Chapter 10: Alternative Educational Settings

Students identified with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) commonly engage in behaviors that impede their ability to succeed in school. These students’ negative behavioral patterns are often initiated or influenced by their experiences with adversity that may include poverty, family instability, parenting difficulties, violence exposure, as well as co-occurring cognitive impairments, including low intelligence quotient (IQ) and attention deficits (Reid, Gonzalez, Nordness, Trout, & Epstein, 2004). Early behavioral difficulties, moreover, may instigate teacher-student conflict and peer rejection that result in a negative cascade of coercive interactions with school authorities (Dodge, Greenberg, Malone, & Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group, 2008; Lane, Barton-Arwood, Nelson, & Wehby, 2008), and represent a primary reason for school suspensions and expulsions (Jull, 2008). In addition to negative behavioral patterns that become more firmly established over time, students with EBD frequently exhibit cooccurring learning difficulties that further impact their school success and heighten their risk for poor school and social outcomes (Bradley, Doolittle, & Bartoletta, 2008). Students with EBD perform one to two grade levels below their nondisabled peers across academic subject areas (Trout, Nordness, Pierce, & Epstein, 2003) and more than two thirds fail one or more of their high school courses (Wagner, Cameto, & Newman, 2003). Academic failure for students with EBD is of particular concern because low or failing grades are a strong indicator of school dropout (Bowers, Sprott, & Taff, 2012). To wit, NLTS2 data report that almost half (44.2%) of students with EBD drop out of high school (Wagner, Newman, Cameto, Garza, & Levine, 2005). The high rates of school failure and dropout experienced by students with EBD, compared with other students with disabilities underscore the difficulties schools face in serving these students effectively (Wagner & Cameto, 2004).