Halpern, A.S. (1999, June).  Transition:  Is it time for another rebottling?  Paper presented at the 1999 Annual OSEP Project Directors' Meeting, Washington, D.C.

 

Loews L'Enfant Plaza Hotel
Washington, D.C.

June 14, 1999

 

TRANSITION: IS IT TIME FOR ANOTHER REBOTTLING?

By Andrew S. Halpern

When I examined this history around 8 years ago, it struck me that the issues and concerns being addressed within the "new" transition initiative were mostly not new at all, and I captured this sentiment through a metaphor, referring to the "new" transition programs as "old wine in new bottles" (Halpern 1992). The "new bottle" of transition has now been in the cellar for around 15 years. Can the needs of adolescents with disabilities still be served adequately through the current transition initiative, or is it time for another rebottling?

A great deal has occurred under the transition banner, especially during the past 10 years. From the federal perspective alone, the Office of Special Education Programs has funded 549 projects that focus exclusively on transition programs. All of us in the audience today are very grateful for this federal effort.

As I look toward the beginning of the 21^st century, however, I am very uncertain about the future of our transition movement if we continue to regard it as essentially a component of special education. Around 50 years ago, we separated ourselves from general education, believing that we needed special schools and special classes in order to address the needs of disabled students satisfactorily. Yet even at the beginning of the "modern era" of special education in 1975, Public Law 94-142 spoke of a free and appropriate education for students with disabilities in the least restrictive environment, requiring that whenever appropriate, students with disabilities should be educated along side of their non-disabled peers. This concept has been reinforced several times since then, with such words as "regular education initiative" and, most recently, "inclusion" (Stainback & Stainback, 1996).

During the past 20 years and, most seriously during the past decade, another educational movement has been unfolding in several different ways, all more-or-less captured by the term "general education reform or restructuring." The transition movement in special education affects approximately 12% of the total student population. The general education reform movement, at least in theory, affects all students. Here is the question that I want to pose with you this morning. If the transition movement is to survive and thrive into the 21^st century, how can it become aligned, if not integrated, into the general education reform movement?

As a starting point for exploring this question, it is useful to consider who within the total population of all America’s students are most in need of general education reform. While he served as the director of the Center for Demographic Policy at the Institute for Educational Leadership in the early 1990s, Harold Hodgkinson offered an interesting answer to this question (Hodgkinson, 1991; 1993). First of all, he suggests, the top 20% of our high school graduates are absolutely world class, and would be that way with or without any educational reforms. The next 40%, he believes, are also capable of completing a college education, with or without any educational reforms. It is the bottom 40 % that he worries about. He summarizes his concerns with the following words:

"The lowest 40% of students are in very bad educational shape, a situation caused mostly by problems they brought with them to the kindergarten door, particularly poverty, physical and emotional handicaps, lack of health care, difficult family conditions and violent neighborhoods....These are the children who are tracked into the "general" curriculum in high school, which prepares them neither for college nor for a job....The best way to deal with this problem is to provide a seamless web of services, combining education, health care, housing, transportation and social welfare" (Hodgkinson, 1993, pp20-21)

With minor modifications, we might find similar words from those of us who have monitored and chronicled the history of our transition movement.

Before returning to the question of whether the transition and general education reform movements might be aligned, if not integrated, it is important for us to have a common frame of reference for understanding the term "general school reform." Many efforts have flown under this banner, and the landscape can easily become confusing. There is, however, a conceptual model developed by a colleague of mine at the University of Oregon, David Conley, that I have found to be helpful in displaying what we mean by general school reform or restructuring. This portrayal of the landscape of educational reform is displayed graphically in Figure 1.

Conley neatly divides the terrain of school restructuring into three concentric domains, each containing four components. He labels the three domains as central variables, enabling variables and supporting variables (Conley, 1997).

The central variables, as you might suspect, are the most important foci of educational restructuring. They begin with the articulation of a set of learning standards, what students should know and be able to do as a result of the learning they receive. Given a set of relevant standards, we then need a curriculum that contains appropriate content to address the standards, appropriate instructional methods to teach the curriculum, and appropriate student assessment strategies through which the teacher and the learner can evaluate the results of the learning process.

The enabling variables are less important than the central variables, and yet they have often been the primary focus of restructuring efforts (Conley, 1997). Two of these variables are classroom oriented, including the learning environment in which the student receives instruction and the amount of teaching and learning time that is provided to the student. The other two enabling variables are the use of technology to facilitate instruction and the establishment or enhancement of school-community relationships, such as collaborations with parents, social service agencies, and members of the business community.

Conley describes the final set of variables in his model as supporting variables. The first of these, school governance, includes such issues as decentralized decision-making through site-based management, and school choice as reflected in such efforts as charter schools or magnet schools within a public school system. The remaining variables include teacher and principal leadership, the redeployment of school personnel as restructuring efforts unfold, and the impact of contractual relationships, especially those negotiated between teachers and school boards.

Although one can find numerous examples of activities within each of the 12 variables represented in this model, there is no doubt that the most widespread approach to school reform that has emerged during the past decade focuses on the articulation and utilization of learning standards. Efforts in this area began to increase dramatically after the passage in 1994 of the Goals 2000: Education America Act, which provided federal funds to support the development and implementation of standards within the context of general school reform (Cobb, Tochterman, & Lehmann, 1999).

In his sixth annual State of America Education speech delivered on February 16, 1999, the Secretary of Education, Richard Riley, indicated that 48 states have begun to address the issue of improved academic standards. These include both content standards describing the knowledge and skills that students need to acquire in a given subject area, and performance standards that describe what students have to do and demonstrate in order to show that they have truly learned what is important within the content standards. But, Secretary Riley cautions, the dialogue around standards has occurred primarily at the state and federal levels. So far, he suggests, there is precious little evidence that newly articulated high standards are actually being implemented with regularity or effectiveness in the classroom (Riley, 1999).

This same perception was also echoed at a focus group forum conducted by the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education on July 7, 1998 in Washington, D.C. (Jennings, 1998). Attendees included 6 representatives of the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education along with 9 other experts in standards-based reform from organizations at the local, state and national levels. This group offered the following observations. Although many states are doing something about standards-based reforms, only 10 states are truly taking the lead in moving from discussions to implementations.

Some very strong concerns were also expressed about the measurement of student learning outcomes that are presumed to evaluate student achievement of newly articulated standards. There seemed to be general agreement among the panel members that adequate assessment systems do not now exist, and the panel could not even agree on what the nature of such an assessment system should be. If these perceptions about the inadequacy of assessment systems are accurate, we obviously face a major obstacle in attempting to evaluate the impact of standards-based reforms.

A recent review by Brian Cobb and his associates of the standards-based reform movement added the observation that most states involved in standards-based reforms have not paid much if any attention to the impact of these reforms on students with disabilities, with the notable exceptions of Kentucky and Vermont (Cobb, et al., 1999). A report issued by the National Center for Education Statistics in December, 1998, confirmed this perception. In a national study of approximately 1500 public school teachers conducted in spring, 1996, only 28% of the teachers stated that they applied to a great extent the same high standards to students with disabilities as they did to other students in their classes (Alexander, Heaviside & Farris, 1998). Putting all of this information together, it would appear that standards-based education is more a vision than an accomplishment at this point in time, both for students with or without disabilities.

A further complication in this vision lies in the fact that most of our efforts in standards-based reforms, thus far, have tended to focus on raising traditional academic standards, with precious little attention being paid to career education or transition components of the curriculum (Thurlow, Ysseldyke, Gutman, & Geenan, 1997). In some ways, this is very reminiscent of those very conditions that led to our separation from general education some 50 years ago and, at the high school level, created a need for the work-study programs of the 1960s. Even from the perspective of the general population of students, it is not likely that the push for higher academic standards will address adequately the needs of that lower 40% of students whom Hodgkinson identified as being poorly prepared for either a job or further education after leaving high school.

In addition to this strong national interest in standards-based reforms, there are other components of Conley’s taxonomy that seem to be attracting a lot of attention. Charter schools are now being explored seriously in at least 34 states (Center for Education Reform, 1999; U.S. Charter Schools Web Site, 1999). Site-based management is a buzzword in many local school districts. The development of a national assessment program causes some people to cheer and others to cringe. Indeed, most if not all of the 12 components in Conley’s taxonomy are receiving some level of attention throughout the country. Since reviewing the details of all of this activity is well beyond the scope of this presentation, I will examine instead the legislative foundation, if any, that might nudge us in the direction of aligning our special education transition programs with programs that are focused on general educational reform or restructuring.

Let’s begin with the regulations for the 1997 Individuals with Disabilities Act that were instated several months ago. These regulations stipulate the following four requirements for building bonds between special and regular education (IDEA Law, 1999):

1. IEPs must address ways of enhancing the student’s involvement in the general education curriculum;
1. Regular education teachers must be included in the student’s IEP meeting, when appropriate;
2. Students with disabilities must be included in state and district assessments, with appropriate accommodations or alternative assessments provided, when appropriate; and
3. Children with disabilities who attend public charter schools and their parents retain all rights under Part B of IDEA, and compliance is required whether or not a public charter school receives Part B funds.

But how does this courtship look from the perspective of regular education legislation? In particular, how are people with disabilities addressed in the Carl Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act of 1998, the School-To-Work Opportunities Act of 1994, and the Goals 2000 Act of 1994?

The series of Carl Perkins vocational education amendments has a recent history of including people with disabilities and other "special needs" populations as appropriate recipients of the programs that are authorized through this legislation. The 1998 amendments identify six types of people who can be construed as members of special populations: (a) individuals with disabilities; (b) individuals from economically disadvantaged populations; (c) males or females preparing for jobs where their gender is typically under-represented; (d) single parents, including single pregnant women; (e) displaced homemakers; and (f) individuals with "other barriers" including limited English proficiency (American Vocational Association, 1998). In general, the law provides guidelines to insure that all of these "special populations" have "equal access" to recruitment, enrollment and placement activities that are supported through this legislation.

The School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994 also contains language to insure that all of the programs it authorizes are fully accessible to students with disabilities (Cobb, et al., 1999). This act furthermore encourages recipients of funds to coordinate all of their programs and activities in their partnerships with concurrent efforts that pertain to general school reform (Benz & Cochhar, 1996).

But how about Goals 2000 itself? The report from the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Relations, leaves no doubt concerning the intent of Congress with respect to the inclusion of students with disabilities in the general educational reforms being promulgated by Goals 2000. Here are some of the words contained in this document.

"The Committee wishes to send a clear and unequivocal message that Goals 2000: Educate America Act is fully consistent with the Americans with Disabilities Act and implements the values and precepts of the ADA in the context of education reform. The Committee also wishes to send the message that this legislation is fully consistent with and complements the spirit and intent of Part B of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973" (Committee on Labor and Human Resources, 1993).

These pieces of federal legislation, accompanied by similar initiatives at the state level, represent a significant "top-down" commitment to general education reform, for all students including those with disabilities. But how is this legislative commitment playing out where it really counts, in the classrooms and other learning environments throughout our country?

In 1998, the U.S. Department of Education published the findings of a national survey conducted in 1996, documenting the perceptions of 1445 public school teachers on their implementation of school reforms (Alexander, et al., 1998). The overall image that emerges from this is somewhat underwhelming. In spite of the fact that, by this time, standards-based reforms were being promulgated heavily through policy initiatives, only 44% of the high school teachers reported that they were even attempting to assist their students in achieving higher standards. Around 38% reported aligning their curriculum materials with high standards, 20 percent reported using authentic assessments, mostly in core academic areas such as reading and math, and 7% reported using effective new technologies. As for parent involvement, 10% of the high school teachers reported providing information or advice to parents to help create supportive learning environments, 15% reported sharing responsibility with parents for the academic performance of their children, and 3% reported involving parents in classroom activities. Finally, with respect to the provision of in-service training, only19% of the school teachers reported receiving information on school reform strategies to apply in the classroom, 16% reported an ongoing integrated professional development program, and 8 % reported receiving some sort of follow-up assistance.

The general imagery that obviously emerges from this study is that teachers are not yet extensively engaged in implementing educational reforms. If this is true with respect to the various components of general education reform, how does it play out in the specific arena of including students with disabilities in general education high school programs?

A provocative study provides us with some tentative answers to this question, within the context of vocational education and school-to-work programs. In 1998, Lombard, Miller and Hazelkorn reported the results of a survey investigating teacher attitudes toward including students with disabilities into programs authorized by the school-to-work legislation and the vocational-technical programs authorized by the 1990 Carl Perkins amendments. They selected a random sample of 300 teachers from a national directory of school-to-work and tech-prep personal. Eventually 161 members of this sample responded, providing representation from 45 states.

The findings were not very promising. With respect to policy and program implementation, only 53% of the respondents stated that their schools advocated for the inclusion of students with disabilities into their programs. At the operational level, only 23% stated that they actually received any assistance from special educators, and only 31% stated that they received assistance from guidance counselors. Sixty-two percent stated that they had never participated in the IEPs of any of their students with disabilities. The picture does not grow brighter when we consider the availability of in-service training to address some of these problems. Only 49% stated that they had ever received any in-service training related to inclusion. This is not a pretty picture at the grass roots level.

As important as teachers are in ultimately determining the real impact of school-reform initiatives, we must also consider the attitudes of the general public who examine and evaluate public schools from several perspectives, including tax payers who support the schools and parents who send their children to the schools. Interesting information about such attitudes can be found in the 30^th annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll, the results of which were published in September, 1998. The sample consisted of 1151 adults, randomly selected to generalize to the U.S. population as a whole (Rose & Gallup, 1998).

It is clear from the findings of this poll that the general public has mixed feelings about the current performance and accomplishments of our public schools. Half of the parents believed that the schools caused their children to become eager learners, but 34% said that their children simply tolerated learning and 15% say that their children were turned off to learning. Most of the major problems they identified as currently plaguing the schools have nothing to do with education per se. The top five problems were fighting and violence, lack of discipline, lack of financial support, use of drugs, and overcrowded schools. Half of the respondents believed that school quality was directly related to the amount of money spent on schools, and two-thirds believed that we should spend more to improve the quality of inner-city schools. Perhaps in response to the extensive publicity that American students are not achieving at a high enough level, 71% indicated support of a voluntary national student assessment program. But here is the kicker. Two-thirds of the respondents believed that students with learning problems should be placed in special classes. Although the poll did not question the reasons for this attitude, we can speculate that many parents believe either that students with disabilities cannot learn effectively in regular education classes, and/or that their presence will detract from the education of their own children.

When we reflect upon these findings from teachers and the public about grass root support for general education reform, as well as including students with disabilities in such efforts, it is obvious that we have much work to do. What will be the impetus? I am reminded of a scene from Bernstein and Woodward’s book on the Watergate scandal entitled All of the President’s Men. At one point as the drama was unfolding, Bernstein meets "deep throat" in the bowels of a parking garage and asks, "What do I need to do in order discover what really happened?" Deep Throat responds, "follow the money". Although our purpose now is not to uncover a scandal, there is some merit in looking at how education is funded as a context for understanding both the promises and perils of what we are trying to accomplish.

The funding of education needs to be examined from two perspectives: how the education dollar is being spent and how the education dollar is generated. Allen Odden and his colleagues have provided us with a very thorough analysis of how we spend the education dollar in their findings from an extensive study of spending patterns for education across all 50 states, using both state and local sources of information in their meta-analysis (Odden, Monk, Nakib, & Picus, 1995). When examining the growth in school district budgets since 1960, they observed that expenditures had tripled between 1960 and 1990 in inflation adjusted dollars, before leveling off in 1990.

It appears that most of these increases went for three purposes: (a) higher teacher salaries, (b) hiring more teachers, and (c) paying for special education. When looking closely at the special education component of these increases, their findings suggested that, on average, the cost of educating a special education student is 2.3 times greater than the cost of educating a general education student. Since approximately 12% of all students enrolled are in special education, this means that around 25% of the entire education budget is being spent on this 12% of the school population. Most of these funds have been used to pay for "pull-out" programs. What if, Odden and his colleagues speculate, these extra funds were used instead to reduce class size in regular education so that regular education teachers could address the needs of disabled students in their own classrooms? Hardly a resounding endorsement of special education!

In attempting to understand further the impact of funding increases in education, Odden and his colleagues lament that they can find no evidence that the increases have resulted in enhancing either teacher performance or student achievement. They conclude with the following words:

"The substantial investment the country has made in its public education system needs to be restructured so that it "pays off" in terms of large increases in student achievement over the next two decades. The long-term task is to get schools to act more like producers of high levels of student achievement than like consumers of educational resources" (Odden, et al., 1995, p 167).

Such a challenge, of course, fits in neatly with those who are advocating for standards-based school reform.

How about the generation of the education dollar? As we all know, this dollar comes from three primary sources: (a) local communities through property taxes, (b) state governments through state taxing authorities, and (c) the federal government. Over the past 40 years, we have seen the local share decrease from around 55% to around 45%, the state share increase from slightly below 40% to around 45 %, and the federal share fluctuate from around 5% to slightly over 10% (Odden, et al., 1995; National Center for Educational Statistics, 1999). In other words, the federal government has always been a relatively minor participant in financing education, and state participation has been steadily growing larger as localities have revolted against property taxes, even at the cost of losing some control over their own schools.

Even though the federal government has always been a junior partner in paying for the costs of education, its influence remains strong as a designer of policies that structure education and as a minor partner in the funding of programs to support these policies. In this sense, an examination of current and proposed federal funding for education can provide us with some indications of what is and will be featured in both general education reforms and special education as we move into the next century. Recent information published by the U.S. Department of Education provides us with some indicators of these directions (U.S. Department of Education, 1999a), showing actual federal expenditures for Fiscal Years 1998 and 1999, along with the administration’s proposals for Fiscal Year 2000.

Total federal expenditures for education were $35.53 billion in FY 98 and fell 3.5% to $34.27 billion in FY 99. The administration proposes to increase this by 5.9% to $36.28 billion in FY 00. These federal appropriations represent 12% of approximately $300 billion that we now spend annually on education from federal, state and local resources combined (National Center for Educational Statistics, 1999).

The largest component of the federal budget for education, $11.79 billion in Fiscal Year 1999, was used to provide financial aid to college students. This amounted to slightly more than one-third of the total federal budget for education. The next largest segment of this federal budget, around 23%, comes from funds authorized by the Improve America’s Education Act which, for the most part, consists of Title 1 funds that are appropriated to assist schools in the education of economically disadvantaged children. During FY 1999, this amounted to $8.37 billion.

The next component of the federal budget for education that we need to examine is that part which provides funding for educational reform and school improvement activities. This component includes activities and programs that pertain to Goals 2000, school-to-work, educational technology, personnel development, and safe and drug free schools. During FY 98, these programs received $2.86 billion which was around 8% of the total federal budget for education. During FY 99, however, appropriations jumped 51% to $4.33 billion, and the administration’s request for FY 2000 includes an additional 8% up to $4.67 billion.

The third largest segment of the federal budget, around 13%, funds special education. During FY 99 we received $5.05 billion. Within this special education appropriation, the amount allocated for all national discretionary programs was $279.5 million in FY 99, which only amounts to around 6% of all federal funds given to special education, and less than one-tenth of a percent of total federal funding for all of education.

Somewhere within this tenth of a percent lies our national discretionary agenda for transition. How can we use this very small amount of money effectively to press our own agenda, within both special and regular education? Before attempting to answer this question, let’s take a brief look at the pattern of federal discretionary expenditures for secondary special education and transition as part of the overall federal budget for education.

During Fiscal Year 1998, OSEP spent $37.8 million of its discretionary budget on new and continuing projects that were devoted to some aspect of secondary special education or transition concerns. This represents 13.5% of OSEP’s total national discretionary budget for that year. There is strong evidence, however, that OSEP’s funding for transition efforts has dramatically begun to decline. If we look at the funding patterns for new projects with a transition focus over the past three years, examining the funding commitment over the full length of each project, we find a precipitous decline from $55.23 million in Fiscal Year 1996 to $11.96 million in Fiscal Year 1998. Figure 2 documents this decline graphically.

There appear to be two primary causes for this decline. First, the funding of new grants supporting state systems change in transition was drawing to a close during this period of time. Since each new state grant involved a commitment of approximately $2.5 million over five years, the decline of this systems change initiative had an obvious impact on overall funding for transition programs, since the funds used to support this initiative have not been retained for new transition programs or projects.

Much more significant, however, are some changes in funding authorizations that are contained within the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1997. A major new component of this act eliminated the requirement that OSEP spend a designated proportion of its discretionary program budget for "special populations", such as deaf/blind students, seriously emotionally disturbed students, programs supporting early childhood education, and transition programs. Instead, OSEP was given the authority to determine its own funding priorities (Public Law 105-17, 1997).

A complete reorganization of OSEP accompanied this legislative change. Prior to this reorganization, transition efforts were actively championed by OSEP’s Secondary Education and Transition Services Branch, which was administered by a branch chief and program officers who had expertise in transition and focused their activities almost exclusively on transition efforts. The reorganization of OSEP, however, eliminated the Secondary Education and Transition Services Branch along with several other special population branches, and consolidated management into two new divisions: (a) Research to Practice, and (b) Monitoring and State Improvement Planning.

The Monitoring and State Improvement Division is actually quite similar to the former Division of Assistance to States, retaining responsibility for the Part B and Part C state formula grant programs. The Division on Research to Practice, however, is quite new. It consolidates all of the remaining former divisions and branches of OSEP into this one new division which is administrated by three age-related "teams" plus a fourth "national issues" team. Given the new freedom to determine its own priorities, OSEP seems to be moving in the direction of allocating new monies to large-scale institutes and smaller projects that cut across specific populations.

For example, there are no longer model demonstration or outreach competitions with funds designated for transition. Such competitions are now generic, so that applications focusing on transition must compete with applications focusing on early childhood or elementary school education, all within a pot of money that has not grown to accommodate the larger range of applicants.

Whether or not the sharp decline in federal support for transition efforts turns out to be an irreversible trend, we must still make good use of whatever funds may be available from any source in the future. In order to make this happen, we must build upon our past accomplishments in a thoughtful and creative manner.

What have we got to show for our years of supporting transition programs, not only the few years that we have just examined from a fiscal perspective but throughout the past 40 years since we first began implementing our cooperative work/study programs for high school students with mild mental retardation? Most of you in the audience today are as capable of answering this question as am I. Each of us, undoubtedly, would provide somewhat different answers to the question, based on our own beliefs and experiences. What I offer next, therefore, is best construed as only one informed opinion about what we can learn about our past that might help us to look with insight toward the future.

I believe that there are six areas where we either have laid or should lay a good foundation for focusing our future efforts. These include (a) helping students to assume responsibility for their own education, (b) identifying and developing improved tools and programs for delivering transition-related instruction, (c) enhancing teacher skills for implementing transition programs and providing them with opportunities to use these skills, (d) involving parents more effectively in the education of their children, (e) facilitating the replication and utilization of proven programs, and (f) doing whatever we need to do to enhance the integration of secondary special education and transition programs within the overall structure of general education reform.

In my opinion, the future success of all high school programs, including our own secondary special education and transition programs, must begin with the empowerment of students to assume a high level of responsibility for their own educations in an appropriate manner. The very essence of adolescence involves an emerging and surging drive toward independence, which is often accompanied by strong feelings of self-doubt within the adolescent and resistance from parents or teachers. We have been working on this issue in special education for the past decade from a variety of perspectives including defining student empowerment with the words "self-determination," developing programs and instructional materials teach students and significant others how to enhance student self-determination, and establishing organizations to promote self-determination. My colleague, Michael Wehmeyer, will focus his keynote presentation on this topic tomorrow.

In a very thoughtful review of literature, Brian Cobb and his colleagues have conducted a research synthesis of best practices that have emerged over the past 15 years in our field of secondary special education and transition (Cobb, et al., 1999). They were able to identify a wide array of accomplishments that should play a role in guiding our future efforts. But they also identified a shortcoming that has not been addressed in the reported literature thus far, namely, an absence of studies about pedagogy. We have developed instructional materials that pertain to transition and programs to support the organization and delivery of transition services. But apparently, we have not attended carefully to the methods of instruction that will assist teachers in implementing the exemplary curricula and programs effectively. It would seem that additional research, development and demonstration will be useful in this area. Allen Phelps will discuss this issue shortly during his comments following my presentation.

If teachers are to become proficient in implementing what we have learned over the years and hope to learn in the future, we must assist them in such endeavors. Both in-service and pre-service training are needed, along with some focused demonstrations and evaluations on how innovations can be accomplished by restructuring teacher time and effort, rather than by adding new responsibilities on top of a burden that is already quite large. OSEP’s overall commitment to personnel preparation is substantial, approximately $82 million in both Fiscal Years 1998 and 1999, representing nearly 30% of their entire budget for national activities. Assuming that this commitment remains strong in the future, we need to insure that a meaningful proportion of these dollars are used to support special and general education teachers in implementing high school and transition programs successfully.

In addition to enhancing the roles and responsibilities of students and teachers in the educational enterprise, we must also somehow find a way of involving parents more effectively. The most important role for parents to play, in my opinion, is to interact effectively with their sons or daughters at home. This is not always easy, especially when the normal stresses of adolescent/parent relationships are exacerbated by such difficulties as dysfunctional families, or parents working so hard that they are unavailable to provide meaningful time with their children. But students need this time, not only to help them deal effectively with important educational issues, but also to help them deal successfully with the many social and interpersonal concerns of adolescence. In Fiscal Years 1998 and 1999, OSEP allocated $18.5 million each year for parent information centers, and the administration has requested $22.5 million for Fiscal Year 2000, an increase of 22%. We should continue to support these efforts, and offer whatever insights and assistance we can in order to help these programs attend effectively to transition issues and concerns.

In addition to the four areas I have just described, there are many transition programs that we have developed over the years that properly be construed as "best practices" based on external reviews of their impact. The research synthesis provided by Cobb and his colleagues (Cobb, et al., 1999) offers one approach to identifying our best practices. Another recent effort has just been completed by the National Transition Alliance, in which they identified 27 "promising programs" following their review of 50 nominations (Kohler, 1999). I think that our field is now in the position where we should be devoting substantial resources to disseminating and replicating those programs that have shown the most progress. It is time to move from demonstration to wide-spread implementation, from using our discretionary funds to affect the lives of a few people to using these funds to affect the lives of many people. This strategy will be especially important if the dramatic decline in federal funds earmarked for special education transition programs can not be reversed.

And finally, we need to support research, demonstration and utilization of models and programs that enhance the integration of secondary special education and transition programs and policies within the overall structure of general education reform. We already have a beginning, if not extensive, history of using OSEP funds in this area. Allen Phelps’ research institute at the University of Wisconsin provides but one example of this, which he will discuss with us shortly.

In addition to focusing some of our own special education national discretionary federal funds in this arena, I believe that it is important for us to explore ways of connecting with programs and initiatives that are exploding on the scene from the direction of general education reform. Devi Jameson will talk to us shortly about her own experiences in attempting to implement standards-based reforms for students with and without disabilities. David Johnson will speak about both national models and his own experiences with school choice issues and programs.

A further examination of the federal budgets provides us with another rationale for connecting special education transition programs with general education reform. During Fiscal Year 1998, federal funding for general education reform was $2.86 billion, which is 10 times larger than the total amount of $278.9 million that OSEP spent for national programs during that year (U.S. Department of Education, 1999a). If you contrast instead the $2.86 billion for general education reform with the $37.7 million that OSEP spent on new and continuing transition projects during Fiscal Year 1998, the ratio becomes 76 to 1. How can we leverage this dollar to infuse our agenda into theirs?

The federal approach to exercising leverage for innovation has often utilized a "systems change" approach. An important example of this approach can be found in the local school district partnerships that were funded through the School to Works Opportunities Act in 1994. The general purpose of this act is to prepare all students, with or without disabilities, for work or further education after leaving high school. An interesting structure for accomplishing this purpose was defined by the act, including school-based learning, work-based learning, and connecting activities between the two. Furthermore, Congress stipulated that all efforts supported through the School-to-Work Opportunities Act should somehow be coordinated with general education reform efforts, such as those stipulated in Goals 2000 (Benz & Kochhar, 1996).

How has this worked out? In February, 1999, a report was filed by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. documenting their thorough evaluation of programs funded by the School-to-Work Opportunities Act since 1994. In this report, the authors concluded:

"Although progress has been made, the practices that the STOWA promotes may be difficult to sustain. STW implementation is rarely at the core of states’ high-priority education reforms to increase school accountability and academic standards. Moreover, after federal STW funding ends, it appears that few states or local partners will continue to fund local partnerships. As a result, there is a risk that coordinated efforts to promote STW will wane" (Hershey, Silverberg, Haimson, Hudis, & Jackson, 1999).

Attempts to stimulate systems change are tricky. The federal dollar alone will not be sufficient.

Another example of the federal commitment to a systems change approach for general school reform can be found in the Obey-Porter Act of 1998 which provides substantial funds for comprehensive school reform demonstrations. The initial appropriation was $125 million for Title 1 schools plus an additional $25 million for any schools. Award recipients received a minimum of $50,000 per year for up to three years. As of April, 1999, after the first round of funding, 44 states had received $122.6 million to support projects in 2311 schools (U.S. Department of Education, 1999b).

What is perhaps most intriguing about these projects is the manner in which the term "comprehensive" has been defined and operationalized. Each applicant for a grant was required to address the following 9 funding criteria:

1. Adopt a school reform model that is backed by research findings concerning its effectiveness.
2. Incorporate a comprehensive design that includes instruction, student assessment, classroom management, professional development, parental involvement, and school management and technology, all within a reform model that addresses student achievement of high standards.
3. Provide high quality and continuous teacher and staff professional development.
4. Stipulate measurable goals for student performance and benchmarks for meeting the goals.
5. Provide evidence that the effort is supported by faculty, administrators and staff.
6. Provide for the meaningful involvement of parents and other community members in planning and implementing activities.
7. Utilize high quality external technical support from a school reform expert.
8. Include a plan for evaluation of the implementation of school reforms and student results achieved.
9. Identify how other resources will be available and utilized to sustain the effort after the seed money is gone.

It is too early to tell whether funded projects will actually address all of these criteria effectively, but the intent is obvious: to use the seed money for restructuring purposes, in a manner that will sustain the innovations over time once the federal dollar disappears.

Assuming that the steam roller of general education reform will be with us for at least another decade or so, what reason do we have to believe that they will be interested in us. After all, a large proportion of the educational dollar is already earmarked for students with disabilities. Some would argue that this occurs at the expense of programs for students without disabilities, especially those who come from economically disadvantaged communities. Even though the mandates are there at the federal level, from both general and special education legislation, we know from our evaluation studies that the mere mandate calling for collaboration or inclusion does not necessarily result in the existence of collaboration or inclusion. We also know that many proponents of standards-based reforms are thinking primarily about traditional academics, paying only lip service to standards that directly address a variety of adult roles, prized by us in the transition movement, including vocational, independent living, and personal/social needs and opportunities. And finally, we know from the Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup survey that two-thirds of all parents still believe that students with disabilities should be taught in separate special classes.

So where do we stand at this point in time? Is our cup half full with promising possibilities or is it half empty with road blocks and pitfalls? Fifty years ago we left general education and created special education, believing that this approach was necessary to address adequately the educational needs of students with disabilities. During 40 of these years, we focused some of our attention on high school students with disabilities, and for the past 15 years we have labeled this approach "transition." From the beginning, with minor distractions, our efforts have been anchored in an outcome vision that includes employment, independent living, the establishment of social networks, and student satisfaction as appropriate goals of education, in addition to traditional academics at the highest level possible for each student. We have developed programs to support this vision, and some of them are quite good. We have explored ways of empowering students, families and teachers to implement such programs effectively. And now we stand at a cross-road where our own discretionary funds seem to be declining and general education reform has become the focus of our national interest in education. How should we proceed in a way that acknowledges both of these realities?

Very cautiously. With our limited funds, we must continue to develop and promote a complete high school curriculum that includes both traditional academics but also the components of successful transition programs that we have so painstakingly developed over the past 40 years. We must do what we can to redirect a reasonable portion of special education discretionary funds in support of transition programs, pointing out to anyone who cares how dramatically these funds have declined during recent years. We must also be clever in accessing those funds earmarked for people with disabilities that are still available from OSEP and other federal agencies but perhaps are not labeled specifically as "transition" funds. And yes, we must find many ways of effectively becoming part of the general education reform movement, including meaningful participation in both the planning and implementation of such reforms at the local, state and national levels. Transition needs are not unique to students with disabilities. We need to help our colleagues who share this perception, while acknowledging that collaboration and classroom inclusion are not identical concepts. We can work together to achieve common goals without requiring that students with and without disabilities must always sit next to one another in the classroom or other learning environment.

In closing, I would like to share with you a memory I have of a symposium that I attended some 25 years ago. The meeting occurred in a lovely retreat site near Notre Dame University. The purpose of the conference, organized by Michael Begab, was to examine the future of services for people with mental retardation in the United States. Most of the attendees were professionals or consumer representatives in the field of mental retardation, with the notable exception of Amatai Etzioni, a renowned sociologist. When it was his turn to speak, he offered the following metaphor to illustrate his message. "If one were to attempt to cross the ocean in a row boat", he suggested, "it would be wise to row with the currents rather than against them." The point of his metaphor was that people with mental retardation constitute only a small portion of society, and that progress for such people may be influenced more by general societal trends and movements than by isolated activities on behalf of the smaller population.

Following this metaphor with an analogy, in order to preserve special education’s investment in the transition movement, it may be necessary to "catch a wave" within general education reform. The cross-currents will be tricky and will sometimes lead us to places where we would rather not be. But the general direction is unavoidable, and is at least partially consistent with the goals we would pursue even if we were only following our own agenda. We must learn how to navigate these waters skillfully, helping both to chart the course and influence the outcomes of the journey.

Which brings me to the beginning of this presentation and the metaphor of wine. Is it time for another rebottling? Current policy and funding initiatives strongly suggest that the answer is yes. The old wine, still robust and full of flavor, is what we have learned about secondary special education and transition programs over the past 40 years. The new bottle is general education reform. If we can rebottle the old wine, preserving the best of what we have created and refined over time, its further development and eventual presentation from the new bottle just might be an experience worth celebrating.

LIST OF REFERENCES

Public Law 105-17. (1997). Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Sections 661 (e) and 672 (e).

Riley, R. (1999). New challenges, a new resolve: Moving American education into the 21^st century. Long Beach, CA: Sixth Annual State of American Education Speech. February 16,1999.

Rose, L. & Gallup, A. (1998). The 30^th annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll of the public’s attitudes toward the public schools. Phi Delta Kappan, September, 1998, 41-56.

Stainback, S. and Stainback, W. (1996). Inclusion: A guide for educators. Baltimore: Paul H Brookes Publishing Co.

Thurlow, M., Yssledyke, J., Gutman, S. & Geenan, K. (1997). Inclusion of students with disabilities in state standards documents. (Technical Report 19). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, National Center on Educational Outcomes.

U.S. Charter Schools Web Site. (1999). The state of charter schools: Third year report. Available at http://www.charterschools.org.

U.S. Department of Education. (1999a). Fiscal Year 2000 Budget Request: Detailed Budget Table by Program. Available at http://www.ed.gov/offices/OUS/Budget00/BudgetSumm/apndx-2.html.

U.S. Department of Education. (1999b). States Awarded Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration Funding as of April, 1999. Available at http://www.ed.gov/offices/OESE/compreform/93states.html.

Will, M. (1984). OSERS programming for the transition of youth with disabilities: Bridges from school to working life. Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of Education.