Making a Reasonable Calculation: A Strategic Amendment to the IDEA

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) lays out a powerful set of protections and procedural safeguards for students with disabilities in public schools. Nevertheless, there is a persistent debate as to how far schools must go to fulfill their mandate under the IDEA. The Supreme Court recently addressed this question with its decision in Endrew F. v. Douglas City School District Re-1, holding that an educational program for a student with a disability must be “reasonably calculated” to enable a child’s progress in light of their circumstances. Currently, the Act’s statutory language mandates Individual Education Program (IEP) teams to consider a variety of factors including “the strengths of each child,” “the concerns of the parents,” “the results of the . . . most recent evaluation of the child,” and “the academic, developmental, and functional needs of the child.”1 This Note proposes an amendment to the IDEA, inspired by the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis framework used in business strategy, that adds external “threats” to this list of factors. This amendment will help parents, advocates, and schools better understand the Endrew F. standard and implement it with fidelity to the IDEA’s broad mandate.

A Foundation's 20-Year Experiment in Art and Civic Engagement

In 1994, four family foundations in San Francisco launched a grantmaking program to support Bay Area artists by providing them with project grants for the creation of new work through collaborations with nonprofit organizations. Creative Work Fund grantees may collaborate with any kind of nonprofit organization and many choose to work in community settings. This chapter explores five projects awarded grants between 2008 and 2013. Each focused on a distinctive goal: increasing cohesion among a community of recent immigrants from Africa, exploring a city's recovery from the economic downturn and foreclosure crisis, promoting literacy and reading in a inner city school district, incorporating public art into the development of an historic waterfront, and achieving better health and mental health outcomes for women infected with HIV. Project research is based on grant proposals, reports, media coverage, and interviews with artists and their principle nonprofit partners.

A Foundation's 20-Year Experiment in Art and Civic Engagement

In 1994, four family foundations in San Francisco launched a grantmaking program to support Bay Area artists by providing them with project grants for the creation of new work through collaborations with nonprofit organizations. Creative Work Fund grantees may collaborate with any kind of nonprofit organization and many choose to work in community settings. This chapter explores five projects awarded grants between 2008 and 2013. Each focused on a distinctive goal: increasing cohesion among a community of recent immigrants from Africa, exploring a city's recovery from the economic downturn and foreclosure crisis, promoting literacy and reading in a inner city school district, incorporating public art into the development of an historic waterfront, and achieving better health and mental health outcomes for women infected with HIV. Project research is based on grant proposals, reports, media coverage, and interviews with artists and their principle nonprofit partners.

The Imagination Library Program and Kindergarten Readiness

Literature suggests that reading to children can have a significant impact on their early literacy development and long-term school performance. We examine whether consistent participation (i.e., three or more years) in Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library (DPIL), a book distribution program that provides one book per month to children ages birth through five, is associated with higher kindergarten readiness. This study examines 2,731 incoming kindergartners in the Syracuse City School District in 2013 and 2014 using the AIMSweb Letter Naming Fluency (LNF) test to assess kindergarten readiness. LNF is frequently identified as the best single indicator of risk for reading failure and has been shown to have a strong ability to predict future reading, vocabulary, and language development. Examining both the entire population and propensity score matched groups, we find that a significantly higher percentage of those consistently participating in DPIL were considered as ready for kindergarten. This difference remained even after controlling for key demographic variables.