North Carolina special education funding utilizes a dollar allotment per identified student, applying a funding cap based on a percentage of district average daily membership. While representing an attempt to reduce over-identification of students with special needs the funding cap has led to large systematic disparities in district fiscal…

Raising academic standards and eliminating achievement gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students are America's prime national educational goals. Current federal and state policies, however, largely ignore the fact that the childhood poverty rate in the United States is 21%, the highest in the industrialized world, and that poverty…

While the due process provisions within PL 94-142 are designed to protect the rights of handicapped children and their parents regardless of costs, this study suggests that Congress' original intentions are not being realized. Findings disclosed enormous cost differences (especially person hour costs) among due process hearings. Includes two…

This study examined the extent to which federal and state funding compensates for the excess cost of educating students under Public Law 94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act. The literature is supports of the contention that the high costs of educating a handicapped child were well known prior to passage of P.L. 94-142, which…

Although federal involvement in education has been reduced in the 1980's under the Reagan Administration's "New Federalism," it is far from clear that state and local governments are willing and able to adequately compensate for this decreasing involvement to ensure educational equity and quality. In the current debate over federalism,…