Against Mainstreaming Essay, Research Paper

Educational Society

Final Paper

Against Mainstreaming

Faced with skyrocketing costs and wildly uneven results, nearly two-thirds of the states are sketching plans to limit special education spending. Most hope to save money by pushing disabled children out of the small, specialized classes (that many of them need to succeed) and into crowded, ill-equipped classrooms where they will compete with non-disabled peers. On the other hand, some parents and teachers see this as beneficial, because it allows the special child to interact with other “normal” children and therefore learn at the same pace; these parents ask for this action. The process is often called “mainstreaming” or “inclusion” and is being justified by the civil rights notion that segregation of any kind is damaging and that diversity is an indisputable social good.

Researchers have yet to prove that mainstreaming is beneficial — or even that it does no harm. Still, educators who have watched children flourish in specialized settings are being urged to send them into regular classes. By dragging these children indiscriminately into the mainstream, we may actually be discarding them again, only this time in full public view. About 5 1/2 million children — 11 to 12 percent of the school population — are categorized as disabled. The U.S. Department of Education estimates the cost of educating the students is at about $30 billion annually, up from about $1 billion 20 years ago. In New York City alone, the annual tab is $2 billion. This 22 percent of total education spending is then educating less than 13 percent of the children, with about three times as much spent on each full-time special-education student as on each general-education child (http://www.ed.gov/).

While mainstreaming may be all well and good for the parents, mainly because this means the state and federal governments are giving their child a free education, this act is taking away from “normal” students, even gifted ones. In my old high school, for example, we had an ADHD student in our classroom mainstreamed over from the special education department. This student exhibited all the signs of ADHD, including constant fidgeting, inability to concentrate on the main lecture of the class for too long, and made constant interruptions throughout the class, making it nearly impossible for the educator to teach and distracting the students.

Studies based on government data show that about 43 percent of learning-disabled children leave school without diplomas and that an enormous number of them end up in jail soon afterward. Fewer than 2 percent of them go on to four-year colleges, as compared with about 28 percent of visually impaired students and 15 percent of deaf ones (http://www.ed.gov/). The myth of mildness has led to many questionable assumptions, among them the idea that learning-disabled children can be successfully educated in regular classes as long as they are allowed occasional trips to a specialist. But a child who leaves class several times a week for special reading instruction will miss math, science or whatever else is offered while he is away.

Depending on the number of absences, the missing lessons could loom large in the child’s education. Add in travel time and the ordinary shock of dislocation, and the school day evaporates. In addition, school administrators watching their budgets are notoriously stingy with expensive special services, no matter how emphatically teachers or clinicians recommend them. As those services become optional, they will be withheld.

Jay Diskey, spokesman for the House Committee on Education and the Work Force, says providing special-education students with nursing care will cost schools about $15,000 a year for each disabled student. This is contrastive to the average public school expenditure per pupil of (1995-1996 unadjusted dollars): $6,459 (http://edreform.com/pubs/edstats.htm#EXPENDITURES).

One of the strongest arguments against mainstreaming special children is that less than a quarter of American teachers know how to teach reading to children who do not get it automatically. Successful mainstreaming would take a huge retraining effort and fundamental changes at teachers colleges. Learning-disabled children tend to do poorly in public schools, and their problems often go undiagnosed. Ashamed of failure, they act out in class, become truant and eventually drop out. The luckiest children are those whose disabilities are detected early and who are sent to special private schools where teachers drill them in the fundamentals of language (http://www.lowwwe.com/ihrt/index.html).

Another argument resides in television, particularly in children’s programming. On children’s television, the kid in the wheelchair has become a kind of mascot, beloved by all in his gang. But imagine a real-life classroom where all of the children are non-disabled except the one who drools uncontrollably, who hears voices or who can’t read a simple sentence when everyone else can. Diversity is a noble ideal. But many disabled children would be marginalized and ridiculed in the mainstream. The mainstreamers argue that special education was never intended as a permanent place for any but the most profoundly handicapped students. For most children, it was supposed to be an educational “pit stop” where they developed the skills needed for full participation.

This is true as far as it goes. But the central goal has always said it would educate children who had traditionally been viewed as uneducable. Integration was an important but distinctly secondary objective. The danger for students lie less in the specialized classes that allow at least some of them to succeed than in the widespread expectation that they cannot learn and are supposed to fail. Society needs to worry a good deal more about what these children are taught and a good deal less about who sits next to them in class.

It became a contentious federal issue when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a quadriplegic boy in Iowa in 1999, who could not attend school without a trained aide to monitor his ventilator and other medical equipment. The ruling requires public schools to pay for the aide, but, naturally, doesn’t say how they would afford it. Congress is working on it. Sen. Susan Collins, a member of the House-Senate conference on an education reform bill that give states more flexibility on federal requirements, has one such proposal. Her bill would give elementary and secondary schools the option of using money to reduce class sizes on special education. That plan would make an additional $5.6 million available in Maine.

The individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA), allows additional federal money to supplement but not replace previous funding unless the state obtains a waiver. To get a waiver, a state must provide “clear and convincing evidence that all children with disabilities have available to them a free appropriate public education,” according to IDEA (www.ed.gov/offices/OSERS/IDEA). Depending on what the government thinks is clear and convincing, Congress intends by meeting the federal obligation to relieve state and local taxpayers of some of their burden. I think they should also seek an expedited waiver process to simplify the disbursement. IDEA is a just and humane plan for providing children with an appropriate education, but it becomes a divisive tool when Congress fails to send the proper amount of money along with its mandates.

The GOP also wants Congress to fully fund its share of the IDEA, which was passed in 1975. Congress has only been paying around 12% of disabled-students’ costs, instead of the 40% mandated by the law. This would mean about $10.3 billion a year, up from $4.3 billion now (http://www.ed.gov). The Supreme Court dealt a wild card to school districts in 1999 as well, when they ruled that public schools have to provide full-time nurses for severely disabled students. Jay Diskey, spokesman for the House Committee on Education (as stated above), and the Work Force, says “…providing special-education students with nursing care will cost schools about $15,000 a year for each disabled student. If the federal government paid its share of these costs under IDEA,” Diskey says, “the Los Angeles Unified School District alone would get $60 million a year more from Washington. Local taxpayers would have to come up with an extra $90 million.”

The U.S. Supreme Court this year will hear yet another Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) case—this one impacting on school inclusion of special education students. The state of Georgia is challenging lower court rulings that a psychiatric hospital violated Title II of the ADA by failing to provide two patients with care in the most integrated setting appropriate to their needs. The state placed the patients at the Georgia Regional Hospital in Atlanta, a mental hospital for inpatient psychiatric treatment. The patients complained the hospital is a “segregated environment” and asked to be placed in community-based treatment centers. Section 504 and Title II of the ADA are considered sister statutes that share the same enforcement, remedies, procedures and rights, as well as the same definition of “person with a disability.” Does this mean these people can be educated as well in America? Legally, yes. And that is a scary thought.

Schools should be allowed to use the money for special-education expenses. Republicans said those costs will rise after the ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, which held that schools are responsible for nursing costs for handicapped students. In addition, it makes little sense for Congress to embark on a new teacher-hiring program when it has failed to deliver on a commitment made in 1975 to pay for 40 percent of all special-education expenses.

Diane Ravitch, Head of the Brown Center on education reform for the Brookings Institute, January 14, 1999, Federal News Service:

What we need, I think, is a realistic sense of what the federal role should be, what Washington can reasonably do to help education reform along and also a recognition that Washington can’t and should not be expected to do everything. Many of our state budgets are overflowing with surpluses themselves. And while President Clinton has done a great deal to raise people’s consciousness about the importance of education and being well educated for the jobs and the opportunities in the country today and in the future, he’s also come out with a plethora of programs. And it seems sometimes as though he’s a school superintendent. There’s almost nothing you can think of connected to a school that has not become a proposal coming from the Department of Education or President Clinton. He’s prepared to have federally funded preschool programs, not preschool but early morning programs, afternoon programs, and tutoring programs. He’s made pronouncements on all sorts of things that, where, as one state superintendent said to me, when you heard a governor give his state of the state address and the President talk about education, you couldn’t tell which was the governor and which was the president.

Disabled students must be educated in the “least restrictive environment”, which means placed whenever possible in regular classrooms. Such “inclusion” works well for some (especially those with physical handicaps) but can lead to chaos when a teacher must cope with youngsters who have severe emotional and behavioral problems. Yet the teacher does not have much say. Parents have sweeping “due process” rights to shape their disabled child’s educational program, and a thriving legal practice is keen to help them exploit those rights. (Since the school system must pay parents’ legal fees, it’s no surprise that administrators are apt to cave quickly to their demands by parents and their attorneys’ threats.)

A double standard applies to discipline. It’s nearly impossible to suspend or expel a disabled child; even to move him out of the classroom unless his parents consent or a court orders it. Although one federal law requires states to suspend a gun-toting student for a full year, if he is disabled another statute limits to 45 days even his placement in an “alternative setting.” (For other weapons, the limit is ten days.) Says Fairfax County’s respected school superintendent, Robert Spillane, “Any student who is classified as disabled is now literally able to get away with anything” (Gearheart and Weishahn.)

The Public Law 94-142 states all these facts as more, such as “least restricting environment” and “equal education.” Yet because these terms are so vague and are interpreted so they do not fit “everyone,” it’s a tough call to try and find out what these terms really mean. When they say “every” student, it is implied that the law does not apply to “gifted” children, yet billions of dollars are being dished out of the corporate piggy banks for special education, while federally funded public schools are lacking, as well as AP and gifted programs throughout the United States.

Each student is unique and has different needs. Mainstreaming is a good thing if the student can keep up with the work, but 9 times out of 10 they can’t. This leads to interruptions and hardships within the learning process. Teachers can’t teach, students can’t learn, principles get stressed and frustrated, and superintendents can’t individually establish decent, satisfying budgets because of the parents and government constantly looking over their shoulders, waiting for a legal mistake. Nowhere in The Constitution does it say anything about education, but it does say that any rights not mandated by the federal government are left for states to govern on. Therefore, the states should be the ones funding their own schools, designing their own curricula, and mandating regulations. However, this is not realistic. Some districts are poor, causing low tax income, and therefore deficient funding. Where should the funding come from?

Right now, it is coming from the federal government, and yet there is no way the government can allot certain percentages of the country’s budget to each individual part of education. There is special education, public education, charter schools, and the way people are fighting, soon funding will have to go to home schooling. Out of all these different schools (and there still are some which have gone unnamed), who will be left out the most? Which of these schools will get the short end of the stick when the courts are finished distributing this funding? Public schools.

Our schools, as of now, are indigent enough as it is and need more funding than they are receiving. Since most special education children do not even graduate with a diploma, my suggestion is that we keep special education and regular education separate from each other. Perhaps we need to begin testing children to see where they would place in high school: have a test – one of high moral standard and academic strength to place these students. Yes, this isn’t easy, but those who should be in school will be, and these students should have no distractions while in their classroom settings. Special kids flourish in special settings, I have seen it happen. To put them in a regular classroom could cease this prospering. However, since it could also heighten it, I think we need to have tests for these children as well, or at least reviews from the school board if the parents thing there should be admittance into regular settings.

There has to be standards and regulations to be in classrooms. Students need to be put where they will flourish the most. I think the school boards and states, not the federal government or parents, should decide where these students go. If the state is paying for the education, the state should chose. When parents start paying, they can choose, and I don’t see many parents volunteering to pay for a special child’s education, especially if they cannot afford it.

Gearheart, Bill and Carol and Mel Weishahn. The Exceptional Student in the Regular Classroom (Sixth Edition). Published by Merrill, 1999.

Secretary of Education Website: http://www.ed.gov/

The center for Educational Reform: http://edreform.com/pubs/edstats.htm#EXPENDITURES

The need for training: http://www.lowwwe.com/ihrt/index.html

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