The paper describes development of the Brockton Battery: A Special Needs Assessment for Minority Students, a collection of four independent instruments designed for special education assessment of minority students. Initial sections review demographic information on the city of Brockton, Massachusetts, and on special education in the city. Assessment procedures in Massachusetts differ from those in the rest of the country. Massachusetts does not allow the use of traditional special education labels such as those used for reporting purposes of numbers to the federal government, but instead uses a system of prototyping students by the amount of time each student must be out of the regular education program. The special education assessment process covers referral, assessment and evaluation, placement, annual review, reevaluation of the individual education plan, and monitoring of special education placements of bilingual and minority students. The Brockton Battery contains the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts and the Beery Test of Visual Motor Integration to determine if the child understands the primary concepts necessary for test taking; Tests of Language Abilities (including one receptive language test, one expressive picture naming subtest, a receptive subtest of sentence repetition, and an expressive subtest involving story telling); tests of language development; tests of reading abilities; tests of learning rate and method; and the adaptive behavior scales. (SB)