Special education - a failure on many fronts

In California, children are being classified as “learning - disabled” because they have difficulties in reading. The state has 651,000 special education students, and 63% are not emotionally, physically or mentally handicapped - they just may have never been taught to read. According to the LA Times, research has proven that the reading difficulties that these children experienced could have been reduced, “had they received systematic, intensive instruction”. In order to measure unexplained gaps in performance, schools used to give their students IQ tests and simultaneously measure their reading performance. If IQ results were higher than reading scores, a child would be labeled as disabled. The special education system as a whole has problems. In California, one in three of the teachers assigned to special education lack full credentials.