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Introduction
Twenty years ago, the publication of A Nation At Risk instigated two decades of educational reform in the United States. Yet improving our educational system remains a national priority. Today, various school reform efforts brought about by enabling legislation and funding streams are converging on the goal of providing a single high-quality education for all of America's students. Expectations of excellence and equal access, as well as a focus on outcomes, are driving the effort to "leave no child behind" The goal of much of this reform work is to ensure that children of color, children living in poverty, children learning English as a second language, and children with disabilities encounter no barriers as they receive the best education possible in order to become independent, productive, and participating members of the communities in which they will live as adults.
Once, the "factory" model of schooling in America viewed all children as mere "raw material" to be measured and then either mainstreamed or side-tracked, with children disadvantaged by color, poverty, language, or disability automatically winding up outside the mainstream. This system of sorting and then tracking children institutionalized inequality and denial of opportunity. Reform efforts of today are directed toward eliminating this ad hoc marginalization of groups of children, such as those listed above, who are viewed as "at risk" in America's schools. Reforming education, improving schools, and raising student achievement are noble and socially just pursuits, but by what means are these lofty goals to be accomplished?
Many of the diagnostic and prescriptive approaches of the past have resulted in practices where presumably the least capable receive significantly less curricula. An alternative approach to understanding student learning difficulties becomes available when assessments are applied to a school itself, or, more particularly, to a school's curriculum, instead of to students. Measurement can then proceed with the following questions: How accessible and user-friendly is the curriculum? To what extent does the curriculum permit multiple entry and exit points? To what degree does the curriculum allow for wide participation? How accurately and fairly does the curriculum assess student progress?
In order to make a single high-quality public school education available to all, the curriculum itself must be examined. The typical lecture-and-textbook curriculum, made accessible only to those who could demonstrably benefit from it, implies that any failure to grasp the material calls for the student him- or herself to be examined for flaws, as has traditionally been the case. Failure to examine the curriculum and to consider modifications to it presents a crucial question: are the problems confronting public schools today rooted in the students or in the curriculum? In the following pages, we take the position that the challenge of educating students with disabilities or students who are not achieving rests with the curriculum, not with the student. In particular, we posit that the problem resides within the static presentation of typical curriculum, which is unresponsive to the many and varied ways in which individual learners differ.
In order to begin addressing not the deficits of students but rather the barriers erected for them by traditional curriculum, a framework is required for examining the curriculum as it is and for suggesting ways in which it may be made most accessible to all students. One such framework is Universal Design for Learning (UDL) (Rose & Meyer, 2002). UDL takes a trifold approach to assessing curriculum as it examines, first, the ways in which content can be represented; second, the means by which students can respond; and third, the conditions under which students can engage in the learning process. UDL anticipates an increasingly digitized information source for curriculum, which allows a UDL framework to guide the development of future digital media, delivery mechanisms, and technology tools for use in education. Today, an object as static as a textbook can be transformed in seemingly limitless ways when presented digitally (such as audio, CD-ROM, HTML). As schools become more inclusive and democratic institutions, and as technology develops exponentially, unprecedented opportunities lie ahead for all students to reach high standards in their learning and to experience a high quality of life in adulthood.
In the discussion that follows, we present practices that hold promise for increasing access to the general education curriculum for our nation's most vulnerable populations of students with disabilities. It is the general curriculum that prepares children to take on independent, responsible, and productive roles as adults. The general curriculum—delivered through publicly-funded schools (and therefore by or through democratic institutions)—affords a central opportunity for all to pursue the American dream. For students who are blind, deaf, multiply disabled, or significantly developmentally delayed, equal opportunity to pursue that dream is out of reach without advances in how we prepare and employ our teaching force, how we set policy that raises standards and expectations without discrimination, and, above all, how we deliver a curriculum that is flexible and widely accessible for all learners.
Equal access to the general curriculum implies that all students have the right to strive for the same educational goals. Equal opportunity implies that accommodations are in place to remove or minimize the impact of disability on authentic performance, thus leveling the playing field. Equal opportunity also implies that modifications to entry points to and benchmarks of the curriculum can be made so that students with disabilities are enabled to make progress to the maximum possible extent. The central question at hand is how communities and state and local education authorities organize to provide the best education possible for students with low-incidence disabilities. One answer is that public education, equally afforded to all, can be accomplished through collaboration among stakeholders, including families, educators (both special and general), administrators, and policy-makers. We will demonstrate how adherence to a UDL framework for curriculum reform can yield a flexible and accessible curriculum for all students, including those with disabilities.
