Individualized Education Program: Considering the Broad Context of Reform.

The individualized education program (IEP) is the cornerstone of federal legislation that mandates the right to an educational opportunity for students with disabilities. The IEP is the vehicle that elaborates the right to an appropriate education and dictates the measures needed to achieve "specially designed instruction." It is a quasi-contractual agreement that presumably guides, orchestrates, and documents an educational career based on a student's unique academic and social needs. Without question, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 197 5 and the most recent reauthorization by Congress in 1990 known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) brought about much needed change in educational programs for students with disabilities. Conceptually, IDEA intended to reorient the goals of school personnel, parents, and students to obtain new outcomes. The IEP process arranged a way for professionals and parents to work together in achieving new educational priorities for students with disabilities based on equitable decision making and individual rights. As a result, the effectiveness of IDEA lies in the effectiveness of the IEP in the way it is "perceived, conceived, and carried out" (Kaye & Aserlind, 1979, p. 138). Thus, the importance of the IEP in directing, documenting, and facilitating collaboration of a student's education cannot be minimized or ignored. Since passage of IDEA, researchers have scrutinized the IEP document for procedural compliance and quality indicators. From these analyses researchers found the IEP process and document to be ineffective, incomplete, and faulty (e.g., Comptroller General of the United States, 1981; Pyecha et al., 1980; Smith, 1990b). Smith and Simpson (1989), for example, reported procedural faults in over half of the 214 IEPs of students with behavioral disorders, as well as low numbers of behavioral goals, few objectives met, and substantial deficits in the link between performance standards and annual goals. In another study, Smith (1990a) found similar procedural and substantive deficits that undermine the validity, reliability, and accuracy of the IEP document. Research findings thus have highlighted the functioning of IEPs and questioned the value of continuing the current IEP process (Smith & Simpson, 1989; Smith, 1990b ). As it stands, IEPs have become what Neal and Kirp (1985) describe as "a narrow approach in which law and procedures become ends in themselves and substantive goals are lost in mechanical adherence to form" (p. 66).