery and murder of two men in 2008.

Before the jury was seated, the prosecutor moved to dismiss each of the seven Black people from the jury pool. Citing court documents, CNN noted that he “(utilized) a spreadsheet during jury selection that bolded only the names of every Black juror” and none of the white or Latino people. After defense objections, the judge reseated one Black juror, citing the otherwise all-white jury.

The trial proceeded with 11 white jurors and one Black juror.

A jury with that racial composition is likely to deliberate in a different way than one that is more racially diverse. According to Duke University law professor James Coleman, “Juries with two or more members of color deliberate longer, discuss a wider range of evidence, and collectively are more accurate in their statements about cases, regardless of the race of the defendant.”

A 2012 Duke University study of two Florida counties found that juries “formed from all-white jury pools convicted Black defendants 16% more often than white defendants, a gap that was nearly eliminated when at least one member of the jury pool was Black.”

Broadnax was executed on the 40th anniversary of Batson v. Kentucky, in which the Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors cannot exclude jurors solely on account of their race.

But Broadnax’s case is not an outlier. Similar efforts to “whiten” juries in capital cases regularly occur in states that authorize the death penalty. A 2025 analysis of Alabama’s death row by the Equal Justice Initiative found that across 122 capital cases – involving Black and white defendants in roughly equal numbers – more than one-third were decided by juries with no Black jurors or, like Broadnax’s case, only one.

As a death penalty scholar who has tracked the role of race in the death penalty system, I believed Batson was a step forward in the effort to address a long history of excluding Black people from jury service. But 40 years have shown that Batson merely scratched the surface of the problem.

A long history

The exclusion of Black people from jury service is as old as the republic itself.

Before the Civil War, one way this was done was by limiting eligibility for such service to those who could vote. Some states went further, saying only whites could serve on juries. A Tennessee law dating from 1858 is a good example: “Every white male citizen who is a freeholder, or householder, and twenty-one years of age, is legally qualified to act as a grand or petit juror.”

It was only after the Civil War and the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution that Black people were entitled to serve on juries nationwide – at least in theory.

Some states resisted. For example, West Virginia law specified that “all white male persons who are twenty-one years of age and who are citizens of this State shall be liable to serve as jurors.”

In 1880, 12 years after the ratification of the 14th Amendment – which guarantees equal protection of the law – the Supreme Court struck down that West Virginia law. It did so in the case of a former slave who was convicted in a capital case by an all-white jury and given a death sentence – a preview, I believe, of the kind of thing that happened to Broadnax.

The court held that the West Virginia law that “denies to colored citizens the right and privilege of participating in the administration of the law as jurors because of their color … is, practically, a brand upon them, and a discrimination against them which is forbidden by the [14th] amendment.”

Despite the court’s unequivocal ruling, the door to jury service remained closed to Black people. As legal scholar Sarah Claxton argued in 2022, “States across the country enacted vague and subjective standards for juror eligibility – requiring good moral character, honest and intelligent men, persons having educational qualifications – whose discriminatory application excluded Black citizens from juries.”

The modern story

The story of racial discrimination in jury selection is not simply a story of a now discredited past.

In 1965, the Supreme Court refused to remedy the exclusion of Black people from juries that its 1880 decision was supposed to have ended. It held, in Swain v. Alabama, that “a defendant in a criminal case is not constitutionally entitled to a proportionate number of his race on the trial jury or the jury panel.”

Two decades passed before the court again took up the glaring problem of racial discrimination by prosecutors seeking to keep Black people off juries.

In Batson v. Kentucky, the court considered a case in which the prosecuting attorney “used his peremptory challenges to strike all four black persons” in the jury pool and managed to seat an all-white jury. And on April 30, 1986, it reaffirmed that “a State denies a Black defendant equal protection when it puts him on trial before a jury from which members of his race have been purposefully excluded.”

The court then created a process for challenging jury selection. First, the defendant must point to evidence – based on how the prosecutor used their strikes – that suggests racial discrimination. If they can, the prosecutor must then come forward with “a neutral explanation for challenging Black jurors.” Finally, the trial judge weighs all the evidence to decide whether the prosecutor’s stated reason is genuine or a cover for bias. In practice, this means a Batson challenge will fail as long as the prosecutor can offer any nonracial reason for excluding Black jurors, however thin.

When Batson v. Kentucky was decided, Justice Thurgood Marshall, drawing on his years of experience as an NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyer, warned that the decision would not end racial discrimination in jury selection. “Merely allowing defendants the opportunity to challenge the racially discriminatory use of peremptory challenges in individual cases will not end the illegitimate use of the peremptory challenge,” he explained.

He predicted that “any prosecutor can easily assert facially neutral reasons for striking a juror, and trial courts are ill-equipped to second-guess those reasons.”

40 years of Batson

History has proved Marshall right.

In the Broadnax case, prosecutors claimed that their efforts to remove Black jurors had nothing to do with their race. They suggested that they were dismissed because they could not be impartial or they had reservations about the death penalty, disqualifying them from service on a jury in a capital murder trial.

The Batson test has not been much of an obstacle for prosecutors in other capital cases either. In fact, in 2025 the Death Penalty Information Center reported that in the years after Batson, “prosecutors soon learned how to successfully defend race-based challenges, and courts generally accepted even the flimsiest excuses.” That’s why defendants rarely win Batson challenges “despite powerful evidence of racial bias.”

In the 40 years since Batson was decided, the Death Penalty Information Center has identified only 68 cases across 16 states in which a capital defendant succeeded in getting a conviction or death sentence reversed because of racial discrimination in jury selection.

The picture is similar in California, where more comprehensive data exists. According to a 2020 Berkeley Law report, the California Supreme Court reviewed 142 cases involving Batson claims over 30 years and found a violation in only three. At the time the report was published, it had been more than three decades since that court found a Batson violation involving the strike of a Black prospective juror.

Looking at what has happened since Batson v. Kentucky, Elisabeth Semel, a UC Berkeley law professor and co-director of the school’s Death Penalty Clinic, said in an interview with the Death Penalty Information Center that she would give Batson a grade of “F.” As she explained, “It certainly has failed to achieve its promise.”

Austin Sarat does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Why a landmark Supreme Court ruling has failed to keep racial bias out of jury selection – https://theconversation.com/why-a-landmark-supreme-court-ruling-has-failed-to-keep-racial-bias-out-of-jury-selection-282132

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Robert M. Thorson, Professor of Earth Science, University of Connecticut

The steam locomotive chugged its way toward Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Aug. 15, 1859. On board was an impatient young scientist wanting to understand the math and science governing how river channels should behave. After disembarking at Harvard College and searching the stacks of its library, Henry David Thoreau checked out “Principes D’Hydraulique,” a three-volume tome of hydraulic engineering.

Once he translated and transcribed 17 pages from the original French, he finally discovered what he was looking for: an equation for the equilibrium velocity of a stream, given its shape, slope, volume of flow and bed roughness.

This theoretically minded, quantitative side of Thoreau is nearly invisible in the cultural zeitgeist. There, his other side dominates: the famous 19th-century transcendental nature writer, philosopher, social critic and abolitionist who lived for two years in a small house in the woods above Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts.

This literary-minded, qualitative Thoreau is canonized and mythologized for “Walden,” a foundational text for America’s environmental movement, and for “Civil Disobedience,” which describes a model of nonviolent political protest later adopted by Emma Goldman, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and many others.

The nearly invisible Thoreau – the compulsively quantitative and analytically rigorous physical scientist – emerged from my research as a geologist interested in the history of 19th-century science. With two decades of scholarly books and articles behind me, I’m now featuring this less well-known Thoreau in my upcoming book, “The Walden Experiments: The Science of Henry David Thoreau.”

Footnote to fame

Thoreau rose to fame as an original American thinker. He’s now the star of an award-winning video game. The Thoreau Alliance, an organization dedicated to educating about his life and legacy, is international. A recently released and highly acclaimed Ken Burns-Ewers brothers biopic, “Henry David Thoreau,” focuses on the usual side of Thoreau as a writer and activist, emphasizing his focus on environmental justice, sustainable living and the power of nature to heal our increasingly technological and frenetic lives.

I served as an adviser for and appear in the film, which touches on Thoreau’s science. These touches are limited mainly to his work as a biological naturalist. Examples include his pioneering insights on the dispersal of seeds, his anticipation of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection and his study of the seasonal manifestations of natural phenomena, such as plants’ flowering times and bird migrations.

Physical science

“I keep out of doors for the sake of the mineral, vegetable, and animal in me.”

Thoreau wrote this entry in his journal on Nov. 4, 1852, when he was busy researching the lake at Walden Pond. His words remind readers that any search for meaning must ultimately begin with the bedrock roots of their lives on which all plants, animals and cultures depend. My way of saying the same thing is, “No rocks, no ecosystems, no cultures.”

During his research on the lake and nearby streams, Thoreau made an original discovery in fluid mechanics. On June 4, 1854, he wrote the first known technical description of a standing capillary wave: a small water wave that, instead of rippling outward, stays in a fixed position.

This phenomenon, which he later made a technical drawing of, is now known as the Thoreau-Reynolds Ridge. His co-discoverer, Osborne Reynolds, was a pioneering Irish-British hydraulic engineer.

Limnology and geology

Thoreau also pioneered limnology, the science of lakes. He studied how light passed through the water of Lake Walden in liquid, solid and vapor phases, how the lake stored heat in stable layers during the summer and winter, how the water chemistry affected its clarity, and how lakes eventually fill to become dry land.

His 1939 recognition as America’s first limnologist precedes by two years his 1941 canonization as an important American writer.

Thoreau correctly interpreted that his New England landscape had been shaped by a colossal ice sheet that had flowed southward from Canada. At the time, the state geologist of Massachusetts and the American science establishment were incorrectly attributing the same landscape to an iceberg-laden catastrophic flood. He also correctly reasoned that his beloved Walden Pond was born when a buried remnant of that ice sheet melted downward to create a groundwater-filled sinkhole called a kettle.

He kept a growing reference collection of rocks and minerals in his attic garret that was later exhibited for decades at the nearby Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, Massachusetts. His journal entries are peppered with geological insights related to these specimens. His final journal entry is a geological interpretation of rain splash erosion.

Thoreau’s river science

The most analytically rigorous science of Thoreau’s life culminated with his 1859 research trip to the library stacks of Harvard College. At the time, he was investigating how the Concord River watershed had changed in response to the construction of a downstream factory dam a century earlier.

Thoreau’s research was a clandestine part of a protracted legal case involving four acts of the state Legislature between 1859 and 1862. Potentially, this was America’s first major environmental assessment because it examined alternative actions to dam removal and weighed environmental protection against socioeconomic costs.

During a span of 18 months, Thoreau carried out nearly 50 discrete research tasks to create dozens of tables of numerical data and a detailed compilation map of the Concord River Valley that’s over 7 feet long. His river science predates that of the United States’ first recognized river scientist by 18 years.

The boldest claim of my latest book is that Thoreau’s sharp swerve toward science in 1851-52 led to the rescue of “Walden,” his most famous work. Specifically, his field research led to an understanding of its namesake place as a natural system of water, air, land, aquifer and life that included humanity. This more complex and inclusive vision transformed what had been an abandoned draft of social critique into the nature writing that became a foundational text for America’s environmental movement.

The Thoreau who built literary castles in the air put the solid foundations of physical science beneath them.

Robert M. Thorson was an unpaid scholarly advisor for the film project described here and appears in the film.

– ref. Thoreau the scientist – how environmental research informed ‘Walden’ and later works – https://theconversation.com/thoreau-the-scientist-how-environmental-research-informed-walden-and-later-works-281097

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Matthew N. Hannah, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Politics and Culture, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Jeffrey Epstein’s death on Aug. 10, 2019, sparked a flurry of conspiracy theories, and the release of Epstein’s purported suicide note on May 6, 2026, is a good bet to be fodder for more.

But Epstein’s death is only one facet of the convicted sex offender’s story to spawn and sustain conspiracy theories.

The Department of Justice has released more than 3 million publicly available documents related to the shadowy sex-trafficking networks surrounding Epstein. Journalists and researchers are working to make sense of the massive trove of data, but it is going slowly, and the interface built by the Department of Justice to the documents is unwieldy.

In response, some Americans have taken it upon themselves to dive into the archive. They are using artificial intelligence to develop platforms to make navigating the Epstein files easier and to conjure up new assessments of all the information.

As a scholar of online conspiratorial activity, I’m seeing that these tools are also helping conspiracy theorists craft their narratives.

Do-it-yourself conspiracy platforms

Because the Epstein files are a massive, unstructured dataset made up of PDF files, videos, photographs and other materials, these platforms make it easier for people to see connections where none exist.

Some of the platforms are intentionally masquerading as neutral, data-driven AI research tools but are actually designed by conspiracy theorists to encourage and amplify conspiracy thinking, leading to what I call “platform conspiracism.”

Epstein conspiracy theories often follow a classic logical fallacy known as “post hoc ergo propter hoc” — assuming that because event A happened before event B, event A must have caused event B. For example, in 2017, QAnon participants claimed that there was a secret cabal of satanic pedophiles trafficking children, so by this faulty logic, the subsequent Epstein revelations must be evidence that QAnon was right.

Some Epstein platform operators are supplementing their thinking with ideas from QAnon and other online conspiracy movements about cannibalism, satanism or the CIA’s experiments with mind control in the 1950s known as MK Ultra.

The platform conspiracists have a ready audience because many Americans are concerned about the vast tentacles of Epstein affiliates reaching into government, entertainment, academia and the tech industry. And of course many people simply want to know who is in the files and why. The unintended, or in some cases intended, consequences are that the do-it-yourself conspiracy platforms encourage paranoia and conspiracism.

Each time the Department of Justice releases or tries to not release a new crop of documents, it sparks widespread interest. Social media influencers, for example, immediately share videos of their own interpretations of the files.

Conspiracy masquerading as data analysis

One platform, called the WEBB, promises to use AI for “document intelligence” that can purportedly help researchers explore the Epstein files, flight logs, court documents and depositions.

Using a slick interface with literal red threads animating the screen as a reader moves their mouse, WEBB automates the messy data cleaning tasks that are required when working with unstructured data. The site says WEBB converts, optically records and indexes the files’ contents automatically, making the documents “structured, searchable intelligence.”

Named for Gary Webb, an investigative journalist who reported on an alleged CIA drug trafficking operation, WEBB invites users to imagine themselves as scrappy open-source intelligence researchers. It presents the platform as an objective resource that will be transparent about its functions. But even in the necessary first step of cleaning data, researchers make decisions that can steer the results.

One of the creators of WEBB is purported antisemitic conspiracy influencer Ian Carroll, who has appeared on Alex Jones’ Infowars and other far-right shows espousing conspiracy theories about Jewish cabals, 9/11 Trutherism, Epstein and Pizzagate, the discredited conspiracy theory in which child sex trafficking was allegedly happening at the Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria in Washington.

Carroll, or someone on his team, engages with people who mine the Epstein files through the WEBB interface, sharing their interpretations with his 1.4 million followers. Carroll also posts explainer videos showcasing his own conspiracy theory research with WEBB.

Other platforms such as Epstein Exposed and Epstein File Search offer similar platforms for “doing your own research” in the Epstein files. While they are less overtly conspiratorial, lacking endorsements from conspiracy theorists such as Candace Owens, such platforms use social media posts to encourage conspiracy research on their platforms.

An expanding web

WEBB also promises to begin adding datasets to its AI-powered platform that are related to other conspiracy theories, such as those about the 9/11 attacks and UFOs. Added “files” even include books of the Bible that were removed.

The WEBB team stated that their AI tool won’t hallucinate – create false or nonsensical content – because it is only trained on the file data, even though large language models routinely hallucinate because they are driven by probabilities.

It remains unclear how WEBB won’t hallucinate when it jumbles the Epstein files, JFK reports, 9/11 documents and Book of Enoch together. Carroll is now promoting a product called WEBB Enterprise, which presumably will include more access and tools for a fee.

Conspiracy of data

Whenever Americans are hungry for answers, platforms such as these can more easily masquerade as objective data analysis tools. They feed into a “conspiracy of data,” in which false or misleading information is presented in charts and graphics that create the impression of accuracy and authority.

Legitimate data analysis is complicated, messy and challenging, and best practices call for data analysis tools to emphasize transparency and context. For example, journalists at The New York Times use AI to supplement their work while also acknowledging the potential sloppiness of such tools and need for experts and journalists to do the work.

And as platforms like WEBB add their own datasets, the fodder for the paranoid fantasy of online conspiracy theories grows.

Matthew N. Hannah does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Conspiracy theorists are building AI interfaces to the Epstein files – and presenting their views as data analysis – https://theconversation.com/conspiracy-theorists-are-building-ai-interfaces-to-the-epstein-files-and-presenting-their-views-as-data-analysis-277949

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Christopher Niezrecki, Director of the Center for Energy Innovation, UMass Lowell

The U.S. is in a bizarre situation in 2026: It’s facing a looming energy shortage, yet the Trump administration is making deals to pay offshore wind developers nearly US$2 billion in taxpayer money to walk away from energy projects.

These politically motivated moves are costing Americans far more than just the buyouts.

Communities have been laying the groundwork for offshore energy projects for years. Offshore wind development brings jobs and economic development that reshape regional economies, with the scale of public and private investment reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars over years. East Coast communities have built up ports to support the industry and launched job-training programs to prepare workers. Construction, maintenance and shipping businesses have sprung up, along with secondary businesses that support the industry.

Losing the projects, and the threat of losing other planned wind farms, will also likely mean higher energy prices. And while some offshore wind farms are moving ahead, developers must account for both lost momentum and increased uncertainty from the Trump administration.

As a result, Americans will bear the economic brunt of these decisions for decades ahead.

How America got to this point

To understand how the U.S. arrived in this predicament, let’s take a step back.

In March 2023, leaders from three U.S. federal agencies under the Biden administration met with the CEOs from American technology and manufacturing giants Microsoft, Amazon, Ford, GM, Dow Chemical and GE at the annual ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit, under the banner of “Affordable, Reliable and Secure American-Made Energy”.

They agreed on a key point: The nation was staring down a severe shortage of electrons to drive American business forward.

Fortunately, solutions abounded. Enormous amounts of onshore wind and solar power had been deployed during the previous five years. More than 80% of all new power additions to the U.S. grid had come from these two sources.

Particularly exciting were plans to build large offshore wind farms up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Taken together, the wind farms would generate 30 gigawatts of new power by 2030, enough to power more than 10 million homes and reduce volatility in energy pricing thanks to long-term power purchase agreements.

The U.S. had one small wind farm at the time, off Rhode Island, and two wind turbines off Virginia, but Europe had been operating large offshore wind projects for over two decades and was building more.

In the months following the 2023 meeting, leasing and permitting for the U.S. mega projects continued, and in some areas construction got underway.

Then, the Trump administration arrived in 2025. As president, Donald Trump immediately issued an executive order to halt offshore wind lease sales and any approvals, permits or loans for wind farms. He had made his disdain for wind power clear ever since he lost a fight to stop construction of a small wind farm near his golf course in Scotland in the 2010s.

After a federal judge declared Trump’s executive order unconstitutional in December 2025, the administration shifted strategies.

In March 2026, news outlets began reporting on deals struck in which the federal government would pay three offshore wind project developers hundreds of millions of dollars to cease development of their permitted projects, agree not to build others and repurpose the funds toward fossil fuel projects.

According to reported discussions involving the French energy company TotalEnergies, the money would be paid out through the Department of Interior’s Judgment Fund, intended for payment of legal settlements, despite there not being any active litigation with TotalEnergies.

The other projects agreeing to Trump’s buyouts as of early May were Golden State Wind, in California, and Bluepoint Wind, off New Jersey and New York. Both are co-owned by Ocean Winds, a joint venture of the French energy company Engie and EDP Renewables, headquartered in Spain. The California Energy Commission and members of Congress are now investigating the moves.

Offshore wind means local investment

Regardless of whether these buyouts are even legal, the losing parties will be the American taxpayers and a U.S. economy that needs more electrons on the grid, not fewer.

One analysis projected that deploying 40 GW along the U.S. East Coast by 2035 would generate roughly $140 billion in investment, much of it concentrated in port infrastructure and supply chain development.

New York in early 2026 announced a $300 million state grant program to expand port infrastructure supporting offshore wind. And the New Jersey Wind Port represents an investment exceeding $600 million to enable manufacturing and assembly of turbines.

In 2025, California state lawmakers authorized $225.7 million in spending for offshore wind ports and related facilities.

For these projects to pay off for local communities, however, the regions will need to see the development of wind farms.

Killing jobs

The cancellations of the planned projects also take jobs away from hard-working, blue-collar Americans.

The construction and installation of offshore wind turbines requires the expertise of skilled electrical workers, pipe fitters, welders, pile drivers, iron workers, machinists and carpenters.

Future offshore wind costs depend on investments today. As infrastructure is established and expertise grows, each subsequent project becomes easier to build, less risky and less expensive.

This pattern is already evident globally: The levelized cost of electricity from offshore wind globally fell by 62% between 2010 and 2024.

Canceling projects or buying back leases eliminates the electricity those projects would have generated. It also slows the accumulation of experience, scale and supply chain maturity that drive costs down over time.

The result is higher costs for future projects and for electricity ratepayers.

An energy crisis

Developing a robust offshore wind industry provides resilience in the face of an unstable global energy market.

Future U.S. and global energy demand is projected to grow significantly, largely driven by the rapid expansion of AI data centers and electrification of vehicles, homes and businesses.

Limiting the supply of homegrown energy will increase energy costs for Americans, especially in the regions where the wind farms were supposed to be located – New York, New Jersey, North Carolina and California.

With the federal buyouts, the U.S. is losing 8 GW of planned electricity generation, enough to power more than 3 million homes. That generation needs to be replaced by other energy sources and expanding power transmission lines that can take seven to 10 years to get permits for and build out. The leased projects were on their way to providing new clean power generation fairly quickly. Eliminating them restarts the project clock.

Reliance on dirtier, conventional forms of power generation will increase along with foreign energy imports, such as electricity delivered from Canada to New York, leading to higher and more volatile electricity prices.

Evidence from Europe shows that offshore wind can also reduce electricity costs for consumers by lowering wholesale prices and reducing dependence on fossil fuels and their volatile prices.

Vineyard Wind I, an offshore wind farm completed in 2026, with 806 MW of generation – enough to power about 400,000 homes – is projected to save Massachusetts customers about $1.4 billion on electricity bills over the next 20 years. With a fixed-price, 20-year contract, the project also lowered prices during cold snaps and peak demand for gas, reducing volatility and cost.

From jobs to local economic development to power costs, we believe canceling these offshore wind projects is a bad deal for American taxpayers.

Christopher Niezrecki receives funding from from the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, ARROW Center, and several companies that support the WindSTAR Industry-University Cooperative Research Center.

Ben Link serves on the Maryland Clean Energy Center Board of Directors.

Zoe Getman-Pickering receives funding from The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center and Maryland Energy Administration. She is affiliated with ARROW based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. ARROW is a member of NE4Wind and sits on the advisory board for The Pacific Offshore Wind Consortium.

– ref. Why Trump’s $2 billion buyoff to cancel offshore wind farms is a bad deal for American taxpayers and the US energy supply – https://theconversation.com/why-trumps-2-billion-buyoff-to-cancel-offshore-wind-farms-is-a-bad-deal-for-american-taxpayers-and-the-us-energy-supply-282456

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Paul L. Morgan, Director, Institute for Social and Health Equity, University at Albany, State University of New York

Students who are Black, Hispanic, female, from low-income families or multilingual learners are less likely to be identified with autism in U.S. elementary schools than their white, male, higher-income or English-speaking peers. This finding comes from our new research, published in April 2026 in the academic journal Autism.

These disparities appear even among students who have similar levels of academic achievement and who are attending the same schools.

Our research shows there are big and recurring gaps in whether students are identified with having autism while they attend U.S. elementary schools. In both 2003 and 2019, for example, fourth grade female students were about 80% less likely to be identified with autism, as compared to similarly situated boys.

We found that for every 10 boys identified with autism, only about two girls in a comparable situation – including those displaying similar levels of reading achievement and attending the same schools – were identified.

We analyzed data repeatedly collected from 2003 to 2022, using large, nationally representative samples of about 160,000 fourth grade students participating in the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

We specifically looked at data that included student academic achievement. This approach let us consider potential bias in how a student’s disability is identified.

Why it matters

Understanding these disparities in U.S. elementary schools is important to help ensure that all students with disabilities have equal access to appropriate services and supports.

Schools are one of the most common places that provide disability services to children and adolescents. This includes students who have autism.

Some research finds that teachers are more understanding of a student’s classroom struggles when informed that the student has autism.

School-based special education services, such as speech therapy, often benefit students with disabilities, including those of color. Student will not receive these services without an identified disabilty.

For example, recent analyses of public data from Massachusetts, Indiana and Connecticut compared the achievement trajectories of the same students before and after they received special education services. The students did better in both reading and mathematics when they received special education services.

Students with disabilities are also more likely to graduate from high school and attend college if they receive special education services.

What still isn’t known

We do not know whether these disparities in autism identification are occurring in other elementary grades, at least based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress data.

In another of our recent analyses, though, we did observed racial disparities in autism identification across elementary grades.

Some other research suggests that students of color and girls experience significant delays in receiving autism diagnoses.

Our analysis is based on students who completed the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test. Students with severe autism and higher support needs who were unable to complete these assessments, even with accommodations, were not included in our analysis.

Future studies could examine whether sociodemographic disparities in autism identification are occurring in U.S. middle and high schools as well for students with significant impairments.

What’s next

Our additional preliminary analysis indicates there are other types of disparities at play. For example, we are finding that Black and Hispanic girls, low-income Black students and multilingual learners who are white or Hispanic are especially unlikely to be identified as having autism.

We are also exploring whether some of these disparities have grown, or otherwise changed, following recent increases in autism prevalence rates, including for students of color and girls.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Paul L. Morgan received funding from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences to support these analyses. Opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the view of the U.S. Department of Education.

– ref. Black, Hispanic, female and low-income elementary students are less likely to be identified with autism – https://theconversation.com/black-hispanic-female-and-low-income-elementary-students-are-less-likely-to-be-identified-with-autism-281469