Gaining Access to General Education: The Promise of Universal Design for Learning

On November 29, 1975 then President Ford signed the Education of All Handicapped Children Act (EAHCA, Public Law 94-142) into law, mandating for the first time that children and youth with disabilities be afforded the right to a free and appropriate public education, individualized programming, parental participation in the decision making process, nondiscriminatory identification and evaluation, instruction in the least restrictive environment, while ensuring families due process rights and responsibilities. A little over thirty years have passed since the commencement of this important special education legislation with additional changes to the law and the manner in which we educate and support students with disabilities and their families. Many researchers and practitioners have documented both the accomplishments and challenges brought forth during the law’s first three decades of implementation (Jimenez & Graf, in press). One such challenge has been ensuring adequate access to the general education curriculum for an increasingly diverse group of learners within general education classrooms. As teacher educators and researchers in the field of special education, we recognize the need to prepare general and special educators to meet the needs of students with disabilities, those at-risk for academic failure, and learners from diverse cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds (Grenot-Scheyer, Coots, &