The Real Challenge of Inclusion: Confessions of a 'Rabid Inclusionist.'

The new challenge of inclusion is to create schools in which our day-to-day efforts no longer assume that a particular text, activity, or teaching mode will "work" to support any particular student's learning, Ms. Ferguson avers. About a year ago, a colleague told me that my work was constrained by the fact that "everyone" thought I was a "rabid inclusionist." I was not exactly sure what he meant by "rabid inclusionist" or how he and others had arrived at the conclusion that I was one. I also found it somewhat ironic to be so labeled since I had been feeling uncomfortable with the arguments and rhetoric of both the anti-inclusionists and, increasingly, many of the inclusionists. My own efforts to figure out how to achieve "inclusion" - at least as I understood it - were causing me to question many of the assumptions and arguments of both groups. In this article, I wish to trace the journey that led me to a different understanding of inclusion. I'll also describe the challenges I now face - and that I think we all face - in trying to improve our schools. The Limits of Our Reforms Despite our best efforts, it was clear to my husband and me that even the possibility of "mainstreaming" was not open to our son Ian. Although mainstreaming had been a goal of the effort to change the delivery of special education services since the late 1960s, the debates never extended to a consideration of students with severe disabilities. Indeed, it was only the "zero reject" provisions of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (P.L. 94-142) in 1974 that afforded our son the opportunity to attend school at all - albeit a separate special education school some 20 miles and two towns away from our home. What that landmark legislation did not change, however, were underlying assumptions about schooling for students designated as "disabled." Since special education emerged as a separate part of public education in the decades spanning the turn of the century, the fundamental assumptions about students and learning shared by both "general" and "special" educators have not changed much. Despite periodic challenges, these assumptions have become so embedded in the culture and processes of schools that they are treated more as self-evident "truths" than as assumptions. School personnel, the families of schoolchildren, and even students themselves unquestionably believe: * that students are responsible for their own learning; * that, when students don't learn, there is something wrong with them; and * that the job of the schools is to determine what's wrong with as much precision as possible, so that students can be directed to the tracks, curricula, teachers, and classrooms that match their learning-ability profiles. Even our efforts to "integrate" and later to "include" students with severe disabilities in general education failed to challenge these fundamental assumptions. Indeed, these special education reform initiatives have served more to reinforce them. Unlike mainstreaming, which was grounded in debate about where best to provide the alternative curricular and instructional offerings that students with disabilities need, the reform initiatives of integration and later of inclusion drew much more heavily on social and political discourse. From a democratic perspective, every child has a right to a public education. For those moderately and severely disabled students who had previously been excluded from schooling on the ground that they were too disabled to benefit, the application of a civil rights framework gave them the same status as any minority group that was widely disenfranchised and discriminated against.(1) The essential message of integration was to remediate social discrimination (not so much learning deficits) by ending stigmatizing and discriminatory exclusion. We sought this more "normalized" schooling experience for Ian, advocating actively for placement in a typical public school rather than in a separate school. …