Educators re-examine who�belongs in special ed classes - CNN.com: WASHINGTON (AP) -- Many children in special education classes may not belong there, the government says.
A new policy is aimed at intervening early with intensive teaching to give struggling students a chance to succeed in regular classrooms and escape the 'special ed' label.
There are nearly seven million special education students in the United States, and roughly half have learning disabilities. Most of those are reading related, such as dyslexia or problems in processing information.
The Bush administration, following passage of a broad special education law, issued rules in October that rewrote the way schools determine if a child has a learning disability.
States have largely relied on a 1970s-era method that looks for disparities between a child's IQ and achievement scores.
'The fundamental concept here is unexpected underachievement,' said Tom Hehir, a special education expert at Harvard University. He said a child with a normal IQ who is lagging behind in learning would generally be identified as having a learning disability.
