The Truth About Special Education

This easy-to-read book contains a step-by-step discussion of the special education process and has hundreds of additional resources for parents including professional organizations, support groups, and useful websites.

This easy-to-read book contains a step-by-step discussion of the special education process and has hundreds of additional resources for parents including professional organizations, support groups, and useful websites.

Teachers report being unprepared for the difficult behavior they encounter in classrooms, and administrators find themselves under increasing pressure to maintain safe and orderly schools. IDEA regulations have also resulted in ongoing confusion about how schools can and should discipline students with identified disabilities.

What You Need to Know About Special Education Law in the Classroom is an interactive guidebook to special education law that provides basic information that special educators and administrators need to know to deliver special education services to students in the most appropriate and law-abiding way. Each chapter presents a different topic related to special education law, including working with parents and colleagues, supervising students, IEP development, behavioral interventions, confidentiality and record keeping, and teacher conduct both inside and outside school.

Special Education: What It Is and Why We Need It provides a thorough examination of the basic concept of special education, a discussion of specific exceptionalities, and constructive responses to common criticisms of special education. Whether you’re a teacher, school administrator, teacher-educator, or simply interested in the topic, you will learn just what special education is, who gets it or who should get it, and why it is necessary. The second edition of this brief yet powerful primer will help you build the foundation of a realistic, rational view of the basic assumptions and knowledge on which special education rests.

Demonstrates how the fields of special education and inclusive education have evolved philosophically and technically over the past 30 years.

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.