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Emotional Disturbance Label: A Social Justice Catastrophe

Abstract

The Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) delineates categories of disabilities. Each disability category has a definition and criteria for the identification, labeling and placement of students into special education. These disabilities are assigned to students when a team of individuals, through their observation and assessments, determine that the disability is present and preventing the student from learning. Specially designed instruction is deemed as required and can only be facilitated, allegedly, through the special education system. It is the purpose of this paper to uncover the social injustice that is inherent in these processes and to provide alternative ideas to ameliorate the injustices contained in the existing model. (Oakes, Lipton, Anderson & Stillman, 2015) provide a social justice framework to analyze these systems. All of the definitions and the means with which they are determined to be “within the child”, are questionable at best and serve to sort, label and often segregate children from their typically developing peer group. The most problematic category within the IDEA legislation is that of Emotional Disturbance (ED). The definition for this category is vague, unclear and serves to identify students with the disability that is the least understood, the least researched and manifests some of the worst outcomes in all of special education.

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