The number of minority children who are placed in special education programs is disproportionate to the number of minority children in school. One factor causing this situation is that dialect interference causes lower reading scores among minority children. Since few standardized tests instruct the teacher to ignore errors attributable to differences between the child's dialect and standard English, children who speak in dialect regularly get lower scores than would be the case if such errors were ignored. In discounting the effect of dialect interference, teachers should pay particular attention to the areas of word recognition (errors attributable to a nonstandard dialect should be ignored), latency (a child may recognize words slowly because a translation process is occurring), and comprehension (what really matters is whether or not the child understands the text). Some typical black dialect variations from standard English are omissions ("hep" for "help"), substitutions ("pin" for "pen"), syntax (omission of prepositions), and word order changes ("why she won't come?" for "why won't she come?"). (TJ)