Special Education Disproportionality: A Review of Response to Intervention and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
Special education disproportionality for culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students persists as a controversial and intractable problem in our educational systems. Response to intervention (RtI) and culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP), both independently and collectively are considered to offer promise for mitigating conditions of overrepresentation in special education programs. The purpose of this paper is to review the existing research to examine the effects of RtI on minority students and the combined effects of RtI and CRP on minority students. The reviews of these works are discussed to assess whether the Morgan et al. (2015) recommendation for the U.S. Department of Education to recall its efforts to reduce minority disproportionality is justified.
Contributor Notes
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Gwendolyn Cartledge, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita in the Department of Educational Studies, College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University. Her professional area is special education. Currently, she is the principal investigator on grants from the Institute of Educational Sciences (IES) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Cathy D. Kea, Ph.D., is a Professor of Special Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at North Carolina A&T State University. Her research interest focuses on repositioning culture in teacher preparation through course transformation. This involves infusing diversity throughout course syllabi, field experience competencies, and the design and delivery of culturally responsive instruction in urban classrooms.
Alana Oif is pursuing her master's degree in special education in the College of Educational Studies at The Ohio State University. Her research interests include reading interventions for struggling readers with a focus on urban learners and students with dyslexia.
Martreece Watson is a doctoral candidate at The Ohio State University in the Department of Teaching and Learning in the College of Education and Human Ecology. Her research interests include deaf education, language and literacy development, with a focus on Black deaf and hard-of-hearing youth, and disability studies.
