At the end of a 108th Congress plagued by partisan rancor and seemingly more devoted to symbolic than substantive progress on a host of issues, a lame duck session just before Thanksgiving managed to produce an unexpectedly promising bill to reauthorize the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which governs special education. (The text of the bill, which the President is expected to sign, can be found here.)
Enactment of IDEA's antecedent law in 1975 was a landmark for both education and civil rights, promising that children with disabilities could no longer be excluded from public education. Yet a 2001 study by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) and Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, Rethinking Special Education for a New Century, along with plenty of other research, showed that IDEA has fallen well short of its promise. For example, it suffers from mission creep, serving a rising share of students with an expanding list of ever-less-severe disabilities. Due process protections have fostered adversarial relations between parents and educators and endless litigation. Combined pressures of paperwork, lawsuits, and high-cost placements build a spirit of resentment about the law in many places. While many children clearly benefit from IDEA, many others are ill-served, with negative results for both general and special education.
This new reauthorization can't solve all of IDEA's problems, some of which arise from state policies and the incredible challenges faced by many disabled youngsters as well as their families and teachers. But a number of worthy reforms made their way in, albeit many of them in attenuated form. For example:
Prevention and Early Intervention: IDEA offers extra resources for students with disabilities, yet many students benefit too late because they are diagnosed with disabilities only after falling far behind. This reauthorization allows up to 15 percent of IDEA funds to be used for prevention and intervention for struggling students before they fall far enough behind to require a disability diagnosis.
Redefine Learning Disabilities: IDEA once defined "specific learning disabilities" as gaps between students' overall aptitude and their performance in a specific subject. That approach forced educators to wait for students to fail, "identified" too many children who suffered from poor teaching instead of true disabilities, and overlooked real disabilities in low-performing youngsters. In this reauthorization, Congress eliminated the discrepancy definition, allowing states to substitute their own definitions and encouraging them to focus on how students respond to scientifically-based interventions.
Racial Inequities: Persistent racial gaps in special education diagnoses, placements, and discipline have long been troubling. Now Congress has taken a step to understanding - and mitigating - these gaps by requiring states and the U.S. Secretary of Education to monitor racial differences in special education and change policies that perpetuate them.
Align IDEA with other reforms: American education increasingly focuses on results-based accountability, but IDEA has concentrated on process more than outcomes for disabled students. The reauthorized version places a needed focus on learning, requiring states to set goals for improving achievement of students with disabilities, and mandating consequences and interventions if states don't improve. Reauthorization also brings special needs children under the banner of NCLB by clarifying how children with special needs are included and accommodated in state accountability systems.
Reduce Paperwork and Litigation: Excessive paperwork, litigation and an adversarial atmosphere are enormous burdens on special educators. This reauthorization authorizes a 15-state pilot project to experiment with paperwork reduction, seeking to preserve protections for students while closing some loopholes that allow savvy lawyers to abuse due process. It also encourages mediation before going into due process.
End Double Standards: Protections to ensure that disabled youngsters receive the services they need have also inadvertently kept educators from disciplining them to ensure safe and orderly schools. The reworked law still safeguards students from discipline for disability-related behavior but gives administrators more leeway to remove disruptive youngsters from the classroom while continuing to provide services to them.
Funding: Congress's 2005 IDEA appropriation, though up by $500 million from 2004, doesn't back up this reform bill as generously as it should. At $10.6 billion, it's $1.76 billion less than the reauthorization allows and less than half what would be required to keep the original (if arbitrary) federal funding commitment for special ed. The need, however, is not just more dollars, but also smarter funding to address district needs and incorporate evidence on effective special ed practice. One positive step in this bill requires states to set aside a percentage of IDEA funds to serve students with exceptionally costly disabilities, freeing local school districts from the burden of absorbing these rare but burdensome costs.
This bill was not without contention. PPI and Fordham took plenty of flak for advancing unconventional reform ideas and provisions of the final bill were both cheered and jeered by innumerable advocacy groups. Parent and disability rights interests opposed proposals to streamline due process or make it easier for schools to remove disruptive students. Democrats are disappointed with funding shortfalls. Republicans are disappointed by the absence of special ed vouchers ?? la Florida's McKay scholarship program. Despite its shortcomings, however, this law's passage offers a refreshing example of adults pushing across party lines and back at interest group pressures, and working together to change the status quo and improve educational opportunities for our most vulnerable children.
"Making progress," Washington Post, November 19, 2004
"House approves final special education bill," Committee on Education and the Workforce, November 19, 2004
Rethinking Special Education for a New Century, Chester E. Finn, Jr., Charles R. Hokanson, Jr., and Andrew J. Rotherham, editors, The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and Progressive Policy Institute, Spring 2001
Sara Mead is a policy analyst with the 21st Century Schools Project at the Progressive Policy Institute.
