Editor’s note: This is the third in a three-part series in which Miriam Kurtzig Freedman reflects back on a half-century of special education law in the United States. Part I focused on where we are now and the need for a new law, and Part II explained that new legislation must be built on the science of learning, not the adversarial legal system.
First, let us be brave and consider this big shift: End the individual entitlements for students with disabilities (SWD) with mild or moderate needs and their parents. Since all SWD now are in school with access to individualized services, it’s time to sunset that old law and create a new one. Continuing on our current path will only increase its quagmires and dysfunctions. Lawyers, bureaucrats, and hearing officers are not educators. We need special education to draw from the science of teaching and learning, not the machinery of law.
Six shifts to restore focus on learning for all students based on science and common sense
1. Focus on general education. Work very hard to improve that. End the reading wars and teach students how to read! Provide services for struggling students before they fall behind. End the house divided approach between general and special education. Special education should serve students who are disabled—not students who were failed by the lack of general education’s focused teaching, supports, and interventions.
2. Build on the whole child: strengths as well as needs. Individualized education programs (IEPs) too often dwell endlessly on deficits, largely ignoring student strengths. That is not based on science. Evidence from vocational technical schools demonstrates that many SWD thrive there because, during the week, they get to do what they like and are good at. How many of us became successful by focusing only on what we cannot do?
3. Empower parents as partners and children’s first teachers. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) provides parental rights but is silent on parental responsibilities. Families are a child’s first teachers. For a child’s success, schools should support parents in that pivotal role. How about rewards for parents who get their kids ready for school and stay involved thereafter?
4. Foster student agency. Empowerment and effort should be central goals. Too often we do too much for students instead of helping them do for themselves. “Learned helplessness” helps no one. It’s time to empower students and promote engagement, as they are key players in their own success.
5. Build honesty, trust, and clarity about standards. What is considered success should be unambiguous for each child and clear to all. While accommodations for SWD may be appropriate, they should not muddy our understanding of achievements for all students and must be made clear from the outset. For trust in the system, we need honest reports of achievement—for all students, including SWD. Today we don’t have that. Exhibit A: While many students can’t read, they graduate from high school. Why? Whom does that benefit? Real trust requires real honesty.
6. Use objective and reliable research. School policies should serve all students—including those with disabilities. For example, today’s “inclusion” push (also called “mainstreaming”) to have students with widely varying abilities and achievements in the same classrooms needs to be tempered through objective, reliable research and common sense—not just notions of rights or preferences. It needs to actually work effectively for all students—disabled or not. Symbolic gestures will not do.
Summary: A call for courage
To paraphrase Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz: “We’re not in the 1970s anymore.”
It’s time for boldness. We need a new law today that builds on the IDEA’s success. Design the new law to rebalance responsibility, free teachers to teach, and rebuild trust among students, families, and schools. Having achieved access for all SWD, it’s time to end the no-longer-needed entitlement and focus instead on what works in classrooms for SWD and all students. We can’t continue to endure the 50-year-old house-divided approach of regulatory-paperwork-lined battlefields inside our schools. Instead, we need to focus on today’s needs—improving student outcomes and working toward excellence for all students.
President Ford ended his signing statement for IDEA with guarded hope: “Fortunately,” he said, “Congress can revise the legislation and come up with a program that is effective and realistic.” But Congress never did. It falls to us to finish that work.
It’s time to build a system for our era that gets us back to the mission of education: achievement, growth, knowledge, skills—not rights, regulations, or disputes. Education is optimism personified. Teachers need more than 29 percent of time for teaching; parents need to partner with schools. Let’s free teachers to teach, support parents as true partners, get lawyers and bureaucrats out of those classrooms, and keep our promise focused where it belongs—on students and their learning. Education has never been about compliance and paperwork. It is about effort, trust, and the belief that every child can learn and grow.
Going forward, that is the promise we are called to keep.
