Thirteen Categories and Its Importance in Special Education

Individuals with Disabilities Education Act - An ANALYSIS

Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), U.S. states are in charge of meeting special educational requirements of students with disabilities. For ascertaining which children are entitled to services under the Act, students should first be individually and comprehensively evaluated, for free. The evaluation serves two purposes: • seeing whether the child is disabled or not, within the framework of the Act; and • acquiring a detailed understanding of the special educational services needed by the child (NICHCY, 2012). States have the authority to segregate some disabilities, among the thirteen stipulated by IDEA, into distinct categories; but determining qualification in individual categories necessitates performing of a thorough, appropriate evaluation, employing various stipulated strategies and tools for assessment. IDEA declares that children's developmental, academic, and functional information has to be obtained for aiding eligibility determination (IDEA, 2004). The best interventions for children having disabilities in both general and special education settings make use of intensive, relatively individualized instruction, accompanied by thorough, regular progress monitoring of categorized students (Hocutt, 1996). Combination of categories has one key advantage, which is that it becomes much simpler to ascertain and thereby provide services, as well as to monitor progress; individual student goals deal with disability-linked academic requirements affecting students' progress and involvement in general education, in addition to other academic needs. A disadvantage linked with combining of categories is: if the Individualized Education Program (IEP) Team decides that even one of the elements isn't applying to any given child, that child won't be entitled to receive special interventions (Klein, n.d.). While the Act and its regulations name thirteen disability categories, there is a lack of precise criteria to define these categories; several school districts and states adopt modified taxonomies. Certain problems are associated with distinguishing children having mild learning and intellectual disabilities, and other such mild cognitive issues, resident in low-achievers. In fact, detection and classification methods are so divergent and subtle that a child identified among these categories by a particular school district might not be identified as disabled by another - overall reported disability prevalence differs from state to state, from around 7% to 15% of school-age children (Learning Differences and Special Education, n.d.).

2. Before IDEA's reauthorization in 2004, experts mainly utilized two major concepts for determining students having learning disabilities -- "definition of exclusion" and "ability-achievement discrepancy." They found that, while the intellectual ability of those having learning disabilities was "average," their performance at school was well below average (Learning Differences and Special Education, n.d.). This discrepancy was attended to and identified differently by different states; however, in every case, this difference between performance and potential was the key to characterizing a child as "having learning disability." Moreover, most experts employed "definition of exclusion" to define students with learning disability; i.e., children having learning disabilities were defined as those not functioning at academics in spite of (a) not having intellectual disability, (b) not being psychologically disturbed, (c) being free from modality impairment (e.g., deaf, blind), and (d) being able to learn without being hindered by excessive absences, lack of native-language instruction, frequent moves by family, poor teaching, etc. (Learning Differences and Special Education, n.d.). Thus, this definition, "excluded" other possible causes. Some learning disability professionals, however, are of the view that the aforementioned identification criteria (concepts) for ascertaining learning disabilities prove problematic for children. Under this system of identification, children have to be failures, or fall extremely behind before becoming eligible for intervention services, such as special education; therefore, it is imperative for special education leaders to first understand IDEA's 13 categories as a useful skill. The category of "learning disabilities" includes nearly 50% of children in special education. These children display a broad range of differences in learning, manifesting in the gap between performance and potential. These categories ought to define a few instructional strategies to assist children having specific learning disabilities (Learning Differences and Special Education, n.d.).