Special education inclusion deception

Special Education Inclusion Deception

Many schools today have a new classroom placement for kids who learn differently. It is called “inclusion class”.

Since the latest re-authoration of the Individuals with Disabilities Act (formerly the Education for all handicapped Children Act, 1976) the federal government has gotten a message to States that (as provided in the IDEA) students must be educated in “a least restrictive environment”. Research has clearly shown that sequestering kids by ability level (reading, writing, math) in school placements like self contained classes leads to substandard educational opportunities and substandard overall education quality for those students.

States have responded by mandating schools to find ways to get students with special needs out of self-contained rooms and into regular education venues for learning. In the old world this meant “mainstreaming” special education students into some or all regular classes with varying levels of support. The least restrictive of these supports was called “resource room” in which students attended all regular education classes and got help with specific learning issues, homework and class-work assignments in a one period a day class with up to fifteen students and one teacher.

In 1986 the Supreme Court eliminated the idea of “Equal Educational Opportunity” with the “Rowley Ruling” in which it rejected that legal standard for a standard of “Appropriate Educational Services”.

The intention of this ruling was two fold.
First, it followed a line of previous civil rights for handicapped rulings that supported rights to special (medical) services. Second, the judges believed that districts should not be compelled to provide any more educational attention than necessary to get students to pass standard tests. (a ford not a cadillac)

School district’s reaction to State mandates (motivated by federal funding guidelines) to educate students with special needs in normalized settings has been to create a class that is called regular but functions to serve students with special needs. In New York State these “inclusion” class are permitted to have forty percent of the students with special needs. The other sixty percent can be any mix of the regular population. I have worked in schools for over twenty years. Let me tell you a few ways I have seen this mix constructed so that the real regular population never has to come into contact with special education students.

NYC, 1993. I am the mainstream coordinator at a large Manhattan vocational High School. Our special education students are scheduled into English as a Second Language classes so they sit with others who have English language problems. The only difference between my sped students and the ESL students is that my students all speak English fluently. The internal politics of the school made it easier for my supervisor to place our students with English language learners than into real content area classes where they might benefit from the expertise of our content teachers.

These teachers and their supervisors did not want sped kids in there rooms. They saw sped students as social and academic rejects that the school was required to house but not really teach. In the opinion of most of the regular teachers and administrators all sped students and their teachers were misfits to be avoided.

I explained to the assistant principal of the English Department that our scheduling of sped students in ESL class was of no benefit to our students and very taxing on the ESL teachers. I lost my post as mainstream coordinator.

In 2002 I was the District Chairman of Special Education in a wealthy Rockland County school district. I worked as a cooperating teacher in an inclusion sophomore Biology class. This class was made up of forty percent sped students and sixty percent students “at risk”. In other words, it was “the slow class” and it was presented and taught just that way. It was as watered down and academically un-ambitious as the group of students gathered in the room dictated.

This was exactly the kind of thing that putting sped students into mainstream classes was supposed to eliminate. I found myself the director of a program that was perpetuating the same practice that I experienced in school as a teenager in 1964! The reasons for this kind of placement were the same.

School administrators, board members and teachers had never come to grips with their own negative beliefs and stereotypes about persons who learn differently. The result is that they don't follow through in finding the best ways to really meet the spirit of the law.

Inclusion class is just another title for kind of special education class. As long as the percentage of kids with special needs exceeds ten percent (or whatever is the ratio of person with special needs to persons without in the surrounding community) then the class can’t help but become a special needs class itself thus making the regular students attend a special education class. With the reputation of special education what parent wants that?

Here is the answer.
Stop regarding needs as special and realize that we all have different and unique needs.

Next:
Train all teachers to deal with students as individual learners with individual learning profiles. Finally, recognize the problems of attention, memory, language, ordering, cognition and motor development and address them in understanding and teaching curriculum and in finding ways to teach and assess students and their capabilities.

Mostly, don’t make a new special education class placement and call it regular. Half normalization is not really normalization. It is just another way of stopping schools from having to learn to teach all learners.
I just can’t say enough. But for today. I guess.