DINF Web Posted on December 15, 1997

Individuals with Disabilities Education Act Amendments of 1995

A critical element of aligning IDEA with State and local educational reform efforts is promoting high expectations for children with disabilities commensurate with their particular needs and meaningful and effective access to the general curriculum in the regular classroom, to the maximum extent appropriate. We know that most children work harder and do better when more is expected of them. Disabled students are no different. We know from experience and research that when we have high expectations for students with disabilities, ensure their access to the general curriculum whenever appropriate, and provide them the necessary accommodations and supplementary aids and services, many can achieve to high standards--and all can achieve more than society has historically expected. Despite our knowledge, too often the education system fails to have challenging standards for these students or even to take responsibility for their academic progress. Instead, in many cases, the system provides a watered-down curriculum, fails to set meaningful educational goals, and excludes far too many students from State and district-wide assessments. The original intent of IDEA was to ensure that access to an appropriate education is based on individual needs, including access to the general curriculum whenever appropriate. Special education is now too often seen as a "place" to send students, rather than as special education services designed to ensure that students have meaningful and effective access to the general curriculum and achieve to high standards.

There are three complementary strategies for promoting high expectations: (1) including students with disabilities in State and district-wide assessments; (2) improving the IEP process to focus on access to the general curriculum, whenever appropriate, and on goals designed to improve educational results; and (3) asking each State to establish goals for the performance of students with disabilities and to report regularly on its progress toward meeting its goals.

Including Students With Disabilities in Assessments

Challenging standards and aligned assessments are a central component of State and local school reform efforts. One strategy to help ensure that the education system has high expectations for students with disabilities and includes them in school reform efforts is to require that these students be included in State and district-wide assessments, that the results be publicly reported, and that the data be used in State and local school improvement efforts under IDEA (Shriner, Dong-il, Thurlow & Ysseldyke, 1993; Brauen, O'Reilly & Moore, 1994; Ysseldyke, Thurlow, McGrew & Vanderwood, 1994). While section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended, and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 already prohibit the discriminatory exclusion of students with disabilities from participation in assessments, we believe that public reporting of results and use of the data in developing State improvement efforts is equally important. When schools are required to assess students with disabilities and report on the results, schools are more likely to focus on improving results for students with disabilities, and students are more likely to have meaningful access to the general curriculum (Ysseldyke, Thurlow, McGrew & Vanderwood, 1994).

Including students with disabilities in assessments will be a significant change from current practice in many States and school districts. Despite the civil rights requirements of section 504 and the Americans with Disabilities Act, overall, States exclude about half of all students with disabilities from assessments (Ysseldyke, Thurlow, McGrew & Shriner, 1994).

Many students with disabilities currently excluded from assessments are fully able to participate. It is estimated that 85 percent of all students with disabilities are capable of full participation in Statewide assessments (Ysseldyke, Thurlow, McGrew & Shriner, 1994), and assessments for those students can be consistent with high standards. Some States are already developing a variety of alternate assessments, such as portfolios or performance tasks for students with cognitive disabilities (Brauen, O'Reilly & Moore, 1994; McLaughlin & Warren, 1994), and significant research exists to help educators make appropriate decisions regarding the inclusion of students with disabilities in general assessments and the use of assessment accommodations and adaptations (Brauen, O'Reilly, Heid, Gentry & Morrisey, 1994; Thurlow, Ysseldyke & Silverstein, 1993; Ysseldyke, Thurlow, McGrew & Skinner, 1994; Ysseldyke, Thurlow, McGrew & Vanderwood, 1994). In order to assist States and school districts, research and technical assistance efforts under IDEA support programs will include specific attention to assessment issues.

Making IEPs More Effective

However, including students with disabilities in assessments is not, alone, sufficient to meet our goals of higher expectations and access to the general curriculum. The IEP--which plays a central role in the implementation of IDEA--must also effectively support these goals. However, there is much concern in the field that IEPs often fail to include meaningful educational goals designed to provide students with access to the general curriculum and the special education and related services to enable them to achieve much more. (What Research on IEPs Tells Us) Parents rarely receive regular reports of their child's progress toward the annual goals set out in the IEP. And the annual review of the student's progress at the IEP meeting often fails to take a hard look at the results of on-going classroom assessment to determine whether a revision of the child's program is necessary or the student continues to need special education or related services.

Experience offers insight into why this is the case: IEP meetings too frequently focus only on the time each day or each week the child is "in" special education and on the detailed short-term objectives that bear little relation to how children learn or their parents' aspirations for them. And, because the law does not require regular education teachers to attend IEP meetings, for those students who spend much of their day in the regular classroom, the discussion of what instructional approaches and services are necessary to enable the student to achieve to high standards often takes place without the teacher with whom the student spends most of his or her time. In effect, IEP meetings focus on access to special education rather than on access to an overall high-quality education. Moreover, because of the requirement that the IEP contain short-term objectives for every goal, teachers may spend significant time and energy developing a multitude of detailed and lengthy objectives that have little instructional utility. As a result, the IEP process too often results in a paper exercise characterized by fragmented objectives, lower expectations, and instructional irrelevance.

There is a fair amount of agreement that this is in stark contrast to what IEP meetings could be--an opportunity for the parents and the child's teachers to discuss a student's progress based on ongoing classroom assessment and other appropriate information; how he or she will achieve to challenging standards and have access to the general curriculum whenever appropriate; what changes in the child's program and special education services are needed to improve achievement; whether he or she will be included in the general assessment or in alternate assessments; the extent to which the student will be removed from the regular education environment; and whether the child continues to need special education and related services.

After 20 years of experience, we have learned much about the effectiveness of IEPs. In this reauthorization, we should increase the utility of the IEP by preserving the individualized educational planning that is central to effective teaching and learning while reducing paperwork requirements that do not benefit families, students, or teachers.

The specifics of our IEP proposal support all of these general aims. For example, a number of improvements to the IEP would focus on participation in the general curriculum and challenging standards. Importantly, the IEP would include a statement of: (1) the student's present levels of educational performance, including how the child's impairment affects the child's participation and progress in the general curriculum, or, for preschoolers, access to developmentally appropriate activities; (2) measurable annual objectives related to meeting the child's needs that result from his or her disability, to enable the child to participate in the general curriculum, and meeting any other educational needs, if any, resulting from the disability; and (3) any modifications in the administration of general State or district assessments to permit the student to participate in the assessments or, if participation is not appropriate, a statement of how the student will be assessed.

In order to support inclusion in the regular education environment and ensure necessary aids and supports for successful inclusion, the IEP would include a statement of the special education and related services to be provided to the student and any program modifications necessary to attain the annual objectives and participate in the general curriculum and in extra-curricular and other nonacademic activities. The IEP would also include a justification of the extent, if any, to which the child is not being educated or will not participate in extracurricular or other nonacademic activities with non-disabled students. In addition, at the start of each school year, the school district would be required to consider what supports are needed for each teacher who has children with disabilities in their classroom in order to help them implement those children's IEPs.

The IEP provisions also would require that parents be kept regularly apprised of their child's progress toward meaningful, measurable annual objectives, and the extent to which that progress is sufficient to enable the child to achieve the objectives, at least as often as parents of non-disabled children, by means such as report cards. As part of developing a more instructionally relevant IEP that includes measurable annual objectives and regular reporting to parents, short-term objectives would no longer be required. However, educators could include them whenever they believed them to be useful.

To make the IEP process work, the child's regular education teachers need to be involved. Therefore, the IEP provisions would require that, no later than the 1998-99 school year, at least one regular education teacher, in addition to the special education teacher, would participate in the IEP meeting, if the student is or may be participating in the regular education environment.

To ensure attention to particular needs that are sometimes overlooked, the IEP team would be asked to consider the language needs of the student as they relate to the student's IEP. And, to help prevent behavior and discipline problems before they occur, when a student's behavior impedes his or other students' learning, the IEP team would be asked to consider strategies, including a behavior management plan, to address the student's behavior.

Finally, because meaningful annual reviews of the child's progress are essential to improving achievement, the IEP provisions would require that the IEP be reviewed annually to determine whether the annual objectives are being achieved and the effectiveness of the services and program modifications provided. The IEP would be revised to address lack of expected progress or if otherwise appropriate.

State Goals for the Performance of Students with Disabilities

These new strategies for IEPs and assessments are critical to promoting high expectations and better educational results. However, neither is sufficient to ensure that overall State and school district resources are directed at helping students with disabilities reach the same challenging standards established for all children or to address systemic barriers to improving results for students with disabilities.

An explicit focus in IDEA on improving educational results for children with disabilities is needed to ensure that States and school districts do not settle for process compliance with IDEA, but work also to improve results. In order to promote this focus on results in IDEA, States should be asked to develop their own high goals for the performance of students with disabilities in the State, measure progress toward their goals, and publicly report the results. Information on student performance obtained from reporting on assessments, as well as other student performance information, would then be integral to an overall State effort to improve student performance.

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