Special Education Legislation Gets Reauthorized
WASHINGTON, Nov. 19 – The research, drafting and negotiating process took more than three years, but an overhaul of the legislation governing the education of disabled students seems headed for approval in the extended session of Congress.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act ensures disabled students receive a free education with an emphasis placed on including disabled students in class with non-disabled students as much as possible.
The House passed a reauthorization of the bill in April of 2003 and the Senate passed its version in May 2004. A joint Senate and House conference committee this week approved a compromise version, and it is expected to be approved by Congress and signed by President Bush, said Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
Both sides in the conference committee praised the bipartisan compromise efforts to allow the bill to reach its final stages.
“None of out differences are insurmountable, and the consequences of not getting a bill done this year are far greater than the challenge of compromising with another,” said Boehner.
The bill is modeled after the No Child Left Behind Act in that it tries to focus on results rather than process. Sen. Judd Gregg, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, noted that the bill has five themes. It seeks to improve the scholastic results of properly identified disabled students, reform the way disabled students are disciplined, reduce the number of lawsuits brought by their parents, require their teachers to be “highly qualified” and reduce the paperwork load for those instructors, and reform federal funding for disabled student education.
“We’ve gone from an input exercise to ultimately an output exercise, where we’re looking at what the results are,” Gregg said. The bill is aimed at students achieving academic goals, instead of getting sidetracked by bureaucratic requirements, resulting in students falling behind. It also seeks to change the way schools evaluate students so as to more accurately identify those with special needs.
The bill also revised the disciplinary rules for those students, making guidelines slightly more lenient: Administrators will be able to discipline disabled students using the same methods as non-disabled students, unless the student’s disability is a factor in the behavior. Gregg said the bill is “sensitive to that child’s handicap, but also recognizes that child must function in a classroom of other children.”
Thirdly, the bill is designed to reduce litigation by creating a better communication network between parents and schools, so disputes can have constructive outcomes, rather than lawsuits.
The bill will require special education teachers to be “highly qualified” as defined by the No Child Left Behind Act in each subject they teach. It also “recognizes that special education teachers face two and a half times the paperwork burden as other teachers, by allowing 15 states to test new ways of giving teachers more time with students and less with needless paper work,” said Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.).
Lastly, funding has been set on a six-year path to reach a goal of 40 percent national average federal funding for the total costs of educating students with special needs. The law stipulates, however, that that money be used for the extra cost of educating these students, not to defray their regular educational costs. Currently, the federal government contributes roughly 18-19 percent, according to congressional officials, though that figure varies state by state. Last year federal education grants to states totaled $10.1 billion and this year the House has proposed an additional $1 billion, according to the House Education and Workforce Committee.
Additionally, the bill will add programs to connect students with technologies to make them more independent after they graduate.
“Five years after they complete their special education programs, more than half of those with disabilities still are not working or involved in continuing education,” said Kennedy. “We owe it to them .to provide the training and support they need to lead independent lives.”
Although he has not reviewed the language in the new bill, George Dowaliby, chief of the Connecticut Bureau of Special Education, said guidelines for student achievement and student discipline won’t change that much.
Dowaliby said he is concerned about the bill’s language on federal funding.
He said the funding promise to achieve 40 percent federal funding, appears to be more “concrete language” than before, and an improvement. But, he said, while Washington politicians claim states currently receive 18 to 19 percent federal funding for special education, Connecticut receives much less, receiving around eight percent. “The percentage in Connecticut is lower primarily because it costs more to do business here,” he said.
Even under the new law Connecticut’s share would likely end up around 20 percent rather than 40 percent, Dowaliby said. He said he would like to see the system refined to more equitably distribute funds to states, so benefits would be more even.
Also a concern for Dowaliby is the funding formula under the new bill which, he said, could give local school systems more money and the state system less money.
