Parents of students with disabilities oppose mainstreaming
As policy makers push to include more special-education students into general classrooms, they are facing opposition from an unlikely quarter: some parents of students with disabilities. Advocates for the disabled say special-education students benefit both academically and socially by being taught alongside typical students. Legislators often side with them, arguing that mainstreaming is productive for students and cost-effective for taxpayers. Some teachers and administrators have been less supportive of the practice, saying that they lack the training and resources to handle significantly disabled children. And more parents are joining the dissenters. They believe that mainstreaming can actually hinder the students it is intended to help. Waging a battle to preserve older policies, these parents are demanding segregated teaching environments―including separate schools. In 2005, more than half of all special-education students were considered mainstreamed, or "fully included," nationally. These students spent 80% or more of the school day in regular classrooms, up from about a third in 1990, according to the U.S. Department of Education (ED). "The burden is on school districts and states to give strong justification for why a child or group of children cannot be integrated," says Thomas Hehir, an education professor at Harvard and former director of special education at ED.
That point of view frustrates many parents. Some have struggled to get services from their local school districts; others have seen their disabled children falter in integrated settings. Parental pushback has prompted local school districts across the country to delay or downsize mainstreaming initiatives. Last year, parents of disabled kids in Walworth County, Wis., clashed with an advocacy group over the creation of a new special-education school. As part of the battle, Disability Rights Wisconsin sued the county in Milwaukee federal court to try to block the school. The new school is currently under construction and the lawsuit is under appeal. The debate has grown contentious in New Jersey, a state with a strong tradition of separate education for the disabled. About 9% of the state's disabled students―triple the national average―attend separate schools. In 2004, the state, which had faced federal pressure to mainstream, placed a year-long moratorium on the opening of new special-education schools. Since then, it has stiffened the approval process for private facilities and bolstered funding for local districts to broaden in-house programs. In June, a coalition of disability-rights groups sued the New Jersey education department in U.S. District Court in Newark. Taking a page from the racial desegregation battles of the 1960s, it alleges the department isn't moving fast enough to integrate disabled students and asks the federal court to take over the process.
Wall Street Journal, 11/27/07, By Robert Tomsho
[Editor’s Note: In an appearance at the annual conference of the Education Law Association last month, Amy Rowley, the named plaintiff in the first Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, Hendrick Hudson Central School Dist. v. Rowley, 458 U.S. 176 (1982), said that she views the California school for the deaf that her children attend as the “least restrictive environment” for them. While this contradicts IDEA’s definition of that term, Ms. Rowley cites the support and peer interactions available in such an environment.]