IMPLEMENTATION OF IEPs: New Teacher Roles and Requisite Support Systems

The Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 represents a unique and innovative piece of legislation in that it addresses not only administrative and fiscal concerns, but also deals directly with instructional programming.Through its provisions that every handicapped child must have an Individualized Education Program (IEP), the law essentially legislates an individualized, child-centered approach to educating handicapped children.Certainly, the concept of child-centered, individualized programming for children is not new to special education.If speciaf education instructional literature of the past decade has had a focus, this has been it (Johnson, 1967;Reger, Schroeder& Uschold, 1968;Hammill, 1971 ;Cartwright, Cartwright, & Ysseldyke, 1973;Herrick, 1972;Minskoff, 1973).A predominant concern is special education has been to avoid dealing with children in terms of labels, focusing instead on each child's unique qualities, carefully determining his or her educationally relevant strengths and weaknesses, and devising an appropriate educational program for the child based on those strengths and weaknesses.In special education, this generally has been referred to as the diagnostic / prescriptive approach to teaching.Because the IEP component of PL 94-142 requires the child's current level offunctioning to be determined and used as a basis for establishing goals and objectives, it represents a formalization of the diagnostic/ prescriptive approach to education.Since the IEP provisions of PL 94-142 are basically consistent with a predominant trend in special education, implementation of the law would seem to be almost a routine matter for special education teachers and administrators.Passage of the law, however, was greeted with confusion, speculation, and consternation in many instancesmuch of this centering on the IEP.One likely reason for this reaction was suggested by Gotts ( 1976): Widespread adoption of the diagnostic / prescriptive approach has never occurred at the classroom level.Despite extensive literature, heavily promoted curriculum materials, and reoriented teacher training programs, individualized educational programming in many instances remains a concept rather than an operational reality.