The Improving Education Results for Children with Disabilities Act, which reforms the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), contains many positives for students with disabilities. However, two areas in which the bill is disappointing are its mandates for highly qualified teachers and the lack of full funding provisions. The bill was signed into law on Dec. 3, 2004. It is expected that proposed regulations will be released in the spring and final regulations are anticipated in a year.

IDEA 2004 furthers many of the trends we have seen in education in the past few years, such as increasing accountability for students with disabilities, ensuring highly qualified teachers are in our classrooms, expanding the types of methods used to identify students with learning disabilities, and reducing litigation. At the same time, the law, for the first time, addresses the paperwork burden in special education, putting in place several measures that streamline IEPs and other paperwork requirements. Other changes from previous legislation include upping the age at which transition plans are required to 16, instituting measures that will make it easier for schools to discipline students with disabilities, requiring schools to implement measures to reduce the over-representation of students from diverse backgrounds in special education, and moving special education research to the Institute of Education Sciences (IES).

Unfortunately, the new IDEA's financial provisions offer little relief for the cost of special education. Rather than mandating full funding for special education, the new IDEA maintains the current funding system, providing a "glide path" by which the federal government would pay 40 percent of the excess cost of educating students with disabilities by 2010. In addition, the legislation includes provisions that may end up redirecting special education funds to other programs.

Overall, the law has more positives than negatives for children with disabilities and special educators, and CEC is pleased that many of its recommendations have been enacted. CEC advocated for, among others, the following changes in the law:

• Ensuring students with disabilities are included in accountability systems.
• Reducing the special education paperwork burden by deleting short-term objectives and benchmarks from IEPs (except for students who take alternate assessments), initiating a 15-state paperwork demonstration project, piloting the multi-year IEP, and reducing the number of times the procedural safeguards notice is given to parents annually.
• Establishing methods to reduce the number of students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds who are inappropriately placed in special education.
• Ensuring the discipline provisions for students with disabilities continue to protect the rights of these students to a free, appropriate public education.
• Providing funding for professional development for special educators.