On Educational Inclusion

Meanings, History, Issues and International Perspectives

James M. Kauffman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000038422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Combining examination of policy with primary research and analysis of up-to-date literature, On Inclusive Education explores the various interpretations of inclusion, its history in education, and a range of its applications internationally.

With an international complement of authors, this book features detailed yet accessible chapters on a range of topics, including inclusion in law; academically gifted students; students with severe, sensory, and multiple impairments; and case studies from Germany, Portugal, the Netherlands, and the Russian Federation. The book also examines the impact of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities—and Article 24 in particular—and the likely legacies and future implications of recent inclusion movements.

For postgraduate students and academics researching in the field of inclusive education, and also for school administrators and policy makers, On Inclusive Education is an essential resource.

1

DEFINITIONS AND OTHER ISSUES

James M. Kauffman and Jeanmarie Badar

The word “inclusion” in its many forms and phrases (e.g., “inclusive,” “inclusionary,” “full inclusion,” “inclusive school,” “inclusionary practices”) and the words and phrases related to it (e.g., “unified sports,” “universal design for learning”) have become “hot button” issues related to various social policies, particularly education policy. The ideas and language have been popularized by many advocates for individuals with disabilities worldwide, including the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (the CRPD; Anastasiou, Gregory, & Kauffman, 2018; see also Anastasiou et al. 2020).

In the United States, major aspects of special education for children with disabilities are governed by a federal law typically known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, although it has had other titles). The first requirement of this law is free appropriate public education (FAPE) of all individuals with disabilities. Among other things, the US law calls for placement of students with disabilities (SWD) in the least restrictive environment (LRE), although that LRE must be one in which the student’s individual education plan (IEP) can be implemented. Furthermore, the LRE must be chosen from a full continuum of alternative placements (CAP) that includes, but is not limited to, general (regular) education or any other placement. According to the law, placement decisions must be individualized. Standard or automatic placements dependent on the category or label of the student’s primary disability or disability label are proscribed.

Our focus in this book is on inclusion in education, not the inclusion of people with disabilities in community activities or society more generally. One reason this is important is that inclusion in schooling presents issues not relevant in many other social situations. School is important because of what goes on there, which is distinctively different from what goes on in other social settings. Schools are congregations of individuals for two particular, primary purposes: Teaching and learning. They are societies’ primary social vehicles for teaching skills important for children’s development, especially academic skills for all who can learn them, but also social skills and self-care. Schools address individuals’ needs for learning to become independent, informed, self-fulfilled, productive citizens. They are created to help all students achieve these things to the maximum extent possible for them as individuals, depending on their age, interests, prior achievement, and needs.

Schools are not intended to address students’ needs harum-scarum, regardless of students’ age, interests, or prior achievement. Schools are intended to include children without regard to their color, heritage, weight:height ratio, and other characteristics that have no implications for instruction. The definition and issues related to inclusion of children with disabilities in general education are distinctly different from those regarding such inclusion of other forms of diversity. These differences in instruction have been detailed elsewhere (e.g., Kauffman, Hallahan, Pullen, & Badar, 2018; Pullen & Hallahan, 2015).

Nevertheless, some aspects of instruction are the same for all children, in that the instruction must be challenging for the individual (e.g., Endrew, 2017; Kauffman, Wiley, Travers, Badar, & Anastasiou, 2019; see also chapter 10). That is, in its ruling in the Endrew F. case (Endrew, 2017) the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) held that somewhat more than de minimis (i.e., minimum) benefit is insufficient, and free, appropriate public education (FAPE) requires challenging educational objectives, given the individual student’s circumstances.

As Crockett details in the next chapter, the concept of LRE is not new, having been part of US education law since 1975. Before it became US law, the related concept of normalization was suggested by Wolfensberger (1972). Normalization meant that treatment of people with disabilities should be “as culturally normative as possible” (Wolfensberger, 1972, p. 28), and that concept set the stage for the legal mandate of LRE (see also Hallahan, Kauffman, & Pullen, 2019).

Here, we merely mention that the history of special education seems to have been dominated by two passionate advocacies of opposite ideas about the placement of children with disabilities. We think people can take almost any proposition and passionately advocate for it to such an extreme that their advocacy becomes unhelpful, if not counterproductive, even destructive (Kauffman, Anastasiou, Badar, & Hallenbeck, in press). People appear to have done so in the institutionalization movement of the past, and they may be doing so again in the inclusion movement of the 21st century (Kauffman, Ahrbeck et al., in press).

The first of these unhelpful enthusiasms was dominant in the 19th century but continued into the first half of the 20th century. We refer to it as separapassion. This was the passionate belief that (a) effective teaching requires that SWD be placed in a separate special school or class in which a special educator provides instruction designed specifically for that child’s disability, (b) placement in a general education class typically precludes the instruction needed by SWD, and/or (c) special education’s improvement can best be achieved by making sure that special education is offered in a separate, dedicated setting. This belief, proposition, or invariant solution to the education and treatment of SWD was promoted by many professionals, who seemed to argue that, in all cases, everyone (children with and without disabilities and their families and communities) was better off when a child with disabilities was placed in an institution or special school or class.

The second invariant proposed solution we call inclusiopassion. This passionate belief began in the 1980s and now dominates the thinking of many in the 21st century. It is the passionate belief that (a) free appropriate public education (FAPE) cannot be achieved for any student placed in any setting other than general education, (b) inclusion in general education is demanded by the IDEA, and/or (c) special education’s improvement can best be achieved by striving to achieve the full inclusion of all SWD in general education classes. Its misapplication to students with emotional and behavioral disorders has been called FAPE accompli by Brigham, Ahn, Stride, and McKenna (2016) because FAPE was assumed to be possible only if the student was placed in a general education classroom. As we shall see, some would like to make the concepts of LRE and CAP moot by having an invariant placement—general education, regular classroom in the neighborhood school (no options or alternatives). The notion is that all special services—all instruction and related services—will be brought to the student in the general education setting or environment. That this is both possible and desirable is assumed and often asserted as unquestionable.

We now see the drawbacks of separapassion and, by the middle of the last century, understood the faux necessity of separate environments in all cases. By 1975, federal law recognized the need for LRE and CAP, which included all kinds of educational placements to fully meet the needs of SWD, including their families and communities. Inclusiopassion is merely the mirror image of separapassion, very much as the advocacy of deinstitutionalization of all people with disabilities became the mirror image of the institutionalization of all people with disabilities. Now, we are tempted to claim another, in many ways opposite, “final solution” to dilemmas of placement in the education of those with disabilities—general education in all cases. An understandable but counterproductive tactic is to avoid the inevitable mistakes of human judgement by proscribing all alternatives to bodily inclusion.

Defining inclusion

Even in education, “inclusion” is a variable concept, easily misunderstood. For example, Imray and Colley (2017) wrote:

educational inclusion despite a constantly changing and liquid definition, has not been achieved in any country under any educational system despite some 30 years of trying. It was no doubt a valiant and laudable attempt to ensure justice and equity but its failure must now be addressed. Inclusion has become a recurring trope of academic writing on education; it is trotted out as an eternal and unarguable truth, but it is neither. It doesn’t work, and it never has worked.

(Imray & Colley, 2017, p. 1)

Imray and Colley explain that inclusion is a dead idea when it is interpreted to mean placing all students in general education—an idea sometimes called full inclusion. Inclusion, even full inclusion, is decidedly not dead in its less radical forms that put instruction first (see also Osgood, 2005).

Of course, the argument that inclusion (of any description or by any definition) is dead has been met with the assertion that it is not (e.g., Slee, 2018), and efforts to make schools more “inclusive” have continued apace (e.g., Causton & Tracy-Bronson, 2015; Hehir & Katzman, 2012; Kaushik, 2019). The issue always has been—and it remains—just what practices actually lead to social justice and what practices, if any, have a patina of social justice but upon deeper inspection are found to result in injustice. Perhaps there is a form or ideology of inclusion so extreme or unrealistic that it turns against itself and causes the exclusion of individuals with disabilities in the activity in which they are to be included (Kauffman, Anastasiou et al., in press). Others may maintain that such extremism is justified and will not become self-destructive but will produce only true and enduring social justice.

As we suggested, people might conclude that inclusion of any type is not now and never will become its own worst enemy. Some seem to believe that any criticism of inclusion is more hysterical than logical. Moreover, “inclusion” means, to some, the location of the student’s body—presence in a regular classroom with students who have no disability. In their definition, placement comes first, and instruction plays “second fiddle.” We might call this a habeas corpus definition of inclusion (the Latin meaning of habeas corpus approximates “[we] have the body”). The legal term involves both a person’s body and a body of evidence justifying that person’s arrest and imprisonment. In another chapter in this book, the authors focus on the body of evidence supporting inclusion. However, as we use the words habeas corpus in this chapter, they refer only to the location of a student’s body in a general education classroom.

People who focus attention on where the student’s body is argue that the regular or general education classroom is always where students of any description should be placed—in classrooms intended for general public education. For example, Sailor (2009) wrote, “I recommend operating schoolwide RTI [response to intervention] models without having any separate special education classrooms” (p. 123; see also SWIFT Schools, 2019). About two decades earlier, attorney Frank Laski, then president of TASH (the acronym remains, although in 1975 it was founded as the American Association for the Education of the Severely and Profoundly Handicapped, or AAESPH), wrote:

All children with learning problems, whether they be “special education” students, “at-risk” students, or otherwise regarded as disadvantaged in schooling, belong in regular classroom environments.

(Laski, 1991, p. 412)

Three generations of children subject to LRE are enough. Just as some institution managers and their organizations—both overt and covert—seek refuge in the continuum and LRE, regional, intermediate unit, and special school administrators and their organizations will continue to defend the traditional and professionally pliable notion of LRE. The continuum is real and represents the status quo. However, the morass created by it can be avoided in the design and implementation of reformed systems by focusing all placement decisions on the local school and routinely insisting on the home school as an absolute and universal requirement. In terms of placement, the home-school focus renders LRE irrelevant and the continuum moot.

(Laski, 1991, p. 413)

Laski’s kind of thinking about inclusion has been at the forefront of inclusion rhetoric for a long time. Stainback and Stainback (1991) argued that, just as was found for racial segregation in schools, physically separate education is, in the case of disability as well as in the case of heritage or skin color, inherently unequal education. And, in defense of special education, as long as it is practiced when students’ bodies are in the right place, Blackman (1992) wrote:

“Place” is the issue … There is nothing pervasively wrong with special education. What is being questioned is not the interventions and knowledge that has [sic] been acquired through special education training and research. Rather, what is being challenged is the location where these supports are being provided to students with disabilities.

(p. 29, italics in original)

This focus on place or placement of SWD for their education in regular classrooms assumes that any teacher or teachers can make a classroom so malleable, supple, and differentiated that it serves all variations in children’s abilities appropriately. This idea has long historical roots (e.g., Gartner & Lipsky, 1987, 1989; Stainback & Stainback, 1984, 1991). That goal or idea also has its more contemporary advocates (e.g., Agran et al., 2020; Sailor & McCart, 2014; SWIFT Schools, 2019). This line of argument also begins with the assumption that social justice can be achieved only when all students, regardless of any characteristic they may have (other than chronological age and location of their domicile), must share a common space for their schooling. However, we argue that place is not the issue in achieving social justice for SWD in their education and that something is pervasively wrong with special education when place, not instruction, is the paramount concern.

In evaluating special education as habeas corpus, we understand that those who def...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Author biographies
• Series editor’s foreword
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Definitions and other issues
• 2 Inclusion as idea and its justification in law
• 3 The inclusion of students with high-incidence disabilities in general education environments
• 4 A science of instruction and its implications for students with disabilities
• 5 Tiered systems and inclusion: potential benefits, clarifications, and considerations
• 6 Disproportionality and inclusion
• 7 An examination of highly cited research on inclusion
• 8 Inclusion and students with severe, sensory, and multiple impairments
• 9 Inclusion of academically advanced (gifted) students
• 10 Inclusion, governments, and nongovernmental organizations
• 11 The impact of Article 24 of the CRPD on special and inclusive education in Germany, Portugal, the Russian federation, and the Netherlands
• 12 Likely legacies of the inclusion movement
• Index