ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the situation regarding the disproportionate placement of ethnic minority pupils in special education under the two headings of What is and What could be. According to Reginald Jones, a social scientist from the University of California at Berkeley, who has done extensive work in special education, there is a crisis in the psycho-educational assessment of minority group children. This crisis has been brought to our attention because of the over-representation of minority group students in special education classes - especially classes for pupils with mental retardation or moderate learning difficulties (MLD). Robert Rueda has suggested that the focus on the problems of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) pupils has also served to illustrate the problems of special education in general. The discussion has highlighted some of the factors leading to the disproportionate representation of CLD pupils in special education.
