Transit Access for Americans: A Proposal for the Next Stage of Implementing the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990

Formany Americans with disabilities, transit is the only path to real opportunities. An open society for them depends upon increased transit services for all Americans. Many transit professionals, however, daunted by transit needs and worn down by their critics, wallow in cost issues, ignoring transit's real value to their communities. The key to improvement is to measure transit benefits that are intuitively obvious to most taxpayers. Empirically, accessible transit proves to be the most valuable transit to passengers and to other taxpayers as well.     

The Americans With Disabilities Act and Reasonable Accommodation: The View From Persons With HIV/AIDS

This study examines the application of reasonable accommodation to situations involving employees with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus or Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome. Two questions are posed. What types of accommodations are needed? How readily available is the reasonable accommodation component of the Americans With Disabilities Act? These questions are addressed through qualitative analysis. Three lessons are drawn from the findings.     

The Americans With Disabilities Act and Medical Providers: Ten Years After Passage of the Act

This article discusses the impact of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) on health care providers in the last decade. Even though some ADA training has been provided for health care providers, more education will help to improve access to their offices, improve health care practices for their patients with disabilities, and be an incentive for the providers to help raise the consciousness of the rest of the community about the ADA.     

Local Government Implementation of the Americans With Disabilities Act: Factors Affecting Statutory Compliance

One of the questions raised after the signing of the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act is how local governments would implement the statute. This qualitative study examines 20 cities in two states, categorizing implementation efforts and identifying factors that affect local government compliance with the law.     

Unintended Consequences in Public Policy: Persons with Psychiatric Disabilities and the Americans with Disabilities Act

This essay explores the occurrence of unintended consequences of public policy, particularly those embodied in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) towards people diagnosed with mental illness. Rights to equal opportunity under the ADA are not inalienable. Two key provisions of the ADA allow employers to abridge those rights. While these provisions sound reasonable on the surface, this paper points out how they disproportionately affect people with psychiatric disabilities. The first provision is the direct threat exclusion, which exempts employers from the requirement to provide reasonable accommodation to a person with disabilities if that person poses a significant risk to the safety of others. Employers can exclude or fire qualified applicants or employees who potentially may pose a direct threat to the health or safety of other individuals in the workplace. The second provision is that employers must only accommodate the known disabilities of an employee or applicant. While these provisions address legitimate concerns, they may be abused and they may distract employers and policymakers from other underlying problems.     

The Americans With Disabilities Act as Engine of Social Change: Models of Disability and the Potential of a Civil Rights Approach

The Americans With Disabilities Act, based on the civil rights/minority group and independent living models of disability, may enhance access to health care, personal assistance, employment, the electoral process, and smoke-free environments for people with disabilities. However, this essential law cannot resolve these key issues. Supplemental theoretical and policy approaches will be necessary to promote fundamental change.     

Linking Public Agencies With Community-Based Watershed Organizations: Lessons From California

Watershed organizations routinely seek to influence public agencies and sometimes also depend on them for financial and technical assistance. For some agencies this relationship is strained and problematic. Watershed organizations tend to develop closer working relationships with decentralized and locally responsive agencies, like the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Centralized and unresponsive agencies, like the Forest Service, tend to be unreliable partners. Ironically, the same characteristics that once led to accusations that the BLM was captured by local stakeholders such as ranchers have allowed BLM officials to reorient themselves in the 1990s to become responsive to watershed organizations, which currently are favored by grass-roots environmentalists. This paper examines these relationships through a case study from California, where state and federal agencies designed and partially implemented a public/private strategy to preserve biodiversity. The strategy was a curious hybrid of top-down planning and bottom-up implementation. Although orchestrated primarily by the BLM, the strategy was implemented initially in a region of the state where the Forest Service predominated. The case study, therefore, highlights some of the fundamental tensions underlying the relationship between watershed organizations and public agencies.     

FLPMA: A Decade of Management Under the ELM Organic Act

This article assesses the impact on public land management policy in the west following a decade's experience under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA). The assessment first describes the political and institutional forces that converged to produce the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) Organic act and then identifies three major policy innovations found in the Act. In conclusion, the article assesses the impact of these policy innovations of FLPMA on management of the public lands.     

Organizing From Diversity in the Name of Community: Lessons From the Disability Civil Rights Movement

The recent passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act and other pieces of legislation affecting the disability community and other civil rights communities suggests a level of cohesion within the disability movement that blurs the reality and the power of the tensions which did and do exist. Examining the struggles to maintain an effective, cohesive entity provides an opportunity to explore the complexity of the disability movement as well as lessons for policy and program planning and for community organizing.     

苏联最初十年农村青年的东正教信仰

东正教传入俄罗斯后,深深地影响了俄罗斯人,特别是俄罗斯农民。苏联最初十年,在苏联政府的反宗教无神论宣传下,俄罗斯农民的东正教信仰发生了变化,表明苏联政府无神论宣传在当时取得了一定的成功,是值得肯定的,同时也说明了社会主义意识形态的先进性得到了青年农民的承认。研究这一问题对如何引导青年接受先进的宗教文化意识,根除他们思想中的封建迷信,具有很大的现实意义。     

20世纪美国残疾人就业权利的缘起、制度化与困境

在某种意义上,20世纪的美国历史也是一部残疾人的民权运动史。如果说经济大萧条初步唤醒了残疾人的就业权利意识,两次世界大战开启了美国伤残军人康复与就业援助的机制建设,第三次科技革命则加速了残疾人就业权利保障的制度化进程。从公共就业计划、残疾人社会保障保险计划、补充收入保障计划,到《1973年残疾人康复法》,再到《1990年美国残疾人法》,残疾人的就业权利经历了被漠视、依附于福利救济、向实现平等权利转变等阶段,给美国的政治、经济、社会、思想领域留下了诸多挑战和值得思考的问题。由于法律在解决社会问题上存有局限、残疾人对各种福利保障资助的依赖、根深蒂固的偏见等因素,美国残疾人争取平等权利之路仍任重而道远。