Essentials of IDEA for Assessment Professionals

Quickly acquire the practical coverage and guidance you need to understand the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) governs how states and public agencies provide early intervention, special education, and related services to children with disabilities.

To understand it thoroughly, school psychologists, teachers, and other school service providers need a comprehensive resource to guide them in what this frequently amended Act means and how it should be interpreted. The first concise, yet authoritative, book of its kind on which professionals can rely to navigate this often-misunderstood law, Essentials of IDEA for Assessment Professionals is that source.

Like all the volumes in the Essentials of Psychological Assessment series, each chapter features numerous callout boxes highlighting key concepts, bulleted points, and extensive illustrative material, as well as test questions that help you gauge and reinforce your grasp of the information covered. Written in the user-friendly and well-known Essentials format, each of the seven concise chapters covers terminology, classification, assessments/evaluations, and other topics related to IDEA.

With an accompanying CD offering commentary on judicial decisions related to interpretation of IDEA, as well as references to the 2006 final regulations for IDEA 2004 and Section 504 regulations, Essentials of IDEA for Assessment Professionals provides helpful guidelines for educational assessments and evaluations.

As in life, most of the woes resulting in adversarial situations in special education law result from simple things that special educators have either done or left undone. Below are ten proverbs (or pseudo proverbs) that may help practitioners avoid the most common pitfalls:

1. Providing protections to parents through meticulous adherence to due process procedures should never be regarded as “passing the buck.” The corollary for individual practitioners and evaluators with respect to identification and placement decisions should always be, “The buck never stops here.”


2. In spedlaw, "No good deed goes unpunished.”


3. When arguing special education law, a perceived loophole more often than not will become a hangman’s noose.


4. If it’s not in writing, it didn’t happen (but anything you write anywhere may come back to bite you).


5. The legal standards in determining whether a child has received a free appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment cut both ways; what is sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander; but most especially, beware of the two- edged sword.


6. When FAPE is on the line, cost is never a consideration in special educational litigation; but it may well be a factor in deciding whether to litigate at all.


7. Parents and their children with disabilities have power; one should therefore always be nice to the parents (and to the children). When the time comes not to be nice, that’s why schools have board attorneys.


8. “It is better to spend a bit now then to squander a lot later.” It is usually far, far better to spend a few dollars more than one might be obliged to spend on the education of a child with a disability than it is to squander hundreds of thousands of public tax dollars underwriting your attorney’s condo in Cancun.


9. When you do engage in litigation, it’s never over until the fat lady sings . . . and the final decision handed down by the final court in protracted spedlaw litigation can be eight years or more after an initial complaint is filed, depending on the number of appeals and the number of remands back to lower courts.


10. If you’re in a real adversarial situation, you need a real lawyer.