The History of Inclusion in the United States

8. 1992–2004: The Promise, Limits, and Irony of Inclusion

T oday, special education stands at a crossroads. After decades of efforts to create truly special education for children with disabilities , decades of internal and external critique of the scope, form, and substance of special education within public school systems, and decades of trial and error—intellectual as well as practical—in trying to shape special education in ways that would allow it to serve a wide range of stakeholders while trying to address goals and expectations that were so often mutually exclusive, special education arrived at a point where it was more visible and contentious than ever. Between 1990 and today, special education has continued to evolve as a result of legislative action, court decisions, practical experience, and exposure to some long-held but never outdated visions as well as concerns. As the debate moves into the new century, the perspectives that continue to resurface are fundamentally empirical, pedagogical, operational, ethical , ideological, and emotional in nature, all qualities that have been present in the discussions in varying degrees for decades. While there is no imminent end to the controversy over the proper extent to which children with disabilities should be integrated in regular classrooms, the beginning of a new century does provide an opportunity to consider what has brought the debate to this point and assess what we may have learned from it thus far. Legislation and court decisions continued to validate and spur on 180 1992–2004: The Promise, Limits, and Irony of Inclusion 8 efforts to bring more and more children with even more involved disabilities into the regular classroom. In 1990, PL 94-142 was reauthorized as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The reauthorization continued the emphasis on the need for regular classrooms to engage in purposeful adaptation for students with disabilities, maintained the importance of the least restrictive environment, expanded services to children with disabilities, and added conditions such as autism and traumatic brain injury to the list of disability categories. In 1997, IDEA was again reauthorized, this time to protect the rights of students whose disabilities result in “violent or dangerous” behavior and to improve parent participation as well as school-parent relationships in special education. The 1997 IDEA also revamped funding in order to ease the financial impact of special education on local districts while also “account[ing] more accurately for poverty.” It should be noted, however, that this reauthorization also redefined the construct of “free and appropriate education” to comply more fully with the Rowley decision of 1982, in which the court determined that an appropriate education did not require districts to provide the best possible education . Court decisions in civil lawsuits brought against schools by parties representing disabled children more often than not found in favor of the child, thus reinforcing the responsibilities of school districts to ensure that the regular classroom could effectively serve as a child’s least restrictive environment. Such decisions, grounded in civil rights law, provided continued impetus to those advocating for greater integration and put schools on notice that limited resources, past expectations, or the difficulties involved in making necessary changes or accommodations to the regular classroom were insufficient reasons to avoid doing so. Legislation and court action for the most part underscored the assumption that the regular classroom was essentially the default least restrictive environment for all children, and that schools were expected to do more to keep it that way.1 As the federal government, state legislatures, and court decisions pressed for more complete and authentic integration of exceptional children in regular classrooms with an eye toward the rights issues involved, the debate about the educational implications and ramifications of that trend continued at full throttle. The complex and intense The Promise, Limits, and Irony of Inclusion 181 controversy over the Regular Education Initiative (REI) maintained its high profile and attracted widespread interest and attention both within the profession and, increasingly, among the public. It was during the early 1990s within the context of such debates that inclusion began to emerge as the definitive term describing the range of efforts to serve many more students with disabilities than ever before in regular classrooms . As with the term mainstreaming, inclusion as a definitive term did not appear in the law and did not arise from a single event, document , or scholarly work. The term had been used in its current context seldom if at all prior...