While Americans talk about improving education, establishing national goals and standards, professionalizing teaching and empowering individual schools to be creative, something is happening that will wipe out the benefits of all these changes. That is the move toward requiring that students with extreme emotional/behavioral problems be educated in regular classrooms. This subject is not much talked about because it is not politically correct to do so. Proposals to educate such students separately are met with arguments to the effect that separate is never equal and the separation of violent and disruptive students is just as immoral as legally sanctioned racial segregation.
So three cheers for Pete ldstein, now a graduate professor of education at Wilmington College and formerly principal of Etta J. Wilson Elementary School in Wilmington, Delaware. In "Swimming Against the Mainstream" (Phi Delta Kappan, December 1993), ldstein tells a story every American needs to know. His story is all the more powerful because he is clearly what those on the Right would call a "bleeding heart Liberal" rather than what those on the left would dub a "law-and-order Conservative."
Like most Americans, ldstein welcomes the idea that all our kids including those with disabilities, have a right to a public education. He also embraces the idea that we should try to educate all youngsters together-- those with and those without disabilities-- because they will be living and working together later in life. And he agrees that many students who are now educated separately could be successfully integrated into regular classrooms. But he breaks with the establishment in his realization that it is not always possible to keep all kids together and maintain an effective educational climate in the classroom.
ldstein tells the story of one student, "Ronald Doe," a second grader "with above-average intelligence ... [whose] behavior was severe enough to warrant placement in a Level 1 special education classroom at the start of the year." This was a "mainstreamed" classroom in which one-third of the students were "special education" and two-thirds were "from the general population, including top students." As ldstein tells us, "The case for Ronald's placement had been made the previous year at a [considerable] cost in time and money ... "
Within a month, Ronald's behavior began to stand out: "He would scream, throw furniture, talk to himself and hit other children with unmatched fervor." Two outstanding teachers made "a heroic effort to catch him being good" so they could praise and reward him. But Ronald's disruptive behavior escalated. He was disciplined, "more as a model for the other children in the classroom than in the hope of changing [his] behavior." It took a great amount of teacher time, ldstein says to deal with Ronald individually, "keep a daily log of his behavior, write an individual behavioral contract and meet with his mother and me to agree on appropriate rewards and punishments." The loss of instructional time for the class was huge. Ronald's behavior got worse. ldstein reports that Ronald started licking other students' faces. He "also rolled around on the floor, thereby delaying recess or lunch. He [ate] paste, paper clips, staples and various other ... materials and repeatedly stabbed himself in the arm with pencils. He ... alternated between screaming and laughing raucously. In general, he pushed every button he could think of to make his teacher to push the button on the wall that would summon [ldstein] to come to the rescue."
ldstein describes numerous strategies aimed at trying to integrate Ronald. ldstein and the teacher visited his home to establish a closer personal relationship and provided transportation for his mother to attend meetings with teachers. They anonymously sent food and gifts--even a World Book Encyclopedia. Eventually they said, "Enough is enough." They wanted a different kind of placement. But that was easier said than done.: It took nearly nine months, "hundreds of hours of work and thousands of dollars to achieve." They had to convince the special education bureaucracy and Ronald's mother, without whose permission the school district could move Ronald only by going to court. This would have taken many more months, huge sums for legal fees and time lost for witnesses. And even with this "voluntary" resolution of the problem, there was the cost of "time taken from teachers, principals, psychologists, educational diagnosticians, the director of special services and the transportation division."
ldstein says he chose Ronald's story as the focus of his discussion because it is a "typical" one. There was a huge cost in dollars, but more devastating was the demoralization of the teachers and the educational time lost by the other children in the class: "Most of them were neither special education students nor gifted students; they were the usual mix of children who form the bulk of our student population and who stand with advocate in the political arenas of education." Shouldn't we be equally concerned about the education of these children?