Contributions from: Dorothy Kerzner Lipsky.
Abstract
The implementation of the re-authorised Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) has had significant consequence for policy and practice in the United States. (The law was passed late in 1997 but regulations for its implementation were not promulgated until March 1999; thus, implementation is in process.)
At the policy level, IDEA has directed attention to the congruence of improvements in the education of students with disabilities with those changes taking place in education in general. For example, this is expressed in the law's strictures that 1. special education be understood as a service not a place to which students are sent and 2. that the education of students with disabilities is best achieved in the context of "whole school" approaches.
In practice, the law requires that: 1. students with disabilities have beneficial access to the regular curriculum (i.e., that curriculum which each state has prescribed for its students in general); 2. there is a presumption that students with disabilities be educated in classrooms with their non-disabled peers; and 3. the outcomes of the learning of students with disabilities be assessed and made public, be included in the school's overall performance reports, and be made available to the student's parents. Key factors in the implementation of these provisions include priority for service delivery in the student's home school; understanding services for students with disabilities as grounded in an enhanced general education program; emphasizing the unique supports that each student needs; and providing an array of innovative instructional models.
This paper will describe developments across the United States, with particular emphasis on administrative and programmatic changes in urban settings, e.g., San Francisco and New York City, and the review of more than a thousand school districts throughout the country. The paper will conclude with an assessment of the consequences of these federally-mandated changes both for students with disabilities and their non-disabled peers, and, more broadly, for the educational system at large.
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