Rethinking Professional Issues in Special Education

Special educators are facing new challenges at the beginning of the 21st century as public education is being reformed by a vision focusing on measurable student outcomes. The future course of the field will be shaped by the policy and programmatic responses to several issues, including demographic changes in student populations, a lack of certified special education teachers, criticism in the public media for the rising costs of services, and debates about the preferred philosophy of service delivery for students with disabilities. Additional chapters discuss university-school collaboration, charter schools, disability studies, school violence, disproportionality in placement, male African-American teachers, and ethics.

This book has been written out of a context of research and program development activities with public schools over the past decade in one of the largest Colleges of Education in a diverse metropolitan area in the country. The issues selected for analysis and the perspective guiding those analyses grew out of this work and out of a national Delphi study of the views of parents and constituent organizations and leading researchers, teacher educators, and policy makers in Special Education.

JAMES L. PAUL is a Professor of Special Education at the University of South Florida and formerly chair of the Department of Special Education. He is the co-editor of Stories Out of School: Memories and Reflections on Care and Cruelty in the Classroom (Ablex, 2000).

CAROLYN D. LAVELY is a Professor of Special Education at the University of South Florida.

ANN CRANSTON-GINGRAS is an Associate Professor of Special Education at the University of South Florida.

ELLA L. TAYLOR coordinates the University of South Florida's online master's degree program in gifted education as well as teaches Special Education courses.