A challenge for the instruction of linguistically diverse exceptional students is the need for identifying individuals who can provide links between the students' home and the school. Individuals fluent in the students' home language and familiar with their culture can play important roles in the prereferral process and in staffing and intervention. Finding certificated bilingual/bicultural personnel in the many languages represented by exceptional students in schools remains difficult and, too often, support personnel are not sufficiently prepared to represent special education to their respective communities. This paper explores important elements necessary to develop a stable, well-prepared itinerant instructional team that includes paraprofessionals working collaboratively with, and under the direct instructional supervision of, a certified special education teacher. Such a team can provide a vehicle by which districts with limited bilingual/bicultural personnel can maximize their resources, integrate services, and more effectively serve a great number of linguistically diverse students.

Schools of education typically prepare their prospective teachers to work with amorphous “average students”—who are by implication middle class, native, English speaking, and White. They are then given some limited opportunities to adapt these understandings to students with diverging profiles—children of poverty, second language learners, and students of color. The authors argue that given the changing demographics of public schools, initial teacher education should be based on the understandings that teachers typically do not receive until the end of their programs or in add-on endorsements. They should be prepared from the outset to work with the wide diversity of language, culture, and class that they are likely to meet in public schools. Ten recommendations are presented for “What Every Teacher Should Do” to work effectively in the linguistically and culturally diverse settings they are likely to encounter.

Developing largely out of an awakened commitment to the ethical requirement that all individuals be provided with access to a decent public education, special education has had a strong ethical component from its inception. Because it challenges traditional organizational structures and the knowledge and skills of teachers, it has continued to engender many ethical dilemmas. Despite this fact, the ethics of special education has received scant attention, either as a field of ethical inquiry or as a topic in teacher education. This article characterizes the kinds of perspectives that go into establishing a general framework for ethical deliberation and then uses that framework to characterize the special role-related obligations that help define the ethics of special education. An extended example of the case method is used as the point of departure for the discussion, and cases illustrative of special ethical dilemmas in special education are presented.

Bilingual Hispanic students whose English or Spanish dominance cannot be clearly determined, and who are not achieving at grade level, are particularly at risk for academic failure. This study examined the patterns of oral reading miscues, retelling, and fluency of such mixed dominant students in order to develop a better understanding of their reading strategy use. The scores and text of fourth-to sixthgrade Hispanic mixed dominant (MD) students were compared to those of two other distinct fourth-to sixth-grade Hispanic student groups: good English readers (GE) and good Spanish readers reading in English, their second language (GS-ESL). The data indicated MD students did not differ significantly from good English readers on several important categories including story retelling, where they got the highest mean scores. The ability to retain in-text grammatical function was low for both the GE and MD groups. The GE group was more fluent that either of the two groups, making significantly less miscues per words read. A factor analysis indicated that the MD group was distinctly different in strategy use from the GS-ESL group. Overall, these data suggested that MD students were not easily categorized into a homogeneous group, and that some of their strategies and skills may have been underutilized.