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Moral Issues in Special Education. Robert F. Ladenson
right, in spite of weak data supporting it as an educational “best practice” for many SWD [students with disabilities] for improved educational results in many situations. . . . To make inclusion work schools often provide paraprofessionals (or one to one aides), accommodations or modifications, co-teaching, and other approaches to maintain the child in a classroom. Such procedures are often provided even when there is scant or nonexistent evidence that they actually improve learning for SWD and are not detrimental to other students.22
Another severe critic, Robert Worth, puts the above point bluntly, saying, “Parents of severely disabled kids . . . regularly try to shoehorn them into mainstream classes, even when it would do little good for the child and plenty of harm to the rest of the class.”23
As for point (3) in their critique, the severe critics object that the IDEA’s mandated procedural safeguards have fostered an adversarial climate in which parents feel compelled to advocate for their children against their schools. In this climate, say the severe critics, educators focus more on process compliance than on improving educational performance of children.24 The IDEA’s procedural safeguards, in the severe critics’ opinion, have resulted in an educational system “built upon mistrust between parents and schools [which] is unwise and not sustainable.”25
Given their witheringly negative assessments of special education in American K–12 public schools on the combined grounds of unfairness, ineffectiveness, and divisiveness, many severe critics would agree that, in the words of Miriam Kurtzig Freedman, the time has come “to consider ending the entitlement status of IDEA.”26
IDEA advocates dissent emphatically from the calls of the severe critics to end the entitlement status of the Act, rejecting the position of the severe critics thoroughly and unequivocally. With regard to the charge of unfairness summarized above, the following two replies could address, respectively, the severe critics’ complaints of excessive expense and excessively protective procedural safeguards for children with disabilities.
First, the greatest per pupil expenditures generally involve children with severe intellectual disabilities and/or severe physical disabilities with adverse effects upon the ability to learn. High expenditure levels are often needed in such cases for the children to have any meaningful education at all. The sole alternative is custodial care, and not education.
Second, apropos the extensive procedural safeguards related to school discipline of children with disabilities, one needs to acknowledge the high correlation between long-term school expulsions, on the one hand (followed by motivation-destroying academic failure), and/or rejection by peers, on the other hand. Further, such situations often lead to dropping out of school, social isolation, and/or depression, resulting in tragically diminished life chances.
In response to the complaint of ineffectiveness, the advocates would say the severe critics’ disparagement of inclusion completely misses the most important point in its favor. Inclusion, they would say, aims to avoid, or prevent, grievous harms of exclusion, which the severe critics either ignore or badly underestimate. The advocates might cite as illustrative in this regard the following recollections offered by Jonathan Mooney. (He is looking back in young adulthood at the impact upon him, in third grade, of removal from his regular education class for reading instruction in a resource room):
Even Mr. R. (Mooney’s 3rd grade regular classroom teacher) couldn’t stop the snide embarrassing looks my classmates gave me every time I left to go to the resource room. . . . Sometimes for cruel fun kids would ask me what room I was going to even though they knew. . . . They wouldn’t wait for an answer but just laughed and called me stupid.27
The advocates would say they could cite many more examples similar to the above. But they would insist that doing so is unnecessary to underscore the irreparable damage that exclusionary educational practices can often cause to a child’s self-confidence, sense of self-esteem, and motivation to learn. The same kinds of damage, the advocates would acknowledge, result inevitably when children with disabilities are placed without appropriate support into regular education classes. That is why, the advocates would point out, the IDEA’s least-restrictive-environment mandate calls for provision of “appropriate” “supplementary aids and services.”
Furthermore, the advocates maintain that when such are provided, inclusion of children with disabilities in regular education classrooms need not diminish the education of nondisabled students and even has the potential to enrich it in transformative ways. Apropos the latter, strong commitment to regular classroom inclusion by K–12 public school districts throughout the United States, say the advocates, could catalyze far-reaching, lifelong changes in prevailing attitudes and behavior of nondisabled persons toward individuals with disabilities. Such attitudinal change, the advocates insist, would make American society both more just and more kind.
Finally, the advocates would disagree categorically with the severe critics’ view that the right for parents of a child with a disability to challenge educational decisions concerning their child at a due process hearing (under the IDEA) has resulted in a system based upon mistrust between parents and school districts. The advocates would counter this view by noting that trust in the system requires the confidence of everyone involved that the system is fair. In this regard, the advocates would contend, the IDEA’s procedural safeguard of a right to due process is indispensable to uphold the moral right of American children with disabilities to receive an appropriate K–12 public education—a right they possess no less than do nondisabled students.
The Morally Basic Questions
The attitudes of many—if not most—people about special education in American K–12 public schools tend to lie uneasily between the polar opposite positions of the severe critics and the advocates as summarized above. On the one hand, the widespread stigmatizing and shunning that faced children with disabilities and their families well into the twentieth century has been substantially replaced—compared with years past—by empathetic awareness of the immense problems they confront. Many, though by no means all, people agree that those children with disabilities have a moral right, like all other children, to receive an appropriate K–12 education.28
On the other hand, there also is widespread recognition of the following points: The costs of educating children with disabilities, in some instances, can be very high and the educational progress of the children, compared with nondisabled peers, in many cases is small. Furthermore, the presence of children with disabilities in a regular education class often poses difficult issues with regard to allocation of educational resources, especially teacher time. As with all American K–12 public schooling, taxpayers must cover all the costs.
For the above reasons, many people don’t fully and clearly understand the rationales for practices, methods, and goals central to special education and incorporated in the IDEA. Prime examples in this connection are the zero-reject policy, the least-restrictive-environment mandate, the strict requirements and limitations regarding discipline of children with disabilities, and the IDEA’s extensive procedural safeguards (especially the right of parents to challenge a school district’s placement decision in a due process hearing).
Six morally basic questions raised by the disagreement between the severe critics of special education in American K–12 public schools and advocates for children with disabilities and their families are set forth below. No one—whether severe critic, advocate, or anyone else—has articulated all these questions clearly. And no one has analyzed them carefully and deeply enough for an adequate exploration.
(1) Do all American children, including children with disabilities, have a moral right to receive an appropriate K–12 education?
(a) If the answer is “yes” then what are the justifying reasons?
(b) If the answer is that no American child with a disability has a moral right to receive an appropriate K–12 education, then what are the reasons that justify this conclusion?
(c) If the answer is that some, but not all, American children with disabilities have such a moral right then which children have it, which do not, and, in both cases, why?
(2) Is the zero-reject