Below are the first 10 and last 10 pages of uncorrected machine-read text (when available) of this chapter, followed by the top 30 algorithmically extracted key phrases from the chapter as a whole.
Intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text on the opening pages of each chapter.
Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
Do not use for reproduction, copying, pasting, or reading; exclusively for search engines.
OCR for page 163
Informing Policy Makers About
Programs for Handicapped Children
Mary M. Kennedy and Carry L. McDaniels
When it comes to federal education legislation, the
saying "last but not least" applies well to handicapped
children. They have been last to receive the attention
of Congress, receiving federal educational assistance
only after services have been authorized for disadvantaged
and bilingual children. The services that have been
authorized, however, have by no means been trivial. Over
the past 15 years Congress has sponsored a number of
different programs for handicapped children, including
research and demonstration, teacher training, and the
production of media and materials for handicapped
learners. In 1975 congressional assistance for handi-
capped children culminated in a major piece of civil
rights legislation: the Education for All Handicapped
Children Act of 1975.
This chapter describes two particular federal programs
established for handicapped children. Through these
examples we hope to illustrate the kinds of information
federal policy makers need to improve their policies
regarding handicapped children as well as the kinds of
evaluation studies that would provide such information.
The two programs differ in funding mechanisms, require-
ments, and intent, thus offering a valuable contrast for
exploring questions regarding the types of evaluations
and outcome measures that are useful to federal policy
makers. 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. The 1981
163
OCR for page 164
164
appropriations for these two programs were $20 million
and $940 million, respectively.
Congress has rarely questioned the effectiveness of
either of these programs during its authorization or
appropriations hearings. Still missing from the history
of federal legislation for the handicapped is the large
national impact study and the ensuing debate over the
interpretation of the data. These twin events, the yin
and yang of educational evaluation, have been a tradition
in other areas of federal education legislation, but have
not been involved in programs for handicapped children.
This paper aims to discover why that is and to determine
what kinds of outcome measures are of interest to federal
policy makers.
This paper has five sections. The first two describe
the two programs. The third discusses the federal role
that has apparently been adopted for the education of
handicapped children. 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. The rationale for the program was put
forth by the chairman of the Select Committee on
Education when he opened the 1968 House hearings on the
proposed program (U.S. Congress, House, 1968:2):
Studies of child development have shown that early
education can accelerate the development of handi-
capped children; yet most parents find that, while
their children may be diagnosed as handicapped at
birth or shortly thereafter, they must keep those
children at home from school until they are at
least five or six years of age. This is a waste
of the critical years of a child's life.
The chairman's conviction was reiterated by the first
witness, who said, "There is no sounder proposition in
education than that the earlier the child is educated,
the greater the return for the energy spent."
The program began with $1 million in 1968 and continues
today with $20 million annually. It followed on the heels
OCR for page 165
165
of such federal programs as Head Start and Follow Through.
The projects supported by the program were labeled as both
"experimental" and "demonstrations"; that is, the program
offered a situation in which theoretical concepts could
he transformed into real activities and tested under real
circumstances. 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 profes-
sionals, one in which ideas could readily pass from one
researcher to another and from researchers to
practitioners.
The implication is that the goal of Congress was not
to provide a particular type of early education to young
handicapped children but to stimulate interest in and
explorations into the possibilities of early education
for handicapped children. From the point of view of
Congress, then, the effectiveness of particular program
variations was an issue for the research community to
address, whereas the "outcome" of interest to Congress
was whether these explorations were occurring.
How one measures the success of a program in expediting
exploration or in stimulating the production of new ideas
is not clear. The program does emphasize the dissemina-
tion of new program strategies, and funds are used to
support a number of mechanisms for communicating ideas.
Roughly a fourth of the projects are funded specifically
for outreach activities, and many of the remaining
demonstration projects are associated with colleges and
universities, whose faculty disseminate research findings
through professional journals. In addition, two centers
for technical assistance foster cross-fertilization of
ideas among projects
holding conferences
by brokering assistance and by
(U.S. Office of Education, 1979).
These activities are often designed not only to stimulate
the research community and agencies that provide services
iThis is not to say that they do not care whether the
projects would benefit young handicapped children; they
seemed to assume that benefits would accrue and therefore
to concentrate their efforts on stimulating program
development.
OCR for page 166
166
to handicapped children but also to stimulate the general
public as well. Concomitant with the activities
supported by the program has been a growing public
concern about the needs and rights of handicapped
children.
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. The Education for All
Handicapped Children Act of 1975 is a good example of
this newly evolving federal concern. It came into being
in the company of such federal initiatives as the Family
Education Rights and Privacy Act and the Emergency School
Aid Act. The need for the act was justified by such
statements as, "More than half of the handicapped children
in the United States do not receive appropriate educa-
tional services which would enable them to have full
equality of opportunity," and "[It is] in the national
interest that the federal government . . . provide
programs that meet the educational needs of handicapped
children in order to assure equal protection of the law"
(P.L. 94-142, Section 3). The act was designed to ensure
each handicapped child a free, appropriate public educa-
tion commensurate with his or her unique needs. It
contains the following four requirements:
1. The program and placement for any given handi-
capped child must be determined on the basis of his or
her individual needs rather than on the basis of any
category or label that might be assigned to the child.
2. The child's individual needs are to be determined
by a group of individuals that includes the child's
teacher and parents (and, where appropriate, the child).
3. If the parents and school personnel disagree as to
what constitutes an appropriate educational program, the
dispute should be resolved by a neutral third party.
Either the parents or the school can request a court
ruling or an impartial hearing.
4. To the extent possible, the child's needs should
be met in a setting in which the child will be able to
interact with nonhandicapped children.
OCR for page 167
167
The first three requirements are built on a different
set of assumptions from those held by most members of the
research and development community. Researchers tend to
assume that the ultimate criterion for the appropriateness
of educational programs is an empirical one; this assump-
tion leads to the inference that one of the "outcomes"
that should be measured for the Education for All Handi-
capped Children Act is the empirical validity of the
individual educational programs. Yet these three require-
ments imply not only that what is appropriate for a child
must be determined individually, but also that the child
(or, more often, the parents) has a right to contribute
to the final decision, even to take it to federal court
if necessary. This means that the people deemed best
qualified by Congress to judge the appropriateness of
individual educational programs are not necessarily those
who apply empirical criteria.
The first requirement disallows reliance on knowledge
of a child's labeled handicapping condition to prescribe
an educational program. 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. Since this requirement restricts the
use of such labels for prescribing educational programs,
in principle it curtails the use of a significant body of
educational research.
While the first requirement involves the type of infor-
mation that can be used to make educational decisions, the
second states who is to be involved in developing programs
for children. The child's educational program needs are
to be determined by both parents and the school staff--
people who know the child well. The empirical information
that can be used is not restricted by this requirement,
but encouraging the contributions of personal and profes-
sional judgments, in principle at least, effectively
reduces the relative contribution of empirical
information. 2
2We are emphasizing here the apparent intent of the
legislation rather than its actual effects. There is
evidence, for example, that school personnel may actually
use more data when interacting with parents in order to
justify their proposed programs.
OCR for page 168
168
The third requirement suggests that negotiators who
disagree should turn to impartial third parties to resolve
their disputes regarding the appropriate educational
program for a child. At these impartial hearings, testi-
mony from a number of witnesses, some of whom may present
empirical evidence and some of whom may not, is con-
sidered. Once again, the contribution of empirical
information to decision making is tempered by an emphasis
on the personal values of individuals who may use
whatever criteria they choose.
The fourth requirement appears to differ from the first
three. Whereas the first three requirements establish a
decision-making process and indicate no preference about
the outcome, the fourth requirement actually lays down a
criterion for what kind of educational programs are appro-
priate. Congress has taken the position that for handi-
capped children integrated education is, in general, more
appropriate than segregated education. 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 non-
handicapped 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. In addition, many handicapped adults--the
deaf population, for example--enjoy the security and
familiarity of a separate culture in many communities.
Parents of deaf children often argue that the most appro-
priate education for their sons and daughters is one in
which they are exposed primarily to other deaf children.
The requirement for placing children in the least
restrictive environment is particularly interesting from
a researcher's perspective--one cannot help but wonder
whether Congress was privy to any empirical evidence to
the effect that such placements are more educationally
effective. In fact, some testimony to the contrary was
introduced to Congress in 1963 (U.S. Congress, House,
1963:20):
A recurring question is that of special classes
for educable mentally retarded children. Are such
classes really helpful or do they tend to keep
these youngsters out of contact with other
children? The results of a four-year research
project concerned with the efficacy of special
OCR for page 169
169
classes for educable mentally retarded children,
completed at the University of Illinois, show that
with a well-designed curriculum and trained
teachers certain clear differences are emerging
between those groups of identified educable
mentally handicapped youngsters who have had
special classes and those who have not. A group
of children attending special classes since school
entrance appeared to be more advanced academically
and socially than those who entered and remained
with a group attending regular classes. Moreover,
intelligence quotients as measured by standard
tests showed improvement, in many instances to the
degree where an individual who at 6 years of age
was judged to be mentally retarded was now
considered to have advanced to the slow learner
level and possibly even within the slow average
range. Implications based on the final results of
this research emphasize the need for early
identification and placement into special classes.
If this is the case, then why should education in a normal
classroom be part of the entitlement? The answer is
closely related to the reason for establishing a right to
education in the first place. Those who value access to
education often defend their position by pointing to
long-range results, stating, for instance, that education
provides children with the "basic minimum skills necessary
for the employment of the rights of speech and the full
participation in the political process" (San Antonio
Independent School District v. Rodriguez, 36 L.Ed. 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.
94-142, Section 3, emphasis added). Those who hold that
education is a means to other opportunities also tend to
believe that integration involves more than simply not
denying opportunities, that it is an important mechanism
for social change because it exposes the minority and
majority groups (handicapped and nonhandicapped, in this
case) to one another, presumably increasing each group's
tolerance and understanding of the other. By forcing
interactions between these groups, integration tends to
blend them so that the "different" children lose many of
their distinguishing characteristics. This effect, known
as "normalization," is often used to justify integrated
education for handicapped children. The effects of
OCR for page 170
170
normalization are evident in this mother's statement
(Brightman and Sullivan, 1979:14):
I used to hide behind a tree outside the playground
and just watch. It was painful to see him with
regular kids, this retarded kid of mine. Then one
day, I went up to get him after school and for a
few moments I couldn't find him. He looked like
all the other kids. His posture, the way he
walked, everything. . . . I think separate school
where every kid has the same disability is the
worst thing you can do for a kid. It just serves
to reinforce the disability.
s
The children affected by this law are those who have
traditionally received special education in separate
classrooms, often in the school basement or in Quonset
huts in the school yard. 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.
These practices persist in part because teachers are
certified to teach categories of children, and they
persist despite evidence that neither tests nor profes-
sional judgments can discriminate among relatively mild
forms of retardation, learning disabilities, and emotional
disturbances (Craig and McEachron, 1975). Many of the
classroom activities designed for children with mild
handicapping conditions look much like classes for
disadvantaged youngsters (Goldstein et al., 1976).
Rather than raising questions about the appropriateness
of services relative to issues of child development and
curriculum, these practices led to questions regarding
the administration of special education and the extent to
which children's rights to an appropriate education were
being met.
Federal Role in the
Education of the Handicapped
In neither the Handicapped Children's Early Education
Program nor the Education for All Handicapped Act has
Congress actually made any educational stipulations.
OCR for page 171
171
Rather than defining the quantity, location, or type of
preschool education to be offered to young handicapped
children, the Handicapped Children's Early Education
Program is designed to stimulate the development and
dissemination of preschool program innovations and to
heighten awareness among a variety of different groups
regarding the nature of handicapping conditions and the
benefits of early childhood services to handicapped
children. To ensure that ideas extend beyond researchers,
the legislation also requires that individual projects
acquaint the community to be served with the problems and
potentialities of such children. And, just as the
Education for 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.
For both enactments, then, the primary influence on
practice has not been to define it, but to define the
decision-making processes that affect practice and to
expand the number and types of participants involved in
these decisions. There are several reasons why Congress
chose this particular strategy.
First, education has traditionally and constitu-
tionally been viewed as a state and local enterprise, and
as such it has been considered an activity for which local
control should be paramount.
Because of the pervasive
influence of education on society and on the lives of
individuals, however, both the quality of education and
the distribution of educational services are of concern
to federal policy makers, who see education as an
attractive means for promoting social changes. Thus,
although Congress wants to improve both the quality of
education and the distribution of educational services,
it does not want to take major decision-making powers
away from state or local education agencies. Hence,
Congress encourages educational improvements without
mandating what the improvements ought to be.
Second, even when Congress is interested in providing
an entitlement for educational services (as with the
Education for All Handicapped Children Act), a definition
of that entitlement is elusive. Education is not a
tangible product that can be exchanged between individ-
uals, nor can one determine what quantity of it is
sufficient. Moreover, the diversity of the handicapped
population further complicates the problem of defining a
blanket entitlement or a "best" program. The population
OCR for page 172
172
of handicapped children varies from children with mild
speech impairments, to blind children who have adapted to
their blindness and can function in regular classrooms,
to children who are so severely retarded or physically
disabled that they continue to need training in feeding
themselves when they are teenagers. All of these children
are expected to benefit from programs for the handicapped.
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.
New policies are formed through a complex sequence of
committee meetings, hearings, negotiations, and votes.
It is a group that is accustomed to participatory decision
making, and one that assumes that these processes lead to
reasonable conclusions. The Handicapped Children's Early
Education Program and the Education for All Handicapped
Children Act reflect a belief that if the right people
are involved in a decision, it will, for the most part,
be a reasonable decision. No empirical tests of
correctness are necessary.
Fourth, Congress is constrained in a very practical
way by the extent to which its policies or laws can be
enforced. Some laws are easily enforceable; others are
not. Those that regulate material quantities or mechani-
cal performances (such as automobile mileage) are
relatively easy to monitor. Other laws, such as those
defining public broadcasting, are enforceable in large
part simply because the activities are public. Citizens
who are aware of and in agreement with these policies
serve as volunteer overseers of compliance. Without
their aid the government would not be able to monitor
compliance. Many educational policies, which fall into
yet another category, relate to behaviors that are not
necessarily public: the behavior of individual teachers
toward children in their classrooms or the decisions
school staffs make about their students. In the case of
the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, Congress,
fearing that some school staffs might make unfair or
uninformed decisions about services for handicapped
children, created the opportunity for parents to partici
OCR for page 173
173
pate in the process. This essentially converted the
decision-making process from a private one to a public
one, thereby enlisting the aid of sympathetic citizens to
help oversee compliance. Such a requirement does more
than simply provide parents with a right to participate:
It also opens the process to the scrutiny of local
advocacy groups. These groups, being more familiar with
educational jargon and often more knowledgeable about
parents' rights than are parents themselves, may be
invited by the parents to accompany them to the school
when decisions are being made concerning their
handicapped children.
Outcomes of Interest to Congress
Although education per se is essentially a state and
local issue, many educational problems are widely
distributed across the country--so much so that they come
to be recognized as national issues. If Congress
perceives a particular educational issue as nationally
distributed, it may respond by providing financial
assistance to state and local agencies to help them
address the issue. Such a response creates issues that
are uniquely federal, having to do with federal funding
mechanisms; federal, state, and local agency relation-
ships; eligibility rules; and so forth. These federal
issues involve areas that are controllable by the federal
administration--management and funding, for example--and
are separate from the educational issues that may have
stimulated the original legislation.
Many researchers are unaware of the difference between
the federal goals for such programs (which involve the
interrelationships among agencies and other groups) and
educational problems (which are more likely to involve
the cognitive or social development of handicapped
children). These researchers assume that since local
programs are designed to affect children's development,
the outcome of most interest to Congress is the program's
national educational impact; that is, an aggregation of
local effects or a kind of "gross national product" of
cognitive changes in children. 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
OCR for page 176
176
grapple with. It is also uniquely federal--that is,
although issues of whether and how to serve young
handicapped children are raised throughout the nation,
questions about how to distribute federal funds are
raised only in Washington.
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. Both enact-
ments initiate far-reaching changes in the patterns of
relationships among individuals and in so doing they alter
the demand for, as well as the supply of,
educational
services. The nature of Congress's efforts suggests that
the authors of these bills may have had a somewhat
complex (if not always explicit) idea of what a better
society might be like, a vision that includes notions
about the relationship between the individual and govern-
ment, the relationship between education and government,
and the relationship between education and other aspects
of social life. Included in this vision are a number of
assumptions about who should be involved In eaucat~ona'
decision making and how the several parts of society--
parents, educational agencies and researchers--should
interact to affect educational Practices.
It these 1nceracclons represent the "outcomes" of
interest, then traditional investigative mecuoas using
two-variable models, i.e., models with one cause and one
effect, will be inappropriate for measuring them. And it
may not even be possible to test two-variable subsystems
within the total system. A variable identified as
independent may not be amenable to manipulation or
control by a researcher because it is continually being
influenced by other components of the social-educational
system. And investigations of naturally occurring events
may also be inadequate if they are limited to discrete
pieces of the system.
If investigations are to be of
interest to Congress, then the outcomes investigated must
be based on models of the social-educational system that
approximate the complexity of the interactions these
programs might produce--models that could take into
account mutual influences, chain reactions, and other
tangled networks of causes and effects.
For example, the
OCR for page 177
177
Handicapped Children's Early Education Program was based
on the explicit premise that early childhood programs
provide an important contribution to handicapped
children's development, and its design implies a number
of congressional assumptions regarding the relationship
between early childhood educational programs and other
early childhood services; the role of federal, state, and
local agencies in offering these services; and the
contributions research and development can make toward
improving services.
Similarly, the Education for All
Handicapped Children Act was based on the explicit idea
that an individual has the right to participate in
decisions that will affect him or her. That premise is
associated by Congress with a number of implicit
assumptions regarding parent-school relationships, the
role of education in enabling children to enjoy equal
opportunities, the social and personal effects of
integration, and so on. It is these implicit assumptions
that researchers must discover, test, and incorporate
into their research models if they are to be useful to
policy makers.
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. Keeping in mind that while the dispute is being
settled, the child is still being educated somewhere, the
researcher must ask how different the current educational
program is from the program eventually determined to be
appropriate and what the consequences of temporary place-
ment are for the child pending resolution of the dispute.
If the researcher were to expand the study in order to
measure the program characteristics well enough to
describe the difference between the original program and
the one eventually determined to be appropriate, there
would still be no way of determining whether the original
program's "degree of appropriateness" was acceptable
relative to the appropriateness of the parents' right to
due process. Measures of these two effects of the act
could not be equated, nor could they be summed to provide
a net outcome of the policy. To add yet another layer of
complexity to the problem, it is possible for either party
to terminate the dispute at any time on the grounds that
the proceedings themselves are having an adverse effect
on the child, for which the child would not be compensated
if that party won the dispute. An appropriate model for
OCR for page 178
178
investigating dispute resolution, then, is one that can
enlighten policy makers about how all these facets of the
system interact or fail to interact.
For purposes of informing policy makers, however, the
model would not have the elegance and precision that two-
variable models tend to have. Although the enactments may
imply that their creators had a clearly focused picture
of the social processes involved, the picture is no doubt
impressionistic. The first contours were probably
sketched in by political scientists, and over the years
the testimony of many witnesses has added more brush-
strokes, so that what researchers are given to study
blurs in some Places, has overlays of paint in others,
and multiple images in still others. Even if researchers
were to refine a model of the social-educational system
so that it was focused more precisely, it might not be
more useful to Congress, which, as it is, can affect the
system in only general ways.
A reasonable model for describing the special educa-
tional system, then, is one that is developed by using
the language and the degree of precision appropriate to
the policy-making process. Such models, however, should
not be considered inferior or less challenging than those
developed for other purposes. Many valued social and
political models are not defined precisely. The model of
the relationships among the executive, legislative, and
judicial branches of government, for instance, is often
described as a system of checks and balances. Most
informed citizens could generate examples of how that
system works and would probably know if it was not
working properly. Yet few (perhaps none) would be able
to define this system precisely. The fact that it
involves three, rather than two, entities increases its
complexity enormously. The special education system may
involve even more elements. 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.
Models of social systems cannot be expected to have the
clarity or lasting quality of models of simpler mechanical
OCR for page 179
179
systems. Social systems are not closed; they do not start
and stop as mechanical systems do. And because they are
in perpetual motion, models must account for several kinds
of mutual or circular causal relationships. A new federal
policy influences individuals the way a wave influences
sand. Each grain moves in a slightly different direction,
so that the total effect might be better presented by a
general description of the beach than by summing up the
movements of all the grains of sand.
The construction of models of Congress's picture of
the social and educational systems that affect handi-
capped children will allow researchers to determine in a
general way which aspects of a system influence the
quality of programs that young handicapped children
receive and which appear to influence parents' abilities
to exercise their rights. Already, investigators are
finding evidence that special education mandates are not
being readily implemented in schools (Kirp et al., 1976;
Stearns et al., 1980; Weatherly and Lipsky, 1978). Their
evidence suggests the need for understanding the entire
system in order to determine how mandates can influence
it. 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 inter-
actions 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.
Many investigators are reluctant to conduct case
studies because they feel that the small number of cases
involved in such investigations do not permit general-
izations to the full population. The concerns expressed
by these researchers reflect a number of scientific
assumptions that are almost as vague as many of the
congressional assumptions underlying these two enactments
involving handicapped children. Larger samples are
presumed to allow generalizations partly because the
statistics describing the sample can be used to estimate
the parameters of the population. Statistical inferences
about the population are based on these estimates, and
analytic tools have been developed that permit researchers
not only to estimate a population value but also to
OCR for page 180
180
estimate their confidence in that value. The argument
that case studies involve too few cases from which to
generalize is based on the assumption that the method of
generalizing will be a statistical one, that the general-
ized statement must be precise, and that the "fact" that
is to be generalized is a quantitative fact. But the
kind of statements that are needed to describe the effects
of such programs as the Handicapped Children's Early
Education Program and the Education for All Handicapped
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 institu-
tions. What is estimated for the population is how, not
how often, these components can influence one another.
And if researchers use case studies to develop reasonable
models of how the system functions, their models will
specify the sources of variation among cases that are
relevant, so that sound, nonstatistical, general state-
ments can be made (Kennedy, 1979).
Although these investigations may provide an under
. . ~
standing of how the system works, continuous, intensive
Study of any particular system, aside from being expen-
sive, is impractical. Automobiles are driven on the
assumption that they are functioning properly. Motorists
do not stop every mile or so and tear down the engine to
see whether all the parts are synchronized. Instead,
they wait for signs of trouble, a clank or rattle,
perhaps. Where federal policies are concerned, Congress
hears these clanks in testimony, in letters, and from
lobbyists, so there is no apparent need for researchers
to report them. But reseachers can, like mechanics,
interpret these noises. They can inform Congress when
the noises are merely part of the normal functioning of
the system (and do not necessarily imply a dysfunction)
and when they are indicative of needed repairs.
Researchers can do more than wait for the clanks.
They can independently measure certain aspects of the
system. The quality of an automobile's functioning can
be estimated by such indicators as miles traveled per
gallon, the amount of oil being burned, or the quantity
of its noxious emissions. Measures such as these can
provide useful estimates of the extent to which the
automobile is functioning properly. In addition to
creating a model of the social-educational system,
researchers could devise a second, complementary form of
outcome measure, one that indicates the status of the
system at regular intervals. Since the special education
. . .
OCR for page 181
181
system is a part of a larger social-educational system,
it will influence and be influenced by the larger system,
so that regular spot checks of its operation are required
over time. Already, studies initiated during the first
two years of implementation of the Education for All
Handicapped Children Act, such as Newkirk et al.'s survey
(1978) of state definitions of handicapping conditions
and Kotin's survey (1977) of state due process proce-
dures, are outdated. 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. Some of the following measures might
be pertinent to the Handicapped Children's Early
Education Program:
The distribution of projects reflecting different
theoretical orientations.
The number of contributions to the professional
literature that derive from the projects.
· The number of graduate students or teachers who
receive in-service training in these projects.
· The distribution of projects serving different
ages of children or children with different handicapping
conditions.
The distribution of projects across geographic
regions.
· The number of projects housed in public schools
versus university laboratories or experimental units in
hospitals.
· The number of projects that continue to operate
after federal funds are removed.
The measures given below might be relevant to the
Education for All Handicapped Children Act:
· The proportion of children served as handicapped.
· The proportion of those children served who are
being served with nonhandicapped children.
· The proportion of minority children served as
handicapped.
· The proportion of educational decisions that are
appealed.
· The proportion of appeals that are re-appealed the
following year.
OCR for page 182
182
When the Education for All Handicapped Children Act was
passed in 1975, several of the findings used to justify
the need for it were based on such indicators, and a
recent report criticizing the administration's enforce-
ment of the act was also based to a large extent on these
kinds of indicators (Education Advocates Coalition, 1980).
In many cases, the issues raised on these two occasions
were similar. For example, in 1975 Congress found (P.L.
94-142, Section 3) 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.
94-142, Section 3) that "one million of the handicapped
children in the United States are excluded entirely from
the public school system and will not go through the
educational process with their peers" while in 1980
critics claimed that "children remain unnecessarily
segregated in special schools and classes for the
handicapped."
These measures are often called "atheoretical" by the
research community for two reasons. First, they are
value-free, in the sense that they merely describe certain
aspects of special education systems. Second, they are
hard to interpret in the scientific sense of attributing
their causes to particular events. But they are not hard
to interpret in the social-political sense; tremendously
important values are embodied in these data. While the
indicators themselves may be value-free, their interpreta
tions are not.
The importance of these indicators does not lie in
their status as measures of "outcomes" in the traditional
meaning of the term. Indeed, no one knows what the right
proportions for many of these measures should be. The
outcomes of interest are in the system itself, and the
indicators are important because they provide some clues
as to how the system is working. That policy makers
interpret these indicators according to presumed relation-
ships between the system and the measure means that the
value of the indicators depends less on their technical
precision than on the extent to which their relationship
to the rest of the system is understood. The debate and
discussion following from the 1980 critique of the
OCR for page 183
183
administration of the Education for All Handicapped
Children Act included much of what might normally be
considered the job of the research community, i.e., to
infer causal relationships responsible for these
numbers. Rather than drawing these inferences from
controlled studies, a forensic process was used to
generate rival hypotheses; these in turn were tested
either by reference to findings from case studies, if
these are available, or by alternate analyses and
displays of the available numerical indicators of
different aspects of the system.
In fact, the forensic process is similar to the
critical process 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. Second,
the debate following an impact study is often restricted
to members of the research and development community,
whereas this recent debate included members of interest
groups, lawmakers, and federal administrators.
Many researchers will find this forensic process
disturbing in part because it deprives them of an aspect
of their trade in which they take great pride--the process
of drawing inferences from data. The relationship between
data and decision making that has been described here
brings into question the appropriate role of researchers
and their unique skills in social problem-solving: To
what extent can or should the researcher interpret, either
in the scientific sense or in the social-political sense,
the data that he or she may be gathering for policy
makers?
In the example given here, the most appropriate
contribution for that group would be to provide two kinds
of data: intensive descriptions of the processes by which
the social and educational system operates and quantita-
tive atheoretical indicators of the special education
system's functioning. Such a contribution would be
similar to that provided by economists; they regularly
produce a variety of economic indicators for policy
makers, who in turn find these indicators useful because
the economists have also developed a reasonable,
OCR for page 184
184
if imprecise, model of how the economic system operates.
Models of the special education system must be developed
if special education indicators are to be useful. Yet
even the combination of these two kinds of data is not
sufficient without a forensic process to provide the
causal interpretations necessary for policy modification.
The information ultimately used by policy makers results
from a three-way interaction among descriptions of
processes, indicators of processes, and the forensic
process itself.
This process need not exclude researchers from causal
interpretations. Indeed, researchers could be in the
center of the forensic process, conducting ad hoc analyses
and searching through extant data as alternate hypotheses
are raised. Such a role would not preclude them from
raising and testing their own hypotheses, nor from
maintaining a role of objectivity or neutrality. The
particular posture that researchers take with respect to
the forensic process is as much at their discretion as it
is when they debate the meaning of large-scale,impact
studies.
The mention of large-scale impact studies brings up a
second objection that researchers may have to the kind of
interaction between data and debate that has been
suggested here. The data involved in this debate do not
define the particular kinds of program effects that most
researchers are accustomed to measuring and that most
researchers feel are of paramount importance: the
cognitive and social development of handicapped children.
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. Rather, we suggest
that Congress has indeed recognized those outcomes as a
national issue. We also suggest that Congress itself has
limited its participation to one of creating a forum in
which other concerned parties can exchange ideas and
evidence about these outcomes. Federal policy makers
probably assume that studies of cognitive and social
outcomes will be carried out and that the results will be
discussed and debated among service delivery agencies,
parents, advocacy groups, and researchers. The quality
of educational programs, while it is the concern of all,
is not a federal policy issue; what is an issue is who is
involved in determining these programs.
OCR for page 185
185
The situation is analogous to a division of labor. If
other groups will concern themselves with methods of
improving programs, Congress can then address itself to
the best ways of distributing funds. Those researchers
who think such a division of labor is inappropriate may
try to persuade Congress to attend more to questions of
treatment efficacy. But in so doing they will be entering
the forensic process, not as impartial researchers but as
advocates.
REFERENCES
Brightman, A., and Sullivan, B.
(1979) Disabled children and their families, progress
report 1-9. Cambridge, Mass.: American
Institute for Research in the Behavioral
Sciences.
Craig, P. A., and McEachron, N. B.
(1975) Whom do teachers identify as handicapped?
Studies of Handicapped Students (Vol. 1).
Menlo Park, Calif.: SRI International.
Education Advocates Coalition
(1980) Report on Federal Compliance Activities to
Implement the Education for All Handicapped
Children Act. Washington, D.C.: Children's
Defense Fund.
Goldstein, H., Arkall, C., Asheroff, S. C., Hurley,
O. L., and Lilly, M. S.
(1976) Schools. In N. Hobbs, ea., Issues in the
Classification of Children. San Francisco,
Calif.: Jossey-Bass, Inc., Publishers.
Kennedy, M.
(1979) Generalizing from single cases. Evaluation
Ouarterly 3:661-678.
Kirp, D. L., Kuriloff, P. J., and Buss, W. G.
(1976) Legal mandates and organizational change. In
N. Hobbs ea., Issues in the Classification of
Children. San Francisco, Calif.:
Jossey-Bass, Inc., Publishers.
Kotin, L.
(1977) Due Process in Special Education: Legal
Analysis. Cambridge, Mass.: Research
Institute for Educational Problems, Inc.
Newkirk., D., Block D., and Shrybman, J.
(1978) An Analysis of Categorical Definitions,
Diagnostic Methods, Diagnostic Criteria and
OCR for page 186
186
Personnel Utilization in the Classification of
Handicapped Children. Reston, Va.: Council
for Exceptional Children.
Stearns, M., Green, D., and David, J.
(19801 Local Implementation of P.L. 94-142:
First
Year Report of a Longitudinal Study. Menlo
Park, Calif.: SRI International.
U.S. Congress, House
(1968) Hearings Before the Select Committee on
Education, Committee on Education and Labor,
on H.R. 17829. Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office.
U.S. Congress, House
(1963) Hearings Before the Special Subcommittee on
Labor, Committee on Education and Labor, on
H.R. 6013 and H.R. 6025. Statement of
Lindley J. Stiles. Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office.
U.S. Congress, House
(1968) H.R. 17829. 90th Congress, 2nd Session,
Section 2(a). Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office.
U.S. Office of Education
(1979) Handicapped Children's Early Education
Program. Bureau of Education for the
Handicapped. Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
Weatherly and Lipeky
(1977) Street-level bureaucrats and institutional
innovation: implementing special education
reform. Harvard Educational Review 47:171-197.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
children act
