Curriculum Access for Students with Low-Incidence Disabilities: The Promise of UDL

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How can IEPs ensure greater access to the general curriculum for students with low-incidence disabilities?

 


Expanding Roles and Functions of IEP Team Members

It should be well understood that students with low-incidence disabilities possess highly complex needs and are thus uniquely challenging to serve in local community schools. Required personnel, materials, and technological resources are all highly specialized and difficult to acquire and maintain, which exacerbates difficulties in supporting access for these students within the general education classroom. Much of the curriculum and many of the instructional practices which have evolved over time for these students were historically targeted to needs connected with disability. As interventions moved away from developmental skills to address more functional life skills, the context for assisting students with disabilities in improving their lives widened to include home, school, and community. Ecological assessment (assessing students in real-life contexts) and community-referenced curriculum helped to broaden this context by placing a high priority on the attainment of adult outcomes such as independent living, community participation, and employment. Due to these more open contexts, approaches to collaborative planning have emerged to meet the needs of students in the local school and community. This has also necessitated expanding the roles and functions of IEP team members.

For example, person-centered planning, has extended IEP team membership beyond previously prescribed roles limited to professionals. Person-centered planning includes extended family members and a 'circle of friends' to build upon more natural and informal sources of support in framing a vision of quality of life for an individual extending beyond the immediate present and into the future. Much of this movement into the community—as the natural ecology for persons with severe disabilities—was inspired by Lou Brown and his colleagues. They defined the criterion of ultimate functioning as "an ever changing, expanding, localized, and personalized cluster of factors that each person must possess in order to function as productively and independently as possible in socially, vocationally, and domestically integrated adult community environments" (Brown, Nietupski, & Hamre-Nietupski, 1976).

Democratic ideals and a specific value orientation has driven the stance on community integration and belonging taken by Lou Brown and many who followed. As the inclusion movement has progressed from mere physical inclusion to social inclusion and now to instructional inclusion, collaborative planning approaches that engage both general educators and special educators are called for. COACH, as described earlier, is an example of such an approach that can assist an IEP team in targeting priorities contained in the general curriculum for students with low-incidence disabilities.

No matter what approach to collaborative planning a school or district adopts, the IEP process must begin with an analysis of the student's present level of educational performance (PLEP) in the general curriculum. This is an approach that departs markedly from earlier perspectives on IEP development. The following discussion looks at how teams of special education and general education personnel can work together to develop and implement an IEP that ensures access, participation, and progress in the general curriculum for students with disabilities.

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Origins of the IEP

The Individualized Educational Plan or Program (IEP) remains the touchstone of special education law. The IEP is a document that makes explicit the extent and intensity of special education and related services needed for a particular student with a disability. In 1972, James J. Gallagher proposed a contract between parents of students with mild/moderate mental retardation and the special education administration at the local level to agree upon goals and objectives that would structure programs to help students make effective progress. Gallagher's notion of a two-year, renewable contract was the predecessor of the current standard three-year IEP.

The structure and process of the IEP was also greatly influenced by the decision rendered in the landmark 1972 PARC vs. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania case. The Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children (PARC) won a class-action suit on behalf of all children with mental retardation in Pennsylvania. As a result of the court's decision on this case, the state of Pennsylvania was ordered to provide systematic education individually tailored to meet the developmental needs of all retarded children residing in the state. Soon after, the framework for that "systematic education" became a blueprint for Massachusetts' famed Chapter 766 which in turn foreshadowed the federal Education for All: The Handicapped Children Act of 1975. The Massachusetts special education law Chapter 766 designed the IEP to arrive at a "prototype" placement—i.e., a one-of-a-kind program individually tailored to meet a particular student's special needs.

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Purpose of the IEP

In 1975, the Education for All: The Handicapped Children's Act stated that no child with a disability could be denied a special education designed to address needs resulting from that disability. This principle of "zero reject" withstood several challenges in the courts and today adds credence to one of the central arguments in the landmark Pennsylvania case: that educability is not the same as schoolability (Lippman & Goldberg, 1973). Prior to the Pennsylvania case, children whose mental age was below 6 could be denied access to an education because they were considered uneducable or not able to benefit from the offerings of regular education. The federal district court for Pennsylvania found that such an interpretation of educability was discriminatory, denying children with mental retardation access to a fundamental right to education. Separating educability from schoolability opened the door for a national special education mandate. The IEP then became the vehicle for ensuring that students with disabilities would be offered a free, appropriate, and public education (FAPE). Note that the IEP does not ensure results; nor does the IEP serve as a performance contract between a family and a school district. It is a statement of intent. Accountability is a separate step that rests with the determination of whether an IEP was implemented as proposed and approved. There are other components to federal law governing the provision of special education services, of which the IEP is only one; however, the IEP pulls all components and principles of current federal law together into a single document, making it the cornerstone of any special education program.

The process of creating an IEP begins with referral, assessment, and eligibility determination. A child thought to have a disability must be assessed by a multidisciplinary team in each area of suspected need. As described previously, disability categories suggest, through correlation, that there are always unique disability-specific needs to be considered in an IEP. Assessment determines the manifestation and extent of those needs. Once eligibility is confirmed, an IEP team, with the informed consent and participation of a student' parent(s) or guardian(s), plans a program of special education and related services designed to eliminate or reduce assessed needs. Goals, objectives, and evaluation criteria are specified. The intensity of services and necessary qualifications of personnel delivering those services are made explicit. Finally, an IEP team must determine the settings in which planned services are to be carried out. Services are to be provided in the least restrictive environment, which is defined as that environment where necessary services can best be put into place.

Since passage of the Education for All: The Handicapped Children's Act of 1975, the IEP process and its forms have undergone substantial change. It is important to underscore here some of the features of the IEP as Congress originally intended in order to clarify the current state of the IEP. First, early IEPs permitted exclusion from state-mandated assessments, as such assessments were thought to be punitive and invalid for students with disabilities. Second, goals and objectives pertained only to special education and related services. Academic work in the general curriculum, whether via a classroom instruction or tutor, was not accounted for in an IEP, unless such instruction was designed for remediation or compensation of needs or for disability-related skills training. Third, activities supportive of collaboration among a student's group of support personnel, such as consultation and co-teaching, could not be accounted for in an IEP. In short, the structure and process of early IEPs encouraged the development and maintenance of a separate system within, but quite apart from, general education. Substantially separate classrooms and pull-out programs dominated the special education delivery system, with state and federal funding formulae serving to keep the system inert. The essential difference between IEPs originally envisioned by Congress and those of today is that the principle of zero reject now applies to the general curriculum and to the state- and district-level assessment system intended to measure progress. Although students with disabilities still generally receive education specific to their specialized needs, they are no longer separated from the general curriculum available to their non-disabled peers, nor are they automatically exempted from participation in the standards-based assessment system regularly engaged in by those same peers.

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Limitations of the IEP

Karger (2004) reviewed four major summaries of IEP literature prior to the passage of IDEA '97. These analyses were independently conducted by Smith (1990), Rodger (1995), McLaughlin and Warren (1995), and the U.S. Department of Education (1995). From these four summaries, Karger inferred a general consensus in the literature that the IEP as a document and as a process possessed several shortcomings that needed to be corrected prior to IDEA's 1997 reauthorization. Inadequacies were noted in the content and quality of IEPs. For example, there was a lack of congruence between various IEP components, differences in IEP content across settings/delivery models, and a lack of connection between IEPs and the general curriculum. Further, general education teachers assumed a minimal role in the IEP process, and special education teachers had negative perceptions of the IEP as a process. In elaborating upon these shortcomings, Karger noted that the 1997 IDEA reauthorization represented an attempt to address these concerns.

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IDEA '97 Challenges for the IEP

IDEA '97 laid the groundwork for including special education in the broader educational reform agenda. Specifically, IDEA '97 required that students with disabilities participate in and benefit from standards-based reform. IDEA '97 stipulated that no child with a disability could be denied access to and involvement in the general curriculum, and that no child with a disability could be excluded from participation in state- and district-wide assessments aimed at measuring academic achievement. To ensure that these new requirements would be implemented, the IEP had to become a more meaningful instructional and planning tool. The intent was to bring about this necessary change by focusing on disabled students' participation in general education standards and curriculum. Nolet and McLaughlin (2000) have listed five newly required elements of the IEP from IDEA '97:

  1. A statement of a student's present level of educational performance (PLEP) must specify how his or her disability affects involvement in and progress in the general curriculum.
  2. An IEP must incorporate measurable annual goals including short-term objectives or benchmarks, which must be designed to enable a student to be involved in and to progress within the general curriculum.
  3. An IEP document must include identification of special education needs, related services, and supplementary aids to be provided for a student, as well as program modifications or supports for school personnel that will enable a student to be involved in and to progress within the general curriculum.
  4. An explanation of the extent, if any, to which a student will not participate in the general education classroom or activities must be included.
  5. A description of accommodations or, if necessary, modifications, that will allow a student to participate in state- and district-level assessment systems must be included.

Taken together, these five IDEA '97 requirements for IEPs are intended to guide IEP teams in planning particulars of how a student with a disability will access, participate in, and make progress within the general curriculum. Karger (2004) has proposed a framework for analyzing the extent to which IEPs reflect access to the general curriculum. This Karger Framework consists of five parts, each of which corresponds to the five requirements listed above, and each of which contains a series of guidelines that can be viewed as indicators of access to the general curriculum. The Karger Framework is useful for helping team members determine if IEPs are legally correct and educationally sound.

Generating IEP goals that align with the general curriculum is a major challenge for team members. To ascertain the extent to which IEP forms actually reflect state and district standards, Thompson, Thurlow, Quenemoen, Esler, and Whetstone (2001) examined the IEP forms of 41 states. Only 5 of the 41 addressed state and district academic standards. Moreover, only 13 states had IEP forms that reflected IDEA '97 requirements that both present levels of educational performance and annual goals address the general curriculum.

When IEPs are aligned with state and district standards, a number of benefits for students with disabilities are reported to accrue. In a study by McLaughlin, Nolet, Rhim, and Henderson (1999), special education teachers reported that when IEPs are aligned with state curriculum standards, students with disabilities have greater exposure to diverse subject matter and to content-targeted instruction. Moreover, working with students who have standards-aligned IEPs increases opportunities for collaboration between special and general education teachers, which is beneficial to students' educational progress. Thompson and her colleagues (2001) have observed that educators focused less on student deficits and more on their abilities when IEPs were aligned with the general curriculum. However, aligning IEPs with state and district general curriculum standards may also create barriers for some students with disabilities. McLaughlin and her colleagues (1999) have reported that standards-aligned IEPs may minimize attention on critically important, functional life skills. This is an area of tension between special and general education team members that has yet to be resolved.

A number of approaches have been developed to assist IEP teams with the task of aligning IEP goals with state and local general curriculum standards. Walsh (2001) provided IEP team members from the state of Maryland with a matrix containing state content standards. Since Maryland had developed a set of outcomes for its alternate assessments of students with disabilities, team members were given exemplars of how to effectively align these alternate outcomes with general curriculum content standards, at age-appropriate levels. With these resources, team members were able to compare a given student's current level of performance to expectations for peers without disabilities of the same age. They were also able to identify skills needed for successful participation in the general curriculum, thus ensuring that instruction would be provided in content areas measured by Maryland's standards-based assessment system. Walsh's approach thus holds considerable promise for other states wrestling with the problem of alignment.

Once goals and objectives have been aligned with the general curriculum in an IEP, the challenge of connecting these goals with authentic classroom activities remains. Kennedy and Fisher (2001) have developed their own IEP matrix to serve as a tool for helping educators identify naturally occurring times, classes, and activities within which students' goals can be embedded. A particular student's goals and objectives are listed across the top of their matrix, while their daily schedule is listed down its left side. For each activity in a student's daily schedule, general and special educators collaborate to determine whether a particular IEP goal can be met within the context of that activity, checking off those that can and leaving blank those that cannot. Persons responsible for addressing each goal (i.e., school, home, peer, or student) are noted at the bottom.

Massanari (2002) has devised a method to help IEP teams connect IEP components to the general curriculum. In this method, prior to a student's IEP meeting, team members are provided with a flow chart containing a series of questions to help structure the process at the meeting. According to Massanari, a student's team should begin by asking, What are the desired outcomes for the student? Their team should then ask what skills and knowledge would be needed to reach each outcome and assess how these compare to the content and performance expectations of the general curriculum for their student's grade level. This procedure allows the team to consider their student's PLEPs, goals, and assessment participation, as well as their specialized instruction, supports, or services, all in relation to the general curriculum. Massanari's questions are clearly helpful in focusing and guiding the thinking of IEP team members.

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Addressing the General Curriculum with the IEP

Earlier sections have stressed that students with low-incidence disabilities have unique needs and require highly specialized curricular and instructional approaches designed to address those needs. How can educators continue to address significant and intensive special needs and at the same time enable access to and involvement within the general curriculum? To answer this question, it is vital that educators realize that, in essence, the goals of the general curriculum are not essentially different from the goals of special education. Broadly stated, educational goals connect with desirable adult outcomes such as living independently, participating in one's community, and securing employment. Therefore, traditional special education goals, which have always been aimed toward these ends, should be considered as naturally embedded in or aligned with general curriculum goals. To achieve the best alignment possible, IEP teams must interrogate their state- and district-level content standards and determine entry points that are developmentally appropriate and functionally relevant for students with low-incidence disabilities. Once entry points are established, an IEP team can prioritize goals and make decisions about the instructional context in which those goals will be addressed.

Nolet and McLaughlin (2000) view curriculum access as falling along a continuum. IDEA '97 begins with the presumption that all students will fully access and succeed in the general curriculum. It is incumbent upon an IEP team to determine the extent of services (such as specially-designed instruction), supports (such as accommodations and modifications), and ancillary aids (such as assistive technologies) necessary to effect that access for each student. The point along the continuum of curriculum access where a disabled student will enter will be based on the determination of their IEP team. Students with disabilities who require only instructional and testing accommodations, such as the use of large print, would fall at one end of the continuum; they would not be eligible for special education services via an IEP unless they also required specially-designed instruction planned or provided by a special educator or related services person. (These students' needs would instead be made explicit through a 504 Accommodation Plan [deBettencourt, 2002].) At the other end of the continuum would be students who present with intensive or pervasive special needs and thus require substantial modifications to content standards and performance expectations of the general curriculum.

It is critically important for members of IEP teams to understand and apply the distinction between accommodations and modifications. Accommodations attempt to level the playing field for students with disabilities without changing standards or performance expectations of the general curriculum.

Nolet and McLaughlin (2000) describe three general categories of accommodations:

  1. Alternative Acquisition Modes are alternative ways for students with disabilities to access the same materials used by their non-disabled peers, and change depending on the specific disability being addressed. Examples include Braille materials and voice-output computers for a blind student, or tape-recorded books and sign language interpreters for a deaf student. These accommodations are intended to augment, bypass, or compensate for a motor, sensory, or information-processing deficit.
  2. Content Enhancements help students recognize, organize, interpret, and remember information. Examples include, graphic organizers, concept diagrams, and semantic maps. These may also include study guides and mnemonic memory devices. These accommodations are intended to assist students with learning disabilities that affect their ability to efficiently process information.
  3. Alternative Response Modes are multiple ways for students to express what they know or can do. Examples include assessments done via skits, role play, pantomimes, and simulations. These accommodations are intended to overcome barriers to instruction created by sensory or motor challenges that make typical written examinations unsuitable as a means of assessing progress.

Nolet and McLaughlin define modifications as either an alteration in subject matter or a change in a student's performance expectation. They stress the importance of making modifications within the context of broadly stated curriculum goals. Modifications to curriculum may involve teaching less of a curriculum and/or teaching different content. Early entry points to a curriculum and time constraints may result in teaching less of the curriculum, and the need to address additional instructional targets such as life skills may require the teaching of different curriculum. In either case, an IEP team should exhaust all possible and appropriate accommodations before designing modifications to curriculum. Broad-scale assessment systems, district-level assessment procedures, and local instructional practices for a disabled student still ought to align as much as possible with content standards in each state's curriculum frameworks.

Given that the goal of supplying accommodations is to level the playing field for disabled students to enable them to participate in the general curriculum, it then logically follows that the same accommodations must be applied during assessments. Otherwise, these students would not be assessed fairly against state standards of proficiency. For example, a student who is being taught to access the general curriculum using a computer to translate text to speech should be allowed to use that same computer during assessment. Other than the necessity of making sure that the same accommodations are present during assessment as during instruction, however, an accommodated student should take the same assessments as his or her peers. When modifications are made to the curriculum, however, serious implications for changes to assessment and accountability result. Since no student may be entirely excluded from participation in state- and district-wide assessment, alternates must be designed to measure the extent to which a particular student has benefited from his modified curriculum.

During the planning of a student's IEP, their team must deliberate over all areas of the general curriculum that are impacted by their student's disability. All areas of the curriculum where access and involvement are hampered as a result of their student's disability must be addressed by the team either through accommodations or modifications. Accommodations may not require the generation of annual goals and benchmarks by the team that differ from the norm for the student's age, unless the student requires specially-designed instruction in the use of accommodations, such as assistive technology devices (in which case specific benchmarks for those special educational goals must be generated). Any modifications to the curriculum, however, must clearly detail the specification of individualized goals and objectives or benchmarks that can be reasonably accomplished by a student in a year's time. In cases such as this, in order for a student to progress toward her or his goals and benchmarks, modifications to the curriculum will necessitate specially-designed instruction.

Designing specialized instruction requires focused collaboration among team members, particularly general educators, special educators, and related services personnel. The general educator has knowledge of the general curriculum and its alignment with state- and district-wide standards. Special education personnel possess knowledge of the implications of disability and the elements of adaptive instruction. The special educator and related services personnel must be able to communicate—in a non-technical and jargon-free manner—a student's needs for accommodations and modifications to the general educator. Both generalists and specialists must have a clear understanding of how planned, modified curriculum will meet a student's needs in the broader context set by the general curriculum. Otherwise, their team will not achieve a sense of shared responsibility and accountability that leads to greatest student success.

Instructional environments vary widely between schools. Some classrooms employ direct instructional approaches focusing on the mastery of skill sequences in, for example, literacy and mathematics. Other classrooms may focus on thematic units, where separate skill and content areas connect, in an interdisciplinary fashion, around the creation of authentic products for portfolio assessments. Some classrooms will offer a combination of both or will use yet another approach. Regardless of the instructional approach or approaches taken, Nolet and McLaughlin (2000) state that solid curriculum analysis for purposes of IEP planning entails a three-phase process. Initially, general educators must identify critical and enduring knowledge offered by the general curriculum for all students: that is, what all students in the classroom are expected to learn. The second phase involves identifying tasks that reveal what a competent person would do to demonstrate attainment of that enduring knowledge. This phase can be well-informed for a student with a disability by input from specialists who can help general educators separate the form from the function of instruction, in order to assess questions such as How critical and enduring is the skill of handwriting to the production of a five-paragraph essay? Can a student demonstrate the ability to craft an expressive and effective five-paragraph essay without the need for handwriting? The third phase of curriculum analysis involves the greatest input from special educators: tasks that are determined to fairly and thoroughly demonstrate a student's competence may need to be broken down into manageable parts for direct and explicit instruction. Cognitive strategies may need to be identified to allow a student to effectively accomplish critical tasks.

Once curriculum analysis is completed, decisions need to be made about how much of the modified, specially-designed instruction can be embedded in classroom routines and how much must be taught in parallel with classroom routines. Time and pace are critical elements of instruction. In whole-class instruction, time and pace are managed with careful sequencing and homogeneous grouping, where most students are presumed to progress at the same rate. In classrooms where flexible grouping schemes and cooperative learning structures are employed, heterogeneous grouping is more easily accommodated. Again, regardless of which classroom style predominates, collaboration is key to success. A student's IEP team will have to collectively examine curriculum, instructional context, and available instructional resources in order to effectively plan for their student's access and participation.

The extent to which accommodations and modifications are designed into curriculum at the outset of the planning process can have an enormous impact upon access, participation, and progress for students with disabilities. We will address how the general curriculum itself can be made more flexible and malleable following principles of universal design. Much of this improved flexibility relies upon digital media and technology tools, but it also depends on systemic change in how curriculum resources are selected and arranged. A curriculum that accommodates all learners from the start requires less modification and fewer resources to create necessary transformations to enable disabled students to access the curriculum. A curriculum that is richly resourced for all students in, for example, captioned video and digital content, can be directly accessed more often by deaf and blind students, respectively, without elaborate and time-consuming alterations.

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Last Updated: 11/05/2010