The overlap of the biosocial, cognitive, and psychosocial domains is evident to developmentalists, as is the need for parents, teachers, therapists, and researchers to work together to help each child. However, deciding whether or not a child should be designated as needing special education is not straightforward, nor is it closely related to specific special needs.

In the United States, recognition that the distinction between normal and abnormal is not clear-cut (the first principle of developmental psychopathology) led to a series of reforms. Dramatic changes occurred in the treatment and education of children with special needs.

According to the 1975 Education of All Handicapped Children Act, children with special needs must be educated in the least restrictive environment (LRE). That law has been revised several times, but the goal remains that children should not be segregated from other children unless it is not possible to remediate problems within the regular classroom.

Consequently, LRE usually means educating children with special needs in a regular class, a practice once called mainstreaming, rather than in a special classroom or school. Sometimes a child is sent for a few hours a week to a resource room, with a teacher who provides targeted tutoring. Sometimes a class is an inclusion class, which means that children with special needs are “included” in the general classroom, with “appropriate aids and services” (ideally from a trained teacher who works with the regular teacher).

A more recent educational strategy is called response to intervention (RTI) (Fletcher & Vaughn, 2009; Shapiro et al., 2011; Ikeda, 2012). All children are taught specific skills; for instance, learning the sounds that various letters make. Then the children are each tested, and those who did not master the skill receive special “intervention”—practice and individualized teaching, usually within the regular class. Then they are tested again, and, if need be, intervention occurs again. Only when a child does not respond adequately to repeated, focused intervention is the child referred for testing and observation to diagnose the problem.

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RTI is used in some nations with success (e.g., Sahlberg, 2011) and is now implemented in many U.S. schools. Most children respond to intervention, but those who do not are then tested to determine if they have special needs. In that case, the school proposes an individual education plan (IEP) with the parents.

The basic assumption of the IEP is that schools need to “design learning pathways for each individual sufferer.” The label, or specific diagnosis, is supposed to help target effective remediation. Yet this rarely occurs in practice (Butterworth & Kovas, 2013, p. 304). Instead, the special needs that attract most research on remediation are not the more common ones. One example: In the United States, “research funding in 2008–2009 for autistic spectrum disorder was 31 times greater than for dyslexia and 540 times greater than for dyscalculia” (Butterworth & Kovas, 2013, p. 304).

In the United States, historical shifts are notable in which children are recognized by educators as having special needs, and what their needs are labeled. As Figure 11.5 shows, the proportion of children designated with special needs rose in the United States from 10 percent in 1980 to 13 percent in 2011, primarily because more children are called learning disabled or autistic (National Center for Education Statistics, 2013b).

There is no separate category for ADHD. To receive special services, children with ADHD are often designated as having a specific learning disorder. Since most disorders are comorbid, the particular special needs category in the school system may not be the diagnosis given by a psychologist. One result is that teachers, therapists, and parents may work at cross-purposes to educate a child.

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Internationally, the connection between special needs and education varies, again for cultural and historical reasons more than child-related ones (Rotatori et al., 2014). In many African and Latin American nations, almost no child receives special education in public schools; in many Asian nations, diagnosis refers primarily to physical disability. The U.S. school system designates more children as having special needs than does any other nation: Whether this is a reason for national pride or shame depends on one’s perspective.

Children who are unusually gifted are often thought to have special needs as well, but they are not covered by federal laws in the United States. Instead, each U.S. state selects and educates gifted and talented children in a particular way, a variation that leads to controversy.

A scholar writes: “The term gifted … has never been more problematic than it is today” (Dai, 2010, p. 8). Educators, political leaders, scientists, and everyone else argue about who is gifted and what should be done about them. Are gifted children unusually intelligent, or talented, or creative? Should they be skipped, segregated, enriched, or left alone?

A hundred years ago, the definition of gifted was simple: high IQ. A famous longitudinal study followed a thousand “genius” children, all of whom scored above 140 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test (Terman, 1925). Even today, some school systems define gifted as having an IQ of 130 or above (attained by 1 child in 50). Other children are unusually talented, recognized by their parents at a young age, by the general public after they die—but not usually by their teachers when they are in elementary school. Mozart composed music at age 3; Pablo Picasso created works of art at age 4.

A hundred years ago, school placement was simple for high IQ children. They were taught with children who were their mental age, not their chronological age. This practice was called acceleration. Today that is rarely done because many accelerated children never learned how to get along with others. As one woman remembers:

Nine-year-old little girls are so cruel to younger girls. I was much smaller than them, of course, and would have done anything to have a friend. Although I could cope with the academic work very easily, emotionally I wasn’t up to it. Maybe it was my fault and I was asking to be picked on. I was a weed at the edge of the playground.

[Rachel, quoted in Freeman, 2010, p. 27]

Calling herself a weed suggests that she never overcame her conviction that she was less cherished than the other children. Her intellectual needs may have been met by her skipping two grades, but her emotional and social needs were severely neglected.

Historically, many famous musicians, artists, and scientists were child prodigies whose fathers recognized their talent (often because the father was talented) and taught them. Often they did not attend regular school, because laws requiring attendance did not exist. Mozart’s father transcribed his earliest pieces and toured Europe with his gifted son. Picasso’s father removed him from school in second grade so he could create all day.

That solution also had pitfalls. Although intense early education at home nourishes talent, neither Mozart nor Picasso had happy adult lives. Moreover, Picasso said he never learned to read or write, and Mozart had a poor understanding of math and money. Similar patterns are still apparent, as exemplified by gifted athletes (e.g., Tiger Woods and Steffi Graf) as well as those in less public specialties. Here is one example:

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Sufiah Yusof started her maths degree at Oxford [the leading University in England] in 2000, at the age of 13. She too had been dominated and taught by her father. But she ran away the day after her final exam. She was found by police but refused to go home, demanding of her father in an email: “Has it ever crossed your mind that the reason I left home was because I’ve finally had enough of 15 years of physical and emotional abuse?” Her father claimed she’d been abducted and brainwashed. She refuses to communicate with him. She is now a very happy, high-class, high-earning prostitute.

[Freeman, 2010, p. 286]

Some children who might need special education are unusually creative (Sternberg et al., 2011). They are divergent thinkers, finding many solutions and even more questions for every problem. Such students joke in class, resist drudgery, ignore homework, and bedevil their teachers. They may become innovators, inventors, and creative forces of the future.

Creative children do not conform to social standards. They are not convergent thinkers, who choose the correct answer on school exams. One such person was Charles Darwin, whose “school reports complained unendingly that he wasn’t interested in studying, only shooting, riding, and beetle-collecting” (Freeman, 2010, p. 283). Other creative geniuses who were poor students are Einstein, Freud, Newton, Steve Jobs. Again, such people are not usually recognized until late in adulthood, or after death.

Neuroscience has recently discovered that children who develop their musical talents with extensive practice in early childhood grow specialized brain structures, as do child athletes and mathematicians. Since plasticity means that children learn whatever their context teaches, special talents may be enhanced with special education, an argument for elementary school teaching to accommodate creative children.

Since both acceleration and intense parental tutoring have led to later problems, a third education strategy has become popular, at least in the United States. Children who are bright, talented, and/or creative—all the same age but each with special abilities—are taught together in their own classroom. Ideally, such children are neither bored nor lonely; each is challenged and appreciated by their classmates.

Classes for gifted students require unusual teachers, smart and creative, able to appreciate divergent thinking and challenge the very bright. They must be flexible: providing a 7-year-old artist freedom, guidance, and inspiration for magnificent art and simultaneously providing patient, step-by-step reading instruction if that same child is a typical new reader. Similarly, a 7-year-old who reads at the twelfth-grade level might have immature social skills, needing a teacher who finds another child to befriend him or her and who then helps both of them share, compromise, and take turns.

Should such teachers be available only for the gifted? Every child may need talented teachers and individualized instruction, no matter what the child’s abilities or disabilities may be. Many educators complain that the system of education in the United States, where each school district and sometimes each school hires and assigns teachers, results in the best teachers having the most able students, when it should be the opposite. This trend is furthered by tracking, putting children with special needs together, and allowing private or charter schools to select certain students and leave the rest behind.

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Some nations educate all children together, assuming that the best learners are not naturally gifted but are able to work harder at learning. Thus, the teacher’s job is to motivate and challenge every child. U.S. law says all children can learn, and it is the job of schools to teach them. Every special and ordinary form of education can benefit by applying what we know about children’s minds (De Corte, 2013). That is the topic of the next chapter.

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