ABSTRACT
Special education researchers and practitioners alike often discuss the changing demography of the U.S. population, noting achievement and outcome gaps between groups of youth based on race/ethnicity. For example, concerns about the disparity in high school graduation rates between White youth with disabilities and their Black and Latino peers are often translated into a need to address “diversity.” Actually, it has now been three decades since Fair and Sullivan (1980) noted that groups of youth with disabilities had limited access to career opportunities based on their group characteristics, such as race. More recently, researchers have focused on the need to think about cultural and linguistic diversity in transition planning (Geenen, Powers, Lopez-Vasquez, & Bersani, 2003). In fact, diversity has become something of a buzzword throughout education; student-teachers say that they have “done that diversity training” (Gay, 2002), researchers acknowledge the importance of including diverse populations in projects (August & Hakuta, 1997), and practicing teachers and transition specialists agree that we should improve our ability to be culturally responsive as we work with diverse populations (Leake & Black, 2005). Unfortunately, these words and phrases, as is often the case with buzzwords, have lost precision. In this chapter, we defi ne diversity in the context of special education transition research and practice as we attempt to answer this central question: What do we know about educating a diverse population of students with disabilities who are transitioning into adulthood?
