Abstract
Beginning in the early 1990s, many states began either allowing or legislatively requiring their local education agencies (LEAs), or public schools, to award standard high school diplomas when students with disabilities met their individualized education program (IEP) goals. IEP goals for students with more significant cognitive disabilities, like intellectual disabilities (ID), for example, are often written so that some or all of a state’s core curriculum requirements are reduced in rigor—often substantially—or modified to an appropriate level of challenge per the individual student’s needs. An example of why modifications are needed can be seen in the IEP terms of a secondary student with ID enrolled in 100 percent core curriculum modification. As a high school sophomore, the student was reading at a fourth-grade-level equivalency, and his or her written postsecondary transition plan was to attend college to become either a veterinarian or a lawyer.1 As long as this student continued to meet his or her IEP goals, he or she would receive a standard high school diploma, indistinguishable to third parties from the diploma received by peers with and without disabilities who were required to meet the minimum state requirements to earn their diplomas on standard state core curriculum.
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© 2014 Juliet Lilledahl Scherer and Mirra Leigh Anson
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Scherer, J.L., Anson, M.L. (2014). The Disabilities Dilemma. In: Community Colleges and the Access Effect. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137331007_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137331007_8
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