Abstract
Federal education laws require that all students with disabilities have access to the general education curriculum and be included in statewide-standardized assessments and accountability measures. Years have past since these mandates have first gone into effect yet educators continue to struggle with the concept of access to the general education curriculum and how it applies to students who have the most significant cognitive disabilities. There is a major need to link policy with practices in schools and classrooms in order to realize the goal of measurable academic achievement for this unique population of learners. This project addresses this need at the secondary level by utilizing an evidenced based classification schema of student symbolic communication levels to develop a framework for general education access and progress monitoring for students with significant cognitive disabilities.