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On a hot summer day in July 1990, President George H. W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) into law with a crowd of onlookers on the South Lawn of the White House. It was a momentous day. The first broad reaching civil rights law that would prohibit discrimination on the basis of disability, not limited only to entities receiving government funding.
Read MoreIn special education research, people with disabilities are often discussed solely as recipients of intervention, who passively participate in school environments designed to help them “overcome” their stigmatized disability labels. When people with disabilities are framed in this way, teachers, researchers and larger nondisabled communities miss something important: the identity development processes of people with disabilities, and the importance of self- and community advocacy in that process.
Read MoreFor decades, educational leaders and school staff have made significant investments in practices or programs that claim to be effective in supporting our children’s learning. Yet, despite leaders’ and teachers’ best-efforts to use a given program, students often do not benefit, especially our students with disabilities. Perhaps this scenario sounds familiar as you reflect on the investments your organization has made in programs that were abandoned, only to adopt and abandon another, and then another. Unfortunately, this cycle of adoption and abandonment of programs is not unusual in K-12 education. Some have taken pause and wondered, what is keeping us stuck in this cycle and why? Is it the programs we are using or are critical elements consistently missing in the selection, ongoing professional learning, monitoring of program effectiveness, and other critical system elements?
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