A long-standing national issue that continues to concern the public is the disproportionate representation of children from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds in special education. The fact is that the percentage of minority students in the population of school-aged children has increased dramatically to more than 35 percent, which is increasing student diversity in many public schools across the nation. This makes the phenomenon of disproportionality particularly worrying. With a growing population of minority children comprising a larger percentage of public school students, we must be responsive to the growing needs of an increasingly diverse society. The overrepresentation of minority students in special education has been posed as a problem for more than three decades, but it is worth asking whether legislative action efforts, educational reforms, and legal challenges have truly made improvements to this problem. More importantly, disproportionality should be examined as a correlation with underlying conditions that can have a large effect not only on the quality of a child's education, but also on ______. Providing an adequate public education to qualified students has been a federal mandate since 1975, but it is still a challenging and often controversial issue in which the public has expressed concern. One reason it has caused public concern is that it is reported in low-incidence categories such as deafness or blindness, which are usually diagnosed by medical professionals, without any indication of disproportionality (Donovan and Cross, 1). Cases in which there are higher percentages of minority students occur more in the high-incidence categories of mental retardation (MMR), emotional disturbance (ED), and…half of the paper…exsive can be reversed or worsened depending on the effectiveness of classroom management (Donovan and Cross). Among the predominant explanations offered for the existence of disproportionate ethnic representation in special education is the influence of poverty or socioeconomic disadvantage on the academic preparation of minority students. The National Research Council (NRC) reported in research conducted and concluded with a “definitive yes” that there are “biological and social/contextual contributions to early development that differ by race and that leave students differently prepared to cope cognitive and behavioral challenges”. needs of schooling” (Skiba, et al. 131). The NRC suggested that the effects of a range of biological and social factors could be included in the broader concept of poverty. The relationship between disproportionality and poverty