Forecast for IDEA Restructuring: Not This Year

By Lisa Fine

Washington

An overhaul of the nation's guiding special education law, the next major education item on Congress' to-do list, will almost certainly fall into 2003, a key congressional aide said last week.

However, Sally Lovejoy, the education policy director for the Republican majority on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, said the first round in the fight over making "full funding" for special education an entitlement program, rather than part of the discretionary budget, is right on the horizon.

The House will look at the issue of whether to give states "full funding"—a special education subsidy of up to 40 percent of the average per-pupil cost—when the annual process of drawing up a budget resolution begins in March, Ms. Lovejoy told the Bipartisan Disabilities Caucus, an ad hoc panel of lawmakers interested in special education. The budget resolution sets non-binding, but influential, spending caps for the official appropriations process...