F amily participation is one of the central tenets of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 (IDEA). Implementation of this mandate is important to all families of children with disabilities. There are three main areas of concern, however, regarding the participation of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) families. First, children of African American, Latino, and Native American groups represent a disproportionately large percentage of certain disability categories and a disproportionately small percentage of gifted programs (Donovan &

The authors contend that the equity and advocacy expectations imbedded in the legal mandate for parent participation in the special education decision-making process directly contradict the hierarchy of professional status and knowledge on which the positivist paradigm of professionalism is based, and are also in con ict with the values held by many families from culturally diverse backgrounds, contributing to low levels of participation and advocacy. They argue the need for professional education to incorporate opportunities for professionals to identify the cultural assumptions imbedded in the eld of special education towards more balanced and effective collaboration.

In this article, we present a conceptual framework for addressing the disproportionate representation of culturally and linguistically diverse students in special education. The cornerstone of our approach to addressing disproportionate representation is through the creation of culturally responsive educational systems. Our goal is to assist practitioners, researchers, and policy makers in coalescing around culturally responsive, evidence-based interventions and strategic improvements in practice and policy to improve students’ educational opportunities in general education and reduce inappropriate referrals to and placement in special education. We envision this work as cutting across three interrelated domains: policies, practices, and people. Policies include those guidelines enacted at federal, state, district, and school levels that influence funding, resource allocation, accountability, and other key aspects of schooling. We use the notion of practice in two ways, in the instrumental sense of daily practices that all cultural beings engage in to navigate and survive their worlds, and also in a technical sense to describe the procedures and strategies devised for the purpose of maximizing students’ learning outcomes. People include all those in the broad educational system: administrators, teacher educators, teachers, community members, families, and the children whose opportunities we wish to improve.

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