Enhancing Diversity: Educators with Disabilities

Contributors

Toreword Robert R. Davila Enhancing Diversity: Educators with Disabilities is a unique, timely, and relevant book. Three distinguished teacher-educators, Clayton E. Keller, Ronald J. Anderson, and Joan M. Karp, have gathered the writings of a selected group of respected and well-known teacher-educators, including themselves, that address the trials, tribulations , and triumphs of persons with disabilities who seek and achieve entry into professionallife as educators. These authors examine the importance of support services, the critical barriers to successful performance, and conclude by recommending actions that, if implemented, have the potential to facilitate entry into the field of education and create more and better opportunities for persons with disabilities. Education is a major enterprise that employs hundreds of thousands of teachers , counselors, psychologists, mental health professionals, instructional design and curriculum specialists, administrators, and numerous other service personnel throughout the estimated thirty thousand school districts in the country. Since the civil rights movement of the sixties, there has been slow but steady progress in transforming the nation's teachers into a group that more closely "mirrors the face of America." Of course, I am speaking about progress made in the recruitment and employment of persons of color and other ethnic minorities. For persons of my generation , it was not unusual to go through elementary school, high school, and even college without having been taught by a person of color. I never was. We need to be reminded, however, that persons with disabilities also reflect images in the mirror. Little has been written about persons with disabilities employed in the field of education, and thus their numbers are difficult to estimate. I had questions about numbers and assignments when I served as assistant secretary for special education and rehabilitative services in the u.S. Department of Education. In my numerous visits to classrooms throughout the nation, I seldom encountered teachers with disabilities . As a result, I developed the unresearched opinion that the number of persons with disabilities employed in the classrooms of the nation was unusually small because it is known that they are underrepresented in professional preparation programs , and that the majority of those employed are tracked into separate classes for children with disabilities (this is definitely true for teachers who are deaf). This seems to be true despite Section 504 of the Rebabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act, which were supposed to open doors for qualified persons with disabilities seeking employment. This book does not fully answer all our questions about the issues facing the preparation, recruitment, and employment of persons with disabilities, but it goes a long way toward clarifying issues and concerns and providing guidance and direcVII Vlll • ForeworiJ tion to decision makers in the event they move beyond rhetoric and get serious about tapping an available, capable, and resourceful cadre of potentially excellent role models for the nation's schoolchildren. Enhancing Diversity will be useful to advocates who champion access and opportunities for persons with disabilities. But more than that, it will be invaluable to the education community, which needs to recognize and appreciate the potential of persons with disabilities for professional service. With this recognition and appreciation will come a better understanding of the role education administrators can assume to promote the same inclusiveness among their staffs that they promote among their student bodies. Ronald J. Anderson, Clayton E. Keller, and Joan M. Karp, and the distinguished writers they invited to contribute to this volume, have done an excellent job of presenting a set of critical issues in an objective manner. They deal with the issues forthrightly, but they also advocate on behalf of qualified and capable persons with disabilities without trying to promote disability as a qualification. Keller and Karp are able-bodied persons who are well known and respected in the teacher-education community; Anderson is physically challenged as a result of spina bifida and is an icon in the disability community, recognized as one of its pioneers in the empowerment movement. As a professional educator of long-standing, including seventeen years of classroom teaching, I believe this book will go a long way in promoting greater understanding and acceptance of persons with disabilities at all levels of professional service in the field of education. It is long overdue. ofcknowledgments A number of people have contributed significantly in their own ways to the development of Enhancing Diversity: Educators with Disabilities. We would like to acknowledge their assistance...