The Gospel of Inclusion is being preached pretty heavily in my school district right now, and its constant message is that children with disabilities flourish when exposed to children without disabilities.
I should be a member of the choir, shouting Amen! to that line of thinking, since I campaigned hard for my daughter to be mainstreamed years ago, long before the district had converted.
But as I've watched, through the years, the way being with children without disabilities has felt for my daughter, and the way being with children with disabilities has felt for my son in self-contained, I have to wonder: Why do people imbue typically functioning kids with such magical powers? Mainstream students exhibit plenty of behaviors I'd be horrified to have my kids adopt. (Watch a group of fifth-grade girls cutting a friend from the herd, or a bully working the playground, and you'll know what I mean.) Kids are kids, not benevolent off-rubbing role models.
So what are we saying, then, when we declare, full of beneficence, that children with disabilities belong in the enchanted and life-enhancing company of their typical peers? Essentially, that letting children with special needs be with children like themselves is death to them. Whatever they'll learn from "regular kids" is bound to be better than what they'll learn from each other, gah!
Some empowering message that is.
And I have a close-up view of what that message does. My daughter has done decently in mainstream classes. She keeps up well enough. But socially, sometimes, I feel like she's a traveler without a country. Her mainstream classmates are friendly, which is, importantly, not the same thing as friends. At the same time, though, trying to fit in has made her unsympathetic to children with more noticeable disabilities. She's disengaged from her former self-contained buddies, but found no one to replace them.
So when I look at my son's self-contained class, it's hard to see it as the "Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here" horror it's supposed to be. He has friends. He has a teacher who is working with students with disabilities on purpose, and not because of state mandate. He has a safe environment where he is understood and accepted, and his differences are part of him but not all of him. He is involved with his classmates and enjoys their routine; his teacher says he's like the mayor of their classroom.
I don't believe that dropping him into a roomful of typically developing peers would magically turn my spirited little frog into a prince. I wouldn't want it to. I do think, though, that it would rob him of his feeling of having a place in the world, a people. And I'm certain that his educational curriculum would turn from actually teaching him things at his particular pace and ability, to teaching him to act more "normal" in a community of unsupportive peers. The mainstream can be a pretty restrictive environment, too.
Making kids with disabilities part of the wider community is a wonderful, necessary thing. But there are all sorts of ways to do it. Being in a self-contained class in our neighborhood school has been a nice compromise situation for my son, allowing him to be aware of but not obsessed with students outside his class. Increasing the inclusiveness of clubs and teams would be a nice gesture for a lot of schools, who seem to feel their obligation toward mainstreaming ends with the final bell. Kids should have the opportunity to both be involved in the life of their school and retreat from it as appropriate.
Educational theories tend to work in absolutes, and we've gone from saying that kids with disabilities must all be placed together to saying that they must not be. But any system that sets rules without considering the needs and strengths of the individual is discriminatory, whether it seeks to exclude or forcibly include. "Individualized" is right there in the name of the document that outlines special education programs. That should be clue enough that it's their differences that make kids magical, not their degree of typical-ness.
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Hi, I wrote something along these lines today for BADD. (But she put it in with parenting and not education, so don’t know if you caught it. Or you might have and decided it was too damn long!)
I am a parent with a disability. My children seem to be able bodied thus far, but I grew up “mainstreamed” and then I was a special ed teacher for a while. I have gone through several transformations about this subject. And although I do not mean to suggest that children should not be mainstreamed if that worked for them, and should definitely have the opportunity to do so, I agree with what you are saying. To force someone to be “the only” their whole childhood is a hard burden to bear. Anyway, nice post and just thought I’d give you a tip to mine. Would be curious to hear your thoughts. (That is, if you can get through it! I really didn’t mean for it to get so long!)
I couldn’t have said it better myself. I did say something related at www dot therextras dot com.
Yep, yep and yep. While my guy absolutely flourished in a fully inclusive environment, there are some kids that won’t. It simply has to be individualized so that every child gets his/her needs met.
Great post!
Wow again! I felt like a traitor not thinking mainstreaming was all it was cracked up to be.
We experienced the best of a self-contained school where our son was tested constantly and pushed to the limits of his abilities and got to experience being the “King of the Hill” on occasion. He spent the last four years of high school in a large high school where he was the only legitimately retarded kid. He learned a few good things, but accomplished virtually nothing educationally, and was exposed to some ugliness that is “normal”, but not nice.
I can’t imagine thrusting him into that situation until his grooming, self-care, and speech skills had reached the level where he wouldn’t have been embarrassed and truly ostracized.
It ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Thanks for voicing that so well. Janie
Thanks for your contribution to Blogging Against Disablism Day
There has been a big drive for inclusion in education here in the UK in recent years and as you may envisage, it has been absolutely fantastic for very many disabled children and a complete disaster for others.
The whole point about valuing everyone as equal is to make sure everyone gets the best chances. And that necessarily means acknowledging and accepting difference, not pretending it isn’t there.
A great post.
Love the post- so true! So far my daughter and I are having a great experience mainstreaming but she’s only in 1st grade so it remains to be seen how it goes as she gets older. It has been trying to balance out the parts of her identity that is related to Down syndrome and the plain old kid parts. I like her to be wherever she is most comfortable and supported- that’s what is most important.
Open Question: So do you think in general, mainstreaming should be done in later years?
Mainstreaming has been WONDERFUL for my daughter. I agree that not one type of learning fits ALL – but mainstreaming should not be discounted either. Let the parents and educators together decide what meets the child’s need at what point in their life. My daughter has not only learned a lot from her class – and no not all of it good – but THAT was a teaching opportunity too – AND the CLASS has learned a LOT *FROM* her!!!!
My daughter thrives in environments with her biological peers but she does not benefit by being in the classroom with them because her IEP is based on her specific needs and her individual emerging abilities. Fortunately, we still have 2 therapuetic-based school in town offered through an MR/dd so she attends there.
Since my background is special education, I see the other the side of the coin, too. Some schools think mainstreaming is letting all the kids be in the lunch rooms together. But most of the day the kids are in a separate room or what the school defines as “LRE.” A room filled with kids of varying LDs, developmental delays, and behavior issues.
Sometimes I see it working very well at some of the district schools. When it isn’t working, I call it “the mainsteam warehouse” because the kid’s needs are just being “warehoused” there until the end of the day.
I also think many of the schools are light years away from truly including children with global delays and I find most schools are delusional about mainstreaming. Think about it. For a child who has an individual education plan (which is based on THEIR own emerging abilities) to be fully mainsteamed into a classroom or a school setting requires a systemic overhaul & changes in attitudes about how we view “education” in general. For my daughter to be included, she would need a special education teacher ALL THE TIME to make the adaptions in curriculum to match her “ability” plus she would need an OT/PT/Speech person to be in the classroom ALL THE TIME.
She would be a three ring circus in a current classroom settings. She would be a distraction in a cognition-driven classroom setting …
Here’s my take on mainstreaming kids. It has worked great for my 3 boys up until junior high.
K-6th my kids, the teachers, and the aids worked very hard to get through the curriculum each year with modifcations and a laundry list of accomodations. My husband worked his you know what off to pay for and insane amount of private tutoring and therapy to remediate them so they could keep up with their peers. My kids were somewhat stressed, but happy because they had friends and they always felt like they fit in despite their leaning disabilities and attention problems.
Fast forward to junior high. My boys who were always well-liked in grade school were dropped like hot potatoes by their peers starting in 7th grade. While they always could keep up in the classroom, suddenly they started to fall behind because the academic pace and homework went into overdrive.
Additionally, they were bullied because for the first time they appeared different. It’s that junior high thing. You’re “out” just for wearing the wrong color that day let alone be LD.
I have always believed in inclusion and I do think my kids have benefitted from being in a a regular classroom during their grade school years. However, now that they are somewhat proficient at reading, writing and arithmetic kind of if you don’t count algebra and 5 paragraph essays), I just want them to have a “normal” high school experience. For the first time, I am exploring private high schools and boarding schools that specialize in teaching kids with learning differences. I just want my boys to have friends that they can relate to and play on a team. The only up side to the junior high nigtmare, is that they are not fighting as much because all they have is each other right now and they know they have to make it work.