Learning from Experience Evaluating Early Childhood Demonstration Programs (1982) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
Informing Policy Makers About Programs for Handicapped Children
Informing Policy Makers About Programs for Handicapped Children
Pages 163-186
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 163... ...
The Handicapped Children's Early Education Program is a discretionary grant program, offering federal funds to public or private agencies that plan to develop new strategies for serving young handicapped children. The Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 is a formula grant program, providing funds to all school districts serving handicapped children and stipulating a variety of standards that must be met.
|
From page 164... ...
The fourth section describes outcomes of interest to federal policy makers, and the fifth section describes contributions evaluators can make. THE HANDICAPPED CHILDREN'S EARLY EDUCATION PROGRAM: DISCRETIONARY GRANTS FOR EARLY EDUCATION The Handicapped Children's Early Education Program was initiated during a period of high expectations for early intervention.
|
From page 165... ...
By supporting demonstration projects Congress showed its faith in the general concept of early childhood intervention and provided a forum in which specific ideas might be tested, elaborated, and refined. The Handicapped Children's Early Education Program aimed not only to serve young handicapped children but also to stimulate a new pattern of interactions among professionals, one in which ideas could readily pass from one researcher to another and from researchers to practitioners.
|
From page 166... ...
The Education for All Handicapped Children Act Financial Assistance to Schools . Since 1968 Congress's interest in education has evolved in such a way that civil rights and equitable educational treatment have superseded targeted comPensa tion as a national priority.
|
From page 167... ...
By contrast, most research related to the education of handicapped children has been conducted using categories of handicapping conditions as independent variables. Such data allow researchers to define trends and establish predictable patterns regarding the relative benefits of different programs to different kinds of children.
|
From page 168... ...
The main reason integration has not been left completely to the discretion of parents and teachers is that Congress anticipated resistance from both these groups. Teachers of nonhandicapped children often feel burdened by the presence of handicapped children in their classrooms, and parents of handicapped children may worry about the effects of exposing their children to the mainstream, preferring for them the more protective environment of separate classes or schools.
|
From page 169... ...
2d 45, 1973) ; or, in the case of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, by stating that education can "enable them to have full equality of opportunity" (P.L.
|
From page 170... ...
In small districts, special education children of all ages and handicapping conditions were often pooled in a single classroom; in larger districts, a variety of classrooms were usually used -- one for the mentally retarded, one for the learning disabled, one for the emotionally disturbed, and so on. Once children were labeled with a particular handicapping condition, the program assignment followed automatically.
|
From page 171... ...
. And, just as the Education tor All Handicapped Children Act requires parent involvement in the development of individualized educational programs, the Handicapped Children's Early Education Program requires parent involvement in the development and operation of early childhood projects.
|
From page 172... ...
The sheer diversity of the population of handicapped children precludes a narrowly focused mandate; it leads instead to the sort of mandates written into the Handicapped Children's Early Education Program and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, in which the kind of education given to handicapped children is under the scrutiny of a variety of groups who have a stake in the matter. Third, the Congress of the United States is an elected body that makes its own decisions by group processes.
|
From page 173... ...
And while it is true that Congress hopes to influence these outcomes, it is also true that its primary concerns relate to those issues that it can control. In the case of the Handicapped Children's Early Education Program and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, the most salient federal
|
From page 174... ...
17829, a bill proposing the Handicapped Children's Early Education Program, was being considered illustrate this difference. Although the congressional members referred to the new projects as "experimental," they demonstrated little interest in evaluations of whether the Programs were beneficial to handicapped children.
|
From page 175... ...
They asked whether priorities would be set according to political pressures, the experience or expertise of the requesting agencies, the distribution of children between urban and rural areas, or the type of handicapping condition served by an agency. How could they develop funding criteria that would be both valid and fair?
|
From page 176... ...
Contributions Evaluators Can Make Enactments like the Handicapped Children's Early Education Program and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act affect more than just handicapped children. They affect parents, teachers, researchers, and local and state educational administrative agencies.
|
From page 177... ...
Suppose, for example, one wished to evaluate the effectiveness of the due process system involved in the Education for All Handicapped Children Act. _ ~ Since there are several stages in the process of dispute resolution, he or she might want to describe its effects at each step.
|
From page 178... ...
In addition to parents, children, school systems, and researchers, it includes prevailing theories regarding effective strategies for services, community attitudes toward the handicapped, state laws regarding services to handicapped children, and the immediate histories of individual school districts, such as their traditional strategies for serving handicapped children, their experiences with due process, and their experiences with the research and development community. Nor are social systems like mechanical systems.
|
From page 179... ...
To provide such information to policy makers, the researcher should engage in close, continuous study of the system -- study that will yield not quantified measures of outcomes but narrative descriptions of the interactions of all parties involved in the social-educational process, descriptions that would provide policy makers with an understanding of how the system is functioning overall, how the various parts interact, and what aspects would need to be changed to make it function differently. To learn these kinds of things investigators would have to observe the naturally occurring dynamic operations of special education systems.
|
From page 180... ...
But the kind of statements that are needed to describe the effects of such programs as the Handicapped Childrents Early Education Program and the Education For All HanalCappe~ Children Act do not require such precision; and the facts to be generalized about their effects are not quantities, but dynamic interactions among individuals and institutions. What is estimated for the population is how, not how often, these components can influence one another.
|
From page 181... ...
Given that it is impractical for researchers to provide continuous descriptions of dynamic effects of the policy, these status indicators offer a cheap, effective alternative for monitoring global changes in the social-educational system. There are many measures already at hand or that could be developed easily to indicate the status of the special educational system.
|
From page 182... ...
that "more than half of the handicapped children in the United States do not receive appropriate educational services which would enable them to have full equality of opportunity," and in 1980 the critics charged (Education Advocates Coalition, 1980:4) that "children are frequently denied related services, such as physical therapy, occupational therapy, school health services, and transportation, essential to enable them to benefit from special education." In 1975 Congress found (P.L.
|
From page 183... ...
In fact, the forensic process is similar to the critical prow ess often used by researchers following the release of findings from-a large-scale impact study -- with two important differences. First, the debate following an impact study usually centers on such issues as the relative merits of different statistical treatments of the data or the validity of certain outcome measures, whereas the debate following the recent critique of the administration of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act centered on the relationships among the federal, state, and local education agencies.
|
From page 184... ...
Shouldn't these outcomes be a part of the debate about the effectiveness of Congress's programs for handicapped children? Our analysis of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act and the Handicapped Children's Early Education Program has not suggested that Congress lacks interest in these outcomes.
|
From page 185... ...
Education Advocates Coalition (1980) Report on Federal Compliance Activities to Implement the Education for All Handicapped Children Act.
|
From page 186... ...
Handicapped Children's Early Education Program. Bureau of Education for the Handicapped.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.