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It's Instruction over Place - Not the Other Way around! Advocates of Inclusion, with Their Emphasis on the Place of Instruction as Opposed to Instruction Itself, Are Putting the Cart before the Horse, According to the Logic of the Law

2016; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 98; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

1940-6487

James M. Kauffman, Jeanmarie Badar,

Diverse Education Studies and Reforms

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Suppose that every Olympic event had to be held in the same environment. No environments for swimming, running, or soccer; no grassy field or track marked with lanes. Sports are sports, the thinking goes, so to be fair, competitions should be held in a single arena or stadium. Not only that, but athletes are just that--athletes. So for swimming, say, there should be no competition just for the butterfly or the breast stroke; swimmers should swim strokes and distances. Or suppose in hospitals there were no ICUs, no NICUs, or no maternity wards, none of that special stuff, just good hospital care for everyone because, after all, hospitals are hospitals, doctors are doctors, and patients are patients. It wouldn't take you long to think these are really crackbrained ideas. Yet we let similar nonsense pass for innovation in education. Many recent proposals to reform or transform general and education have emphasized full inclusion--that is, moving students with disabilities into regular or general education. The idea is that schools and classes should serve students so that no students are taught in special, dedicated environments (Brigham, Ahn, Stride, & McKenna, 2016; Gliona, Gonzales, & Jacobson, 2005; Kauffman et al., 2016; Kauffman, Ward, & Badar, 2016). For instance, take California's state plan for inclusion (The Special Edge, 2016). There, the place of instruction is what matters most; the assumption is that instruction can and should be offered in the same place. The idea of having students together in the same schools and classes regardless of their needs for instruction is taken seriously or even mandated by various legislators and administrators. But the fact is, this can make teachers' jobs impossible and place undue stress on both teachers and their students. Double ironies Movement toward full inclusion reveals two remarkable ironies, one legal and one conceptual. The legal irony is that the U.S. Department of Education supports projects such as SWIFT (School-Wide Integrated Framework for Transformation) at the University of Kansas; the project's motto is All means all (www.swiftschools.org). However, federal law requires a continuum of alternative placements, not full inclusion (see Bateman, 2007, in press; Martin, 2013; Yell, 2016; Yell, Crockett, Shriner, & Rozalski, in press). In fact, in spring 2016, a federal appeals court found that the Los Angeles Unified School District's abandonment of a continuum ofalternative placements in favor of inclusion violated the federal law, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) (Smith v. LAUSD, 2016). So the legal irony is that the U.S. Department of Education supports full inclusion projects that are illegal under its own law. The conceptual irony is that although some have suggested that education be reconceptualized as a service, not a place, education never was conceptualized as a place to begin with. Blackman (1992) epitomized the growing emphasis on place almost a quarter of a century ago: Place is the issue ... There is nothing pervasively wrong with education. What is being questioned is not the interventions and knowledge that has (sic) been acquired through education training and research. Rather, what is being challenged is the location where these supports are being provided to students with disabilities (p. 29). The place of instruction, not instruction itself, has become the central focus of the full inclusion movement. It's been made the focus by the very people who say it shouldn't be. The illogic of full inclusion Attempts to transform general and education to conform to the full inclusion ideal are not only illegal--they're also illogical. The idea that instruction can be improved simply by changing where it's delivered or that instruction can best be delivered in a general education context is inconsistent with experience and careful thinking. …