The educational practice of grouping children on the basis of ability has recently been charged as discriminatory because the tests used for educational placement may be linguistically and culturally biased and may serve to place disproportionate numbers of minority group children (especially speakers of nonstandard English) into special classes. Because of this indictment, the linguistic deficit and the linguistic difference models are explored as possible explanation of the verbal behavior of linguistically different children. In addition, educational implications of each model are discussed.
