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Must Students Earn a Seat in Regular Education Classroom? (Pat Amos)

Pat Amos is the mother of a child with special needs, and a long time advocate for the rights of children with disabilities and their families. She is founder of Autism Support and Advocacy in Pennsylvania (ASAP). This article is adapted from her training, "It's About Relationships For you, for Your Child," which she presents for Youth Advocate Programs, Inc.,

Autism/Developmental Disabilities Program. Pat writes about the frustrations families and their children with disabilities continue to face as they try to assess an education with their peers in Pennsylvania’s public schools. Students with disabilities have traditionally received their education within a "continuum" of placements, from the regular education classroom, to segregated centers and homebound. As the number of students with behavioral disorders in segregated settings or at home increases, her words urge us to "change the system, not the child."

Pat writes:

1.  …The continuum has not proven to be a very useful concept, based as it is on the discredited readiness model of student progress. Certainly we have a greater weight of evidence in recent years to demonstrate the necessity and the feasibility of changing the system rather than changing the child.  This higher standard and steadily increasing overlap between LRE and inclusion needs to be conveyed clearly in this document.  A good resource would be: Taylor, Steven (1988). Caught in the Continuum:  A Critical Analysis of the  Principle of Least Restrictive Environment, JASH.
  
 2.  School districts misunderstand the continuum as a distinct "thing" they must put students in and incrementally move students through, when in fact all that is required of them is that they be able to make this range of placements available somewhere in case some child should ever need them…
 
 Goodbye to the "Readiness Model"
 
… It was felt that by somehow becoming (or appearing) less different, people with disabilities would demonstrate "readiness." By working toward readiness they would earn their way back into the typical settings enjoyed by the rest of the world. Not surprisingly, this unrealistic and abstract goal was not very motivating to the children and adults who spent their days with few desirable choices on the horizon. So the readiness model had to rely for its results on artificial motivation through rewards and punishments. While some special education programs prided themselves on using only positive motivators, many parents and teachers started to question reward-based systems on the grounds that "rewards rupture relationships" and "the task being rewarded comes to seem less appealing in its own right." 

It appeared that the more children  became locked in a system of bribes or threats to get them to act in a certain way, the less prepared they seemed to become to act independently, handle responsibility, or learn the kinds of skills that are needed in the "real world."

Sometimes a child's different ways of learning or behaving were viewed as medical problems that must be fixed before he or she could be returned to more typical settings. The medical model is described as "deficit-based" and "remedial" because it pays attention almost exclusively to the things a child cannot do or cannot do well. It  tries to target and get rid of these "deficits" by placing the child  in a special setting devoted to treatment, much as a medical specialist would do if you were taken to a hospital with an illness. However, hospital stays are usually brief and highly focused, while most programs that took a medical treatment approach to behavioral and learning differences were neither. 

Many children who started school in segregated, readiness-based or treatment-based settings spent their entire school careers "getting ready" for an entry into integrated settings that never occurred. Over time it became clear that such children tended to have more difficulty being included in their communities when they became adults. They were at a disadvantage in finding jobs, making friends, and participating in desirable adult activities. Many grew old still “getting ready to get ready" for a transition to community participation that never came.

Not only did the children who grew up in segregated settings have a  hard time chasing that elusive goal of "readiness," but across the  nation communities were making disappointingly slow progress toward  the goal of welcoming and supporting people with disabilities. Families and other advocates came to realize that this lack of progress had its roots in the center-based service delivery systems created by the readiness and medical models.  For example, if local pediatricians believe that children with autism can only be diagnosed at a distant medical center specializing in their care, they will never develop the local capacity to understand and serve these patients and their families. If neighborhood schools and recreation facilities believe that the needs of children on the autism spectrum can only be met at special centers, they will never learn how to teach, include, and appreciate those children in typical, everyday activities.