Last week Rachel Powell Norton had an entry in BeyondChron, the site for an alternative news source in the San Fransisco Bay area (CA, US), entitled “School Beat: Reaching Special Education Ideals is Still Far Off-Part 1″ that, sadly, perpetuates mis-information about special education. Ms. Norton’s entry, the first of three promised, that promotes full inclusion. Thre is much to discuss in the article (it runs nearly 900 words), but salted away in the middle of it is this statement:
[Full inclusion] was not just another educational fad. In 1995, the National Longitudinal Study of Special Education Students found that those students who were removed from general education were more likely to drop out and to be dependent on public assistance in their post-high school years. These students were less likely to be living independently, and more likely to have criminal records. Sadly, scholars and advocates agree that the findings of this decade-old study are still current.
Had children with disabilities been randomly assigned to general and special education, then the finding that those who received special education had bleaker outcomes would be a
I’m waiting for someone to report that the number of minutes of special education services children receive correlates with their scores on the National Association of Educational Progress (or some other outcome measure). The more special education you get, as represented by the number of minutes, will be negatively correlated with the score; as minutes increase, scores decline. Someone will conclude, therefore, that the way to improve reading scores is to eliminate special education. Then I’ll get to write about faulty reasoning again.
Link to Ms. Norton’s article.
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It sounds to me as if you are brushing off the findings of the 1995 study by saying, oh well, what else can you expect from students with greater needs? By this logic, it’s perfectly acceptable for a subset of special education students to drop out of school, go on welfare or commit crimes. Talk about low expectations!
In addition, your understanding of the goals of full inclusion seems to be seriously flawed. Full inclusion in the general education classroom is not just for “students with fewer needs.” And the law is clear that the self-contained special education classroom is not the default placement for any student. Finding the appropriate placement that best serves a student depends on the individual needs of that student — not his or her general level of impairment.
Thanks for the comment. I do not mean to brush off the National Longitudinal study. It’s a well-done and valuable study. I do mean, however, to disagree with the intrepretation of the study offered in the article. The study did not show that alternative types of services (self-contained special education, resources rooms, inclusion) caused different outcomes for students. So, the study can’t be taken as an endorsement of full inclusion.
You wrote, “Finding the appropriate placement that best serves a student depends on the individual needs of that student — not his or her general level of impairment,” and I firmly agree with that idea. In fact, that very argument is one of the reasons I have concerns about some implementations of “full inclusion.” Some advocates of full inclusion recommend that it applies to all students. When full inclusion is recommended for all students, then decisions about who is to receive what services are no longer individualized. As I understand IDEA, the heart of receiving a free and appropriate public education is that students with disabilities receive an individualized education program. An approach to education that’s to be applied to all isn’t individualized.
Inclusion is fine, provided it meets the unique educational needs (as in IDEA) of the individual student. It’s pretty clear that inclusion does not meet the UENs of all students with disabilities. So, it’s pretty important to sustain a continuum of educational placements.