Background: Students of color are disproportionately placed in special education throughout the United States. Prior research suggests that special education is used too often in high-poverty schools partly due to limited resources available to support struggling students (Skiba et al., 2006). More recent studies, however, suggest that overrepresentation is not necessarily driven by the misidentification of students with a disability. When considering student background characteristics and peer racial and socioeconomic composition, Black students, have also been found to be underrepresented in special education, specifically in high-minority schools (Elder et al., 2021). Less explored in the research are the effects of disproportionality - regardless of the mechanism - on educational attainment for over-represented groups. Although disproportionality may increase within-school segregation by removing more students of color from general classroom settings, there may also be detrimental effects on student performance. Particularly in the case of misidentification - which can occur with more subjectively diagnosed disability categories like Specific Learning Disabilities student needs may not be appropriately met through special education. On the contrary, disproportionate underrepresentation may result in students not receiving services that they are entitled to, and should be receiving, to meet their educational needs. Given the research needs around understanding the consequences of disproportionality, the purpose of this study was twofold. Firstly, I sought to understand how special education placement differentially impacts student achievement by race in two districts where disproportionality is well-established. Secondly, I attempted to reconcile observed heterogeneity in light of differential rates of special education placement by race. While prior research has explored the relationship between special education placement and student achievement (i.e., Schwartz et al., 2021), an important contribution of this study is the focus on the intersectionality between race and gender, along with a discussion of how these results relate to disproportionality. Data and methodology: The study uses student-level data from the two high-poverty school districts in a northeastern state. The sample includes 86,000 students between 2001 and 2016 who were not placed in special education before fourth grade. About 7,100 students from this sample were placed in special education by eighth grade. First, I demonstrated disproportionality in the districts using linear probability models that show how race-by-gender predicts special education placement, before and after controlling for student characteristics and prior achievement. Next, I used student fixed effects models with a time variant indicator for special education placement to show how achievement in math and English Language Arts (ELA) changed following placement. These models compare students to themselves, while also controlling for grade, year, school, and other time-variant characteristics. I then added race-by-gender interactions with the special education indicator to look at effects by each group. Finally, I triangulated findings between the set of analyses to how demonstrate how belonging to a group with low and high levels of placement relates to the effect of being placed. Findings: The results of the linear probability models (Figure 1) predicting special education placement show that Black and White males in the sample had the highest rates of placement (10%), even after controlling for prior achievement. Asian males and females had the lowest rates of placement (6%). The results of the student fixed models (Table 1) demonstrate considerable heterogeneity in achievement across race and gender following special education placement. Asian students - both male and female - appeared to benefit the most following placement in ELA and math achievement, demonstrating noteworthy gains in both subjects. On the other hand, the relationship between special education placement and academic achievement was most negative for White students, regardless of gender. For Black and Hispanic students, effects varied by gender. Males from these groups experienced declines in ELA and no changes in math following special education placement. Black and Hispanic females appeared to benefit modestly from special education placement, although these estimates likely reflect mean reversion. In sum, it appears that - with exception to Asian students - few students across these school districts positively and meaningfully benefited from special education placement as reflected by their academic achievement. Special education may have prevented further declines, however, as achievement stabilized for most subgroups after placement. Discussion: Taken together, the findings suggest that special education is likely overused in these two school districts. The race-by-gender groups with the highest adjusted probabilities of special education placement - Black males, White males and females, and Hispanic males Ð-experienced continued declines in ELA achievement following placement, and no changes in math achievement. On the other hand, the groups with the lowest probabilities of special education placement - Asian males and females - experienced academic gains in both subjects following placement. One way of interpreting these findings is that students who are more likely to need special education - proxied by low incidences of placement within race-by-gender groups - are more likely to benefit from its supports. For example, given the low rate of placement among Asian students, those placed in special education are likely in high need. Due to unobserved confounding, however, the special education regression effect may also reflect additional investments in education families make after their child is designated an IEP, such as afterschool tutoring. Therefore, another possibility is that special education in the district is simply ineffective as a whole, and students who experience achievement gains after placement may simply be benefiting from other investments received at the time. While this unobserved confounding may certainly drive part of the observed effects, given that there is heterogeneity in regression effect estimates by gender - such as Black females improving in math achievement but Black males experiencing no change - there is reason to believe that special education supports alone are effective for some students but not for others, and this may be tied to misidentification. If supports are not adequately aligned to student needs, then not only will they not be effective - as evidenced here - but there may be negative consequences stemming from how students perceive their own academic abilities after being identified with a disability.