Inclusion or Not?

Let us posit a child with a disablity.  Should this child be in a general education classroom  (inclusion) or in a special education classroom?

The answers aren't easy or obvious.

Rachel Powell Norton has written a three-part series on Special Education and Inclusion.

Part I
Part II
Part III

Almost 30 years after the passage of laws guaranteeing a free, appropriate public education to students with disabilities, children enrolled in special education face many barriers to their full participation in academic and extracurricular activities in regular public schools. Special educators like to say that “special education is a service, not a place,” but as a parent of a child enrolled in special education and an advocate for effective education for all children, it seems to me that we still have a long way to go.

I am not sure that full inclusion is always in the best interest of the child.

Comments

[Lisa]

The drive to include students reflects a partial shift in general attitudes towards the disabled, but sometimes has odd practical repercussions. When I do IEPs for my students, we have to specify for legal purposes why, for example, the child can't participate in regular gym class or art class with typical peers. For my students, it's always been clear cut. If he has difficulty processing directions in a quiet classroom with 11 other students, for sure he's going to have trouble in a reverberating gym with 20 or 30 students.

For some kids, I suppose it's less clear. I can imagine students with mild educational issues who would be fine in most regular classes - I went to school with some of them as a kid. Some were my friends. But I really think that if we are serious about integration, we have to make schools friendlier and more personal to all students. Otherwise the included child's family is just fighting the tide.