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...

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…