Critical Reflection #3: The Use of Categorical Labels

Recently in my field placement, my cooperating teacher sat me down and discussed the labels that were on the students in the class along with other opinions that she has about the students and their lives. She told me that one student was labeled MR, which we now call cognitively impaired, or intellectually disabled. Another student's diagnosis falls under IDEAs category of Other Health Impairment, there is a student from Puerto Rico who was tested in Puerto Rico for dyslexia which they determined that he had, and another student who my cooperating teach just said had a low IQ and fell under the EBD category.She also told us that she has NEVER had a student go to college and only a few ever go to Vo-tech. 
As much as I find these different things to be very interesting,  I can't help but think of the impact of these labels on the students. The student who has the label "MR" desperately wants to be a United States Marine like his two older brothers. He is highly determined and actually appears to be a very intelligent person. His social worker is currently in the process of having him retested because she does not believe that the diagnosis that has been placed on him is correct, nor do I. From what I have witnessed, the main difficulties that this student posses are simply reading and speech ones, leading me to believe with the limited observations I have had, that he might simply have a processing disorder (some kind of learning disability)and possibly a speech disorder. But, with the MR/ID  diagnosis this kid would never be able to achieve his dream, or anything that he would actually really enjoy doing. However, with a reading or speech disability there is a much higher chance of him being accepted into a military program.
In class, we learned about these labels and even at that point I believed that in a perfect world students wouldn't need these labels to receive services. Everyone has weaknesses and everyone has strengths  if the schools do not change to meet this fact and provide high quality instruction to all students, labeled or not, than these students who do not necessarily need a label, will continue to be stigmatized. That point that I just made is also made in the following video. 

In this article (http://www.intellectualdisability.info/families/overview-of-learning-disability-in-children), they discuss what exactly the label intellectual disability means and my favorite quote that really relates to the student in my field placement was, "People with intellectual disabilities and their parents are at risk of being undervalued and stigmatized." I think that is exactly what is going on with students like the one I have mentioned before. The stigma associated with his diagnosis often gets his abilities and strengths to be undervalued.