Summary
Inclusion—the
process of moving children with disabilities into
regular education settings so that they are able
to get the same instruction as their fellow regular
education students— has been discussed greatly by
legislators, educators, and parents of disabled
children. Keeping disabled students in isolated
settings in schools has been a practice that has
taken place for many years in education. Today,
one can walk the halls of schools and still find
classrooms where disabled youngsters do not have
an opportunity to come in contact with students
in the mainstream. Many disabled children are kept
in “remediation” classes. These classes are supposedly
designed to improve the skills of disabled youngsters
so that they will be able to perform well academically.
Unfortunately, teachers in these remediation programs
spend much time working on improving students’ performance
on basic skills. Thus the assignments they complete
are repetitive and mundane, and disabled students
very often do not have an opportunity to do assignments
that challenge their critical and creative thinking.
Efforts
at school reform place disabled children with regular
education students in the same classrooms to receive
the same instruction and the same directions, regardless
of their weaknesses. These reform efforts utilize
varied instructional strategies that help to jump-start
the skills of disabled students. While varying the
process to achieve identified goals, special education
students are no longer tracked and locked into groupings
that are based solely on their academic capabilities
but have an opportunity to get into groups that
challenge their thinking, because they are based
upon their interest and learning profiles.
In
this action research study, I looked at one reform
effort—inclusion—and studied groups of disabled
students who for the first time had been placed
in a full inclusion setting. I studied the progress
they made in their eleventh- and twelfth-grade English
classrooms and further examined how these students
fared in their new setting. I also looked at the
factors that support and/or hinder their academic
progress.
As
states push to get students to pass high-stakes
tests, a large amount of money is being expended
to improve the performance of students so that they
can reach the school district’s Average Yearly Progress
(AYP) targets that are established by state department
of education personnel. Placing students with disabilities
into these settings places additional burdens on
these expenditures while also placing districts
at risk of being labeled substandard when large
percentages of their students are not meeting AYP
targets.
My
findings demonstrate that disabled students can
perform just as well as—and in some cases better
than—their regular education counterparts when schools
take the initiative to implement school reform efforts
that are designed to help improve the academic performance
of students, provide a school atmosphere where students
feel connected to their environment and school personnel,
and provide much needed resources to help address
the health and social problems students encounter.
The participants in this study were asked to complete
a student survey. The results indicate that all
but one of the forty-four participants enjoyed being
in the inclusion setting.
RECOMMENDATIONS
- Policy makers should study the results of inclusion
classrooms, considering both the academic performance
and the social wellbeing of the disabled students.
- Inclusion
should be part of all districts that have students
with disabilities, and the proper training should
be provided to the teachers involved.
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