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Essay on Director of Pupil Personnel and the Relationship to Special Education
Our longstanding problem was that we as parents had no way to tell whether our child, heading into the last few years of high school, was being challenged at the right grade level or was performing at the right grade level. Being promoted from Fourth Grade to Fifth Grade really tells us almost nothing. Now, using No Child Left Behind Advocacy Strategies we will know where our child is. If they are below that grade level, we have several opportunities in the law to get them up to grade level, and to the level where they can honestly pass the High Stakes Test and earn a real diploma. Equally important, what the student will learn will help them in terms of Self Advocacy that they will need in taking on further education and in employment opportunities (Sarason, 1990).
The history of the special education
In the 1960s, advocates sought a Federal role in providing leadership and funding for efforts to provide a free appropriate public education, or FAPE, to children with disabilities. Congress took a step toward this in 1966 when it established the Bureau for Education of the Handicapped under Title VI of the Elementary and Secondary Schools Act (ESEA). Subsequently, a number of initiatives earmarked small amounts of Federal funds for serving children with disabilities. As these programs proliferated, the Bureau recommended that they be codified under a single law. The resulting Education of the Handicapped Act, P.L. 91-230, was passed in 1970 (Shapiro, 1993).
During the same period—the 1960s and early 1970s—parents began to pursue State laws that would require local education agencies (LEAs) to offer special education services to students with disabilities and that would provide partial funding for those services. Despite the passage of such laws in a number of States and the provision of some Federal funding.........
