Hoffman won his case on the basis of being misclassified, placed in a school for the mentally retarded, and thus deprived of 12 years of learning opportunities. School officials are appealing on the grounds that damages are excessive and that the adminstration of an IQ test contraindicates malpractice. (WI)

Two essays address these issues in American higher education: popular response to a 1994 book entitled "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life," which addresses assumptions underlying intelligence testing; and recent litigation and controversy over colleges' responsibility to provide instruction at a level…

While the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (Public Law 94-142) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 first established the basic framework for determining the rights of handicapped students, both the courts and Congress are continually interpreting and changing the standards. The eight papers included in this…

To help public schools minimize litigation, this newsletter recommends constitutional and legal training for public school officials and examines relevant court cases involving school official liability, intelligence tests, and religion in the schools. According to the authors, the Maine v. Thiboutot and Owen v. City of Independence cases…

Future special education placement bias litigation can be prevented if special education and related services programs meet certain principles of responsibility, including ensuring the development of effective interventions in regular education, using assessment procedures that are oriented toward intervention rather than student classification,…

A major development of the law in the 1970s has been the extension of the principle of egalitarianism to the developmentally disabled, particularly the mentally retarded. In recent years numerous judicial decisions have overruled the practices of school districts that have excluded developmentally disabled children from educational programs. This…