Barriers to Inclusion

Special Education in the United States and Germany

Justin J. W. Powell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781594512094
• eBook ISBN: 9781317263364
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Barriers to Inclusion offers a comparative and historical account of the rise of special education over the twentieth century in the United States and Germany. This institutional analysis demonstrates how categorical boundaries, professional groups, social movements, and education and social policies shaped the schooling of children and youth with disabilities. It traces the evolution of special education classification, explores growing special education organizations, and examines students' learning opportunities and educational attainments. Highlighting cross-national differences over time, the author also investigates demographic and geographic variability within the federal democracies, especially in segregation and inclusion rates of disabled and disadvantaged children. Germany's elaborate system of segregated special school types contrasts with diverse American special education classrooms mainly within regular schools. Joining historical case studies with empirical indicators, this book reveals persistent barriers to school integration as well as factors that facilitate inclusive education reform in both societies.

1

Special Education and Student Disability Over the Twentieth Century

To the maximum extent possible, children with disabilities … should be educated with children who are not disabled.

Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (United States, 1997)

The education of disabled youth should increasingly be accepted principally as the shared responsibility of all schools.

KMK Recommendation on Special Educational Needs (Germany, 1994)¹

The United States and Germany are meritocratic societies that aspire to provide equal opportunities in education to all children and to integrate them as citizens into the democratic polity. Over the 20th century, both countries successfully eliminated the outright exclusion of disabled children and youth from public schooling, but they achieved this in contrary special education settings. While in the US students with disabilities spend time in a variety of special and general classrooms, in Germany most attend one of ten special school types that remain separate from general schools. Although inclusive education programs throughout these countries demonstrate that such educational models can be successfully implemented within both national contexts, tenacious barriers to inclusion persist.

Comparing these two nations, this book asks why their special education systems developed as they did, diverging over time. Legislative mandates and numerous court cases in both countries have assured disabled students’ participatory rights in public schooling and reformed special education. However, students participating in special education continue to suffer stigmatization as well as frequent separation and segregation. Many children and youth identified as “having special educational needs”² still lack access to high expectations, rich curricula, and individualized support in the general classrooms of their neighborhood schools. In scores of places, even the general school attendance of children with disabilities proves challenging—or remains contested. While international conventions and charters reflect growing political, legal, and scientific support that emphasizes inclusive education’s benefits for individual learning and its desirability in, and for, democratic society, it has yet to be universally accepted or achieved in either country.

Thus, the questions this study addresses are: If a repeatedly declared aim—put forth most forcefully by parent advocates and the disability rights movement—is to make schooling more inclusive, what explains the tenacity of barriers to inclusion evident throughout the American and German educational systems? Which ideologies, institutions, and interests are responsible for development and change in special and inclusive education? How have special education organizations been reformed in these countries—and with what consequences for students who are considered disabled? Why have these systems diverged considerably, especially since World War II? How do American and German schools currently define and serve students with special educational needs, affecting their educational experiences and life courses?

Guided by an institutional perspective, the following chapters analyze changes in educational institutions and organizations. If we wish to understand why—to differing degrees—the US and Germany have not yet reached their proclaimed goal of inclusive education, we must observe structural and cultural barriers: diverse school settings as well as concepts of student disability. Often in conflict but also reflecting ambivalence toward special education, a host of professional and advocacy associations, social movement groups, and policymakers have shaped these systems, with significant consequences for students’ school experiences and educational attainments. To better understand special education and student disability, I compare differing educational policies, school organizations, categories of special educational needs, and classification processes in these two nations over the 20th century.

By tracing changes in the symbolic and social boundaries of special educational needs, student disability will be analyzed primarily as an ascriptive social status, not as a fixed objective property of individuals. While the probability of being born with an impairment or becoming disabled early in life remains low, it increases during schooling, especially as learning disabilities are increasingly identified.³ Investigating special education, as it defines and elaborates educational norms, provides insights into changing societal and school-based conceptions of disability, intelligence, and competence.⁴ Analyses of special education’s transformation uncover how educational systems manage the diversity of human abilities that schools are to foster and shape. They also allow us to gauge the provision of learning opportunities as well as of legitimated additional resources and accommodations that students need to access the curriculum and participate fully in school life.

Empirically, this book explores the historical origins and long-term growth of German and American (special) education that has universalized schooling for all children and youth. Of all disabled children and youth, often placed at the bottom of meritocratic hierarchies, some remain in general classrooms, while others are educated in separate classes or even in their own schools. The consequences of disparate special education institutions for students will be shown using indicators of classification rates, allocations to various special and inclusive education settings, and educational attainment probabilities.

The approach is both comparative and historical, as I investigate the construction of disabilities through one of the major institutions that defines them. In the longitudinal analysis, I will show that, with universalized compulsory schooling, not only did general education expand massively but special education grew apace. Embedded in general educational systems, subsidiary special education organizations developed, most rapidly since the mid-1950s. Provision of such schools and classrooms reduced the exclusion of children with perceived impairments and matched general education teachers’ increasing transfers of disadvantaged or difficult students from general classrooms. As its student bodies became more heterogeneous, (special) educational systems differentiated them, using official classification systems, into a range of disability categories—and into diverse organizational settings. The cross-national and regional comparisons emphasize both similar origins and contrasting developments of German and American educational systems within the context of the global rise of participatory rights to education for all and inclusive education.

This account charts a remarkable expansion of educational rights for children with disabilities over the 20th century, as it maps the development toward universal access to education as the key to citizenship in two societies that pioneered compulsory schooling and special education. While early founders of special education had focused mainly on educating blind and deaf people, today’s special education programs serve a highly heterogeneous group of children with social, intellectual, ethnic, linguistic, and physical differences. Although children with similar disadvantages and disabilities can be found in all countries, significant disparities exist not only in the size of the identified group and its demographic characteristics but especially in provided learning opportunities.

The complex decision-making processes and management of schools from multiple levels of governance have led to considerable differences in reactions to the challenges of student diversity and individual learning needs. Over the past few decades, educational reforms have modified the increasingly successful provision of support and services to disabled children and youth, seeking to not only secure the quantity of learning opportunities but also to improve their quality. The issue is no longer whether to educate children with perceived impairments, but rather which services they should receive and in which educational settings. Today’s conflicts are not so much about access to schooling itself, but rather about access to individualized and peer learning opportunities and to high expectations. At the heart of the debate surrounding inclusive education are the barriers that exist in the institutions and organizations of (special) education that continue to serve students outside general schools and classrooms.

These two nations’ special education systems increasingly diverged since the Second World War, with the US maintaining a range from special schools to inclusive classrooms and Germany solidifying its two-track system of special and general schools. Whereas many American states have succeeded in replacing special schools and classes with inclusive classrooms over the past several decades, most of Germany’s states (Bundesländer) maintain their segregated school systems. Internationally, these two country cases lie between the most segregating (e. g., Belgium, Greece) and most inclusive national educational systems (e. g., Italy, Norway; see EADSNE 2003; OECD 2004; Chapter 2). In both countries, attempts to achieve the goal of inclusive education have been challenged, especially in secondary education. Which disadvantages should be compensated, how much, in which school settings, and what level of school certification should result remains a matter of continued debate. Ambivalence toward well-intentioned, but often stigmatizing, special education programs highlights the tension between the aspiration to equality and merit measured by standardized tests and school performance.

Regardless of one’s normative preference for traditional special education or for inclusive education, the fact remains that, despite repeated rhetorical promises and legal commitments, neither the American nor the German society has fully embraced the unitary model of educating (nearly) all students together in general classrooms.⁵ Whereas access to education as a human right is globally understood and sought after, and nations compete using their educational investments to foster scientific innovation and produce human capital, inclusive education has only recently attained the status of a global norm (UNESCO 1994; OECD 2004). Yet the codification of inclusive education also underscores the parallel “paradigm shift” (Kuhn [1962] 1970) in understanding disability from medical to social models—from an emphasis on charity, welfare, and rehabilitation to a focus on human rights, antidiscrimination, and participation—that has spread quickly around the world over the past few decades (see Degener & Quinn 2006). In this book, attention is given to such global models and discourses in education and disability as well as citizenship and universal personhood (see Soysal 1994). Those ideas frame the study of how the national and regional (special) education systems in the US and Germany responded to the global expansion of rights and organized the schooling of disabled children and youth differently.

Compulsory Schooling, Citizenship, and Special Education

If an educated citizenry is the foundation of a democracy, it also represents the basis of a nation’s economy because skill formation is crucial not only for formulating political values but also for working in complex organizations. Compulsory schooling laws were originally enacted to socialize national citizens and to ensure the preparation of future workers (Heidenheimer 1997). By offering free public education and making it compulsory, democratic nation-states acknowledged the intimate relationship between education and citizenship (Marshall [1950] 1992: 16). Developed at the nexus of industrializing nation-states, forceful social movements and growing citizenship rights, mass schooling arose with the cultural ideologies of the modern system and the nation-state (Ramirez & Meyer 1980: 393). Socializing and integrating diverse student populations into the rapidly developing industrial nation represented crucial challenges for schools. As nation-states invested in, and mandated, schooling to educate their young citizens, their educational systems expanded in scale and scope. First, they did so in respect to literacy, then kindergartens, secondary schools, and higher education institutions (Meyer et al. 1977; Kaelble 2002), with educational systems extending their reach over the life course as students began to spend ever more time in school. Provision of learning opportunities and skill formation have become increasingly valued public goods, relied on for social and economic development as well as for democratic governance.

While compulsory schooling was initially introduced in Prussia and Massachusetts, Saxony included children with impairments from 1873, and Massachusetts was the first American state to do so, from 1885. Although these states were thought to be approaching universal mass education by 1870, with “all” children attending school, the formal enactment of compulsory schooling laws should not be (mis)taken for social reality, as nearly universalized enrollment rates often preceded or followed enactment (Meyer, Ramirez & Soysal 1992). Indeed, as this book emphasizes, the exclusion of disabled children has only been fully eliminated over the past few decades. They constitute the last group to be granted widespread access—in principle—to local neighborhood schools.

When accomplished in practice, compulsory schooling of all children greatly increased student body diversity, as girls, children of low socioeconomic status, migrants and ethnic minorities, and finally those with perceived impairments were brought to school. Educational systems responded to this challenge with increasing differentiation through school structures, such as age grading (Tyack & Cuban 1995: 88–91) and special education (Richardson & Parker 1993: 361). The goal of these reforms was to homogenize learning groups, in an attempt to resolve the tension between expanded access to common schooling and organizational constraints (Richardson 1999, 2000). Many schools and teachers lacked the resources and support, the training and methods, or the determination to accept these students. Informed by disciplinary knowledge, classification systems and groups or tracks based on ability and intelligence were organizational, pedagogic, and political responses to that diversity. In fact, while compulsory attendance affirmed the goal of schooling for all school-age children, it also specified the rules for the exemption of those deemed “ineducable” or “disabled”: Developments in special education reflect changes in these rules of access to, and passage through, schooling (Richardson 1999: 148).

As emergent mass educational systems in Germany and the US reflected evolving conceptions of citizenship, the rise of special education detailed dialectical relationships between in/educability, ab/normality, and dis/ability.⁶ Over 200 years and more, special educators elaborated their profession, specializing on types of student dis/ability most often based on statistically derived and psychometric definitions of ab/normality and intelligence. From the beginning, such cultural ideologies and models, inscribed in educational policies, affected which children were classified disabled and schooled in mostly segregated special education, if at all. The spread of special education, gradually at first, resulted in the concomitant establishment of special classes and schools to meet these newly acknowledged needs and rights of disabled and disadvantaged students. Often after a professional struggle, especially vivid in the perennial debates about the value of integrative versus special schooling, organizational forms emerged as the embodiment of the profession’s ideas and compromises.

While disablement, especially among war veterans, was a central concern of early welfare states (Skocpol 1995), disabled citizens in both countries have been among the last social groups to establish their rights in the areas of education, political participation, and labor markets. However, in accord with the power of citizenship, social movements continue to press for the inclusion of disabled people (Janoski 1998: 232).⁷ As democratic political culture developed, people were less and less willing to ignore surrounding inequalities, especially those that are viewed as arbitrary or unfair, such as being born with an impairment (Phillips 1999: 132). As states concerned with the welfare of their citizens expanded their social and educational policies to address a variety of individual needs and risks, special education grew to attend to those relating to learning. The rationale for state investment in education gradually extended to include children of all backgrounds and those with perceived impairments. Yet, such children fundamentally challenged and changed these systems, which, in turn, produced new categories—and larger numbers—of disabled students.

Rising expectations and standards in schooling have led to increasing proportions of students who participate in special education programs. These are charged with the task of compensating for a variety of student disadvantages and to meet strict standards. While special education’s diverse educational settings emerged gradually, they have expanded far more rapidly since the Second World War. Such programs offered assistance not only to children with recognized impairments. Increasingly, they also served children with a variety of learning needs that the profession defined, often in conjunction with developments in psychology, medicine, and neuroscience. While public schooling attem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Special Education and Student Disability Over the Twentieth Century
• 2 Comparing Special Educational Systems
• 3 Compulsory Schooling for All Children: Learning Opportunities in Special Classes and Special Schools
• 4 Classifying Student Dis/Abilities and Dis/Advantages
• 5 The Development of Special Education in the United States
• 6 The Development of Special Education in Germany
• 7 Special Education in the United States and Germany Compared
• 8 The Expansion and Divergence of Special Education Systems
• Notes
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Bibliography
• Index