April 12, 2002

Will Congress Have a Better IDEA? 

Reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is scheduled to begin in this session of Congress, and debate on the complex and increasingly controversial law is expected to be the most intense since the original Education for All Handicapped Children act was passed more than 25 years ago. The U.S. Department of Education has asked the public to help identify issues that need to be discussed, including any possible changes in Part B of the law, which provides federal funds to school districts to help pay the cost of providing "free, appropriate public education" to children with disabilities.

That there will be no shortage of issues is guaranteed: the last reauthorization of IDEA five years ago shifted the focus of the law from a procedural to a results orientation, with schools now required to show not only that they are following correct procedures in identifying and classifying children with disabilities, but that students receiving special education are making academic progress comparable to that of their peers in regular education. The 1997 revision also requires inclusion of students with disabilities in educational accountability systems, with IDEA youngsters taking the same tests as others and their scores included in school system test reports.

There has hardly been time for schools to adapt to the new expectations, says Thomas Hehir, who headed the U.S. Office of Special Education Programs from 1993 to 1999. In a report by the Center on Education Policy, Hehir notes that many states and school districts "are in significant noncompliance" with the 1997 law. He cites a number of still-unresolved problems, including the fact that because they did not have access to the general education curriculum in the past, many students with disabilities are failing the high-level content tests now required by many states as a condition of graduation. "If students do not believe they have a reasonable prospect of graduating, they are more likely to drop out. This could further exacerbate the already high level of special education dropouts, which is twice that of their non-disabled peers."

Hehir also notes another problem—"persistent misuse of special education as it pertains to minority students." Though some over-representation of minority children in special education should be expected, due to the well-documented connection between disability and poverty, the placement of African-American children in special education exceeds that which would be predicted by poverty alone, he points out. He believes the solution is not further tinkering with the law—which now requires states to report racial placement data and to act on inappropriate placements on the part of school districts—but better enforcement of those provisions and greater efforts on the part of regular education to assist students who struggle with reading and behavior in the early grades.

Another issue that received a good deal of attention in the last reauthorization and needs to be re-addressed this time around is student discipline, Hehir says. The IDEA requires that education services must continue for students with disabilities who are expelled from school, a right that is not granted in federal law to the non-disabled, and this has caused much confusion and consternation in the field, with school administrators arguing that it creates a "double standard" for discipline. As a remedy for this problem, Hehir suggests applying the principle of "universal design"—in other words, creating a system of school discipline that incorporates the principle that education should continue for all students, disabled and non-disabled alike, who are expelled or suspended, though possibly in a different site than regular schooling.

... "I believe it is time to simplify a statute that has been made overly, and unnecessarily, complex." -- Lawrence Gloeckler

A long-time state administrator of special education, Lawrence Gloeckler of the New York Department of Education, agrees with Hehir on one basic point. "Congress should be very cautious in this next reauthorization not to over-legislate or further complicate existing provisions," Gloeckler says. "Instead, I believe it is time to simplify a statute that has been made overly, and unnecessarily, complex." The current timeframe for reauthorization—every five years—leaves no time for implementation before the next round of congressional debate on the law begins, he points out.

Among the program issues of most concern to him, Gloeckler says, are:

• The challenge of providing real access for students with disabilities to the general education curriculum, including the need to compensate for the gaps in knowledge and skills of many older students who have been denied that access simply because they are in "special education";

• Dilemmas associated with assessing students with disabilities academically, after so many years in which "accountability" for special education was judged by how well schools met certain regulatory requirements, rather than by student achievement; and

• The many exacerbating factors that result in tremendous performance gaps between students with disabilities (even disabilities that are not intellectually limiting) and other students, especially in urban and poorer districts.

He also agrees with Hehir that there are continuing disparities in the identification and placement of minority children in special education. And Gloeckler expresses frustration with "the paperwork morass" created by IDEA, which he notes was constructed in good part by lawyers, "who are used to relying on paperwork for their practice." He suggests that burdensome paperwork requirements make special education "a far less attractive career," contributing to a looming shortage of teachers and other special ed personnel.

Margaret McLaughlin, who is associate director of the Institute for the Study of Exceptional Children and Youth at the University of Maryland, says the upcoming reauthorization of the IDEA "shows promise of being what some might call ‘bruising.’" As part of the debate, she suggests, it’s time for Congress "to consider the basic assumptions underlying the federal special education law," including: "What is ‘special education’ and who should receive it?" "What does the entitlement to an ‘appropriate’ education mean?" and "What is the appropriate federal role in special education?"

On the first point, McLaughlin notes that before the federal government became involved in special education, a number of states had compulsory attendance laws that specifically excluded certain students from public school. And although all states had some special education programs in place in 1975, it was estimated that only seven states were serving more than 50 percent of their eligible students. There was a great deal of variability among states in diagnostic categories and processes for determining whether a student was to be considered for special education, a variability that existed across all forms of disability—sensory, physical, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral.

In passing the Education for All Handicapped Children act in 1975, she points out, Congress solved the problem of exclusion by creating an entitlement to a free appropriate public education for every student with a disability, and provided definitions, criteria, and identification procedures for determining which students are eligible for that entitlement. That the eligibility criteria could be manipulated to make huge numbers of students eligible for special education was recognized, though possibly no one anticipated the most contentious category, and the fastest growing, would be "learning disabilities." During the past decade, McLaughlin says, the number of children classified as having learning disabilities has increased by almost 38 percent, and over half of all children receiving special education in the United States (about 5.2 percent of the school-age population) are characterized as having a learning disability.

... "We cannot continue to tweak a provision here or there or move around the edges of reform" -- Margaret McLaughlin

To overcome some of the many problems in determining eligibility, McLaughlin believes Congress will have to rethink the whole concept. Her preference, she says, would be to provide special education to any child who enters school with a clearly defined disability (most notably those with moderate to severe cognitive disabilities or medically defined disabilities) and to provide a support system to any student "who experiences significant failure judged against a common or accepted performance standard and who fails to respond to intensive interventions in general education." That approach to identification would shift special education to more of a "compensatory" model for many students, she acknowledges. But the vast majority of children receiving special education are now in categories—learning disabled, emotionally disturbed, mildly mentally retarded, or speech and language problems—that depend on educators’ professional judgments, meaning, McLaughlin says, that "They are judged to have a ‘disability’ when they have individual learning deficits that general education cannot address or chooses not to address."

She doesn’t expect that all the changes she hopes for will be enacted by Congress in the forthcoming reauthorization, McLaughlin says, but "we cannot continue to tweak a provision here or there or move around the edges of reform." The federal special education law is now three decades old, she notes, and it is time for Congress to "be serious about critically examining the policy structure," with the goals of unifying general and special education policies and achieving better results for students with disabilities.

The report cited in this article, "A Timely IDEA: Rethinking Federal Education Programs," is available from the Center on Education Policy at website www.cep-dc.org.

In future InFocus articles, we will discuss reauthorization issues concerning the related services section of the IDEA.