Online Scholarship
Improve Your Skills And Knowledge Online

At a dinner party, you’re not supposed to talk politics or religion. Although Miss Manners never forbid it, chatting about how to save money in special education may as well have been included in that list of taboo topics, too. After all, cost can’t be a consideration when deciding what services a student with a disability needs.

While the rules about keeping views on religion and politics to oneself were abandoned long ago, the unofficial gag order on talking special ed funding held—until recently.

In a story earlier this year, I wrote about how one Massachusetts company is encouraging school districts to strive for more efficiency in special education. Look here to read more about that and some other recent discussions about special ed spending.

Now, others are chiming in. A report from the American Enterprise Institute reiterated some of the issues raised by others about how special education dollars are spent. <

Read more…

A new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute that looks at how special education students and the people who work with them have changed during the last decade concludes that the field needs to change dramatically.

Among what’s needed, the Washington think tank says, is better, more consistent data about students with disabilities and uniform definitions of different types of disabilities; a better handle on spending; an exploration of why some types of disabilities seem to be declining; and a fresh approach to teaching all students, all of whom have unique needs.

The authors find the way special education works—or doesn’t—is in part because it hasn’t changed enough since the creation of laws that require students with disabilities be taught. And that’s a disservice to those students as well as their peers.

“Special education, like general education, needs a makeover for the 21st century. Its

Read more…

NASHVILLE – The Tennessee Department of Education announces the Annual Special Education Conference on February 23-25, 2011. Presented by the Division of College & Career Readiness, this year’s theme, “First to the Top Through Creating Partnerships,” addresses the importance of working together to ensure that students with disabilities are prepared for independent living and employment once they leave the public school system.   “It’s important that we invest time in professional development to better improve our efforts to provide students the services they need alongside their peers,” said Joseph Fisher, Assistant Commissioner for Special Education. “We want to ens Read more…

After two decades of decline, education litigation appears to be on the rise, with special education leading the way, according to an analysis from Lehigh University professor Perry A. Zirkel, an expert in special education law.

Zirkel’s paper on his findings will appear in full in an upcoming issue of West’s Education Law Reporter, but he walked me through the findings.

Using West’s Key Number System, Zirkel tabulated state and federal court decisions by decades, starting in the 1940s. In the 1970s, state and federal education decisions combined reached a high of about 7,600 decisions, but dropped to about 7,300 decisions in the 1980s and under 7,000 decisions in the 1990s. When Zirkel counted the cases for 2000 through November 2010, he expected to see the same downward trend. Instead, the number was higher even than in the 1970s, at about 8,000 reported decisions.

Read more…