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BUSH'S SPECIAL ED COMMISSION MAKES A PLAN BUT NEEDS MORE TIME

January 20, 2002

WASHINGTON -- The President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education laid out its plan to evaluate the successes and failures of special ed in the United States last week, but with six task forces each needing to gather input from the special ed community and meet publicly at least once, the commission says it will not make President George W. Bush's aggressive April 30 deadline for a final report. The group has asked the president to extend his deadline to sometime in June.

Kicking off the project with a public meeting in the nation's capital, the 19-member commission created subcommittees to address accountability systems, research, professional development, finance, student assessment and system administration. The group also approved a slate of nine meetings in nine different U.S. cities, each addressing a different aspect of the special ed system. The next meeting, for example, will be held February 25 through 27 in Houston and will examine ways in which current special ed programs are effective. The group will meet four times in March and three more times in April, then hopes to approve its report at a final meeting May 30 in Washington.

At the initial meeting, members of the Council for Exceptional Children urged the commission not to rush to change a system that has yet to be fully tested for effectiveness. The CEC, one of the special ed community's chief lobbying groups, argued many improvements could be made by fine-tuning the way states implement the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Other problems may be a matter of state policy, not warranting the interference of federal lawmakers.

Division in Congress over whether and how to change various provisions in IDEA was a critical reason attempts to dramatically increase federal funding for state special ed programs through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act failed. With IDEA up for reauthorization this year, Bush is counting on the commission's report to guide the administration in negotiations with Congress over potential changes to the law. However, CEC argued that some changes made to IDEA in 1997 have yet to be fully implemented, since official U.S. Department of Education guidelines did not become available until spring of 1999 or later. 8