http://differentizgood.org/2012/03/a-different-view-mainstreaming-and-inclusion/
What does everyone think of this? Personally, I do think that the author has a VERY good point about how low incidence kids are falling through the cracks both academicly and socially. We really do need to revamp low incidence special ed, so that kids are not falling through the cracks.
Sped does do a decent job of educating learning disabled kids. They’re not headed to Harvard, but on the other hand they do have at least functional academics. I know a problem seems to be that the classes are viewed as good, but the behavorial kids tend to really fuck things up.
But it seems like the kids with more tradtional/low incidnece disablities tend to be REALLY falling through the cracks and getting lumped in with the kids who are in Resource Room/sped b/c it’s a dumping ground. Why can’t we offer a continum of placement to those kids? Like “sight saving” classrooms for blind/low vision kids, but also blind/low vision schools, and the same for other disabilties such as hearing or even mobilty (there used to be classes for kids with cerebal palsy for example)
OK, somewhat long, complicated, and rambling post to follow:
First, I think the blogger has an idealized vision of schools specializing in educating the disabled. My spouse attended such a school prior to the Great Mainstreaming Stampede and while there were some upsides it was not the paradise she seems to think it was. While many vocational options were open to the kids higher academics were not - it was simply assumed none of these kids would go to college no matter how smart. A lot of the kids still had emotional and social issues, in part because so many were socially isolated outside of school, a lot of families weren’t supportive of their disabled kids, and the kids who spent a lot of time in the hospital due to physical problems had issues arising out of that even when kept on kids’ wards and having interaction/play time with other sick and/or disabled kids. Bullying most certainly DID occur, because disabled kids are still bald, poo-flinging monkeys just like normal kids.
Myself, I went to a school district that had a modified sort of mainstreaming. Different schools in the district “specialized” in certain forms of disability. My high school, for example, had a deaf education wing. A different high school in the district had a similar wing for blind/vision impaired students. This enabled a spectrum of DHH education from full mainstreaming for those able to do it to full DHH immersion for those who couldn’t. And it wasn’t just a matter of how deaf a kid was - one of the completely mainstreamed kids who was an honor student and very popular socially was also completely without hearing and had been from infancy. There were other kids with relatively little impairment who spent all their time in the deaf wing. It’s not always predictable who’s going to need what. It have the advantage of giving the disabled kids contact both with other disabled kids and with normal kids which probably did help with their social skills. One problem spouse’s classmates had was that they could relate to other disabled kids just fine but sometimes had problems interacting with normal, non-disabled folks. Kids growing up in an isolated enclave of their “own kind” may be in for a shock when they graduate into the real world and have to deal with normal folks, who can be real assholes. In my school district the disabled kids learned about that issue early and had time to develop coping strategies, along with the support of peers and a few adults who gave a damn.
I want to return briefly to that perceived solidarity among alumni of specialty schools. Yes, there was/is a strong community among such student bodies. There is also a tendency to form a “disabled ghetto”. Sure, in the old days the school network could lead to jobs and social interactions among adults… but what about the kid who went to that school who didn’t fit in among the other kids with the same disability? The blogger is idealizing the old system without looking at the downsides, people who only learned to interact with the deaf or the blind and didn’t have the skills to interact with the non-disabled community even in a superficial manner. Then tendency for society to only allow disabled people to live in their own “ghettos” and denied them even the chance to try to live in the mainstream world. Having a community to retreat to is not a bad thing… being allowed only that community and no other is.
Finally, the bullying she describes also happens to perfectly normal, physically intact kids. I know this, because it happened to me. As I noted, bullying also occurs in special ed schools as we’re dealing with groups of human beings and human beings can be such piles of festering snot. Yes, disabled kids can be targeted. So can minority kids, but we’ve also decided that we’re not going to sort kids into different schools based on appearances.
One consequence of the set up in my school district was a certain solidarity among the deaf kids - any bully who targeted/attacked a deaf kid (they are sooooo easy to sneak up on, after all, they can’t hear you coming…) suddenly found himself the object of attention of a couple of dozen deaf kids the next day. This discouraged prolonged campaigns of harassment, not that a couple of dozen kids putting the beat-down on another is necessarily a good thing.
The thing is, disabled kids ARE at a disadvantage. It’s not fair, agreed, but at this point it’s reality. Also, what works for one kid won’t for another and it’s not just a matter of measuring impairment. Two kids with equal impairment might have radically different results when either mainstreamed or at a specialty school. I think too many of the specialty schools were closed too quickly, I think some kids would do better at them than mainstreamed, but back in the day when segregation was common schools for the disabled were often just as “separate and unequal” as schools for black kids were. There were a few outstanding schools for any given disability, but there were also a lot of what were essentially warehousing/babysitting facilities for disabled kids.
The blogger is looking at the best of specialty schools and comparing them to the middling-to-worst of public mainstream schools. That’s not a fair comparison. I understand she had bad experiences in mainstream schools, but that doesn’t mean segregated schools are paradise. There were numerous flaws and abuses in the old system, that’s why the pendulum swung to mainstreaming.
My own preference would be for a world where people were more open to sending a kid to a fully immersive special ed environment but it wasn’t mandated. The problem is that any school system is a bureaucracy, and bureaucracies want to be able to file people neatly. They want a measuring stick and cut-off point so they know which kids to shuffle off to totally mainstream and which ones to send to the “special school” and there isn’t such a yardstick. You can’t predict, solely on disability, which six year old will do best in the public school and which will do best in the specialty school.
Of course, there is also the issue that mainstreaming and special education is often give more lip service than anything else. The “support” the blogger received was, indeed, minimal. This is also a problem for normal kids who can be ignored, sidelined, and neglected. It’s a dysfunction that relates as much to lack of funds and practices that interfere with rather than promote education for the student body as a whole. It is worse for the disabled, who are all to often seen as an economic drain on the school system whether they are or not. Special ed schools also have funding problems leading to impaired education. That relates to our society not really valuing teachers and being willing to pay for public education and injecting politics where they don’t belong.
I don’t really think that the author isnessarily idealizing the specialized schools. I think the author is saying that there needs to be a continum of placement for low incidence kids, which means both specialized schools and a low incidence sizable formal mainstream program. She’s saying that the “resource room”/ inclusion model really isn’t working out, since low incidence kids fall through the cracks with that model.
and indeed, that is what she is arguing for. It’s not that she’s arguing for say American School for the Deaf vs. inclusion/mainstreaming with minimal accomodnations. I know that deaf ed is famous for having specialized programs like that. But those types of programs are very rare for say blind/low vision kids. They used to be very popular. And a lot of other kids with low incidence issues who are academic even very strongly academic, tend to not be served too well in the mainstream.
I think her point is that the experts thought that something like trickle down academic theory would work. But a typical resource room teacher really wouldn’t know how to educate a low incidence kid…there’s also the fact that negative attitudes about special ed are still in the mainstream. I mean sped kids aren’t exactly seen as the smart kids.
Then again, deaf and hard of hearing kids were very often sent to Gallaudet or NTID. I think too she was arguing for reform of those insistutions. Yes, a lot of those programs were really crappy, and were just warehousing/babysitting. But with reform, those programs could be tweaked to give a decent option. Like one major issues is that kids with disabilties are very often MAJORLY sheltered by their parents. One thing that specialized schools could do is have independent living programs for say dhh, and blind/low vison or whatever disabilty for middle and high school. And a lot of the problems that the specialized schools faced was b/c they were insistutions. With insistutional reform, and a few tweaks there could be some decent programs.