The highly qualified mandate of the No Child Left Behind Act and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act has created unnecessary confusion, particularly among secondary-school special educators and administrators with respect to instruction in core academic subjects. The pursuit of compliance solutions to meet this requirement has generally distracted stakeholders from re-examining the mission of secondary-school special education for students with learning disabilities (LD). Because effective subject matter instruction within inclusive classrooms is dependent upon general and special educators capitalizing on each other's areas of expertise, the necessity of requiring special educators to possess a comparable level of subject matter knowledge as the general educator is not only of questionable merit, but often counterproductive. This article poses and examines several fundamental philosophical questions related to the delivery of core academic subject matter to students with LD.