Special education is intended to provide support and services to help students with disabilities learn to their full potential. In theory, and often in practice, students who are eligible for special education receive valuable assistance in the forms of tutoring and specialized instruction by teachers with specific training.Most important, special education is services for children, not a place where children are sent.

Historically, special education has too often been a place - a place to segregate minorities and students with disabilities. Individuals with disabilities are often confronted with fear, prejudice, and stigma. Today, despite some far-reaching improvements, both racial and disability discrimination persists. As a result, minority children deemed eligible for special education are in jeopardy of being discriminated against on the grounds of both race and disability.

In 1998, approximately 1.5 million minority children were identified as having mental retardation, emotional disturbance, or a specific learning disability. Compared to White children, African American children (in data from 1997) were almost three times more likely to be labeled "mentally retarded."

Some minority children do need special education support, but far too often they receive low-quality services and watered-down curriculum instead of effective support. Moreover, research suggests that minority students are less likely to be mainstreamed than similarly situated White students.

Most pronounced is the dramatic overrepresentation of African American male children labeled "mentally retarded" compared to Whites, as well as other minorities. To the extent that minority students are misclassified, segregated, or inadequately served, special education can contribute to a denial of equality of opportunity, with devastating results in communities throughout the nation.

The special education evaluation process is often described as a set of discrete decisions based on scientific analysis and assessment. In reality the evaluative decisions are more subjective, with many interdependent variables, including school politics and cultural bias. A host of factors, such as the quality of regular education and classroom management are equally important, and often go unrecognized.

Poverty and other socio-economic factors correlate highly with the incidence of disability among nearly all groups, and across most categories of disability. But once socio-economic factors are accounted for, the effect of race and ethnicity remains significant. Most profound is that, contrary to expectations, as factors associated with wealth and better schooling increase, African American boys are at greater risk of being disproportionately labeled "mentally retarded." (Oswald, Coutinho and Best)

Minority students are less likely than their White counterparts to receive counseling and psychological supports when they first exhibit signs of emotional turmoil, and often go without adequate services once identified. This lack of early intervention and support correlates highly with dropouts and suspension or expulsion, and helps explain why minority school aged children are overrepresented in the juvenile justice system. (Osher, Woodruff and Sims)

Evidence suggests that many students are not provided with the opportunities to learn the tested material. (Heubert)

· State funding mechanisms appear to affect minority overrepresentation in special education. Where state funding is weighted to spend more money in relation to the degree of disability, African American students often face a greater chance of being labeled "retarded" and placed in restrictive programs. Moreover, such programs receive less money per student than in states where the funding is not weighted by severity of disability. (Parrish)

· Two recent settlements brought on behalf of minority students in Chicago, using disability law, have resulted in substantive changes in teacher training, special education referrals, evaluations and performance goals for students with disabilities. The lawsuit also resulted in a multi-million dollar infusion of funds for measures designed to increase access to the regular education classroom and curriculum. (Soltman and Moore)

· Interventions by the United States Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights have not often been comprehensive enough or sufficiently monitored to ensure significant improvements for minority students with disabilities. (Glennon and Schafer; Losen and Welner)

· The Office for Special Education Programs of the United States Department of Education, charged with enforcing the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), has achieved only limited success in ensuring that local school districts comply with IDEA. (Hehir)

While often treated as having a singular disorder, many students with EBD often have a variety of emotional, behavioral, and learning problems such as attention deficit disorder, anxiety, depression, and conduct disorder (Carron & Rutter, 1991; Friedman, Kutash, & Duchnowski, 1996) which in turn place them at risk for substance abuse and delinquent behavior (Loeber, Farrington, Stouhamer-Loeber, & Van Kammen, 1998; Rutter, Giller, & Hagell, 1998).

This is a particularly hazardous occurrence for black males who, compared to their white peers, are more likely to deal with a toxic social environment where the lack of economic opportunity, lack of credentials, poor job readiness, and underdeveloped job seeking skills create a particular disadvantage (Wilson, 1997; Hawkins xxx, 2000), and where racial profiling (intuitive or procedural) increases the likelihood of encounters with police where impulsivity or poor social skills can lead to being arrested for such offenses as "contempt of cop" (Osher et al., in press; Prothrow-Stith, 1991; Snyder & Sickmund, 1999).

© 2003 by AfroStaff

Source from: U.S. Department of Education http://www.ed.gov/index.jsp