Bilingual Special Education

Bilingual special education is defined by Julia de Valenzuela, Leonard Baca, and Elena Baca as the instances in which student participation in an individually designed, special education program is conducted [Page 88]in both the student's native language and English; in such a program, the student's home culture is also considered, framed in an inclusive environment. Special education is an interdisciplinary field that addresses the educational needs of English language learners with disabilities. The majority of this population is Latino, which is now the largest minority group in the nation's schools. This is a small field, partly because of limited understanding of the needs and developmental trajectories of this population but also because of a lack of programmatic research. A significant personnel shortage has been documented for years, as described by Leonard Baca and Hermes Cervantes. In the seminal text The Bilingual Special Education Interface, de Valenzuela, Baca, and Baca argue for a bilingual-special education interface as a way to address the limitations of fragmented and separate general, bilingual, and special education services. They recommend the seamless integration of these programs so that the needs of this population are addressed by various groups of professionals in general education.

The convergence of several contemporary reform movements is blurring the boundaries of these systems, though in rather complex ways. First, a growing anti-immigrant and antibilingual discourse has strengthened movements to curtail services for this population in some states. This situation has increased the pressure on general education, since English language learners (ELLs) are being educated in programs that offer few linguistic supports. General education is also absorbing this population at a time when federal accountability policies require states and districts to report high performance levels as measured by standardized achievement tests. This is an important challenge because ELLs have traditionally performed poorly in such measures. It is not clear how general education will address the need of these learners.

Because of the lack of specialized resources and the scarcity of qualified personnel in general education, it has been suggested that districts with significant ELL enrollment will likely place these students in special education; in fact, research conducted in California by Alfredo Artiles, Robert Rueda, Jesús Salazar, and Ignacio Higareda suggests that ELLs are disproportionately placed in disability programs. Historically, the so-called subjective disabilities have been overpopulated at the national level by ethnic minority students, particularly African American and American Indian learners, as explained by Suzanne Donovan and Christopher Cross. These categories include learning disabilities (LD), mild mental retardation (MMR), and emotional/behavioral disorders (E/BD). ELL overrepresentation has been reported in the past two decades, as Alba Ortiz and James Yates report in their chapter in English Language Learners With Special Needs. It is interesting that although general educators may be using disability diagnoses as a means to cope with the aforementioned contemporary reforms, special education is transforming its identity as a result of the inclusive education movement and preventive approaches. Indeed, more students with disabilities are being educated in general education classrooms, though it has been reported by Daniel Losen and Gary Orfield that ethnic minority students are placed in more segregated settings than are their White counterparts. In turn, preventive models such as “response to intervention” (RTI) promise to identify and treat early (i.e., while the student is still in a general education environment).

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