The Theory Of Culture As A Disability

On December 3, 2004, President Bush signed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004. This Act is also known as Public Law 108-446. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is the law that secures special education services for children with disabilities from the time they are born until they graduate from high school. The law was re-authorized by Congress in 2004. This re-authorization has driven a series of changes in the way special education services are executed. These changes are continuing today and they affect special education and related services across the United States.

There have also been landmark court cases like Brown v Board of Education and Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children v. Pennsylvania (PARC) which as a result set the wheels in motion for special education reform. The Education for Handicapped Children Act of 1975 was amended and renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education ACT (IDEA) in 1990, has had the greatest impact on special education in public schools. When the law was originally passed in 1975 it required all school districts that accepted federal funds to provide disabled students, ages 5-21, equal access to an education in the least restrictive (LRE) setting possible. Schools were to also disperse funds equally among all students and provide free of charge, the necessary

According to the 22nd annual report to congress (2003), African-American students are overrepresented in 9 or 13 disability categories: specific learning disabilities, speech and language impairments, mental retardation, emotional disturbance, multiple disabilities, hearing impairments, autism, traumatic brain injury, and developmental delay. Meanwhile, Hispanic students exceed population estimates in 3 categories: specific learning disabilities, hearing impairments, and orthopedic impairments.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is a federal mandate that regulates how educational agencies supply children with disabilities early intervention services, special education classes, and additional assistance that is equitable to a general education student who does not have a disability. The services under the IDEA law are offered to children from birth to age 21. Students who qualify for services under the IDEA Act

In 1997, the United States Department of Education stated that disproportionate representation in special education is a problem, predominately affecting African American boys. The Individuals with Disabilities

Guardians of six African American elementary school children, in San Francisco filed a suit against the California Department of Education in 1971. The offended party represented a class of African American children who had been placed – or later in the future be placed in a special education class called EMR “educable mentally retarded.” The EMR classed was designed for children who were found to be incapable of learning in a regular class. Keeping them from developing the necessary skills for them to return to a regular school environment. The offended parties challenged the process of the standardized individual intelligence tests. Expressing that it was one-sided against African American children, which can cause an increased socioeconomic

Harry, B., & Klingner, J. K. (2006). Why are so many minority students in special education?: Understanding Race & Disability in Schools. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

The purpose of the article’s introduction is to highlight the challenges that students from minority go through in special education schools. Linking his personal experiences as a former special educator, Connor strives to explore the intersection of learning disability, race, and class. The author collected data by conducting interviews with a participant researcher to get his side of the story. Connor planned to compare his LDs experiences with his own.

Disability in a socio-cultural context can be defined as "a barrier to participation of people with impairments or chronic illnesses arising from an interaction of the impairment or illness with discriminatory attitudes, cultures, policies or institutional practices" (Booth, 2000). The traditional view of disability often focuses on the individual, highlighting incapacities or failings, a defect, or impairment. This focus creates obstacles to participation on equal terms since an individual who seems to lack certain capacities may not be able to attain autonomy.

Disproportionate identification of minority students in special education is a major concern in schools today. This paper describes the issues in the assessment process with minority students and how we have arrived at a situation where minorities are being misdiagnosed into special education programs. Additionally, several legal cases are mentioned which show numerous actions and rulings that have tried to correct the disproportionate identification in special education. Some of the legal cases discussed include Larry P. v Riles, Diana v. State Board of Education, and Guadalupe v. Tempe Elementary School, which all significantly impacted special education today. Additionally, the Individual with Disabilities Education Act has enforced

Yet, it is important to distinguish between negative academic outcomes due to environmental factors and actual learning or intellectual disabilities. Moreover, these factors do not justify the disproportionality, thus, many leaders suggest that the source of this misrepresentation is within the school system itself, not the students. In the specific case of learning disabilities, some experts question the validity of this condition and suggest that the real problem is that some schoolchildren are not receiving adequate academic experiences (Fletcher and Navarrete, 2003). Furthermore, test bias, conscious or unconscious bias, cultural mismatch, and racism remain regrettable but likely factors for misdiagnosis due to the lack of diversity in the teaching force and the lack of cultural responsive training (Skiba, 2013).

In a 2014 report from McCann, special education services were federally mandated for the first time in 1965 by the Education of Handicapped Children Act, and a two-year $3.5 million program was created to provide formula grants to states for funding education of special needs students. According to the website, www.understandingspecialeducation.com (2009), in 1975 Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act which guaranteed a “free and appropriate public education” (FAPE). This act was later modified and became the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or IDEA. IDEA requires individual states to provide children with special education services as a condition of receiving federal funding for education. The largest portion of IDEA is called IDEA

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is a United States federal law that consents of four categories outlining how public agencies and individual states ensures that students with various disabilities are provided a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) in the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE) that is conditioned to their specific needs regardless of their ability. This act mandates tailored services, educational modifications, and the main objective for these children throughout the nation is to supply them with the same possibility of getting an education as those who do not have a disability until the age of 21.

Social, cultural and political changes have immense influences on the education sector. This has been witnessed from the onset African and Asian immigration into the United States from 1954 till present times. During the last quarter of the 20th century, immigrants to the US were denied education and those who received education did so under great threats. The dominant view of society about immigrants during this period was extremely negative and rejecting; thereby not deserving of an education. Currently, the education has been made affordable to everybody due to changing atmosphere of unprecedented social change. In education, this change resulted in the legal dismantling of segregated education for African American children (Collins, 2008). As African American children integrated the schools in the United States, they came to school with the stigma of slavery and the negative attitudes held by the agents of the educational institution. Attitudes and held perceptions were the catalyst for constructions such as biased assessment and the retardation paradigm. From these constructions emerged practices in special education that held large numbers of African American students captive in not only the educational milieu, but also limited their work potential. For this reason, the sociopolitical landscape as a context for curriculum, instruction, and assessment has continued to play a significant role in the education

He shows this by saying, “It is this use of disability as a marker of hierarchical relations that historians of disability must demonstrate in order to bring disability into the mainstream of historical study” (Baynton 34). Subconscious associations surround disability in America; disability is linked with social burdens, differences with mental illness, and impairment with deterioration. Baynton employs the examples of women 's suffrage and African American civil rights to display this metaphor of disability as inferiority. He explains that “the concept of disability has been used to justify discrimination against other groups by attributing disability to them”(Baynton 33). In a rejection of social equality, humanity understands women 's perceived physical and physiological attributes to be disabling, solely because they are different from men’s attributes. These traits, including excess emotionality and physical weakness, are considered to be an impairment that makes life harder for women. Similarly, Baynton explains that disability arguments were common in justifying slavery in the nineteenth century. One argument stated that African Americans were not competent enough to function in society and therefore were meant for captivity. American culture doesn 't cope well with differences, which results in the societal antipathy surrounding disability.