Don't blame inclusion for failure of education planning
By Dawn Steele and Matthew Quetton, Vancouver Parents for Successful Inclusion.
Vancouver Sun
July 21, 2010

Winnipeg teacher Michael Zwaagstra ( Students should be grouped by their ability, July 14) argues against inclusion, which, he says, holds back bright students and disabled students who are placed in classes where they can't participate in "normal" activities.

Zwaagstra may not realize that British Columbia's inclusion policy is not synonymous with full integration. It calls for placement of students with special needs based on their unique individual abilities, though sound educational reasons are needed to justify segregation. This two-decade old policy reflects the modern meaning of "inclusion," though many still confuse it with full integration.

If students are placed inappropriately and denied appropriate supports or individualized education planning, this is not a failure of "inclusion," but of sound educational practice. Since the days of the one-room schoolhouse, good teachers have known how to group diverse students appropriately for specific tasks to facilitate learning while still fully respecting a philosophy of inclusion.

Following the logic of separate schools or classes based on "ability" or stereotype as the new norm, we quickly encounter the fundamental flaw. After shipping out disabled kids, you still have gifted, aboriginal, ESL, immigrant, hyperactive, disadvantaged, emotionally fragile, problem kids, etc., all of whom will need their own schools. The disabled kids will also need separate schools for autism, dyslexia, speech and hearing disabilities, medical fragility, etc. Then where do we place the autistic kid who's brilliant at history? The math genius who can't spell? The aboriginal child with Down syndrome? Who gets the music program, or do we create 15 separate ones?

Children with special needs aren't homogeneous. Once you get past the disability to know them as individual human beings, it's clear they have as much (or more) in common with typical kids as they are different from each other.

Life would certainly be easier for teachers such as Zwaagstra if kids were uniform widgets or if teachers had to deal with only the brightest, keenest students. He may also be too young to remember why segregated schools were such a bad idea and why we closed them in the first place. His complaints also highlight the urgency of reforming teacher training programs to better equip teachers for to-day's diverse Canadian classrooms.

It is a common assumption that inclusion must hold back both brighter and disabled students, but what's the evidence? A 2009 study by SFU's Centre for Education Research and Policy, based on Foundation Skills Assessment data, found that academic outcomes among typical students were not negatively affected in B.C. classrooms that included students with special needs.

The Canadian Council on Learning, after reviewing 30 studies from Canada, the U.S. and Britain in 2009, found no evidence that segregation offered educational advantages and that students with special needs generally had better academic outcomes in integrated classes.

Decades of studies have repeatedly affirmed that the benefits of inclusion far outweigh the challenges, for students with special needs and indeed for all students.

But while Zwaagstra's analysis may be misinformed and his remedy misguided, he does raise a very real problem. There is growing alarm that many students with special needs seem to be foundering in integrated classrooms. Less evident, but no less worrying, is the plight of students in segregated classes.

It's hard to say how students with special needs are faring in B.C., because the education ministry hasn't reported on their outcomes since 2005. The ministry also stopped tracking outcomes for students with intellectual disabilities in 2002.

But B.C.'s public schools have repeatedly cut special education teachers despite growing numbers of students with special needs, which is obviously creating growing stresses for all -- whether those students are integrated or segregated.

Some propose segregation as a solution to such underfunding, but who does this help? Not students with special needs.

Overall, integration costs no more or less than segregation. Any savings from segregated instruction are usually attributable to reduced educational quality.

By failing to fund adequate supports for B.C.'s students with learning challenges, we are failing them and placing enormous stresses on the entire system.

Segregation won't fix this; it will only hide this failure. And it will encourage school authorities to keep asking their most vulnerable students to absorb the brunt of fiscal austerity measures, so as to maintain educational quality for the majority in the face of provincial underfunding.