Postsecondary education and employment are two areas that can pose major challenges and major milestones to adults with learning disabilities. This article introduces a special issue comprising six articles that provide insight into factors that engender success in these areas, specifically focusing on transitional programs, spelling disabilities,…

Teaching social skills to students with emotional and behavioral disorders and learning disabilities has become an accepted practice. Social skills training (SST), however, has often resulted in only modest and sometimes no changes in students' social competence. One of the main reasons is that acknowledged problems have been largely ignored. The…

This article serves as an invitation to rethink and to broaden the scope of learning disabilities (LD) research and practice. We begin with 3 assumptions: Education in a representative democracy is inevitably a political enterprise; social justice is everyone's responsibility, but educators have a special role to play; and segregated schooling is…

The purpose of this article is to respond to Reid and Valle's article "The Discursive Practice of LD: Implications for Instruction and Parent?School Relations" in this issue. Our response to the discursive analysis is organized around two major themes: (a) the issue of balance in the scholarship on learning disabilities (LD) and (b) the centrality…

Gersten, Jordan, and Flojo (in this series) review their research on math difficulties, with an emphasis on applying current knowledge to inform practices of early identification and intervention. On a practical level, educators are in dire need of empirically based screening and intervention tools. From a scientific perspective, it is important…

People with learning disabilities from minority ethnic communities face many layers of disadvantage. Providing services that are culturally appropriate and sensitive can be difficult. Through the use of clinical examples the issues, tensions and dilemmas raised for a community learning disabilities team in attempting to provide culturally…

Several studies have shown that children with learning disabilities (LD) have difficulty in inhibiting irrelevant information, which generates endogenous interference from working memory. Other inhibition capacities have not yet been investigated, however. This article reports on an experiment examining the capacities of children with LD to…

In this paper the small body of research which looks at how people labelled as having learning disabilities view this social identity is considered. The author argues that this research has implications for our assumptions about self-advocacy groups for people with learning disabilities.

This response focuses on the effects of the current construction of learning disabilities (LD) on families of children from devalued racial/ethnic groups. Agreeing with the arguments of Reid and Valle, we add that parents from such groups are further disenfranchised because they are not participants in the critical discourse surrounding LD and…

The executive functions of inhibition and shifting were studied in arithmetic-disabled children, reading-disabled children, reading plus arithmetic-disabled children, and controls (N = 74). Measures involved the rapid naming of objects, digits, letters, or quantities with or without additional task requirements that reflected inhibition or…

Responsiveness to intervention (RTI) is being proposed as an alternative model for making decisions about the presence or absence of specific learning disability. I argue that there are many questions about RTI that remain unanswered, and radical changes in proposed regulations are not warranted at this time. Many fundamental issues related to RTI…

Batsche, Kavale, and Kovaleski (this issue) have done an outstanding job of summarizing arguments for and against the use of response-to-intervention (RTI) procedures for identifying learning disabilities. In this response, we raise issues relevant to the concept of learning disabilities, the nature of problems associated with standard…

As a judge, the author was continually confronted with offenders whose behavior was unexpected and surprising. This was observed not only during their criminal activity but during their travel through the criminal process. This behavior did not appear to be intentional, but rather an inappropriate response to the circumstances that existed at the…

The IDEA reauthorization of 2004 highlights the application of responsiveness to intervention (RTI) to both early intervention (EI) service delivery and learning disabilities (LD) identification practices, creating the potential for wide-scale execution. Implementation of any educational reform necessitates more than simply changing practices: It…

Education seeks to cultivate dispositions and skills that promote effective participation in democratic institutions, including the capacity to produce thoughtful written arguments about controversial issues. Unfortunately, students' argumentative writing is generally neither effective nor persuasive, and this is especially so for students with…