For the Berkeley Heights School District, much fanfare has accompanied our efforts at inclusion for special education students, with administrators touting how other districts are looking to us as a shining example of what inclusion should be. I’m going to say something that will, for some (and maybe many), be an unpopular idea: we need to rethink whether inclusion is the best practice. Before going into why I believe we need to take another look at inclusion, some basic information is needed.
First, this idea is squarely focused on middle and high school. While I do have some concerns about inclusion in the earlier grades, due to the nature of learning – social, academic, and personal for young children – it’s a more complex situation for which I’m not well-versed or well-read enough to have a strong opinion.
Second, the term “special education” tends to conjure up an image of students that have more extensive learning disabilities than most children who receive services for special education in Berkeley Heights. Many, if not most, of these students can’t be identified by the casual observer. Indeed, many parents go to great lengths to hide that their student has any level of academic disability. When talking about inclusion, this is important to note because I believe some of what drives inclusion is appearance. Inclusion has a kind of automatic positivity associated with it. It sounds nice; beautiful, even, as a core idea of how we would all like to be treated.
Lastly, it’s important to understand what inclusion looks like in our middle and high school. I’ve written before about the Collaborative Consultative Model, which seems to be the largest component of inclusion for students in our middle and high school. Special education students are placed in a general education classroom with one general education teacher, and one special education teacher who splits their time between two classes.
Now on to the reasoning that leads me to question whether inclusion, as Berkeley Heights is currently implementing it, is the best academic choice. the Hechinger Report, in an article from January 2023 notes, “For the past 25 years, U.S. policy has urged schools to keep students with disabilities in the same classrooms with their general education peers unless severe disabilities prevent it. It seems a humane policy not to wall off those with disabilities and keep them apart from society. Who would argue against it?” My personal experience with my own child who received services under an IEP (Individualized Education Plan) is what led to me to be that person who would argue against it. I (we) found that the most effective class (for math, in our case) was the one made up of students of similar ability, taught by a dedicated special education teacher.
The testing following this 8th grade class – before my child was moved into the general education classroom – is what enabled the “alternative pathway to graduation” when my child didn’t pass the math portion of the new NJGPA exam. The general education classes were a disaster. At one point, after diving into article after article about the Collaborative Consultative Model, after fighting with our former superintendent to try and gain information about specific details of the model, and after email after email with teachers, our case manager, and school staff, I had a conversation with a teacher who said it was “impossible to meet the needs of every student” with this model. This reinforced what I had been seeing and my child had been experiencing. Two years later, after all of this led to a meeting with the Supervisor of Special Education (now our Director), our concerns were met with a listening ear and a small class for students experiencing challenges with the general education setting was brought back. Sadly, at that point my child had given up and barely made it to the finish line – a just-passing grade for the needed math credits.
Our own experience is nothing more than a single, anecdotal data point. Others are noticing, though, and it has led to attempts to provide solid data.
The Hechinger Report article focuses on a relatively recent international analysis of special education inclusion. The article talks about a meta-analysis done by Nina Dalgaard, who is lead author of the inclusion study for the Campbell Collaboration, a nonprofit organization that reviews research evidence for public policy purposes. “I was surprised. Despite a rather large evidence base, it doesn’t appear that inclusion automatically has positive effects. To the contrary, for some children, it appears that being taught in a segregated setting is actually beneficial.” It is noted that 99% of the studies that were looked at for inclusion (no pun intended) for the meta-analysis were rejected. Of note, most studies “were qualitative studies that described students’ experiences in an inclusion classroom but didn’t rigorously track academic progress.” Academic progress is, inarguably, THE goal of education. To do a study that doesn’t track a child’s academic progress seems, to me, to be nothing more than an attempt to justify the move toward inclusion, regardless of the actual effects. The end result of this analysis (which mirrored previous analyses), was inconsistent results on the benefits of inclusion, or very small benefits for some students. Unsurprisingly, the study met with pushback from many advocates for children with academic disabilities.
In researching, an article popped up in my ‘search’ about the structure of upper education in Europe. This was interesting to me, as I hadn’t searched specifically for this information. Perusing the article, I noted that what likely added this to my search results were the academic “tracks” that are offered by many European countries. It’s more than I want to delve into with this article, but the finding that not all students are automatically expected to continue their upper education past ninth or tenth grade was an eye opener. Some students went on to the final level. Some started apprenticeship programs with courses specific to the trade being practiced – like the UCVTS programs on steroids. A few ended their education at that point. This all did seem to fit with the suggestion that we may find more success for students when we meet them where they are, rather than try to force them into our idea of what sounds best.
As a last note, I like to compare the practice of putting nearly all special education students in the general education setting with our practices for placing students into Honors or Advanced Placement classes. To get into these academically advanced classes, one needs to maintain a high grade and receive a teacher recommendation from a previous class. We don’t take an average student and put them in an advanced class, offer them a small amount of extra help, and expect them to shine. It’s really not much different for many of our special education students who are placed in the general education setting with a half-time special education teacher. It’s also worth noting that as students mature, they become more attuned to the need to fit in with their peers and are more reluctant to reach out to the special education teacher or ask questions of the main teacher if they feel like everyone else is understanding the material.
As we look at our academic progress as a district, it may be worth a second look at how we approach the educational needs of our special education population. Inclusion needn’t be thrown out the window, but maybe shouldn’t be the basket we put all our eggs in, either. We may find that regaining our feet, academically speaking, happens with more diversity and less inclusion, to use some current catchwords, and that even students who are not receiving special services may benefit from a more varied approach.