The article responds to previous articles about the regular education initiative and concludes that there is little evidence to justify present practices of student categorization of the mildly handicapped in special education and that the need for major reform is great. (Author/DB)

Concerns raised by the regular education initiative of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services include: the possible elimination of services to learning disabled students, the greater potential for school failure and its relatively greater damage than the "learning disability" label, and the inappropriateness of the…

Discusses historical and contemporary influences on changes in special education assessment, emphasizing three persistent themes: accurate classification, fairness to minority students, and special education outcomes. Dunn's contributions to each theme are discussed, along with other influences such as legislation and litigation. Current dynamics…

Compared special education and vocational rehabilitation guidelines for serving individuals with specific learning disabilities from survey of 50 state departments of vocational rehabilitation. Found considerably more agreement within each field than between fields. Found agency definitions shared important elements but differed in how specific…

Describes a feminist project on masculinities involving boys in a special education school. These labeled, segregated boys were invested in achieving successful positioning within a culture of hegemonic masculinity. Institutional and media preoccupations with quantifiable academic attainments had reinscribed them within a world of hetero/sexist…

The Warnock Committee has just signed the long-awaited report on special education. The focus here is on the most controversial issue in the report: whether children defined as being in need of special education should be integrated into ordinary schools. Examines the success of one authority in pioneering special classes in ordinary schools.…

Describes a study that investigated the influence of special needs labels on employers' plans for training and expectations for employee success; specifically, the study investigated the extent to which entry-level salary has an interactive effect with employers' expectations. Results indicated that employer bias increased as entry-level wage…

The authors critique the Warnock Report on Special Education for its limited focus, the nature of the evidence used, and its conclusions and recommendations about classifying and identifying students in need of special education services, which the authors feel deal too exclusively with psychological and medical issues, ignoring social contexts.…

Proposes the theoretical reappropriation of the labeling perspective as a theory of transformative social valuing, considering how misappropriations of labeling deviance theory undercut the salience of its critique and legitimate segregationist and deficit models of remedial and special education. The paper asserts that if there is to be any…

Examines the appropriateness of using the ABC Inventory and the Developing Skills Checklists to identify or label kindergartners for special education assistance. Data were collected on 92 subjects, including participants in a special instructional assistance program and a comparison group. Findings indicate that using either test for identifying…

A lack of clarity continues as to the precise terminology and classification concerning the concepts of learning disabilities in the fields of school psychology and special education. This paper reviews the complex logical and socio-political issues of learning disabilities as they relate to current educational and social realities. (Author/JDM)

The author describes the education of exceptional children and gives fair warning that they, too, are our children and will be in all our classes in the near future. (Editor)

Nine hundred twenty-four references (in English) and 198 references (in French) published in Canada on special education are included in the bibliography. Citations represent works from 1974 to 1980 on the following topics: identification, assessment, and treatment; mainstreaming; programs and services; rights of exceptional children;…

Focuses on unnecessary labeling practices, poor cognitive and affective performance of children assigned to special classrooms, and the mainstreaming of misplaced pupils from special to regular classrooms. The controversy generated by these problems resulted in three new terms: mislabeling, mainstreaming, and accountability. These terms are…

In this critique of the primary school system, the author discusses such things as early identification procedures which can label a normal child "handicapped", and unnecessary competition which causes unhealthy stress--things the author feels help to generate "system-damaged" children who then require special education. (DLS)