Before Congress passed the education for All Handicapped Children Act "Now known as the Individual With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) nearly half of the nation's approximately four million children with disabilities were not receiving a public education. Of the children who were being educated in public schools, many were relegated to a ghetto-like existence in isolated, often run-down classrooms located in the least desirable places within the school building, or sent to entirely separates facilities. IDEA's substantive rights and procedural protections have produced significant and measurable outcomes for students with disabilities: their graduation rate has increased dramatically, and the number of these students who go to college has almost tripled since 1978 (through it is still quite low).
Minority children with disabilities all too often experience inadequate services, low-quality curriculum and instruction, and unnecessary isolation from their nondisabled peers. Moreover, inappropriate practices in both general and special education classrooms have resulted in overrepresentation, misclassification, and hardship for minority students, particularly black children.
Since the early 1970s, national surveys by the U.S. Department of Education have revealed persistent overrepresentation of minority children in certain disability categories. The most pronounced disparities then were black children who, while only 16% of the total school enrollment, represented 38% of the students in classes for the educationally mentally retarded. After more than twenty years, black children constitute 17% of the total enrollment and 33% of those labeled mentally retarded-only marginal improvement. During the same period, however, disproportionality in the area of emotional disturbance (ED) and the rate of identification for both ED and specific learning disabilities (SLD) grew significantly for blacks.