This classification establishes certain legal rights for children and parents, often including funds for schools offering specialized services. Moreover, removing these classifications and labels to return a student to regular education has proved very difficult. The Rights Without Labels guidelines are based on the assumption that it would be desirable at this time to conduct programs wherein efforts are made to serve children who have special needs without labeling them or removing them from regular education programs.
Research indicates that several factors are critical to the success of such experimental programs.
This benefits all children, especially those experiencing educational problems, while helping to identify students with characteristics consonant with legal definitions of handicapped conditions. Such practices will engender an abiding respect for students' rights under the law not to be evaluated in the absence of genuine suspicion of a handicap. Secondly, identification and evaluation methods must include curriculum based assessment procedures. Research demonstrates these procedures provide reliable measures of student performance and produce relevant information for instructional planning. Most importantly, they fulfill the evaluation protection criteria set out in P.L. 94-142.