“Including” young children with emotional and behavioral disabilities affects the learning and behavior of their non-disabled classmates, researchers conclude. Other students “had more absences, lower math and reading scores in kindergarten and 1st grade, and were more likely to act out in the classroom or struggle with social skills,” reports Ed Week.It doesn't take a tremendous leap of faith to extend these findings to high school, either.
Federal law requires mainstreaming of students with disabilities “to the maximum extent appropriate”.
There is a “direct negative effect,” said researcher Michael A. Gottfried, an associate professor of education at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
A lack of discipline hurts everyone, too.
5 comments:
I think the key word here is "appropriate".
We don't follow the modern ideology of making excuses for "children" by inventing "mental diseases" for every human fault.
What these pseudo-scientists call a "learning disability", I call "laziness" or "stupidity.
What they call a "behavioral disability", is commonly called "mischief" or "crime".
What normal people traditionally call "mischief" or "malice", they call a "behavioral disability".
At the heart of this nonsense is bad parenting, lack of impulse-control, and an ideology that shuns personal responsibility, as if children (and adults) have "diseases" which excuse them from public shaming or censure. Unlike people with Down's syndrome (a real physical condition), these people are perfectly healthy and "normal"; they simply lack discipline and civilization, acting barbarically in many cases.
On a macro scale, this is mostly to excuse "minority" and "liberal" worldviews; black, latino, white liberal, etc.
A black student who doesn't know how to read, acts inappropriately, and "knocks out" a bystander whilst jumping around like a monkey?
It's not that he's stupid, lazy, malevolent, or criminal. He can't help it because he has learning, emotional and learning disabilities - and people like me should fork over our tax dollars to pay loony social workers to "help" this hellspawn.
ADA has done teachers, schools and students no favor by what they see as "fairness" in the placement of students with disabilities. It is one thing to provide books on tape or it's equivalent to students with reading or vision disabilities. It is quite another to have to read every handout, test and question. For the last seven years, special needs students have been parachuted into even advanced electives simply to give the visual impression that they are getting mainstreamed. Here are a few of the things I have witnessed.
1. A mentally ill student who hated boys was placed in an art class where hammers, power tools and craft knives were used. She was allowed to stay in the class until she attacked the school nurse. The girl was over 300 lbs and the teacher of that class was a small woman. The entire class cowered on one side of the room for six weeks until she was removed.
2. A mentally ill student whose mother was a teacher had an IEP designed to keep him from doing any work on his own. Even thought his IPad would read documents, his mother insisted on another costly (and outdated)document reading program. He threatened the sculpture teacher, a woman with two young kids, in all kinds of atrocities which was reported, but he wasn't removed from class until he threatened to rape the daughter of a school board member.
3. A student on the spectrum, whose parents didn't want her to know her disability, was placed in regular ed college bound classes with an IEP that guaranteed she would pass any class. She was permitted (because Daddy was a lawyer) to take any class including AP classes. She would do things like smear wet clay in her hair, pour paint on tables or splatter herself and others with ink to get attention. This was often in classes where there were thirty or more kids and where other students had been denied access because she was allowed to take four art classes every year. This student took the ACT five times, the last time on four successive Saturdays.
4. A non-verbal, non writing, autistic student was placed in my advanced class. I was given no other info than he was on the spectrum. When he started talking on the first day while I tried to talk to the class over expectations, I whispered to him that I needed him to quiet down. Nobody told me it was a trigger. He stood up, six foot four, started wailing at the top of his lungs, threw a stapler across the room and generally terrified the class. I called for help and he was removed, but he had never in 13 years been in a gen ed class. What was the purpose?
These are just a few stories. We have documenation for every IEP, 504, GT kid in the room. God help the average kid who can't get the time of day because others must be served first. And please explain how it's "fair" for the students who will never leave a sheltered environment to have one to one student-teacher ratios when there are 40 kids in Algebra 2, another 27 in Biology and even more in English 3. Why are we investing so much time and effort to educate student who will rarely be taxpayers and then assuming the rest will somehow make it through? I'm not a brand new teacher-I have nearly 20 years under my belt. This is getting ridiculous.
Anonymous,
I am glad that you don't have any physical or learning problems. They do exist. For me I have nearsightedness, which due to family issues was not corrected until fifth grade. I have also struggled with mild dyslexia all of my life. Not enough to cause major problems, but to expect that I will be transposing numbers is not fun.
One time when I was repeating driving directions to our new plant, my mouth said right, my hand pointed left and my hand was right.
Anonymous, there are issues classroom teachers can and do handle. Vision problems, hearing problems, even students with physical disabilities can function in a gen ed classroom---but not kids who are uncontrollable regardless of their IEP's BIP's and behavior mods. My son is dyslexic, so I am familiar with the struggles incurred. But those students are often shoved aside as students with monster IEP's are placed in classes sucking up all the attention. There has to be a limit.
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