In our increasingly diverse nation, as funding for basic public education has tightened over the past decade, school officials have had to address needs the best they can, often by reaching into special education budgets for the resources to assist children who have difficulty learning academics, social skills, and classroom routines. National data indicate that children with disabilities are disproportionately of minority status and likely to be growing up in low income, single-parent families, with grandparents, or in foster care arrangements. The rapid rise in special education enrollment over the past decade suggests that it is being used as an all-purpose intervention for many children who have culturally rooted difficulties fitting into prescribed classroom curricula and settings. Children with disabilities are more likely than all children to be poor. Federal law addresses this problem by providing Title I and other programs to meet the special educational needs of low-income children.
National data show that race and ethnicity are also strong drivers of special education placement.
But culture incorporates other kinds of behavior and demographic changes. All of these changes may influence the content of education and how services are delivered and used. When Joanna and her husband, Robert, watched their teenage daughter prepare to venture into the world, they talked of retirement and travel. Then Joanna's daughter from her first marriage died, and Joanna and Robert inherited five young grandchildren. Joanna's daughter had been drug addicted and had lived in a violent relationship.