The Impact of the Individuals With Disabilities Act on Classrooms
- IDEA, together with earlier legislation relating to the educational rights of disabled children, brought about a need for school administrators to provide disabled children with an education that is most appropriate for them. This means that schools have to educate these children in an environment that imposes the least restrictions on them. They have to be educated, to the extent that it is possible, with their peers who are not disabled. Only in cases where it is not possible to educate these children in the normal setting are they provided a separate schooling.
- The way that inclusion has been accomplished is to place disabled students with other students to receive educational input, in a process described as mainstreaming. Typically, schools place the disabled children with other children to receive input for non-educational programs such as art and physical education. Most of the disabled students are still in special education classes for the most part. They only visit the general education classes for a small part of the time. Later developments have made for more inclusion of disabled students.
- As teachers have found more ways to include disabled students in regular classrooms, IDEA has been found to have an impact on the classroom setting. For one, inclusion has been found to have a beneficial impact on disabled children, according to the book "Inclusive Education" by Lissa Power-Defur and Fred P. Orelove, cited on Pearson Education's TeacherVision website. These children have been found to do better on standardized tests, acquire better social and communication skills and prepare themselves better for their life once they leave the school environment.
- Other students in the classroom have also found to benefit from exposure to disabled students. The National Middle School Association (NMSA) says that other students have developed a better feel for human differences and greater awareness of such differences. Other students also have grown in terms of their cognition and have developed friendships with the disabled students. Not only that, the NMSA reports that inclusion of disabled students has not resulted in any significant loss of classroom time.