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This study examines the historical relationships among privilege, race, and learning disability (LD) diagnosis. Whereas recent research links disability diagnosis primarily with racial and socioeconomic disadvantage (assuming a "low road" to disability), it is argued that in the case of LD, privileged children initially received the most diagnoses (suggesting a "high road" to disability). Using California data from 1976, 1986, and 1998, this study explores causes of LD diagnosis by examining the effects of students' individual race and district-level minority proportion. Initially, LD diagnosis appears at markedly higher rates in low-minority districts. Over time, this effect diminishes, while the effect of individual race increases, with black and Hispanic students becoming increasingly likely to receive an LD diagnosis as compared to white students. This article then discusses the critical implications of these findings for disability studies, and the relationship of social privilege to parents' role in determining the identification and accommodation of disabilities.

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This paper challenges the view that there is one medical model of disability monolithically and oppressively imposed on disabled people. Because the presence of disability may be ambiguous in any given case, multiple actors, lay and professional, may invoke particular medical models of disability and advance competing claims about an individual's disabilities and related needs. The literature for parents of disabled children is seen as a resource on which parents can draw in making claims about their children's disabilities and disability-related needs. Particular attention is given to the assumptions that this literature makes about the identity, resources and dispositions of the audience. Ultimately, these assumptions favor disability claims made by white, highly educated, upper-income parents.

Since the establishment of educational rights for children with disabilities in the 1970s, special education in the US has included a growing share of students and has constituted an ever-growing share of education budgets. Previous research has focused on the disproportionate assignment to special education of low-income and minority students, concluding that special education mainly reproduces social disadvantages. This article argues that privileged parents – by virtue of their ability to navigate complex legal and scientific practices and discourses that are seen as guarantees of fairness and neutrality in special education – are able to secure advantageous resources for their children through special education. Through analysis of the distribution and content of ‘due process' hearing requests in the California special education system, this article shows how advocacy in this part of the system depends on parents' cultural and economic capital. Specifically, reimbursement claims in due process hearings show how having economic capital can be used to leverage public education resources, while parents' testimony in hearings shows the importance of having cultural capital. In concluding, the emphasis on parental involvement in both regular and special education is discussed and alternatives to the individualized system of rights in special education are considered.