DINF Web Posted on December 15, 1997

Individuals with Disabilities Education Act Amendments of 1995

Fundamentally, what happens every school day in the classroom is at the heart of successful implementation of IDEA. As much as possible, unnecessary requirements or other distractions from teaching and learning should be eliminated so that students, parents, teachers and administrators can focus on improving results for students.

Directing Resources to Teaching and Learning

Over the past twenty years, the implementation of IDEA has focused primarily on process without sufficient attention to educational results for children with disabilities. Too often the fundamental purpose of the law is lost--access to education and improved educational results, not just access to a place or service termed "special education."

It will be far more difficult to achieve the significant improvements embodied in the other four principles without accompanying changes in how States and local communities focus their attention and use their resources. IDEA reauthorization must maximize the extent to which special education resources are devoted to teaching and learning of children with disabilities and must promote a greater focus on quality and results and eliminate instructionally irrelevant activities and unnecessary paperwork.

We propose several significant changes to increase the focus on teaching and learning. The first, and most critical, are the improvements to the evaluation and IEP processes that are discussed above. In the IEP, new attention to access to the general curriculum and State assessments will help ensure a focus on educational results. The replacement of short-term objectives with meaningful annual objectives and regular reporting to the parents on the child's progress toward those objectives will eliminate a paperwork requirement that most agree has limited educational value and is a significant burden on teachers. These improvements in the IEP would be supported by our proposals for eligibility and evaluation. These will promote reduced labeling of children, permitting the considerable resources that are now used to determine the appropriate diagnostic label to be devoted to instructionally relevant evaluation of the child's disability and need for special education. And they will promote useful, functional analyses, so that the time and resources of teachers and school psychologists are devoted to activities designed to support higher achievement rather than to the administration of tests that have little relation to the student's instruction or academic progress.

Other changes that will increase the focus on results while reducing paperwork are relaxing the fiscal tracking requirements, which will promote appropriate services in the regular classroom while eliminating burdensome paperwork, and streamlining notice requirements to provide better information to parents while reducing the length of notices. Promoting mediation as a method of dispute resolution also will help to focus resources on teaching and learning. If families and schools can resolve their disputes quickly and effectively through mediation, the heavy financial and emotional cost of due process can be avoided.

In addition to these new strategies, several other areas are of concern if we are to better focus resources on teaching and learning. One critical area is State and local planning. To create an education system that enables all children to reach high standards, regular education and special education must plan together to ensure high expectations, and appropriate professional development, funding, instructional strategies, and classroom configurations. Currently, IDEA State and local Part B applications provide assurances that the States and districts are in compliance with Part B requirements and procedures. They do not focus on results; they do not encourage comprehensive planning for special education, much less alignment between special and regular education; and they drain State and local resources that could be better used. The Office of Special Education Programs routinely receives large boxes containing copies of every State policy and procedure concerning special education from States. But the Office of Special Education Programs rarely receives -- because the State plan requirements do not ask for -- thoughtful plans describing the results children with disabilities are achieving and how the State intends to improve results in the context of its overall education reforms.

Another critical area is data collection. The existence of accurate, usable data about the implementation of IDEA is critical to continuously improving results. While many of the data-collection requirements of the law have yielded significant information that assists States, schools, and the federal government to better implement the law, a few of the requirements create significant burden while yielding data of questionable utility and accuracy. For example, currently States must report the number of children served by disability category. However, because each State develops its own definitions, within statutory parameters, the data is not comparable from State to State. Similarly, the requirement that States develop precise estimates of future shortages and future supply of personnel imposes on States a difficult task and generates inaccurate data that is used only to meet the federal reporting requirements.

Finally, it is essential that we shift accountability to focus on results and the success of efforts to improve results. This means that States, districts, and schools must be held accountable for what really matters--the achievement of children. Under current law, we too often hold educators responsible for filling in forms and filing papers, and we seldom ask them to show to the Department or to parents and the general public whether children are learning. We have learned from advances in a variety of fields that there are several types of accountability and methods of ensuring accountability that can support--rather than detract from--more effective educational services under IDEA.

Effective accountability for results requires understanding how children are doing, revising their programs to address lack of expected progress, and holding States, school districts and schools accountable for these results. Under current law, the IEP process and the due process protections embedded in IDEA are important assurances of accountability for required services. Our proposals will add to this a focus on quality and results. We are already taking steps in this direction. The Office of Special Education Programs has embarked on a multi-year effort to focus its monitoring on student achievement. Already, many States have responded positively to this new approach--saying that for the first time the Department is monitoring what really matters and that monitoring is helping them do their jobs better and not getting in the way.

Our new proposals focus on results--for individual children and for school systems. For each child, the IEP would focus on elements essential to achievement, including measurable annual objectives and access to the general curriculum. The parents would be informed regularly of the student's progress toward the annual objectives. Each year, the school determines whether the annual objectives have been achieved--and revises the child's program to address lack of expected progress. And, under the new provisions for re-evaluations, schools would be responsible for a more in-depth review of the student's educational needs and progress every three years.

While the individual progress of each child is the ultimate goal, it is also critical for children with disabilities to be included in overall accountability measures and for parents and educators to know how well each State is doing in improving results for students with disabilities. Our proposal for including students in the State and district general assessments--and publicly reporting on the results of those assessments for all children with disabilities--will help to ensure this. In addition, each State will establish goals for the performance of students with disabilities and report every two years on progress toward those goals. Moreover, States that choose to develop State Improvement Plans will receive additional resources to analyze student performance--including graduation rates and performance on State assessments--and describe how they will make progress toward their performance goals. As part of their plan, they will show how they will hold school districts and schools accountable for academic progress of children with disabilities, how they will provide high-quality technical assistance to school districts and schools to improve results for children with disabilities, and what they will do to assist the school districts whose students are furthest behind. Every two years, these States would analyze their progress and change their efforts under their State Improvement Plans accordingly.

Ensuring Safe and Disciplined Schools

For teachers, administrators, students, and families to focus on teaching and learning, the schools they are in must be safe and disciplined. Little teaching and learning can take place in schools where teachers or students fear for their well-being. Today's schools are facing new challenges. Twenty years ago, children fought with their fists; today they use guns. All parents want schools that are havens of order and safety for their children--both disabled and non-disabled.

Of course, prevention is the best approach to discipline problems--whether the child is disabled or non-disabled. There are many schools that have learned how to prevent violent and disruptive behavior through a variety of strategies, including early identification of learning problems, consistent application of rules, teaching students how to resolve conflicts peacefully, and ensuring that students get the supports and instruction they need to be able to understand the classroom materials and work at their own pace. In addition, effective behavioral management techniques being used in some schools are helping to prevent discipline problems and enabling children with emotional disabilities to take responsibility for their behavior. (How Two Schools Are Helping Students With Emotional and Behavioral Problems to Succeed) One promising approach is the use of behavior management plans based on careful assessment of the causes and reasons for the student's troublesome behavior. A focus on prevention is critical to help keep children in school and subsequently keep them off the streets, out of the juvenile justice system, and in the workforce as productive adults.

Unfortunately, prevention is not always effective and there are times when schools must take additional steps to maintain safe and disciplined schools. Under the current law, teachers and schools can do a great deal to address the misconduct of disabled students--from temporary suspensions, to alternative placements, to long-term expulsions when the child's misconduct is not related to his or her disability. If a child poses a substantial danger to himself or to others and the parent will not agree to allow the school to move the child to a different placement, the school may go to court to seek immediate removal of the child. In addition, under a provision added to IDEA last year, a school can immediately remove the child from the classroom for up to 45 calendar days when the child brings a gun to school. During that period, the parents and school can work together to devise an appropriate placement and program for the child, or, if the parent and school cannot agree, they can resolve their dispute through mediation, where it is available, or due process.

While the current law gives schools and teachers a number of options for disciplining students, there are still additional situations in which schools need to be able to act quickly to remove a dangerous student from the classroom. We suggest two sensible provisions that will help schools maintain safe classrooms but will also recognize the importance of protections for children with disabilities and their families. Historically, many students with disabilities were labeled "difficult to handle" and routinely suspended or even permanently expelled from school. IDEA was enacted, in part, to help ensure that students were not excluded from school for conduct that related to their disability.

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