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.

This article addresses the effects of 3-tiered comprehensive reading and behavior interventions on K-3 student outcomes in 7 urban elementary schools with a high prevalence of students considered difficult to teach. Specific features of each level of the implementation are described including screening and tier placement procedures, scheduling and personnel supports, procedures for ensuring strong implementation with fidelity, procedures for student progress monitoring, and guidelines for instructional decision making. Early literacy skill outcomes for students were the primary dependent measures in reading; schoolwide office discipline referral rate was the dependent measure in behavior. Significant improvement was evident in phoneme segmentation and nonsense word fluency in reading and significant decreases were documented in office discipline referrals across treatment and comparison schools. Significantly higher outcomes were also recorded on required statewide end-of-grade assessments in treatment schools. Implications and caveats concerning effective implementation of the model in other settings are provided. The article emphasizes that changing schoolwide reading and behavior risk requires effective intervention, instruction, and support in both areas.

In the midst of unprecedented knowledge generation in the field of education, the definition of learning disabilities and the methods used for its identification have essentially remained the same for nearly 30 years. Working from a sociohistorical perspective, the authors’ distinct professional positions within education (university academic, federal program officer, and school administrator) serve as the lenses to examine the constancy of the official definition and the means for the identification of learning disabilities relative to changes throughout the historical chronologies of educational theory, policy, and practice. The concept of context as that which weaves is used to illustrate the relationships across several historical episodes.

An individual's development of concepts to represent situations or events in memory is contingent upon the relevancy of new information to the individual's existing concepts. Learning disabled (LD) adolescents have been characterized as not having the ability to effectively recall existing (internal) concepts and relate those concepts to new information. Comparisons were made among three interactive instructional strategies and a teacher-directed instructional strategy. The influence of integrating internal concepts with external factors in LD adolescents' learning was studied. Results indicated that students experiencing difficulties in developing new concepts benefited from interactive settings where cooperative efforts among peers and teachers are encouraged. These findings emphasize the importance of integrating internal concepts and external factors for learning.

Teachers' adoption of a new teaching practice is related to their investment in staff development and the degree to which they consider it worthwhile. We conducted an interactive staff development, which involved teachers in the analysis, practice, and refinement of new instructional activities. Data from teaching observations, interviews and surveys indicate that the interactive nature of the staff development assisted the teachers to adapt the featured instructional practices in ways that both mirrored and challenged their personal beliefs and knowledge about teaching and learning. The sustained interactive staff development process helped the teachers re-consider the efficacy of their current approaches to teaching while integrating new instructional practices.