JSET ejournal
Assistive
Technology, Universal Design, Universal Design for Learning:
Improved Learning Opportunities
Chuck Hitchcock and Skip Stahl
National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum at CAST,
Wakefield, Massachusetts
Introduction
David Rose, Co-Executive Director of CAST, recently offered
the following introduction to a series of recommendations that
aligned the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB, 2001) with the 1997
amendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act
(IDEA '97). His thoughts provide a fitting introduction for this
paper.
The Secretary of Education recently released four principles
for guiding the reauthorization of IDEA principles that
closely align the IDEA with the framework of No Child Left
Behind. This emphasis on the alignment of special education
with overall educational reform is important both for the education
of students with disabilities, and for the education of all students.
In the past, the standards, curricula, and accountability systems
of special education have been notably separate from the standards,
curricula, and accountability systems of regular education. In
recognition of the weaknesses inherent in this separation, the
1997 IDEA amendments called for evolutionary change: special
education students must have access, participate, and make progress
in the regular education curriculum, and be evaluated within
its accountability systems. With the movement to higher standards
and accountability that underlie NCLB, these advances must apply
to students with disabilities as well.
But there is a major impediment to achieving high standards and
accountability for special education students within the general
curriculum the general curriculum is simply not designed
for those students. In fact, students with disabilities have
generally not been included during any phase of their design,
research, development, adoption, or validation. As a result,
most general curricula are demonstrably ill-suited to achieve
or measure results for students who have disabilities. Students
find barriers rather than supports for learning, and teachers
find tools that are too poorly designed for teaching all of their
students effectively.
To achieve the Secretary's goal of NCLB, and particularly to
extend NCLB to include students with disabilities, the general
curriculum must be strengthened. It must be strengthened by making
it fully accessible to all students, and by including within
it the research-based practices that will achieve results for
students who have disabilities. Such a curriculum is universally
designed.
A universally designed curriculum is one that has been designed,
from the outset, to achieve such results. A universally designed
curriculum is a curriculum that has been specifically designed,
developed, and validated to meet the needs of the full range
of students who are actually in our schools, students with a
wide range of sensory, motor, cognitive, linguistic, and affective
abilities and disabilities rather than a narrow range of students
in the "middle" of the population. Such a curriculum
is essential not only to align NCLB with IDEA, but to achieve
the laudable goals of both. (Rose, 2003, p.1)
