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Special Education in the Context Of Education Reform
This monograph by the Center on Education Policy (CEP) looks at how well three major Midwest cities -- Cleveland, Milwaukee and Chicago -- have been able to comply with the federal special education law IDEA. A guiding principle of this study is that "children placed in special education are general education first," emphasizing that both branches of education share responsibility for students with IEP's.
CEP found significant difficulty with compliance, especially that inner city residents need help understanding the laws and that they need better access to advocates.
CEP found specific improvements: in Chicago in identification, referral staff training, and ongoing classroom assessment; in Cleveland, with general education teachers accepting their role in teaching...
However, they also found significant problems.
A large gap remains between the achievement of students covered under IDEA and students without IEP's.
Even though IDEA was last revised in 1997, schools were still struggling to implement some of its requirements and are worried that the new reenactment will bring yet more changes before they had fully implemented the last version.
The schools noted that legal concerns tend to dominate special education concerns now. Court decisions cause significant changes. A recent one requires changes in how placement decisions are made as well as teacher certifications for both special and general education.
The cities continue to struggle with staff shortages, difficult teaching conditions and providing adequate amounts of staff development.
Personnel are burdened with excessive paperwork, large classes, poor pay as well as the challenges of teaching in the inner city. Districts face critical staff shortages, especially for bilingual staff. Districts struggle to identify early intervention candidates. Current achievement testing does not serve children with special needs well.
Districts face lack of funding; Congress should fully…
It is also worth noting that the evolving nature of special education can be attributed to the cultural changes, family values, and civilizations taking place. Research attitudes towards people with special educational needs exhibit considerable variation as one move from one culture to the other. Findings show that people of different culture may perceive the similar conditions differently. For instance, Yoruba perceived that albinism as a punishment from God (Wilson,
In the past, students with disabilities tended to be isolated from their peers by Special Education paradigms that obliged them to receive learning in a physically isolated setting. Far from helping these children to achieve their full potential, such setups tended to stigmatize them, making, making it even more difficult to look beyond their ability for their own identity and how this could be applied for the benefit of society
.." (2004, p.3) the hands-on experience is also related as being important in the science class in the work entitled: "The National Curriculum" which states that science through inquiry: "...stimulates and excites pupils' curiosity about phenomena and events in the world around them" (the National Curriculum, 2006) and that science also "satisfies this curiosity with knowledge." (the National Curriculum, 2006) Scientific inquiry teaches students investigate skills in the areas of:
Then students use AlphaSmart software to paste the picture and explain in a paragraph why, how and where in the plot they feel that picture relates to the story. This tests three things: (a) student concentration; (b) student level of understanding of the general plot; and - student imagination. This is an important implementation because it opens the students' horizons and allows them to see the general links and
Thus, efforts aimed at helping teachers to avoid harmful stereotyping of students often begin with activities designed to raise teachers' awareness of their unconscious biases." (1989) Cotton goes on the relate that there are specific ways in which differential expectations are communicated to students according to the work of: "Brookover, et al. (1982); Brophy (1983); Brophy and Evertson (1976); Brophy and Good (1970); Cooper and Good (1983); Cooper and
Special Education According to the Federal Laws of the United States of America, "Special Education means specially designed instruction, at no cost to the parents, to meet the unique needs of a child with a disability [IDEA 97-300.26(a)]." The revised statutes of Arizona defines a child with disability as "a child who is at least three but less than twenty-two years of age, who has been evaluated and found to have