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And Miles to Go...:
State SLD Requirements
and Authoritative Recommendations

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(Historical Overview)

Report Text

• Title Page
• Introduction
• SLD Definitions and Classification Criteria
• Historical Overview
• Questioning the Ability-Achievement Discrepancy
• Recommendations for Change in SLD Definition and Classification Criteria
• State Education Agency SLD Definitions and Criteria
• Methodology
• Results
• Analysis of Discrepancy Determination Methods
• Summary of Trends
• SLD Beliefs
• Further Analyses
• Discussion
• References

Figures and Tables

• Figure 1: Distribution of State SLD Prevalence
• Table 1: Consensus Conclusions: LD Summit Follow-Up (Bradley et al., 2002)
• Table 2: Components of State Definitions and Criteria
• Table 3: Methods used to determine the discrepancy
• Table 4: LD Beliefs

Controversy regarding definitions and classification criteria for specific learning disabilities (SLD) has existed from the inception of the diagnostic construct in the mid-1960s. Definitional and criteria disputes intensified in the mid-1970s when SLD was included in the Federal Education of the Handicapped Act (EHA) (1975, 1977a, 1977b) accompanied by a Congressional mandate to the Bureau of Education for the Handicapped (BEH) (the predecessor of the Office of Special Education Programs [OSEP]) to establish classification criteria for SLD that would provide guidance to states and limit prevalence (Federal Register, November 29, 1976). The compromise among contrasting views of SLD definition and criteria was the requirement of, "...a severe discrepancy between achievement and intellectual ability in one or more of the following areas:" (34 C.F.R. 300.541). This uneasy compromise generally settled at least part of what was required for SLD eligibility and worked reasonably well until the early 1990s when persuasive criticism increasingly convinced professional associations and researchers to reject the intellectual ability-achievement discrepancy as an SLD classification criterion. This paper focuses on the major events leading to the widespread rejection of the discrepancy criterion and an analysis of current state SLD requirements in relation to proposed changes in SLD classification criteria. Possibilities for and barriers to change are addressed in this analysis.

SLD Definitions and Classification Criteria

At the outset it is crucial to distinguish between definitions and classification criteria. Definitions tell what a diagnostic construct is. The federal definition of SLD appears at 34 C.F.R. 300.7 (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act [IDEA] 1997, 1999).

(i) General. The term means a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written, that may manifest itself in an imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or to do mathematical calculations, including conditions such as perceptual disabilities, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, and developmental aphasia.
(ii) Disorders not included. The term does not include learning problems that are primarily the result of visual, hearing, or motor disabilities, of mental retardation, of emotional disturbance, or of environmental, cultural, or economic disadvantage. 34 CFR 300.7(c) (10)

Classification criteria are the rules that are applied to determine if individuals are eligible for a particular diagnosis such as SLD. The SLD classification criteria appear at 34 C.F.R. 300.541 (IDEA, 1997, 1999). There are multiple elements in the SLD classification criteria including low achievement in 1 or more of 7 specified areas, exclusion of other plausible causes for the low achievement and, most significantly, the requirement that "a child has a severe discrepancy between achievement and intellectual ability ..." (34 C.F.R. 541).

The most salient features in the federal SLD definition and classification criteria are different. In the former it is psychological process deficit. In the latter it is the severe discrepancy between intellectual ability and achievement. A "healthy" diagnostic construct has close congruence between definitions and classification criteria (Cromwell, Blashfield, & Strauss, 1975). As definitions and classification criteria have less consistency, increasing problems emerge about meaning and eligibility, a circumstance that existed in the 1950s regarding mental retardation (MR). The tensions over the MR definitions and classification criteria eventually produced the modern conceptions of MR (Heber, 1959, 1961) that have continued with relatively few changes over the last 40 years (Luckasson et al., 2002). Similar tensions exist today with the SLD diagnostic construct where the most widely used definition emphasizes deficits in psychological processes, but the most widely used classification criteria do not emphasize these processes and, in most states, do not require assessment of them (see results section).

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