Due to a rare genetic disorder, Alex and Joe Ripley have multiple disabilities, including mental retardation, cerebral palsy, and speech and language problems. Until last year, they had been placed exclusively in special classrooms or special schools with other children with disabilities.
Now both attend their neighborhood high school in Falls Church, Va., and their parents, Scott and Suzanne Ripley, say the new placement has resulted in some positive changes. Both boys have benefited socially in their new setting, and Alex and Joe are gradually becoming part of the fabric of "regular" school. Alex, 18, served as a manager of the football team, and Joe, 16, has been involved in drama. Recently, Suzanne sent out 30 invitations to celebrate Joe's birthday at a local bowling alley—and figured to draw perhaps a dozen students. "Twenty-nine kids showed up," she says.
The effort to foster "inclusive" education—where students with disabilities attend their neighborhood school alongside nondisabled peers—is the latest wrinkle in a long-running debate over the placement of students with disabilities. Although the landmark Education of the Handicapped Act (EHA) in 1975 created strict criteria pushing schools to educate students with disabilities in the context of "regular education," most students receiving special education spend at least part of the school day away from their classmates, usually in separate self-contained classrooms or resource rooms. Increasingly, however, critics argue that such placements are unnecessarily segregative and frequently ineffective. Some advocates for students with disabilities support "full inclusion," a concept that, in effect, does away with the option of placing students with disabilities anywhere but in regular classrooms in their neighborhood school.
"The agenda is [for disabled students] to be included with nondisabled children all the time," says Douglas Bicklen, a professor of education at Syracuse University and a proponent of full inclusion. Some schools already have successfully integrated students with all types of disabilities, he says. Now, "the pressure is on others to show why they have not done the same thing."
Others disagree with some of the ideas behind inclusive education—and especially with full inclusion—arguing that many students are pulled out of regular classrooms in the first place because they aren't well-served there. The hard-fought rights won under the EHA might well be weakened, and disabled students left foundering, if schools move too quickly to place these students in regular classrooms, some experts worry.
"I don't think there's any magic in just having kids be together," says Jim Kauffman, a professor of education at the University of Virginia. Research on the effects of keeping students with special needs in regular classrooms "does not suggest the kind of success that the full inclusion rhetoric would suggest." Further, the entire idea of special education appropriate to an individual student is undermined by any blanket endorsement of placement in a regular classroom, Kauffman and others argue.
Advocates for students with severe disabilities, most notably the Association for Persons with Severe Handicaps, have been among the most vocal proponents of opening up regular classrooms to students with disabilities. Two general education groups—ASCD and the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE)—also have issued statements favoring inclusive education. The Council for Exceptional Children, the largest group of special educators, this year approved a policy stating that children with disabilities "should be served whenever possible in general education classrooms in inclusive neighborhood schools...." But it stopped short of advocating full inclusion, stating that "a continuum of services must be available for all children."
Marginal Outcomes
Advocates for inclusive education argue that little evidence supports the notion that special education services provided outside the regular classroom result in more favorable outcomes for students. And the costs for pupils, they contend, are considerable. Students in special education often are tagged with labels that convey limited potential; have fewer opportunities for friendships with nondisabled peers; face a fragmented curriculum; or must endure long bus rides to special educational sites instead of their neighborhood school.
After winning the right to special services through the EHA, advocates are now raising questions about the separate second system of special education it helped spawn. "Having ensured access to public schools, we must now focus on the outcomes of that guaranteed education," says Winners All, a recent pro-inclusion report by a NASBE study group. The outcomes, NASBE argues, are sobering: Students in special education are far less likely than their peers to graduate, hold a job, or live independently after school. Moreover, students assigned to special education are rarely placed full-time in regular education thereafter, NASBE's report says.
About one thing most everyone agrees: Students with special needs deserve the best, most appropriate education that schools can provide. However, the field is sharply divided over the extent to which that education can—and should—be provided within the structure of regular education.
The debate hinges on the interpretation of federal law regarding special education, most recently reauthorized as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The law requires that "to the maximum extent appropriate, handicapped children ... are educated with children who are not handicapped, and that special classes, separate schooling, or other removal of handicapped children from the regular educational environment occurs only when the nature or severity of the handicap is such that education in regular classes with the use of supplemental aids and services cannot be achieved satisfactorily."
Implementation of the EHA originally settled on the practice of providing a "continuum of services" that would call for placements ranging from full-time regular education to placement in a residential program. A common practice for school districts was to establish programs for students with a particular type of disability in one school and to transport all district children with that disability to that school. Or students might go to their neighborhood school but spend most or all of the day in a special classroom or area segregated from their nondisabled peers. "Traditionally, what we've said is that to get this support, you have to go to this [separate] place," says Martha Snell, a University of Virginia professor of education.
Instead, advocates of inclusion are pressuring schools to bring the special services to the students who need them. The wisdom and feasibility of such an idea are hotly disputed, however.
Doug Fuchs, a professor of special education at Vanderbilt University, says he is for a "responsible downsizing" of special education and more effort to deliver special services in regular classrooms. But he sees regular education "as not being ready for many special education kids." Fuchs is especially disturbed by the goal of full inclusion, which he believes would restrict options that might be more appropriate than regular classes. Much of the support for full inclusion comes from advocates for the severely mentally retarded, who favor the social benefits of such an approach, he says.
Others share Fuchs' concerns. "The key thing that [advocates of full inclusion] have brought forward is the idea that there are kids with severe disabilities who can function in the regular classroom," says Justine Maloney, legislative chair for the Learning Disabilities Association of America (LDA). But "in their zeal they have spoken about the needs of all kids, without looking at the kids with learning disabilities." LDA's position is "that there should be options, depending on the individual needs of the child," says Maloney.
In the past, Maloney says, some districts have unyieldingly placed students with various disabilities in special programs without adequate consideration of their individual needs. "That was then, and still is, a violation of the law." But she worries that inclusion advocates favor another extreme—placing students in the regular classroom even when it is not the most beneficial setting. Faced with fiscal constraints, "schools are moving kids back into regular classrooms, without support, and calling it inclusion," Maloney charges.
Kauffman stresses that "appropriate" special education services must first be defined before deciding on placement alternatives. Advocates for full inclusion, he asserts, have the goal of mixing disabled and nondisabled students as "the first, most important priority" in deciding how to meet a student's needs. "I think that's misguided," he says.
Fuchs also has doubts that regular classroom teachers will receive the support they need to make inclusion work. "Teachers typically do not do a good job of accommodating instruction for large numbers of kids in their classroom," he says. Teachers already are hard-pressed to deal with the diverse learning needs of their students, he notes: "Throw in all of the handicapped kids and you're making a very difficult situation impossible." According to a study cited in NASBE's report, moreover, one-third of mainstreamed students in regular education classes were expected to keep up with the class without extra help.
Could Regular Ed Do It?
Others counter that regular education must enlarge its capacity to respond to the needs of children with disabilities—and will if inclusion is emphasized. "The presence of children with disabilities is a gift to the school system; it pushes us to do things in new ways," says Richard Villa, an education consultant who helped lead a move toward inclusive education in a Vermont school district. Further, Villa and others say, inclusion means regular and special educators working together, not the abolishment of special education. If regular education retains the option of dismissing a sizable number of students as too challenging to teach, inclusion advocates say, how will regular educators ever learn to work with students with disabilities?
Inclusion certainly doesn't mean "throwing the kids in the [regular] classroom and not worrying about it," says Bicklen. By redeploying special education teachers and paraprofessionals, enhancing collaboration between regular education teachers and specialists, and using strategies such as cooperative learning or peer tutoring, many more children will be able to be served in the regular classroom, some inclusion advocates say.
Martha Ann Stallings, a 3rd grade teacher at Gilbert Linkous Elementary School in Blacksburg, Va., is a firm believer in inclusion. Last year, her classroom was the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary, Educating Peter, on the inclusion of a child with Down's Syndrome. The placement in a regular classroom led to higher expectations for Peter, Stallings says, and his academic work and social skills improved throughout the year. Proper support is essential, however, she stresses. She was greatly assisted by a full-time instructional aide and a part-time inclusion specialist. "I had all the support I needed. I could not have done this alone as a classroom teacher."
Washington Elementary School in Mount Vernon, Wash., has reorganized its program to foster inclusion, says Principal Linda Jenkins. The key for regular education teachers is that "you have to believe you can teach [students with disabilities] and you have to have the skills," she says. School staff collaborate to provide small-group and individualized instruction for students in heterogeneous classes. The school has a special peer tutoring program—and all students participate as either tutor or tutee. The program helps to build the spirit of an inclusive community, she believes. "At the end of the year, we had an assembly and I asked who helped someone and then who had been helped." Both times, she says, all hands went up.
The Ripleys' experience with inclusion at the high school level is somewhat different. Alex and Joe "are pretty well segregated for anything academic and included only in the traditionally nonacademic courses, which I think is a pretty poor model," says Suzanne Ripley. There are many barriers, she says: lack of knowledge about how to modify curriculum, little clarity about what to do with students not on the "graduation track," and questions of status in a departmentalized structure. Joe, for example, can quietly do math problems with a calculator on his own, says Scott Ripley. But he's not mainstreamed for math, while he is for choir, which isn't easily individualized for him. "Joe is a major problem in a choral class, which he wouldn't be in a math class. But math classes have status, choir doesn't, so therefore he goes into choir."
Many things are necessary to make inclusion work, says Snell. The entire school system must create a mission and vision supportive of inclusion, she recommends. Then districts must make policies and methods congruent with that mission. All teachers will need training to understand how to include students with disabilities. A district might pick one school to pilot inclusion or start districtwide with the early grades, moving up over time. With the building blocks of inclusion established, students with disabilities can find a home in regular classrooms. Says Snell: "There are so many opportunities for including the child if the supports are there."