The Peacock Hill Working Group “Problems and Promises” Three Decades Later: Introduction to the Creek Bend Consortium Special Issue

Analyses of special education services for students with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders (EBD) conducted prior to and after the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (Public Law 94-142) pointed to significant short comings in service provision such as high rates of segregated placement and poorly prepared personnel. In 1991, a group of leading scholars in the field (the Peacock Hill Working Group) published a set of recommendations to improve practices for students with EBD and summarized what at the time were current research-based strategies. Unfortunately, the field has failed to consistently adopt recommended practices and the in-school and postsecondary outcomes among students with EBD continue to show minimal improvements. Recently, a group of researchers, teacher trainers, and policy makers convened to discuss past and present work in the field and proposed a set of guiding principles and recommendations building on past seminal work. This article provides a context and overview of the group’s work and brief summaries of the five articles that make up this special issue.