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U.S. Supreme Court · 1982
458 U.S. 176 (1982)
Held that the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (now the IDEA) requires a "free appropriate public education" satisfied by "personalized instruction with sufficient support services to permit the child to benefit educationally from that instruction" -- a "basic floor of opportunity," not a program that "maximize[s] the potential of each handicapped child." For a child educated in the regular classroom, the IEP "should be reasonably calculated to enable the child to achieve passing marks and advance from grade to grade." Judicial review asks whether the State followed the Act's procedures and whether the IEP is reasonably calculated to confer educational benefit.
Some later courts have distinguished or questioned it — read before relying.
Treatment last confirmed July 18, 2026. Case-wide subsequent treatment; human-set. Not specific to any one passage.
Systematic phonics instruction — explicitly teaching grapheme-phoneme correspondences in a defined sequence — improves early reading, especially decoding and word reading, with the largest benefits for younger children and for students at risk for or with reading disability; it is an essential component of effective beginning reading instruction.
Prenatal alcohol exposure causes a dose-related spectrum of neurodevelopmental harm — lowered IQ and deficits in learning and memory, executive function, and attention regulation, with or without facial dysmorphology — and is a leading preventable cause of developmental disability; no safe level of alcohol use during pregnancy has been established.
For students with disabilities, inclusive placement in general-education settings is associated with academic and access outcomes at least equal to — and for some groups better than — segregated special-education settings, with no consistent harm to social-emotional outcomes or to classmates without disabilities; but the evidence is observational, heterogeneous, and confounded by selection, so effects are small and depend heavily on the quality and support of the setting rather than placement itself.