The Role of Special Education Interest Groups in National Policy ...

interest groups over two years to work out the different perspectives, and in the end, the disability advocates framed the bill as a civil rights issue (West, 1988). The Handicapped Children’s Protection Act of 1986 (P.L. 99-372), which both chambers unanimously passed, authorized courts to award attorneys’ fees to prevailing parties not just in judicial proceedings but in administrative proceedings as well.

The second instance in which the impetus for Congress to enact special education legislation after a Supreme Court ruling occurred in the case of Dellmuth v. Muth.¹⁴ The Supreme Court ruled that federal courts could not order local schools to reimburse educational expenses previously incurred by parents. The decision was based on the 11th Amendment, which grants sovereign immunity to state governments against damage suits, unless Congress has been clear in abrogating that immunity in the language of a statute.¹⁵ In the 1990 reauthorization of the act—a year later—such language was added to the reauthorized IDEA (P.L. 101-476). The amended law required that “states shall not be immune under the 11th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States from suit in Federal court for violation of this act.”¹⁶ In other words, parties can sue states as well as schools for violating the act.

Another example of the multi-institutional policy environment with multiple interests and access points includes the deregulation proposals of early 1980s. In his first term, President Reagan proposed a major deregulation of the government, including special education. The draft regulations, issued in 1982, proposed to reduce special education rules dramatically, called for more administrative flexibility for state and local agencies, and eliminated many paperwork requirements. The draft regulations caused a stir in Congress and within the advocacy community. For instance, 350 lawmakers drafted a letter to the president, demanding that support be maintained for special education; and the Department of Education received 30,000 written comments on the proposed regulations—the largest ever received on any regulations—99% of which opposed them (Weiner & Hume, 1987). At the Senate hearing on the proposed regulations in 1982, there was bipartisan opposition to the regulations along with strongly worded opposition from interest groups