Special Education Case Summary

Since Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954, special education is constantly changing, and arguments continue to be a daily concern for public schools including administrators, teachers and specialists along with being a source of anxiety for parents, and money making industry for attorneys. The filing of a suit confesses that there has been a failure in resolution in local and state administrative forums. Courts represent an important step regarding the resources and relationships of the public and parents. While the outcome in judicial affairs may vary, the predominant issue in disputes is parents seeking what they think is best for their child, especially when it comes to placements. The outcomes of court cases provide useful

Riles is a class action lawsuit brought on behalf of five African-American children and their families that objected the use of certain IQ tests to place students into the Educable Mentally Retarded (EMR) class. EMR was a term employed by the school districts in California to assign students with IQ scores in the borderland –mild range to special education classes; this was not a federal category. In this case, Larry P. is a student, and Wilson Riles is the Superintendent of Public Instruction for the State of California. Larry was a struggling African-American student that was given an IQ test and was placed in the EMR class. The EMR class was designed to teach social and functional skills with little alignment with the academic curriculum. The plaintiffs argued that the IQ tests were biased, and thus, the defendants were discriminated against by using them, as a disproportionate number of African Americans and Latinos were placed in this special education class. The Plaintiffs also argued that based on IQ tests a disproportionate number of African-Americans were put in this special education class, which stigmatized them and did not provide adequate education thus limited their

v Wilson Riles (1979), the idea of using more than one assessment to put a child in a special education setting is a great practice. Especially if it is an unbiased assessment that should be used as a placement test and not one that superintendents use to fill in the gap. This court case might be for this reason that we over assess students that could go into special education, which most teachers would rather over-assess a student and get more information than is needed then under-assess and have gaps in the information that could quite possibly be needed to make an educated decision on proper placement. In this case, the IQ test was biased, once again think about that test in Mandarin but this time it is in English but it still tests you on Chinese culture. How well would the general public do? Considering that the majority of the public has never been to China, most of us would fail and yet once again schools expect students to pass a test that is based on a culture they don’t