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The future of learning disabilities as federal laws change again.

Article Excerpt
As federal special education laws change once again--with the passage of the 2004 Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA) amendments--what impact is it likely to have for parents, students, teachers, evaluators, school administrators, and the courts? Is it too optimistic to hope that we might learn to avoid some mistakes of the past 35 years and to build on our many successes?

This writer is an attorney who became involved with the field of learning disabilities before special education problems were even being taken into the courtroom. While serving as a legislative assistant to the United States senator who chaired the Senate subcommittee on education as the country began to deal with special education, we realized that we needed to have federal laws and federal oversight of what was happening to these millions of students in state and local programs.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act passed in 1968 promised to help states and local schools develop "a comprehensive system of personnel development by which we would acquire and disseminate promising educational practices and thereby assure an adequate supply of appropriately trained personnel" (U.S. Code 1412(a)(14), 34 C.F.R. 300.135). The majority of those personnel would learn that students with learning disabilities were about half of the population with disabilities that would be served in the public schools and that they could be as "severely" disabled educationally as many students in other categories of disability.

In 1973 Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act was finally passed after two presidential vetoes. With the first federal statute supporting rights of students specifically with disabilities, this writer turned to litigation in special education. We were told by the U.S. Department of Education that our...

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