Where Have All the Children Gone?

Current trends in education are both disenfranchising and ignoring children who could benefit from individualized instruc-tion. Historically, identification of educationally handicapped or failing youngsters occurred in the mid to late elementary grades when prob-lems had become overt and when failure itself had complicated the child's school problem. Recent legislative trends have made state and federal monies more available so that there now should exist a greater potential for more educa-tionally failing youngsters to receive assistance. Recently, however, Secretary Califano faced a perplexing problem: how could it be that the heavily funded Child Find early identification programs were able to locate only 3.7 million