In 2025, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) will have been the primary law driving the field of special education for 50 years. A contentious area of disagreement has been the relationship between two primary mandates of the law: the obligation of schools to provide a free, appropriate public education (FAPE) to eligible…

The Individuals with Disability Act of 2004 states students must be serviced in their least restrictive environment. However, educators see more and more students being provided their instruction in resource rooms, with little evidence that the students are making more progress in a more restrictive environment. This study examined the…

Professional confusion, as well as case law confusion, exists concerning the fidelity and integrity of response to intervention (RTI) as a defensible procedure for identifying children as having a specific learning disability (SLD) under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Division is generated because of conflicting mandates…

Special education used to be a place--sometimes a separate school, more often a classroom down the hall where students labeled as such disappeared for hours at a time, out of sight and out of mind for the typical classroom teacher. That's still sometimes the case, but increasingly, special education is front and center in the regular education…

The inclusion of students with learning disabilities (LD) in assessment is deemed critical to improve the quality of educational opportunities for these students and to provide meaningful and useful information about student performance. Mandated inclusion and accountability for progress raise many interesting questions regarding how to fairly,…

The article reviews the history of public policy, legislation, and services affecting learning disabled children in the context of professional differences concerning definitional issues and anxieties about current initiatives to serve learning disabled students in the regular classroom. The need for solid research on effective instruction with…

In this study focus group interviews were conducted with educational administrators to examine how the inclusion of students with learning disabilities has changed their professional lives in ways they did not expect, and how inclusion has changed the lives of students with learning disabilities and the lives of other students in their schools in…

Examination of data from the "Annual Reports to Congress on the Implementation of Public Law 94-142" from 1979 through 1989 revealed that the placement rate for students with learning disabilities being educated in restrictive, separate class settings almost doubled. The proportion of all students with learning disabilities served in…

To comply with federal and state laws mandating free and appropriate education for all handicapped children, the Kentucky General Assembly authorized the State Department of Education, the Kentucky Council on Teacher Education and Certification, and the Kentucky Council on Higher Education to study higher education programs and certification…

The bulletin explores various aspects of mainstreaming handicapped youngsters into regular K-12 social studies classrooms. It is intended to give classroom teachers practical advice on dealing with the problems which have resulted from the passage of Public Law 94-142. Major problems include that handicapped youngsters often present an additional…

The Association for Children with Learning Disabilities encourages a Regular Education/Special Education Initiative as a system of integrated planning, delivery, and evaluation of the effects of services to disabled children. Specific recommendations regarding the development of pilot projects and competency training for school personnel, related…

This module is designed to familiarize the student training to be a regular physical education teacher with the needs of mainstreamed handicapped students they are likely to encounter in a regular classroom situation and with how to meet these needs through modifying the regular physical education class. Topics covered are: (1) legal provisions of…

Many of the nine articles relating to the counselor and the exceptional child relate specifically to Ontario's Bill 82, similar to the U.S. Public Law 94-142. Exceptional students are discussed focusing on provisions for their education, needs, and how these needs relate to the counselor role. (Author/RC)

A study examined alternative instructional materials and strategies for learning disabled college students and strategies for locating and mainstreaming these students. Site visits were made to programs for learning-disabled college students in the Houston, Texas, area to determine their scope and the strategies that they used. Additional…

This supplement is designed to aid vocational home economics teachers teaching handicapped students in the regular classroom. The first three sections provide background information on legislation affecting teaching of handicapped students in regular classrooms (Public Law 94-142), and definitions of terms associated with these laws; an…