Overrepresentation Of Minorities In Special Education

Special Education is designed to support and to serve children with disabilities. In theory, eligible students are to receive specialized instructions by teacher with specific training, tutoring, and extra attention from teachers, counselors, and other professed(prenominal) support staff. Since, Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) was passed it has brought benefits to students who were not previously served in this country. despite the improvements from the laws, the benefits of special education have not been distributed correctly. Inappropriate practices in both general and special education programs have resulted in overrepresentation, misclassification, and hardship for minority students. The assumption of overrepresentation among all minority radicals is that, when represented accurately, the proportion of different ethnic groups in any class or program should be equal to the proportion of the said(prenominal) group in the general school population. When an ethnic group has two disproportionate groups in the school population, overrepresentation occurs.
In lay to understand todays overrepresentation we must understand what has happened in our country in the past. In the past our country warrant racial sequestration.



Special education was used as a means of classifying and segregating the immigrant population of Irish, Italians, Germans, Russians, and others flooding the schools and isolating them from the more establish Americans (Sarason and Doris, 1979). Placement into much(prenominal) programs was used as a supremacy mechanism based on stereotypes, prejudiced beliefs, and fears (Thomas, 1986).
Even though it is illegal today to segregate students it seems to be occurring in a subtle way through special education. According to Williams-Dixon (1991), such placements may constitute a new version of segregation and discrimination by sentencing minority students to special classes with low or non-existent educational expectations. While many educational policy makers are...If you emergency to get a full essay, order it on our website: Orderessay



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