I’ve seen a couple of messages recently in which inclusion or mainstreaming has been lamented. One of them appeared on Bignity, the new group blog devoted to students with disabilities. In it Jaime Openden talks about the importance of having all teachers prepared to work with students with disabilities and her misgivings about mainstreaming.
For better or worse, mainstreaming is the direction our educational system has been heading in for years. Mainstreaming to me is like communism or a giant hot fudge sundae with the works. Sounds pretty sweet in theory; in practice, not so much.
The second appeared in correspondence on the mailing list associated with Association for Direct Instruction. These are the DI folks, people who are, with some justification, pretty well convinced that they know how to teach students with learning problems successfully, to help them succeed. It’s a bit longer and covers a lot more concerns.
I am still teaching in xxxx county and special education is a mess….in fact teaching in FL is not fun at all anymore. The state and county have gone test crazy. I have not been able to implement Reading Mastery correctly with all its components for several years now. We have to leave our ESE kids in the classroom for instruction and we are supposed to co-teach in the reg ed room. Often our kids sit there with dazed expressions on their faces. They do not pass the state’s FCAT reading test. They cannot spell. They have difficulty writing a complete sentence with correct grammar, punctuation, capitalization and spelling. But conventions don’t matter on FCAT writing, Next year we planned to put about 12 of our severely learning disabled, ASD, and IND (Intellectually disabled….formerly educably mentally handicapped….formerly mentally retarded….it’s the same thing…..I think they change the name so lay people won’t know what it means) 3rd, 4th & 5th graders who are reading at a beginning first grade level back into a self contained ESE classroom which I volunteered to teach. I was so excited because I really do love to teach….but then the bigwigs in the ESE department said they all have to be in regular homerooms because they learn so much from being in reg ed and the “research shows that they don’t learn as much in a self contained ESE room because the curriculum is not rigorous enough”. What research are they talking about? I just would like the time I need to teach these kids to read and to understand a little math….they can’t add or subtract……they didn’t have one-to-one correspondence by the third and fourth grades!! Being in reg ed homerooms means that I will have to deal with the schedules of six or more teachers to try to find the time to teach…..and I won’t get to teach them science and social studies at their reading levels.
Lots of people interested in LD are full-speed-ahead advocates for having students with LD included full time. Others have reservations, arguing that students with LD need specialized instruction delivered in classroom environments that are not available in the mainstream.
What about you? What are your thoughts? What are the pros and cons in your experience?
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Subtyping LD
Have you been hearing a lot about subtypes of LD lately? Perhaps it’s just that I’ve been especially alert to it, but it seems I’ve heard a lot of mentions about subtypes of Learning Disabilities in the last few weeks. I want to write a longer, more thorough discussion of the topic, but I’ve found myself repeating a few foundational comments, so I thought I ought to post them here and let others have a go at them.
First, the idea of subtypes of LD is essentially a given. It has to do with the heterogeneity of LD. Because LD is essentially an umbrella category for a diverse array of learning disabilities (note the plural), there are bound to be subgroups. Some students will have problems primarily with reading, some primarily with arithmetic and mathematics, some with writing, others with combinations of these. That makes for lots of subgroups right there. That is, one could start with dyslexia, dyscalculia, and dysgraphia!
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