Effective Instruction for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students: A Reconceptualization

Special education classrooms often become convenient places for teachers to send struggling students they don't want in their classrooms.-US News and World Report, quoted from Shapiro, Loeb, & Bowermaster, 1992, p. 49 John Ogbu, noted ethnographic researcher and theorist on minority issues, recently stated: Minority children receive inferior education ... through what occurs inside the schools, inside the individual classrooms.Among the mechanisms discovered to affect minority education adversely, none is more important than teachers' low expectations ... .(T)oo many minority children are treated as having educational "handicaps."A disproportionate number are channeled into "special education," a pseudonym for inferior education.(Ogbu, 1990, p. 156, emphasis added) The findings of prominent special education researchers have led to similar conclusions (Gottlieb, Alter, & Gottlieb, 1994).Public concern about the quality and appropriateness of special education services for minority students in general, and language-minority students in particular, is high.The level of concern has increased with the surge of immigration to the United States since 1980, the largest in American history.Recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics (1994) show a 40% increase in the number of school-age children in homes where English is not the primary language.Current estimates project that more than 86 million Americans will be of African, Asian, and Latino heritage by the year 2020 (U.S.Department of Commerce, 1990).Although only one in 10 children in U.S. schools in 1982 was Latino, this ratio will approach one in four by the year 2020 (Natriello, McDill, & Pallas, 1990).