Misrepresentation In Special Education Essay

Words: 520
Pages: 3

In American schools, students are sometimes placed in classes for discipline, behavioral, and emotional problems. Most of the students placed in these classes are of color. Special Education (Special Ed) is a system designed for students who may have learning problems, however, students of color are placed there for other reasons. Sometimes students of color are looked at differently than the dominant race and cause them to be set aside from others. This problem of students of color being placed in special education classrooms is known as minority students misrepresentation.
Overrepresentation occurs when the percentage of students with specific characteristics (e.g., race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, language background, gender, etc.) is higher than their proportion in the general population (Blanchett & Shealey, 2005). African-American children have been over-represented in special education classes in the school system. This overrepresentation has caused a disproportion of more African-American children in these classes than Caucasian children or other ethnic groups. Seeing that this is a problem based on this disproportionality, there has been a call to action to stop this from
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Studies have assessed the nature of this problem and reviewed many causes of disproportionality that will be discussed in this paper (Anderson & Harry, 1995; Codrington & Fairchild, 2012; Kearns & Ford, 2005). In schools across the country, African-American children are being educated in special education programs at a higher rate than their representation in the general population of the school (Kunjufu, 1986 & Piland, 2002). Since there seems to be a racial disparity with African-American children, there has been a sparked interest in the education community on this