I am far from an expert on this topic. My teaching experience barely involved my participation in this turn-of-the-century program that I would now like to open to discussion. With that as an opening for this post, readers may not be interested enough to read any further. The fact that I haven’t mentioned what program I would like to discuss, is the only thing that may keep readers hanging in. As Social Security is the third rail of politics, I believe that Inclusion Programs may be a third rail education issue. Anyone looking to explore this issue, or a possibility for alternatives, may be burned beyond belief.
I understand, and, for the most part, agree with the philosophy, that students should learn in the least restrictive environment. It is this belief that has removed students with special needs from small classes working with special education teachers specifically trained to address the specific needs of those students’ and placed them into mainstream classes. The idea is to have special-needs students as active participants and beneficiaries of mainstream classes, and working within an academic class along with the academic subject classroom teacher, as well as the special education teacher, and any required aides, if indicated by a student’s IEP. In the ideal situation the number of special needs students would be limited and the overall class size should also be small.
Educators often consider fairness to all as a primary consideration in any program for education. It is truly a noble endeavor, but sometimes fairness to all, means unfairness to some. The Irony of course is obvious. Staffing programs like this with effective teachers is the problem. Academic teachers are educators with expertise in content areas and little concentration on special education. Special Education teachers are educators with expertise in Special Education methods and little concentration in content areas. Sometimes an educator comes along with expertise in both areas. They are not in the majority. I do not know if there is a Secondary Inclusion certification. The best models of inclusion involve: collaborative teachers, common planning periods, small classes, limited number of special needs students, and participating teachers in complete and enthusiastic support of the program. It can be a very costly program.
Many believe that the inclusion programs are better alternatives to the small special education classes that often separated special needs students from their fellow students. Including them in a general academic setting is seen by many to be more beneficial, as long as all of the students’ IEPs are being addressed in the overall setting.
As a methods teacher in higher education, many of my students do observations in inclusion classes each and every week. As a supervisor of student teachers, I observe many of my students doing their student teaching assignments in inclusion classes. I am in a position to look at many inclusion programs in many schools. The problem I have observed is that there seems to be many different models of inclusion in place, and they seem to vary greatly. It is understandable when one considers all of the variables in such programs. Multiple teachers for one class, small class size, required aides, scheduling considerations for common planning, these are all money considerations. These were very important when the programs were conceived and implemented. Under today’s climate of cutbacks and reductions however, their import has been reduced. Education considerations are taking a back seat to monetary considerations.
An Inclusion program, to be successful, requires a delicate balance of components. It is not a cheap way to go. Many believe that it is the best setting and the most effective way to meet the needs of students who require special methods and considerations to learn. That may very well be true. My point is asking if anyone is questioning if these programs, under the current conditions, are still meeting their intended goals. Can schools provide the same quality of education while scaling down all of the components necessary to make it happen? Are schools even trying to assess the effectiveness of these programs in their current forms?
My fear is that these programs will become a shell of what they should be. I fear administrators will not call for needed assessments to determine if these programs are still viable with less money invested. I fear that questioning these programs, even for the purpose of assessment; will be deemed as an assault on students with special needs. If we can’t fund education the way it must be funded to succeed, should we not reconsider what, and how we do things. If it is not important for us to fund things properly, how do we best deliver what we can with what we have? How do we do what is needed, as opposed to what we can afford. I fear I have too many questions with too few people even trying to seek real answers. I do not oppose these programs. I do oppose doing things half-assed and then looking to blame someone for the failing result. We all may benefit by assessing how we are teaching, as opposed to what we are teaching.
My Island View 
As a special education teacher this is an issue that I believe will become more and more a problem at many different levels for many reasons, including the ones you describe.
I am not an inclusion is the only way advocate, I believe that the needs of the child outweigh the needs of what programs adults see as a panacea and the way life should be in all circumstances. It just is not reality. As we have all seen, there is no single one best way to educate our students or program/education belief that works in all situations. Full inclusion all the time in all circumstances, is in my opinion an extreme that is not always suitable for all students, no matter how noble the rationale or who believes it is a good thing.
The regular education classroom is not always the least restrictive or appropriate setting for special education or even some regular education students (in the case of behavior issues) and should not always be considered their LRE based upon several factors including the readiness of the child and appropriate resources that the schools may or may not have.
Is putting a student into a bad inclusionary regular education better for a student than having them remain in a good Special Education room???? Nobody really knows, it depends upon the individual child and how they individually react to a bad inclusionary experience.
I believe that as budgets are cut that inclusionary programs will be done more and more “half-assed” and bad inclusionary programs will cause more harm than good to the student’s progress, the other students and teachers involved. At that point what do we do?
Just keep doing the best we can with what we have and use inclusion when the student shows they are either ready for it and the regular education classroom is ready also.
One size does not fit all for inclusion anymore than it does using teaching to the test with Special Education students. They are individuals and inclusion is on the scale of services that should be available to those students when they are ready.
This is a good third-rail issue. NCLB is standards based and that appears to be the direction American education is headed and Special Education is based on Individual Education Plans and appear to be on separate rails going in the same direction but not meeting.
The question that will be asked is: “Do the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many?” That is a question special education and government is going to have to answer over the course of the next decade.
Sorry for the rambling comment.
Harold
I’m a 10-year veteran high school English teacher who is in my 4th year of teaching Inclusion. In my experience, I think the key to Inclusion is a good partnership, where both the subject-teacher and special educator are equal partners in the classroom in the domains of planning, grading, and parent contact. Without such a partnership, students tend to gravitate to the subject-teacher as the “knowing” party, and the special educator as the “assistant.” I have never felt more burnt-out as a teacher as I do this year, and it has somewhat to do with a group of needy kids, but more to do with a disjointed partnership.
I am living through inclusion hell. In the name of budget cuts all professional development funds have been cut, even for brand new teachers. I have students with special needs who I have no training to serve and no access to training. This year has been a crash course in how to be a special ed teacher and I feel like I am totally failing. When I student taught in another district that also had inclusion the norm was different. The highest needs kids remained in self-contained classes and the others had assistants in class and a study hall with their sped teacher. The district I work in has everyone mixed together and no in-class assistants.
Can we say I’m being set up for failure?
Oh yes, I’ve already received a pink slip thanks to the aforementioned budget cuts.
Great post, Tom. I have been what I prefer to call a “collaborative teacher” in both middle and elementary classrooms. I agree that the healthy partnership is vital and have been fortunate to work with fantastic and flexible general education teachers. Inclusion and the standards-based NCLB thinking have had me thinking for some time about what is so special about special ed? Individualization and standardization coexisting makes my head hurt. I think opting for full inclusion of students with disabilities is great, but generally, that means that you are more often accommodating students rather than remediating weaknesses and filling learning gaps using specialized knowledge and skills. It is a topic worthy of deeper and wider discussion. Thank you for posting!
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I am a Special Education Teacher and had my own “self-contained” classroom for 7 years. I was so excited, as were my students at what learning could take place for them and me. I could deliver the material in a totally different way that would engage the students. Years later, they’d say “Remember when….” We created shared experiences and we learned. I can’t fathom them having learned the same material in an inclusion setting. At least not retaining it. At best, they could have regurgitated it on a test, but certainly not have retained it, let alone apply it. I am now in a shared classroom, and while it is a different level, and one sole subject, I see how it isn’t “working” for the Special Education kids, and many of the regular kids. I wholly agree that LRE is not always the best setting for a child to learn.
Tom,
Very thoughtful post, and I agree with the spirit and fact of what you say. Perhaps as a special education professional and as a parent of a kiddo with special needs, I have a particularly warped and often conflicted view of all this. I thought I would add to the discourse.
Inclusion is a very loaded term. And as you point out, both delicate and complex. Based on the “individualization” of each student’s strengths and weaknesses, “Inclusion” bridges the individual’s program with the environment; at that moment, this is no longer about one person, but about all the people in that environment. This may seem like a minor phenomenological shift, but it makes all the difference. It stops being about one person’s outcomes, and starts being about group outcomes. Yet, we use the term Inclusion to refer to the “benefit” for a single individual. All of this is wrapped in a layer of altruistic ethics, meaning that if you do not choose to “include”, you are choosing not to benefit the group at large as well, and that is somehow “wrong”. Legally, if you are not “including” someone, you are by definition “segregating” them, the implication of which is that you are “discriminating” against them.
However minute you think these specific linguistics may be, my point is simply this: the discourse of “inclusion” has been “polarized” from the outset, built to be an either/or, almost binary kind of construct. As many teachers know in real life, and as you point out, there are many different kinds of “inclusion”, mostly individualized pockets based on IEP defined “needs”. Parents suffer greatly at the hands of the “Inclusion” debate, and at the end of the day, I’m not sure the debate actually does teachers and administrators any good either. What parents really care about, what they absolutely need to have happen, regardless of ethics, of ideology, of linguistics or anything else, is functional independence outcomes.
Think about it. At age 22 the primary (and really only) service delivery structure for adult independent living that has been available is withdrawn, permanently. We know the difference early intervention makes, and how behavioral routines can over time build new neural connections to support independence in later life. If schools, parents, and lawyers just spent less time discussing the incendiary ethics and catastrophic outcomes associated with the inclusion debate and focused on actually planning, providing, and continuing functional independence training based on each child’s needs, more children would be more independent, special education would cost us less, more resources would be available, and more children could be served.
As a professional I recognize the inclusion debate issues, and while I think the debate rages with the best of intentions, as a parent I feel the debate is actually moot. “To include or not to include” is NOT the question. “What skills does my child need to be functionally independent” IS the question we should be asking and spending resources on. Teach my kid how to ride the bus to a destination successfully or to read a map. Teach my child to feed themselves, or cook for dinner safely and appropriately. Teach my child to bathroom independently, to wash, to clean. Teach my child to brush his teeth and go to bed on his own. These are the outcomes parents need.
I am for inclusion, segregated environments for minorities in the past led to substandard treatment. I agree children w/special needs need to be taught functional skills & in jr high those can be taught as an elective that gened can also attend. Typical kids need functional skills now also i.e. how to ride public transit, financial mgt, cooking. In lower grades it can be met w/aide & teacher, the norm needs to be co-teaching, not as an extra but as a basic for appropriate education. But what if we can’t have ideal, should segregated classes be the norm? I have to say no, since then as a parent your child w/special needs chances are only dependent on if they get a dedicated teacher. In segregated sped classes you can do a lot or you can put on a Barney video. If the class is not part of the school the problem becomes an individual teacher problem instead of a school or district problem. Issues need to be dealt with on a universal and inclusive manner in order to come to a meaningful solution.
I agree that segregation is not much good for anyone. Due to the lack of subject specific knowledge on the part of the special ed teacher the student does not have equal access to information. On the other hand, just throwing a kid into a mainstream classroom does not work for both the special needs students and the rest of the class. Partnering with a special ed teacher has a lot of potential but I have not seen the necessary training and resources being developed to make it work. What ends up happening is that the teacher now has more work to do and has less time to spend with the other students in the class. It seems that everyone loses. Teacher is burnt out and bitter, special ed kid gets “preferential seating” and “more time” on assignments, but that does very little to actually address their disability. Kid is frustrated and possibly acts out in class and thus demands more of the teachers attention and patience…
Could it work? Yes, but without proper training and making the process easier on the teacher rather than a brick… it is not successful.
I am a teacher. This year my classroom is a grade 6 class of 27; 10 of those students are special needs with ‘individual education plans’. All have widely varying learning disabilities. NONE of them receive allocated ‘time’ ( ie: aide time). Here, only low incidence students receive funding for aide time ( low incidence are those that are severely disabled, autistic etc.). There is only me. Last year, I had a split grade 6 and 7 class; 26 students, 9 special needs. One was autistc and received aide time. This student constantly rocked and moaned, and also screamed several times throughout the day. Need I say more?