General Education Curriculum Access - Essay Example

In the 2004 “reauthorization, another provision was added to take the monitoring process further” (p. 234) Districts with an overrepresentation of minority group members in special education must set aside 15 percent of their federal aid for students, particularly those in grades K-3, who need “additional academic and behavioral support to succeed in a general education environment,” according to the law (Andy and Beaker, 2001). The 2004 reauthorization also required states to allow districts to use a strategy called “response to intervention,” as a tool for determining if a child has a specific learning disability.

Response to intervention, or RTI, involves early identification of students’ learning problems and the use of increasingly intensive lessons, or interventions, to address those problems before they become entrenched. The process has been credited as a factor in reducing the overall rate of students diagnosed with specific learning disabilities, which has been on a steady decline since 2005, Aruba (2001). . Although parents often play an important role in securing special education services for their children, much of the responsibility of helping students with disabilities succeed in the classroom falls to teachers, Camacho and Perez-Quiroz (2002).

No Child Left Behind and IDEA require special education teachers to be “highly qualified” in special education as well as in the subjects they teach. General educators, who typically have more experience teaching a specific subject area, must be able to work effectively with students with special needs, but they are not required to be highly qualified to teach students with disabilities” (Camacho and Perez-Quiroz, 2002). An experienced special education teacher typically has helped support the learning of hundreds of children with disabilities or other special needs.

In order to be qualified for this work, she has had to undergo a rigorous certification process, which graduate generally includes course work at the undergraduate and/or level in special education, depending upon the specific licensure requirements in her state (Andy and Beaker, 2001). Susan is a first grader with a wonderful imagination who loves listening to stories and quickly incorporates new words into her spoken vocabulary. Yet, while most of her classmates have begun to read fluently, she continues laboring over each word and her comprehension remains low.

Susan is not a real student, but a composite of many students familiar to virtually every experienced teacher: the ones who appear bright and engaged but inexplicably founder when trying to learn some essential part of the curriculum. Determining whether a student like Susan has a specific learning