The Connections with Race, Class, and Disabilities

No parent wants to hear that their child has a Learning disorder, since many teachers in the elementary schools are diagnosing students with learning disabilities. Could a child who was said to have a learning disability by one of the teachers be misdiagnosed? People often use past life experiences to help guide them with decisions, where race and class have a major impact on how the diagnosing may work. Say a teacher who grew up in a high class family and may have grown up seeing lower class students being diagnosed with LD's, and as a teacher she could possibly jump the ,gun and diagnose a lower income student with a LD if he or she is not performing as well as the other kids, while a middle-to-higher class student who is performing the same as the lower class student is not diagnosed with the same learning disability. A person's class is almost like a handicap in life, high-class being beneficial and low-class not so beneficial. Race plays a factor similar to class, in people's life experience, growing up they have viewed certain races as "better" scholars than other races. For instance, A Latino teacher grew up always seeing Asian students performing better in school, as a teacher he may skip over an Asian student who could possibly have a learning disorder, but since he always seen Asian students excel he could deny to himself that the student suffers from any LD. Race and Class alone cannot make a teacher misdiagnose students, there is a certain bar people use to judge a persons abilities, it is the Social-standard people have for each other.
The social-standard creates misinterpretations of what people are really like. In a society where people view White people as the top of the chain and people of color as the bottom of the chain makes it hard to really diagnose anyone as having a "learning disability". The normalcy people try to achieve keeps rising higher and higher because some people can not handle the fact that no matter what race or class you come from you have an equal chance at education, and being successful in life. There needs to be an understanding among all the different ID's people have in order to make successful diagnoses of student's with LD's. It is surprising that students around the world could be effected by the misinterpretation and misdiagnosing of a learning disorder.

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