Hunt and Marshall assert that labels are useful in describing exceptional children. Although critics of labels advocate for their total removal, labels are significant. Labels enable the counting of individuals with exceptionalities. This helps the federal government and states to plan and provide educational and supportive services to students with disabilities. Labels also enable professionals to different teaching techniques and support services appropriate to different groups of exceptional children. For example, children with visual disabilities use different materials from those with learning disabilities for the purposes of learning how to read.
Although labels enable efficient communication about children and their needs, they are frequently misused, resulting in the stigmatization of children with disabilities. Terms like hyperactive, dyslexic, and autistic are frequently used unreservedly in describing children who have academic or behavioral difficulties in school. Using such terms may change the way other people perceive the learning potential of such children. Additionally, labels often make individual differences between children unclear by creating the assumption that all children identified as “learning-disabled” are similar. There is a need to replace current labels with terms that are directly related to instruction and that reduce negative association for purposes of identifying exceptionality. For example, students with learning disabilities could be described as students with intensive reading instruction needs.