This article describes a process for developing tools for analyzing policy. There are four sets of tools: (1) tools to analyze policy "on the books"—that is, to analyze statutes, court decisions, and other policy documents for their coherence with the core concepts; (2) tools to analyze policy "on the street"—that is, to analyze how executive agencies implement the core concepts; (3) tools to determine whether a policy is appropriate to reflect one or more of the core concepts; and (4) tools to connect core concepts to practice and then to quality-of-life outcomes for families.
The article reviews the federal statutes and relevant decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court that constitute the core concepts of disability policy and their application to persons with disabilities (especially developmental disabilities) and their families.
This article reports the research that resulted in the authorsIn this article, we describe our research process, the resulting 18 core concepts of disability policy affecting families who have a child with a d isability, and our approach to them, which is to describe but not try to reconcile them when they conflict with each other. We also refer to a matrix of legal source material that serves as a reference guide for all the articles in this series.
This article examines precedents that justify Congress in creating a preference for positive behavioral interventions, strategies, and supports over other interventions in the 1997 Amendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The authors concluded that the IDEA 1997 provisions are warranted by several wellestablished precedents based in constitutional law, in the right to treatment and the right to education cases, in moral philosophy, and in democratic-government philosophy.In an extraordinary bow to empiricism and the demonstrated efficacy of the approach identified by IDEA as positive behavioral interventions, strategies, and supports (PBS;Carr et al., 1999), Congress, in reauthorizing in 1997 the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA 1999), explicitly provided for the use of that approach to address specified student behaviors. That choice may seem to be both unwarranted and unprecedented. Some still question the efficacy of PBS, saying that it does not work as well for some students as its advocates assert or that it does not work at all for some students (Mulick, 1994). And some may question why Congress selected this strategy for "most favored intervention" status.Our purpose here is not to answer those who question the efficacy of the PBS approach. Suffice it to say that the strategy has been the subject of intense professional research for at least the last 10 years and that its efficacy for changing the behavior of persons with developmental and other disabilities was documented at the time Congress reauthorized IDEA in 1997 (see Carr et al., 1999, for a review of the strategy's efficacy as applied to persons with developmental disabilities; for reviews of research on PBS as applied to persons with emotional and behavioral disorder or learning disabilities, see Broussard & Northup, 1995;Dunlap, Kern-Dunlap, Clarke, & Robbins, 1991;Dunlap et al., 1993;Dunlap, White, Vera, Wilson, & Panacek, 1996;Kern, Childs, Dunlap, Clarke, & Falk, 1994;Lewis & Sugai, 1993, 1996a, 1996bUmbreit, 1995;Vollmer & Northup, 1996). Indeed, in 1997 the evidence in favor of PBS had not been uniformly developed (all children, all types of disability, all types of settings, all types of behaviors) and in fact it is still being developed. Those facts do not negate this dispositive one: There was sufficient scientific evidence for Congress, in 1997, to identify PBS as an intervention that the schools must take into account.Instead of focusing on the issue of efficacy, we intend to show how very justified Congress was, from legal and related perspectives, in selecting the strategy for favored status. Together with the data on the strategy's efficacy, these justifications should put to rest any objections that may arise concerning Congress's choice. Implicit in our argument is that, given the efficacy of PBS and the large body of law favoring it, professionals, other advocates, families with children with challenging behaviors, administrative law judges, and courts would still be well ju...
The AAIDD's 11th edition of Intellectual Disability: Definition, Classification, and Systems of Support describes a framework for understanding the relationship between public policy and practice. The framework incorporates three inputs into public policy and practice affecting quality-of-life outcomes for individuals and families, society, and systems. The inputs are social factors, the core concepts of disability policy, and changing conceptualizations of disability. We accept the framework's basic premises, but we propose amendments to make the framework more useful for its stated purposes of elaborating on the "context" ( Schalock et al., 2010 , p. 17) that affects people with intellectual disability and "promot[ing] changes in public policy that will lead to the achievement of desired policy outcomes" ( Schalock et al., 2010 , p. 171).
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