Special Education for Language Minority Students

Abstract

NOVEMBER 1985Since the appearance of Dunn's (1968) article questioning the practice of placing mildly retarded children in self-contained special classes, the field of special education has been engaged in critical self-evaluation. Dunn argued against special classes for educable mentally retarded (EMR) children on the basis of the following:1. The composition of those classes typically consisted of a disproportionate number of minority children who were not "truly" retarded.2. The special classes had not resulted in the academic and personal growth expected.3. The practices of identifying and labeling resulted in negative self-fulfilling prophecies for those so labeled.Dunn's article focused attention on the criteria used for classifying children as handicapped and on the services provided as a result of such classification. The merits of his arguments have been discussed elsewhere (MacMillan, 1971(MacMillan, , 1982. It is not surprising that soon thereafter parents of Spanish-speaking students in California were able to obtain a consent decree requiring bilingual children to be tested in their native language.1 Besides the language issue, the content of the intelligence tests themselves was challenged as being culturally biased.2 The consent decree issued as part of the original Larry P. case required reevaluation and, if appropriate, decertification of EMR students who did not meet new state guidelines. In practice, decertification was effected if a student's IQ was higher than 70 (Meyers, MacMillan, & Yoshida, 1978). Although the numbers of EMR students declined over 50%, the proportions of minority studentsblacks and Hispanics-did not. Similar enrollment trends have been noted for minority students in learning disabled (LD) classes (Ortiz & Yates, 1981;Tucker, 1980).