From the Wall Street Journal, another in an occasional series of articles about problems in special education. Reporter John Hechinger examines a lawsuit by eight families against the 13,000-student school district in Greece, New York. The families charged the district with denying children with disabilities a “free and appropriate” education by restricting access to spcial classrooms, eliminating students’ special education eligibility and dumping them in regular classes without support. The suit has been settled.

Advocates for the disabled have long promoted the inclusion of special-education children in regular classes, a practice called mainstreaming. Many educators view mainstreaming as an antidote to the warehousing of children with special needs in separate, and often deficient, classrooms and buildings.

Now, some experts and parents complain that mainstreaming has increasingly taken on a new role in American education: a pretext for cost-cutting, hurting the children it was supposed to help. While studies show that mainstreaming can be beneficial for many students, critics say cash-hungry school districts are pushing the practice too hard, forcing many children into classes that can’t meet their needs. Inclusion has evolved into “a way of downsizing special education,” says Douglas Fuchs, a Vanderbilt University education professor.

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Letters to the Wall Street Journal about the November 27 front-page story ‘Parents of disabled students push for separate classes.’

Some excerpts:

“The issue of mainstreaming is often seen as an either-or situation . It just isn’t that simple. As a parent of two boys who have both been in each situation, I can tell you there are pros and cons.”

“The issue of mainstreaming special-needs children is very complex. As a retired public school teacher I know that a great many parents agitate for inclusion to avoid the social embarrassment of acknowledging that their children are in a special-education program. However, special-ed teachers are trained for just those children.”

See earlier posts here and here.

‘Parents say schools game system, let kids graduate without skills’

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, John Hechinger and Daniel Golden give weight to parent arguments that special education students are being passed through without mastering academic material. Hechinger and Golden track lawsuits claiming that special education programs are undermining academic standards by giving students with disabilities a free ride. The resulting story, the latest in a continuing series by the Journal, assumes the newspaper’s usual skeptical view of the value of special education programs.

In attempting to document the collision of the nation’s special education programs with academic standards and graduation requirements, the reporters find conflicting regulations, poor communication, and lots of hard feelings among teachers, administrators, regulators and parents.

The story is worth your time, although readers should be warned that the conflict it describes is a fundamental and thorny one that has been developing since the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was passed more than 30 years ago. It defies easy solutions.

Sadly, scant attention is given here to the role that could be played by the effective use of each student’s federally-mandated Individualized Education Plan (IEP). IEPs should be designed to challenge each individual student and should be used as the standard against which to measure student achievement.

Instead, underlying the story seems to be the impossible expectation that children with disabilities should be performing at the same academic level as their peers without disabilities, a goal which the reporters say is the result of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act. That law requires that children with disabilities take the same tests as do other students.

There is plenty of blame to go around here. (more…)

Here’s yet another story by the Wall Street Journal about inclusion of students with disabilities in regular classes. Criticism of inclusion has surfaced repeatedly on that publication’s news pages over recent months.

Reporter Robert Tomsho now reports that school districts are pursuing a controversial new strategy to reduce the number of children in special education programs. Known as “response to intervention” or RTI, the strategy claims to bring special support to needy students in regular education programs.

Opponents say it shortchanges children by depriving them of needed assistance. Supporters maintain that many children now in special education are simply victims of poor instruction and wouldn’t need expensive special-education services if they had gotten extra help as soon as their problems surfaced. (more…)