Enduring Issues In Special Education

Personal Perspectives

Barbara Bateman, John W. Lloyd, Melody Tankersley, Barbara Bateman, John W. Lloyd, Melody Tankersley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781136265969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Enduring Issues in Special Education is aimed at any course in the undergraduate or graduate special education curriculum that is wholly or partly devoted to a critical examination of current issues in special education. The book organizes 28 chapters into seven sections using familiar structuring principles—what, who, where, how, when, why, and whither. Each section begins with an introduction that provides historical, legal, and theoretical background information and organizing commentary for the chapters that follow. The book's objective, in addition to informing readers about the issues, is to develop critical thinking skills in the context of special education. Key features include the following:

Dialectic Format – Each of the 28 chapters presents compelling reasons for addressing the issue at hand and specific ways to do so. Because each issue is written from different perspectives and focuses on a variety of aspects, readers are encouraged to weigh the arguments, seek additional information, and come up with synthesized positions of their own.

Organizing Framework – The book's seven sections have been arranged according to a scheme that is the essence of most investigative reporting and provides a coherent, easy-to-understand framework for readers.

Expertise – All chapters are written by leading scholars who are highly regarded experts in their fields and conclude with suggested readings and discussion questions for additional study.

1
Introduction: Does Special Education Have Issues?

John Wills Lloyd, Melody Tankersley, & Barbara Bateman

Getting to Know John Wills Lloyd

After volunteering to teach blind kids swimming during junior high, I began working in special schools as a teacher’s aide for students with many different types of disabilities—autism, emotional and behavioral disorders, learning disabilities, and intellectual disabilities— ranging from kindergarten to high school when I was in college in the mid- and late-1960s. I learned teaching skills from some very good teachers—and some really challenging students.

Later Pat Lloyd and I were teaching parents for four children who had been living in a state hospital. Although we were in our early 20s, we had children ranging from 7 to 15 living with us. We fixed their meals, did their laundry, taught them manners, took them to school and the fair, and helped them adapt to living in the community.

I went back to teaching—before our modern laws—in very heterogeneous classes of students. Just about every one of the students was intriguing and even delightful in her or his own way. Pat and I even taught together some of the time. I have fond memories of many of them even though that was the 1970s.

I learned how to manage behavior from those very good teachers and those students with whom I worked. I also read the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis and would say to myself, “Oh, I could use that.”

I could get my students to sit at their desks, follow directions, and work industriously. I’d read lots of books and journals; I thought I knew a lot. But I didn’t know how to structure academic instruction effectively; other than Distar, all I really could do was give students graduated sequences of worksheets. So, I went to graduate school to learn about instruction.

The night of my first class in graduate school at Oregon, I listened to Barb Bateman give a three-hour lecture that re-captured and reinterpreted nearly everything I’d read, made me reflect anew on lots of what I’d experienced, challenged me to reconsider my assumptions, and directed me to a path of critical thinking that I hope I’ve upheld and I know I’ve never regretted following. And then, after class, in a private moment, she told me that if I wanted to know about teaching, I should go talk to Zig. To my benefit, I followed that advice.

I went home late that night and told Pat Lloyd all about that first class. It was transformative for me. Thanks, Barb.

Getting to Know Melody Tankersley

As far back as I can remember I wanted to be a teacher. My mother recounts the days I would run into the house from kindergarten and first grade and drag my younger brother into my bedroom to teach him what I had just learned in school. My mother likes to talk about all of the admonishments of, “No, Chuck! Do it this way!” yelled from my room. By the time he entered kindergarten, he no longer enjoyed “playing” school, so I had to line up my dolls and kittens to be my students (kittens do not take direction very well).

Although I knew I wanted to teach, I did not know who I wanted to teach until I began my practicum experience in my undergraduate program at Winthrop College (now Winthrop University). I was captivated and motivated by my students with emotional and behavioral disorders and knew that I had found my career. My first job was as a special education teacher in a small-town high school in South Carolina where the students had previously been taught in alternative placements. We set up class in the high school basement (colloquially referred to as the dungeon) in the old ROTC room (rumored to have guns in the locked cabinets). Certainly, it was not what I expected my first classroom to look like. It was a new experience for me and also for my students, all of whom had been away from their general education peers for many years. We learned a lot together—and not always lessons that my students or I expected to learn. But my first group of students inspired me to continue looking for answers and approaches that would enhance their learning, interactions, and outcomes.

Eventually, I completed my Masters degree in special education and began teaching students with severe emotional and behavioral disorders in a residential treatment facility in Charlotte, North Carolina. The full array of services brought to bear upon the children, including family, psychological, medical, educational, and agency programming, helped me to understand the pervasive and long-term needs of my students. This experience started me thinking about how we equip teachers and other professionals with the skills, experiences, and fortitude necessary to work most effectively with children and youths with emotional and behavioral disorders.

So, back to school I went. I entered my doctoral program at the University of Virginia with the good fortune of having John Lloyd as my advisor. John encouraged me to keep asking questions and looking at research to provide answers to the most effective practices for students with disabilities. This remains my quest today—to find instructional approaches that have the best likelihood of positively influencing the learning and interactions of children and youths with disabilities, and to make those approaches widely available to their teachers, service providers, and family members.

Getting to Know Barbara Bateman

On a cold wintery night almost 60 years ago I walked up the steps of a state school for the blind to begin a job for which my preparation was a one-hour lecture in my first year of graduate school. I taught six blind children, ages 6–13, who also had emotional–behavioral issues. I had no idea what I was doing, but I fell in love with doing it. After another term in graduate school I did an internship in a state hospital for mentally retarded adults and children and then began doctoral study. After a year Dr. Sam Kirk suggested I should spend a couple of years in public schools doing remedial reading, speech therapy, psychological testing, parent counseling, and more. We were still almost 20 years away from IDEA being passed and many children with disabilities were excluded from school. Those who did attend were often taught by folks as ill prepared as I was.

After finishing my doctorate, I went into college teaching and stayed there, even while going to law school. I graduated from Oregon’s law school the year after IDEA (then P.L. 94-142) was passed (near the time John Lloyd graduated from Oregon’s special education doctoral program) and since then have stood with one foot each in law and special education. I have thoroughly enjoyed teaching special education law to graduate students, serving as a hearing officer, expert witness, and consultant to attorneys in special education cases, as well as conducting in-service training for special education and related service personnel.

Now that I am 80 and almost retired I spend time birding, writing, and thinking about contentious issues in special education, especially the widespread misunderstanding of LRE and the reluctance of some educators to base decisions on data. And I still ponder how a learning disability ought to be identified.

Contemporary special education regularly makes headlines for its high costs, perceived inequity in discipline, associations with bullying, and other matters that grab lay public attention and spark controversy. Throughout its history, special education has been wracked by contentious issues. As long ago as the early 1800s, according to Rubinstein (1948), the famous physician Benjamin Rush discussed issues in treatment of children with emotional and behavioral disorders. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth century, Bernard Sachs (1895, 1905) published two editions of a 500-page text about “the nervous diseases of children” that covered everything from spina bifida to idiocy and imbecility and insanity, with comments about a controversy over whether masturbation caused the last of these (1905, p. 522).

Current controversies may seem less far-fetched, but one only needs consider suggestions from relatively recent times to find recommendations that make one pause. Special education in the 2000s is only a few decades removed from having children learn to creep and crawl by special patterns or sit in chairs that spin them about as if they were in a carnival ride. So, even if few special educators today need to be prepared to discuss masturbation as a cause for emotional and behavioral disorders, they clearly need to be ready to discuss other issues that are difficult to confront. For example, doesn’t special education give preferential treatment to some children and isn’t that inherently unfair, even un-American? Special educators cannot shy away from hard topics, whether the topic is fairness or sham therapies.

In Consideration of Issues

Today, special education is a well-established part of a public education in the United States and in many parts of the developed and developing world (see, e.g., Lloyd, Keller, & Hung, 2007). However, it is not necessarily a well-understood or well-accepted aspect of public education. Issues of special education’s access, costs, protections, instructional methods, teacher preparation, and outcomes seem as prevalent today as they did prior to the establishment of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975. This is not to say that the field of special education has not established a substantial body of knowledge about the issues; indeed, the scholarship of researchers and theorists in special education is vast, meaningful, and sound. However, issues persist.

Over the past several decades, writings on issues in special education have been categorized as “critical” (Sorrells, Rieth, & Sindelar, 2004; Ysseldyke, Algozzine, & Thurlow, 1992), “controversial” (Byrnes, 2002; Hornby, Atkinson, & Howard, 1997; Stainback & Stainback, 1992), and “contemporary” (Kauffman, 1981; Schmid & Nagata, 1983). Over 50 years ago, Maynard Reynolds (1962) identified segregation (e.g., placement), responsibility of the school (e.g., wrap-around services), financial aid (e.g., funding), and methods of classifying children (for purposes of placement) as current issues in special education. Certainly, these issues seem current today, as well.

It is not worrisome to us that issues are the same over the years. It would be alarming if the issues of more than 50 years ago were exactly the same, though. That is, although access is still an issue, the focus of the issue has evolved from one of access to any sort of instruction, to access into a building, to access to the general education classroom, to access to the general education curriculum. Likewise, teaching technologies also continue to be an issue of debate.

Over the past three decades, research has produced a significant and meaningful knowledge base of instructional techniques, moving the debate from the general question of what to do to the current question of which practices have a trustworthy and comprehensive set of empirical data that identify them as evidence-based. Although we may not have put to rest all issues surrounding access to instruction, place, or content, there are significant changes in the focus of them.

Perhaps many of the issues are the same today as they were in the past because families, students, teachers, taxpayers, and the educational enterprise as a whole continue to need many of the same things—e....