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OVERVIEW
The
Progress
The Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) has a long history. Prior to
its implementation in 1975, approximately 1 million children with
disabilities were shut out of schools and hundreds of thousands more
were denied appropriate services. Since then, the legislation
changed the lives of these children. Many are learning and
achieving at levels previously thought impossible. As a
result, they are graduating from high school, going to college and
entering the workforce as productive citizens in unprecedented
numbers.
Ninety percent of children with developmental
disabilities were previously housed in state institutions. Today,
they are no longer in those settings. As compared to their
predecessors, three times the number of young people with
disabilities are enrolled in colleges or universities, and twice as
many of today's twenty-year olds with disabilities are
working.
Unfulfilled Promises
While
this is significant progress, we can and must do better. The
status of children with disabilities still falls short of our
expectations for them.
- Twice as many children with disabilities drop out
of school.
- Drop outs do not return to school, have
difficulty finding jobs and often end up in the criminal justice
system.
- Girls who drop out often become young unwed
mothers—at a much higher rate than their non-disabled
peers.
- Many children with disabilities are excluded from
the curriculum and assessments used with their non-disabled
classmates, limiting their possibilities of performing to
higher standards of performance.
Strategies for
Success
The new IDEA legislation is an
attempt to remedy these and other problems that contribute to the
barriers children with disabilities face.
IDEA will make these changes by:
- Raising expectations for children with
disabilities;
- Increasing parental involvement in the education
of their children;
- Ensuring that regular education teachers are
involved in planning and assessing children's progress;
- Including children with disabilities in
assessments, performance goals, and reports to the
public;
- Supporting quality professional development for
all personnel who are involved in educating children with
disabilities.
IDEA
Accomplishments
Over the past four
decades, special education research has provided practical answers
to questions about how best to educate infants, toddlers, children
and youth with disabilities. These accomplishments have
translated into benefits for all our citizens.
- Over 1 million children, many of whom would have
been placed in separate schools and institutions 25 years ago, are
being educated in neighborhood schools, saving an average of
$10,000 per child per year.
- Nine percent more children with disabilities
graduated from high school between 1984 and 1992.
- Youth served under IDEA are employed twice as
often as their predecessors, older American with similar
disabilities who were not served under the law.
- Nearly half of all adults with disabilities have
successfully completed course-work in colleges and
universities.
- Although less than 1% of the annual expenditures
to educate children with disabilities is spent on research and
development to improve practice, these dollars have had
exponential results. They support programs that allow
children with disabilities to become independent learners and
self-supporting adults.
- New knowledge has resulted in technologies that
have enriched all our lives. For example, the Kurtzweil
Machine, originally developed for taking written text and
translating it into Braille and speech was the forerunner of the
fax machine. Captioning, an aid for the deaf, has become a
boon for older Americans with poor hearing and for those who are
learning to read and speak English.
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IDEA'97
