Multicultural Special Education

Legal Requirements for Special Education in the United States

In the United States, students with disabilities are guaranteed specialized educational services in public schools. The law recognizes 13 categories of disability, ranging from mild impairments of speech and language, to specific learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, emotional/behavioral disorders, sensory impairments, physical impairments, to the most complex multiple disabilities. Regardless of the severity of the disability, no child can be excluded from a public education.

History of the Law Requiring Provision of Special Education Services in Public Schools

The need for specialized services under the law came about because school districts, up until 1975, were allowed to reject students whom they considered not fit for schooling. This did not mean there were no special education services, but it was up to school administrators to decide who should or should not be admitted. There was no law to ensure that children would receive an education.

The first official requirement for such services was enacted in 1975, under the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, known as the EAHCA. This law must be reauthorized every 7 years and, in 1990, it was renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This law has five key principles:

• 1.
  Children will receive a free appropriate public education.
• 2.
  This education will be provided in the “least restrictive environment,” which means that children with disabilities must spend as much time as possible in classrooms and activities with their normally developing peers.
• 3.
  Children must be evaluated by qualified personnel to determine if they have a disability that qualifies them for special education services, and this evaluation must be nonbiased and conducted by a multidisciplinary team.
• 4.
  Parents of such children must have access to due process of law, which means that they can use the law to challenge school districts' decisions about their children's special education services.
• 5.
  Children must have access to “related services” needed for them to profit from the education they are receiving—for example, speech, occupational, or physical therapy, transportation to and from school, and social work services. Recent reauthorizations of the law have put increasing emphasis on parental participation and on children having access to the general curriculum, meaning that their curriculum must not be so separate that they do not have the opportunity to learn and to return to the general education program.

These provisions were welcomed in the 1970s as a much needed remedy for the exclusion of children with disabilities from public schools. The ideal of equal rights for individuals with disabilities was a triumph for advocates who had been working toward this end for decades. The movement also resulted in the disbanding of huge institutions for people with disabilities and in the removal of laws allowing discriminatory practices such as sterilization of adults with mental retardation.

...