Despite extensive transition provisions in the U.S. Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the post-school outcomes for students with disabilities continue to be disappointing. The IDEA designated those transition provisions as priority targets for federal and state compliance monitoring to assure that schools are attaining the goal…

The Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework can be applied to a variety of instructional contexts and activities, and individualized education program (IEP) meetings are one such context. The primary principle of the framework is to provide teachers with guidelines for designing and implementing instruction that can be adapted to meet the…

Scholars, advocates, and policymakers have long expressed concern that programs subsidizing private education with a taxpayer-funded voucher would not serve children with disabilities in similar proportions as public schools. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty in collaboration with School Choice Wisconsin published a report in January…

Five days after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its ruling in "Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District," the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a decision in "M.C. v. Antelope Valley Union High School District." This important decision involved a student who was being served under the Individuals with…

With the increase of anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion educational policies and guidelines at local school boards and state-level agencies, campus administrators have seen an increase in complex situations as they concentrate their attention on supporting the educational needs of students from marginalized communities, including those with…

The special education literature has included a continuing line of articles and chapters that have translated for practitioners the legal meaning of the progress monitoring provisions in the successive versions of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This article examines this line of publications in light of the language of the…

Although more than 1.38 million students receive accommodations and supports accorded by Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, many teachers report not knowing about their responsibilities under Section 504. The purpose of this article is to educate teachers about Section 504. Specifically, teachers will learn about ways to evaluate and…

This article delineates the four successive dimensions of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act's (IDEA) central obligation of "free appropriation public education" that the courts have developed thus far: (a) procedural, (b) substantive, (c) incomplete implementation of the last Individualized Education Program (IEP), and (d)…

Despite the repeated documentation of the positive outcomes for students with extensive support needs (ESN) when they are included in general education settings and receive access to state-adopted general education standards, there has been little systemic progress on the inclusion of students with ESN across most states. The purpose of this…

For many years state education agencies (SEAs) have sought to create assessment systems that include all students, including students with disabilities. In order to improve outcomes for students with disabilities, there is an urgent need for cross-agency collaboration between special education and assessment offices, but other offices (e.g.,…

Parents of academically talented students with various types of learning differences, often called 2E, need to understand how support their children's unique needs. In this article, we discuss current research about 2E students and focus on how parents can both nurture and find educational opportunities that encourage their children's strengths…

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (2004) (IDEIA) requires practitioners to use educational evaluations to assess students in K-12 schools that are suspected of having a disability. The resulting data provides the basis for determining whether students qualify for special education services, their precise educational…

Confusion among stakeholders regarding some aspects of the special education process--chiefly the triennial reevaluation--leads to misapplication of rules across districts and states based on interpretations of informal lore-based reasoning. Local education agencies (LEA) can determine that no additional data are needed and advise parents to…

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) requires that school districts provide eligible students with specially designed instruction that confers a free appropriate public education (FAPE). Depending on the unique needs of a student, FAPE may include physical education services. The IDEA also requires that a student's individualized…

This is not a legal brief. This is an article written by a special education expert who has witnessed the very best and the very worst education has to offer. This article is meant to serve as a springboard for examining what is meant by education for all, high expectations, schools as laboratories for innovation, high caliber academic and social…