How does UDL help guarantee students equal opportunities to learn?
Both IDEA and NCLB recognize the right of all learners to a high-quality standards-based education. The laws preclude the development of separate educational agendas for students with disabilities and others with special needs. They also hold teachers, schools, districts, and states responsible for ensuring that these students demonstrate progress according to the same standards. Neither law adequately addresses the greatest impediment to their implementation: the curriculum itself. In most classrooms, the curriculum is disabled. It is disabled because its main components—the goals, materials, methods, and assessments—are too rigid and inflexible to meet the needs of diverse learners, especially those with disabilities. Most of the present ways to remediate the curriculum’s disabilities—teacher-made workarounds and modifications, alternative placements etc.—are expensive, inefficient, and often ineffective for learning. By addressing the diversity of learners at the point of curriculum
