A revamp of the federal law governing disabled children's education rights offers many positive changes but stops well short of tackling head-on the problem of disruptive behavior in the classroom.

Overwhelming majorities in both the House and Senate approved a rewrite of the 22-year-old Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) this week (May 13-14), and President Clinton has pledged to sign it. The new IDEA gives schools the power to suspend for up to 45 days disabled students who bring weapons or drugs to school; under current law, only disabled students who carry guns could be removed for more than 10 days without parental consent or court approval.

The new law also streamlines the procedure for removal of dangerous students from the classroom by allowing placement decisions to be made by a hearing officer rather than a judge. It also closes a loophole that allowed students to claim disability status after they had committed an infraction and allows school districts to call police without penalty when disabled students commit criminal acts. (In a recent circuit court decision, the courts had decided that a school district had changed a student's placement without going through due process when it called the police for criminal activity.)

AFT president Sandra Feldman praised the "many positive changes" included in the new law, which the AFT had lobbied for vigorously, but stressed "IDEA doesn't go far enough in dealing with disruptive behavior." In particular, the legislation offers no comprehensive language to help schools remove a seriously disruptive student who is disabled, she said. Clearly, this double standard in discipline -- one set of rules for disabled students, one for non-disabled students -- continues to bother lawmakers under both the old and new IDEA. A floor amendment that would have guaranteed school districts' power to set their own discipline policies for both traditional and disabled students from the regular classroom failed by a narrow 51-48 margin in the Senate.

Other major changes included in the new law: a requirement that disabled students be included in assessments offered by districts and states, a guarantee that general education teachers will be included in teams that develop mandated Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) for disabled students when the student is in a general classroom, and a requirement that IEPs include a behavioral management plan and information on a child’s past violent behavior. In addition, states are required to provide parents and school districts with access to mediation to minimize the use of courts; parents will now be required to give school districts a 10-day notice before placing their children in a private school to give the district an opportunity to provide an appropriate education. The funding formula for federal assistance under IDEA also was changed to include poverty factors.