Individualized Education Curriculum Programs

Within the field of curriculum studies, individualized education programs has a meaning different from mainstream uses of the term individualized education programs (IEP). In the United States, an IEP is a specific written statement for every student with disabilities that is produced, reviewed, and consequently revised within under the purview of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). However, because individuality and the importance of students-as-individuals are paramount American values, there are a multiplicity of connections between curriculum, programs, and the individuals who are their intended audience.

The individual needs of students is therefore a fairly wide and far-reaching category. Curricular programs designed in response to students' individualized educational needs lie at the heart of a central tension in curriculum studies: how to provide all students with an equal education while simultaneously tailoring curricular contexts to individual student's social, academic, and emotional needs. As such, these diverse and occasionally disparate perspectives can be examined as questions of curriculum differentiation: how do curricular programs respond to students' individualized educational needs?

On its surface, individualized education corresponds to singular person's educational needs. However, individual student's particular racial, gender, class, or other such attributes can become the focus of a particular local policy or pedagogical practice. For example, in many large school districts where students speak a language other than English at home or in their communities, there are educational programs designed to assess individual student's current fluency in English and to measure their progress toward a native speaker's level of grade-appropriate fluency. The possibilities for an unintentional or intentional disabling of nonmain-stream students by language is a well-traveled road represented by such strong scholarship as by Lisa Deplit and Joanne Kilgour-Dowdy, Shirley Brice Heath, and Katherine Au. Their works share an understanding of how sociocultural aspects of individuals such as language (or race, class, gender, sexual orientation) can be retooled as individual deficits.

Similarly, there is a body of literature that illustrates how the particularized attention given to individuals with perceived disabilities has a tendency toward self-fulfilling prophecy that reifies students' disabled status in the course of providing the individualized programs students require. Harlan Lane's discussion of schooling and deaf students in The Mask of Benevolence: Disabling the Deaf Community and Harve Varenne and Ray McDermott's presentation of how children acquire a learning disability in Successful Failure: The Schools America Builds are examples of such scholarship. Varenne and McDermott's argument that academic differences are recast as disability and disability is located not within the child, but outside of him or her in the educational definitions and systems that contextualize a child's schooling is particularly germane to this discussion.

Finally, there is yet another body of literature that addresses formalized curricular differentiation at the school and district level. In order to meet student's individualized educational needs, schools regularly offer different levels of academic content to the same-aged students. Work by scholars such as by Jeannie Oakes documents how difference as deficit can negatively impact the curriculum and pedagogy students receive in an effort to provide them with the academic content thought to suit their particular needs. While confirming these tendencies, Reba N. Page and Linda Valli have complicated this curricular conversation. Their work empirically documents how cur-ricular differentiation can, but does not always [Page 474]negatively impact students perceived to be less academically capable and how students who might be considered capable in one context are seen as less than adequate in another.

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