Although Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 1975, barriers remain to successful inclusive classroom models, including the special education legal literacy of general education teachers. Responsibility for educating students with disabilities has shifted from special education teachers to general education…

This review focuses on a subset of literature on the arts and arts education that explores how learning is conceptualized and enacted in the context of out-of-school time (OST) arts education environments that primarily engage Black, Indigenous, and young People of Color in the United States. The review is grounded in principles of critical…

Since schools have generally resumed full in-person services, the legal issues for students with disabilities include not only the continuing line of cases challenging the level and efficacy of services during the pandemic but also the potential disputes about implementation or nonimplementation of "compensatory services" per federal and…

Manifestation determination reviews (MDRs) are a federally mandated practice that prevents schools from suspending students with disabilities for more than 10 days before determining if the student's disability is significantly and directly related to the problem behavior. The process is a controversial one, and prior research has shown that the…

The Individuals With Disabilities Education Act requires schools to conduct a manifestation determination (MD) meeting when suspending students with disabilities for more than 10 days. The MD procedure is intended to safeguard educational access by providing a process to determine if a student's disability is related to the suspending behavior. An…

Personalized, competency-based learning efforts often take place in a single classroom or school, but not systematically across districts, let alone states. To address this dynamic and increase the scale of personalized, competency-based learning, KnowledgeWorks, an independent nonprofit organization that partners with education stakeholders to…

No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds Act have made accountability central to conversations about education policy. But neither statute articulates a clear vision of what constitutes "quality" or "equity" in education, nor do they include a mechanism to ensure that schools have sufficient resources to pursue that…

This report discusses the necessity of expanding school improvement policy and practice in order to meet the growing challenges related to reducing the achievement and opportunity gaps. Specifically, it highlights that student/learning supports are marginalized in current policy and that addressing the matter requires moving from a two to a three…

The "IDRA Newsletter" serves as a vehicle for communication with educators, school board members, decision-makers, parents, and the general public concerning the educational needs of all children across the United States. The focus of this issue is "Authentic Family & Community Engagement." Contents include: (1) Recent…

Each year, over 1.2 million children and youth identified as homeless in the nation's schools experience educational disruption caused by not having a safe and stable place to live. Many students who have disabilities and are experiencing homelessness face additional challenges for educational progress that require close coordination between…

Background: Progress monitoring is a vital strategy for evaluating skill development of young children receiving disability related services. Few effective progress monitoring tools exist for infants and toddlers, and research is needed to examine feasibility as they become available. Objective: The current study examined the implementation of an…

When parents of students with disabilities reach impasse with school districts, after exhausting informal interactions and alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, such as facilitated IEP meetings and mediation, what is the next step if they seek a binding third-party decision under the IDEA? The typical answer, especially if the underlying…

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act grants dissatisfied parents of students with disabilities the right to pursue legal remedies. In 2007, Rose and Zirkel found that parents of students with reading disabilities seeking Orton-Gillingham (OG) instruction under the IDEA's central obligation for a free appropriate public education (FAPE)…

Social policies can be well-intentioned but ineffective in achieving what is intended. They can be undermined or destroyed by their exaggerated or oversimplified caricatures with a single, narrow focus. Caricatures may result in the opposite of the original intent of more carefully crafted variants. Institutionalization and deinstitutionalization…

School psychologists often play a significant role in implementation of the requirements under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) specific to independent educational evaluations (IEEs). The school psychology and special education literature addresses professional norms for IEEs (e.g., Schrank et al., 2006), but its coverage of…