Public Schools Should Not Be Classified As Disabled

Over the past 30 years, the U.S. public school system has faced a significant issue of disproportionate representation of culturally and linguistically diverse students in special education programs. According to Salend (2002), disproportionate representation is defined as the presence of students from a specific group (e.g., race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, language background, gender, etc.) is higher or lower than one would expect based on their representation in the general population of students. Although there have been many efforts to reduce the disproportion in special education, the trend of minority overrepresentation is ongoing. The federal government tried to rectify it with provisions made in the 1997 reauthorization of†¦show more content†¦Possible causes of disproportionate special education representation are incongruity between teachers and culturally diverse students and families, issues with the assessment and referral process and ineffective curricul um and instructional practices. Teachers are often attributed to the problem because they typically make the initial special education referrals. Teacher perceptions are often biased and have been indicated as a contributing factor to special education disproportionality. A teacher lacks of adequate training, cultural insensitivity, and biased way of thinking may affect the referral process. Teacher differences from their students in their racial and ethnic identities, cultural, socioeconomic level, education level, and personal views can also have an impact. Although the number of students in education are increasingly a member of ethnic groups of color, poor, urban residents, and multilingual, the teaching profession is overwhelmingly European-American, female, middle class, sub- urban, and monolingual (Gay, 2002). According to Gay, (2002) Teachers tend to perceive European and Asian students as having higher intelligence and academic abilities. They tend to perceive African and Latinos students as having more disciplinary problems. In some cases teachers may be more biased based on personality, temperament, and social competence. Teachers need to be more aware of their own cultural