Accessing the General Curriculum: Including Students with Disabilities in Standards-Based Reform

Give your students access to the general curriculum and find better ways to assess their progress!

How is your special-education curriculum impacted by the requirements of IDEA and NCLB? How can you improve student learning and retention to positively influence assessment results? What methods are available for determining your students′ present level of performance? In this second edition of the best-selling Accessing the General Curriculum, Nolet and McLaughlin provide updated frameworks and strategies-with invaluable examples and flowcharts for fitting special education into the frameworks created by national standards and assessments.

This invaluable resource provides K-12 educators with the support necessary to produce expected results from every learner. The authors begin with far-reaching legal implications and connect them with individual students to show teachers how to:

• Use curriculum as a map for guiding students toward achievement
• Understand learning research as a bridge to the learning-teaching connection
• Relate each student′s disability to his or her academic performance
• Design alternate assessment tools and curriculum
• Link goals, objectives, and benchmarks to state assessment criteria

Affording special education students accommodations and modifications to their individual curriculum will improve their performance, enhance your ability to help them advance, and, ultimately, improve the evaluation of their progress throughout their academic career.

Victor W. Nolet is Director of Assessment and Evaluation for the Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon. His current interests include the impact of teacher education programs on P-12 student outcomes and the impact of accountability systems on students with disabilities. Address: Victor Nolet, Woodring College of Education, 251F Miller Hall, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA. 98225.

Margaret McLaughlin has been involved in special education all of her professional career, beginning as a teacher of students with serious emotional and behavior disorders. Currently she is the associate director of the Institute for the Study of Exceptional Children, a research institute within the College of Education at the University of Maryland. She directs several national projects investigating educational reform and students with disabilities, including the national Educational Policy Reform Research Institute (EPRRI), a consortium involving the University Maryland; The National Center on Educational Outcomes (NCEO); and the Urban Special Education Collaborative. She also directs a national research project investigating special education in charter schools and leads a policy leadership doctoral and postdoctoral program in conducting large-scale research in special education.

McLaughlin has worked in Bosnia, Nicaragua, and Guatemala in developing programs for students with developmental disabilities. She has consulted with numerous state departments of education and local education agencies on issues related to students with disabilities and the impact of standards-driven reform policies. McLaughlin co-chaired the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Goals 2000 and Students with Disabilities, which resulted in the report Educating One and All. She was a member of the NAS committee on the disproportionate representation of minority students in special education.

McLaughlin teaches graduate courses in disability policy and has written extensively in the area of school reform and students with disabilities. She earned her PhD at the University of Virginia and has held positions at the U.S. Office of Education and the University of Washington.