Introduction Special education has brought out the best and the worst in our society. Special education is often viewed as unreliable, inflated and in some causes even discriminatory. It’s the manner in which students are referred to and then placed in special education. In the past 30 years special education has grown in numbers. According to NPR.org one in seven students, is classified as having a disability. That’s 63% more than when special education programs officially began in 1976. The concern is, what happened in those 3 decades to allow a generation of children to decline mentally and intellectually. There are 13 categories of special education under IDEA: autism, deaf-blindness, emotional disturbance, hearing impairment, mental retardation, multiple disabilities, orthopedic impairment,otherhealth impairment, specific learning disability, traumatic brain injury, speech language impairment and visual impairment including blindness (nichy.org). Two categories made substaintial gains. The number of students labeled with a specific learning disability tripled and the category of other health impairment quadrupled. These categories caused an increase of students placed in special education as a whole to an increase of 86%. Special education has many issues that may hinder or accentuate our present state of consequences. According to Kaufmann (1999), special education is characterized as:

Special Education: Past Historically, special education has suffered with its own challenges, obstacles, shortcomings, controversy and yet improvements and have made great strides and successes in working with children with disabilities. Challenges and obstacles have been an ever present mainstay when speaking of what is best for children with disabilities. Florian (2007) wrote, in 1975, Blatt observed that “in this