EDITORS NOTE: UO special education researcher Hill Walker will return to campus Thursday, June 17. He can be reached then at the UO Institute on Violence and Destructive Behavior, (541) 346-3592.

EUGENE–Minority youth show up in special education programs at much higher rates than their white counterparts, even though they represent a far smaller proportion of the total student population. Per capita, the imbalance is highest for Native American students, followed by African American, Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Islander students.

"We need to understand the specific reasons for why this is happening," says Hill Walker, co-director of the University of Oregon’s prestigious Institute on Violence and Destructive Behavior.

Walker was appointed recently to a 14-member National Academy of Sciences Task Force to study this issue over the next two years. The task force, an arm of the National Research Council’s Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, will meet for the first time Tuesday and Wednesday, June 15 and 16, in Washington, D.C.

"This has tremendous implications for educational policy, practice and legislation. A thorough, searching national study of this issue is long overdue," Walker says.

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