Because of current federal legislation, educators must assess children with possible handicapping conditions and plan an individual education program for each child with a special need. Past trends are inadequate for these two purposes, and, furthermore, have placed bilingual, culturally different children into special education classes disproportionately to their representation in the general population. What needs to be recognized by measurement experts and educators is that no one test method is sufficient for the assessment of bilingual children. This paper discusses past measurement directions and makes recommendations for the assessment of bilingual, culturally different children.
Past measurement trends developed for use with bilingual, culturally different children are insufficient for the concerns of today's educators. Not only must those in education determine whether or not children are handicapped, they must also plan individual children's educational programs based on each child's skills, strengths, and weaknesses. The individual measurement techniques that have evolved over the years for use with bilingual, culturally different children are inadequate for these two assessment purposes. What is necessary is a dual approach to assessing bilingual children with possible handicapping conditions, focusing first on whether or not the child is handicapped, and second on what the child's educational needs are.
Bilingual children represent a specific subgroup within the larger set of children with possible handicapping conditions. While federal legislation (i.e., The Education Amendments of 1974, PL 93-380, and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, PL 94-142) establishes the right of all handicapped children to a free, appropriate, public education, it makes special provisions for the identification and evaluation of bilingual handicapped children. Because many bilingual children have been misclassified as handicapped, resulting in court cases charging discriminatory assessment practices (e.g. Diana vs. California State Board of Education, and Arreola vs. Santa Ana Board of Education), each piece of legislation contains provisions mandating that procedures be adopted to assure that assessment materials are selected and administered so as not to be racially or culturally discriminatory. Further, no one single instrument may be used as the sole determinant for placement, and testing must be conducted in the child's native language or primary mode of communication.
Bilingualism is not an isolated phenomenon in the United States; in a report issued in 1976, the Bureau of the Census (Note 1) estimates that well over one million school children have a primary language other than English. While this figure is itself significant, it grossly underestimates the number of children in this country who use two languages to varying extents. Spanish is the second most widely used language in this country, but many note French, German, Italian, and other languages as their primary ' This manuscript is based on a paper presented by the author at the annual meeting of the National Council on Measurement in Education,