Suppose you were a fourth-grade teacher and, along with the 30 other youngsters on your class list, you found you'd been assigned a Down's syndrome child -- without any preparation and without any extra help. And this was a child who ran around hitting other kids and was not even toilet trained. How would you meet the extraordinary demands of this child without robbing the rest of your students?
Many teachers are facing this problem. Children with disabilities as severe as this -- and far more severe -- are turning up in regular classrooms all over the country as part of a movement called "inclusion." Since the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975, youngsters with disabilities have had a right to a "free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment." At first, this usually meant some kind of special placement, but school districts and advocates for the rights of these children are having second thoughts about segregating them.
Advocates talk about fairness and ask whether kids educated in special settings are forfeiting their chance to develop social and academic skills. School districts are asking how they can continue to foot the bill -- especially since Congress has never appropriated the money to pay its share. And courts are finding that these kids have a right to be in regular classrooms. As a federal judge recently put it: "Inclusion is a right, not a privilege for a select few." So although there are special education groups who believe that a one-size-fits-all approach will be disastrous for disabled children and their classmates, we are seeing a rush to inclusion for every disabled child, regardless of the disability.
Of course, a disabled child placed in a regular classroom is supposed to get special services so he can participate academically and socially and so the other kids' learning is not disrupted. That's the behind-the-scenes reality in the documentary "Educating Peter," which won an Academy Award in 1993. Filmgoers see a moving story about a child with Down's syndrome who learned to work and play with his new classmates. What filmgoers don't see is that Peter's teacher had been intensively prepared for his arrival, as had the parents of his classmates; a full-time special education aide was with Peter all day; and an "inclusion specialist" worked with him daily and was available to help his teacher and classmates.
But this kind of help is expensive and rarely provided. Instead, the responsibility for dealing with disabled kids falls on teachers and paraprofessionals, who typically have had very little training. One teacher described her preparation as "one video that showed a couple of mildly retarded students."
Who is supposed to be helped by this approach to educating disabled students? It gives these kids the "rights" they are entitled to, and for mildly disabled youngsters, or the few kids like Peter who get the support they need, it can work well. But what about severely disabled youngsters thrown into a regular classroom without this support? Will an autistic child learn to socialize with other children simply because he's been put into a class with them?
And what about the rest of the class? What happens to attempts to raise their reading or math achievement levels when their teacher has to devote extraordinary amounts of time and energy to deal with a severely disabled classmate who may never learn to read or count?
This week, I received a draft document on inclusion from the New York State Education Department. It talks about the "needs" of special education students as though they were the whole story and defines these needs exclusively in terms of placing these youngsters in a regular classroom: "Inclusion is the ultimate goal for all students with disabilities regardless of their disabilities or current placement." And "the removal of a student from the general educational environment occurs only when the needs of the student are such that, even with the use of supplementary aids and services, their needs cannot be met." What about the needs of the other students?
Our students are far behind, and we talk a lot about how we can get them to meet world-class standards. Well, no other country in the world has total inclusion. Its rapid spread constitutes a decision, based on ideology, to experiment on 40 million children -- the disabled and the rest. The way it's being done now, by edicts from judges and state boards of education who have no idea of what the consequences will be, is proof that educational achievement is not their major priority. But even if they believe that advancing their social agenda is more important than raising educational achievement, the people who advocate this brand of inclusion are likely to fail when taxpayers, disgusted with the further deterioration of the public schools, turn to vouchers and private schools, and disabled children are left behind in the public schools.