What is Special Education Law and why is it important to understand?

 

The Special Education Law is the laws which give children with disabilities and their parents important rights. The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) gives families of special education children the right to:

• have their child assessed or tested to determine special education eligibility and needs

• inspect and review school records relating to their child

• attend an annual "individualized education program" (IEP) meeting and develop a written IEP plan with representatives of the local school district, and

• resolve disputes with the school district through an impartial administrative and legal process. 

 

How have these acts significantly impacted Special education?

 

1. Education for All Handicapped Children Act: 

Before 1975, public schools had few obligations to children with disabilities. The vast majority of children, especially those with severe disabilities, were kept out of the public schools and even those who did attend were largely segregated from their non-disabled peers. However, in 1975 this changed with the passage of The Education for All Handicapped Children Act (P.L. 94-142), which required all schools receiving federal funding to provide handicapped children equal access to education and mandated that they be placed in the least restrictive educational environment possible.

 

2. The Rehabilitation Act of 1973:

Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 protects the rights of individuals with disabilities in programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance, including federal funds. The Section 504 regulation requires a school district to provide a “free appropriate public education” (FAPE) to each qualified person with a disability who is in the school district’s jurisdiction, regardless of the nature or severity of the person’s disability.

 

3. Americans with Disabilites Act of 1990:

"The ADA is solely about 'equal opportunity', from its preamble to its final provision: like other civil rights laws, the ADA prohibits discrimination and mandates that Americans be accorded equality in pursuing jobs, goods, services and other opportunities -- but the ADA makes clear that equal treatment is not synonymous with identical treatment, says Professor Robert Burgdorf Jr., one of the drafters of the original bill that became the ADA. 

 

 

What is "litigation" and what effect has it had on education?

Litigation is the term used to describe proceedings initiated between two opposing parties to enforce or defend a legal right. Litigation is typically settled by agreement between the parties, but may also be heard and decided by a jury or judge in court. Compliance is a fertile source of litigation. For example, if someone believes that a school district is violating a student’s right to free expression by requiring school uniforms, one way of challenging that is to file a lawsuit in federal court. Plaintiffs with a compliance lawsuit are generally claiming that the district has failed to meet its legal obligations in some way. The district, for its part, has to prove that the actions taken are justified and meet either the precise letter of the law or the intent.

 

 

Cases that have had an effect on education:

 

Brown vs. Board of Education:

On May 17, 1954, the Court unanimously ruled that "separate but equal" public schools for blacks and whites were unconstitutional. The Brown case served as a catalyst for the modern civil rights movement, inspiring education reform everywhere and forming the legal means of challenging segregation in all areas of society.

After Brown, the nation made great strides toward opening the doors of education to all students. With court orders and active enforcement of federal civil rights laws, progress toward integrated schools continued through the late 1980s. Since then, many states have been resegregating and educational achievement and opportunity have been falling for minorities.

Hobson vs. Hansen:

A trial court’s ruling in Hobson v. Hansen (1967) raised legal questions about ability grouping but failed to stop the practice in its tracks. Civil rights activist Julius Hobson filed a class action lawsuit in federal trial court against the Board of Education of the District of Columbia and its superintendent, Carl Hansen. The suit alleged that low-income and Black students were denied equal educational opportunity as a result of the district’s discriminatory practices. Included among the challenged practices was the institution of a rigid system that assigned students to three or four homogeneous ability groups, or tracks.

PARC vs. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania:

In 1971, we brought the seminal lawsuit Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children (PARC) v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the first right-to-education suit in the country, to overturn that Pennsylvania law and secure a quality education for all children.

The case quickly settled before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pa., resulting in a consent decree in which the state agreed to provide a free public education for children with mental retardation.

Mills vs. Board of Education D.C.:

Mills v. Board of Education of District of Columbia (1972) was one of two important federal trial court rulings that helped to lay the foundation that eventually led to the passage of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EAHCA), now the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), laws that changed the face of American education. Prior to 1975 and the enactment of these laws, many schools did not offer special education for students with disabilities. As such, millions of students were denied appropriate services or excluded from public education entirely.

Diana vs. State Board of Education:

Here was a case in which the use of tests to place students was again challenged. Diana, a Spanish-speaking student in Monterey County, California, had been placed in a class for mildly mentally retarded students because she had scored low on an IQ test given to her in English. The court ruled that Spanish-speaking children should be retested in their native language to avoid errors in placement.

Larry P. vs. Riles: 

Larry P. Was a black student in California, and his complaint led to an expansion of the ruling in the Diana case. The court ruled that schools are responsible for providing tests that do not discriminate on the basis of race. In the class-action case of PASE v. Hannon (1980), however, the fudge stated he could find little evidence of bias in the test items. The Larry P. Case also set a precedent for the use of data indicating disproportionate placement of minority groups as prima facie evidence of discrimination.

 

What is IDEA?

IDEA stands for Indivudals with Disabilities Education Act. It is a federal law that requires schools to serve the educational needs of eligible students with disabilities. Its primary goals are to protect the rights of children with disabilities and to give parents a voice in their child's education. The significance of IDEA is that IDEA ensures students with disabilities have access to a free and appropriate public education (FAPE), just like all other children. Schools are required to provide special education in the least restrictive environment. That means schools must teach students with disabilities in general education classroom whenever possible. Another significance of IDEA is that under IDEA, you have a say in the educational decisions the school makes about your child. At every point of the process, the law gives you specific rights and protections. These are called procedural safeguards.

 

NCLB-No Child Left Behind

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 is arguably the most farreaching education policy initiative in the United States over the last four decades. The hallmark features of this legislation compelled states to conduct annual student assessments linked to state standards, to identify schools that are failing to make “adequate yearly progress” (AYP), and to institute sanctions and rewards based on each school’s AYP status. A fundamental motivation for this reform is the notion that publicizing detailed information on school-specific test performance and linking that performance to the possibility of meaningful sanctions can improve the focus and productivity of public schools.

There is a lot of controversy about NCLB. I do not personally think that a child's test scores should be able to determine whether or not a teacher gets to keep their job or not the following year. The comedy to the right really sums up my perspective of NCLB.

 

14 Categories Under IDEA 

 

1. Autism: means a developmental disability significantly affecting verbal and nonverbal communication and social interaction, generally evident before age three, that adversely affects a child’s educational performance.

 

2. Deaf-blindness: means concomitant [simultaneous] hearing and visual impairments, the combination of which causes such severe communication and other developmental and educational needs that they cannot be accommodated in special education programs solely for children with deafness or children with blindness.

 

3. Deafness: means a hearing impairment so severe that a child is impaired in processing linguistic information through hearing, with or without amplification, thatadversely affects a child’s educational performance.

 

4. Developmental Delay:for children from birth to age three (under IDEA Part C) and children from ages three through nine (under IDEA Part B), the term developmental delay, as defined by each State, means a delay in one or more of the following areas: physical development; cognitive development; communication; social or emotional development; or adaptive [behavioral] development.

 

5. Emotional Disturbance:means a condition exhibiting one or more of the following characteristics over a long period of time and to a marked degree that adversely affects a child’s educational performance:

(a) An inability to learn that cannot be explained by intellectual, sensory, or health factors.

(b) An inability to build or maintain satisfactory interpersonal relationships with peers and teachers.

(c) Inappropriate types of behavior or feelings under normal circumstances.

 

6. Hearing Impairment: means an impairment in hearing, whether permanent or fluctuating, that adversely affects a child’s educational performance but is not included under the definition of “deafness.”

 

7. Intellectual Disability: means significantly subaverage general intellectual functioning, existing concurrently [at the same time] with deficits in adaptive behavior and manifested during the developmental period, that adversely affects a child’s educational performance.

 

8. Multiple Disabilities: means concomitant [simultaneous] impairments (such as intellectual disability-blindness, intellectual disability-orthopedic impairment, etc.), the combination of which causes such severe educational needs that they cannot be accommodated in a special education program solely for one of the impairments. The term does not include deaf-blindness.

 

9. Orthopedic Impairment: means a severe orthopedic impairment that adversely affects a child’s educational performance. The term includes impairments caused by a congenital anomaly, impairments caused by disease (e.g., poliomyelitis, bone tuberculosis), and impairments from other causes (e.g.,cerebral palsy, amputations, and fractures or burns that cause contractures).

 

10. Other Health Impairment: means having limited strength, vitality, or alertness, including a heightened alertness to environmental stimuli, that results in limited alertness with respect to the educational environment, that—

(a) is due to chronic or acute health problems such as asthma, attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, diabetes, epilepsy, a heart condition, hemophilia, lead poisoning, leukemia, nephritis, rheumatic fever, sickle cell anemia, and Tourette syndrome; and

(b) adversely affects a child’s educational performance.

 

11. Specific Learning Disability: means a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written, that may manifest itself in the imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or to do mathematical calculations. The term includes such conditions as perceptual disabilities, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, and developmental aphasia. The term does not include learning problems that are primarily the result of visual, hearing, or motor disabilities; of intellectual disability; of emotional disturbance; or of environmental, cultural, or economic disadvantage.

 

12. Speech and Language Impairment: means a communication disorder such as stuttering, impaired articulation, a language impairment, or a voice impairment that adversely affects a child’s educational performance.

 

13. Traumatic Brain Injury: means an acquired injury to the brain caused by an external physical force, resulting in total or partial functional disability or psychosocial impairment, or both, that adversely affects a child’s educational performance. The term applies to open or closed head injuries resulting in impairments in one or more areas, such as cognition; language; memory; attention; reasoning; abstract thinking; judgment; problem-solving; sensory, perceptual, and motor abilities; psychosocial behavior; physical functions; information processing; and speech.The term does not apply to brain injuries that are congenital or degenerative, or to brain injuries induced by birth trauma.

 

14. Visual Impairments Including Blindness:means an impairment in vision that, even with correction, adversely affects a child’s educational performance. The term includes both partial sight and blindness.

(d) A general pervasive mood of unhappiness or depression.

(e) A tendency to develop physical symptoms or fears associated

with personal or school problems.