SPED: The Role Of Minority Groups In Education

Before children can be declared eligible for special education or placed in a special education program, they must be evaluated by a team of professionals. The law requires that schools and other agencies give tests to children that show both their strengths and their weaknesses. This is called nondiscriminatory testing. All tests must be given to children in their own language and in such a way that their abilities and their disabilities are accurately displayed. Children will be placed in special education based upon several tests, not upon one single test or test score. Nondiscriminatory testing ensures that children who do not need special education will not be placed there, and that children who need special school services will get them. (Parent Educational

The special education programs in the United States have been designed to help children with special needs learn easier and fit in better with the education program. Unfortunately, many minority students get caught up in the mix and don’t get the proper attention they deserve. Furthermore, minority students are seriously over-represented in the educational programs. Many minority students are misdiagnosed and put into special education programs when in fact; they do not have a learning disability. This has become a growing problem in this country because it is seen as the easy way out. Schools all over the U.S. are doing this in order to not have to properly test and evaluate students for learning problems.

Some school systems assign disproportionate numbers of students from particular groups to special education classes. They

The Special Education team for learning disabilities will test the student. These students have shown signs of continuous problems with interventions in place. Psychologist, psychiatrist, and any other testing will be conducted with parental consent have evaluated the student. Parents will be mandated to attend all assessment evaluations and the team shall review the findings for referral back to tier two or upgrade student to tier four for special educational services based on educational or problematic behaviors.

The problem of disproportionate numbers of minority students in special education can be attributed to a report by Lloyd Dunn in 1968 (as cited in Skiba et al., 2008) even though discrimination was evident long before that in America. The phenomenon of disproportionality as it relates to students from minority backgrounds being placed in special education refers to the percentage of students receiving services being a higher rate than is expected or that differs significantly from other races. Skiba et al. (2008) discuss the history of various aspects of the civil rights movement as they pertain to the issue of disproportionality of students from minority backgrounds in special education, the measurement tools used to determine the need for special education, the current status of disproportionality, and what factors have contributed to the discrepancies in numbers. Finally, recommendations are offered by the authors on how the existence of disproportionality of students from a minority background can be rectified.

1. How does John Ogbu explain the achievement gaps between voluntary and involuntary groups in American schools?

High Stakes Testing has been overly integrated in the education systems. High-stakes testing are used to determine grade retention, school curriculum, and whether or not students will receive a high school diploma (Myers, 2015). Since the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001, high stakes testing has become the norm and mandating that students must pass a standardized test before moving up in grade. As a special education director, the focus is to ensure the student’s accommodations are being followed. Accommodations help increase students’ academic performance. “Both the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA) of 2004 and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) call for students with disabilities to participate in the general education curriculum and in testing programs to the maximum extent possible for each student (Luke and Schwartz, 2010).” Throughout the years, high stakes testing is becoming more common than ever before. The reality is high stakes testing is one indicator in evaluating children with specific needs. This paper will discuss, the violation of the statutory language regarding assessment based on IDEA, the strategies and goals of a remediation, staff training, common Core and PARCC assessment, and funding for the remediation plan under IDEA.

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).

Although most would say the action of learning a new language is the largest implication of minorities in the public education system, throughout the United States a decline of teachers who are willing to help minority students has proven to have a burden on their ability to learn.

Race in America is and has always been an enormous deal and a focal point in America and of many educational studies. Many studies have researched the educational achievement gap between minorities and non-minorities. I rather refer to it as the educational debt we as educators owe those students, this study looks at the idea of having more teachers of color in hopes to pay our debt of education back to these minority students. I surveyed over 100 minority students to gauge their attitudes concerning learning, motivation, confidence and much more to see how it differs from their minority teacher class and their non-minority teacher class. I also looked at grades of 20 students and was able to view a survey done about my class compared to

Wright suggests that the high percentage of minorities in low scoring schools may be a result of attendance zoning in most of America’s public school systems:

I have chosen to explore the disproportionate representation in special education because it is a topic that is of great concern among minorities. It is my passion to understand and work for equal justice among all students in education. The assessment test is the first critical part of deciding if a child needs special education. Therefore, to give a correct assessment, it would help the child and family to assess the child in their natural environment for at least one

The other issue that affected minorities are the teachers that are placed in the classrooms to teach. Many of these teachers are veteran teachers whom have been properly trained or able to continue upgrading themselves. Many do not have the interest in their jobs as a teacher and the few good teachers can only do what is humanly possible. Therefor the teachers graduating with A's and B's grades will be placed in the high tax paying neighborhoods while those with lower grades placed where the minorities can afford to live. Listed below are a few of the many issues that faces the children of minorities: they have less access fo advanced

Throughout my career I have always been amazed by how little regular education teachers know about the special education process. On numerous occasions I have had teachers ask me, “Why don’t you just test him, to see if he qualifies?” And when I tried to explain that there was more to the process then just testing, most of the time the teachers would walk away in disgust, without knowing the steps we had to follow in the process.

Education is the ability to receive knowledge in order to impact the world. Many scholars argue that there’s still a divide between ethnic groups and education and I agree because minorities are less likely to receive a better education than the majority.