Beyond Access: Ensuring Progress in the General Education Curriculum for Students with Severe Disabilities

In September and November of 2000, I served on an BExpert Strategy Panel[ on BStudents with Disabilities’ Access to, Participation in, and Progress in the General Education Curriculum[ convened by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), as part of that agency’s comprehensive planning process. Among the other members of this panel was Thomas Gilhool, staff attorney at the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia, a former Secretary of Education for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and, as many RPSD readers will know (and should know if they do not), lead attorney in PARC v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1972, a landmark case that literally set the precedence for the doctrine of FAPE as a right for students with disabilities, the settlement from which provided much of the structure for Public Law 94-142 (U.S. Senate, 1975). For 2 years prior to the OSEP meeting, my colleagues and I had been engaged in research and model development activities exploring how best to promote Baccess to the general curriculum[ for students with severe disabilities. [I would note, parenthetically, that the 1997 amendments used the term Bgeneral curriculum,[ while the 2004 amendments changed that to Bgeneral education curriculum. [ Although I use the more current term, I prefer the earlier term. The Bgeneral curriculum[ refers, in my mind, to a curriculum with content everyone should know. The Bgeneral education curriculum[ strikes me as inviting a return to our dual system of general education and special education and a return to the notion of a Bspecial education curriculum[ that is, in some way, different from the Bgeneral education curriculum. [] The Baccess to the general curriculum[ mandates in the 1997 reauthorization of Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) were still a relatively new concept at the time of the OSEP panel meetings and, at least for students with severe disabilities, a relatively ignored component of the new law. The Final Regulations for IDEA (1997) had only been out since March 12, 1999, and the field was just then sorting through what was meant by the Bgeneral curriculum[ [somewhat pithily defined in the regulations, I thought at the time, simply as the same curriculum as every other student, although I have since come to appreciate the simple elegance and inclusiveness of that definition] and by Baccess[ to that curriculum, as well as considering how to promote such access. It was, as Carter and Kennedy noted in this issue, a fundamental shift in educational expectations for students with disabilities. My concern then was that, by and large, there seemed to be only limited recognition that these regulations and requirements actually applied to all students, including students with severe disabilities. A survey we were conducting about the time the OSEP panel met (eventually published as Agran, Alper, & Wehmeyer, 2002) was suggesting that teachers who worked with students with severe disabilities were, shall we say, skeptical about the Baccess[ requirements as they applied to the students they taught. Certainly, as Browder, Spooner, Wakeman, Trela, and Baker (2006) note, the standards that were established against which to hold students accountable in school reform efforts did not take into consideration students with severe disabilities. Further, those of us looking at ways to achieve greater access were coming to the uncomfortable realization that the research foundation upon which to build models to promote access to the general curriculum for students with severe disabilitiesVat least when Bgeneral curriculum[ meant core contentVwas rather embarrassingly lacking. That Browder et al. located only 10 studies focused on teaching science to students with severe disabilities confirms, I think, their observation that the Bevidence is constrained by the field’s focus on functional skills[ (Browder et al., 2006). I was, quite honestly, just as surprised when we began our work in this area by how Address all correspondence and reprint requests to Michael L. Wehmeyer, 1200 Sunnyside Ave., Room 3136, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045-7534. Email: wehmeyer@ku.edu Research & Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities 2006, Vol. 31, No. 4, 322–326 copyright 2006 by TASH