Learning-Disabled Enrollment Dips After Long Climb After decades
of what seemed to be an inexorable upward path, the number of
students classified as learning-disabled declined from year to
year over much of the past decade—a change in direction that is
spurring debates among experts about the reasons why. The
percentage of 3- to 21-year-old students nationwide classified
as having a “specific learning disability” dropped steadily from
6.1 percent in the 2000-01 school year to 5.2 percent in
2007-08, according to the most recent data available, which come
from the U.S Department of Education’s 2009 Digest of Education
Statistics. In numbers, that’s a drop from about 2.9 million to
2.6 million students. A learning disability—a processing
disorder that impairs learning but not a student’s overall
cognitive ability—is the largest, by far, of the 13 disability
classifications recognized by the main federal special education
law. Forty percent of the approximately 6.6 million students
covered under the Individuals