The Meaning and Practice of Inclusion for Students with Learning Disabilities

Since the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (P.L. 94142) nearly two decades ago, the focus of special education for individual students with learning disabilities (LD) has shifted from an emphasis on what and how to teach to an emphasis on where to teach. Discussions of practice used to be about individually prescribed instruction typically delivered outside of the general education classroom; discussions of practice these days are about grouporiented interventions or accommodations delivered within general education classrooms. Preservice teacher preparation in the 1970s stressed competencies in diagnostic-prescriptive teaching (Lerner, 1971) or response-contingent instruction (Zigmond, Vallecorsa, & Silverman, 1982) and the development of individually tailored instructional plans implemented one-to-one in resource rooms or self-contained classes (Faas, 1980). During the 1980s, it was common practice to administer elaborate assessments of students with LD, using both formal and informal tests, to document skill deficiencies in language, academic, and social domains, and to provide a carefully sequenced plan of remedial instruction, oneto-one or in very small groups, to correct the deficiencies. By the 1990s, however, we are being challenged to rethink special education services to students with LD, to abandon pull-out, diagnostic-prescriptive skill building, and to return students more completely to general education settings while delivering whatever specially designed instruction is needed within the confines of the general education class. Many practitioners and university faculty have responded to the gauntlet thrown down by Will (1986) in her call for a new vision of services for students with LD. The public school programs we described in the preceding cases all represent variations on the theme of including students with LD completely, or almost completely, in general education classrooms. In these case studies, we have tried to describe the richness of these variations. We have reported how inclusion operates from the perspective of the adults in each school by describing the roles and responsibilities of the various actors in the process of educating students with LD. But we have also paid particular attention to what the specific educational program feels like and looks like from the perspective of the individual student