Education Reform and Children with Disabilities

Education reform is in the wind. Talk shows, government reports, editorial writers and politicians have found that in times like these, public opinion on the need to change schools taps into some deep adult fears and disappointments.

Schools certainly fail to meet everyone’s expectations. It’s possible, however, that these expectations are pretty unrealistic, or even contradictory. The evidence used to support some of the criticisms may be shaky, but my quarrel isn’t with the gap between perception and reality. I’m concerned that not enough advocates are aware of how certain proposed education reforms could undermine hard-won gains for children with disabilities. I’m worried that the schools into which our children (sometimes) fit are going to become much less welcoming environments. By the time public attention is drawn to these consequences, it may be too late.

Anyone keeping track of the ever-more politicized world of public education knows these are not obscure or radical ideas from the fringe. These are mainstream reforms that have a lot of support. Unfortunately, these reforms are most often discussed as if their only effects would be the intended ones, like higher achievement or decreased costs., It’s the unintended consequences I want to address.

Trend 1: Making Public Schools More "Private"

This idea is advocated by those who see excellence as the only result of competition. "Privatizers" want to see parents choose the schools their children attend. Schools would be funded according to how many students are enrolled. Each student would be entitled to a "voucher" of a certain number of dollars, more or less equivalent to the cost of educating the average child each year. Schools would collect the money value of the vouchers and spend it according to their own priorities. Obviously, ,marketing each school’s standards, clientele, academic achievements and ability to keep costs down would become key to attracting customers.

Will the existence of ramps ,elevators and wide corridors be considered marketing advantages or expensive eyesores? Who will want our vouchers if they come attached to kids who require teacher aides? Will our children be included in the pictures of bright shining faces used to attract more customers? Even if legislation requiring every school to accept our children is created, will competing schools find much more important priorities than the special needs of our children? Will it become convenient to provide minimal services so that our children will go "somewhere else"?

All of these outcomes, even if they are unintentional, are quite plausible. When students represent market share rather than individuals with entitlements to use their abilities, we all lose. But when children with special needs are seen as burdensome to the wrong side of the ledger the outcomes in a profit-and-competition system are absolutely predictable.

Trend 2: Confusing Excellence and Achievement

Education is getting very political. It’s convenient to blame education for the figures we all worry about, like unemployment and the trade deficit. What’s ironic is that today’s schools keep far more students through graduation than ever before, with a far higher literacy rate than their parents or grandparents enjoyed. This doesn’t mean schools are perfect, but as large institutions go, schools have turned out to be more adaptable than churches, penitentiaries, big businesses or big government. At one time, the role of schools was to teach children who were easy to teach what their parents already knew. Now schools are attempting to figure out what each child will need to know in the future while also meeting children’s social, psychological and physical needs in the present.

If schools have this kind of broad mandate, then goals like the integration of children with special needs make sense. If schools are places for "the whole child", then they are places for every child. This kind of shared understanding has made integration compatible with the purposes of education.

But listen to those who argue that schools must return to "academic excellence" as their only pursuit. Rigorous instruction, a demanding curriculum and a teacher evaluation programme which equates "merit" with how much growth students can demonstrate on yearly standardized exams; these are the elements of this new "back to the basics" movement.

The arguments can be seductive. Turn back the clock and put quadratic equations back where they belong. Forget about teaching non-violent conflict resolution and safe sex, proving school food programmes for hungry children and promoting multiculturalism. If we pretend the world is a simpler place then that is what it will become.

The trouble with valuing schools only for their ability to impart knowledge is that it doesn’t take long before we start valuing only those students who acquire that knowledge easily and quickly. Soon it won’t be just the other goals of schooling which are seen as "getting in the way" of able students, it will become the students who are less academically able who will be seen as the problem.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a classroom teacher. Imagine that your worth to the system, the size of your paycheque and your job security depend on how well your Grade Ten algebra class performs on its quarterly exams. How much attention could you afford to spend on the child with a learning disability or on one who needed assistance writing down the questions? Before long, someone would tell you to invest your time where the "real" payoffs can be found, teaching the most teachable, the ones most likely to give you a return on your investment.

Any business text will tell you that to succeed in a competitive environment, you have to invest in winners and divest yourself of losers. When the quality of kids’ test scores, not the quality of kids’ lives, becomes the only important way to measure a good school, be prepared to pick up the pieces for the ones who don’t make the grade in the heartless efficiency of excellence.

Trend 3: School-based Management/Community Decision-making

Getting "close to the customer" is the objective of many changes in business and industry. In education it can take many forms, but one gaining in popularity is the concept of school-based management. In theory, decisions formerly made "downtown" are now in the hands of individual schools and communities, including the creation of a school philosophy, deciding which programmes will be offered, how many and which teachers will be employed, capital expenditures on renovations and an assortment of other decisions. This business strategy is based on the rather sound assumption that the people closest to the situation are in the best position to know what will work and what won’t.

This model is often put forward as the only one which makes sense if the strategies of school competition and "excellence" have been adopted. Its advocates insist that it shouldn’t be left to the professional inside the school to make decisions which affect the community, so parents make decisions they have never made before. The needs of my daughter using a wheelchair must now compete for parent support with those needs common to far more children. When the parent advisory committee votes on how to spend $6000 on new recreation equipment, how do you suppose my proposal to spend the money making the playground structure accessible will fare?

As you will recall, it was to avoid this kind of situation that we demanded provincial legislation holding school boards accountable for meeting the needs of children who would never be in the majority. We argued successfully that neither pity nor persuasiveness should be the factors which determined whether schools welcomed our children. We established principles of accountability that meant parents’ elected representatives, not the consciousness of individual parents, determined levels of service. School-based decision-making may work well for dealing with those matters which affect all of us equally, but it is a completely inadequate mechanism for promoting equity for children with special needs.

As a professional educator employed by Canadian teachers, it is my job to watch and track education trends. There are times when I have to resist the conservatism we all feel when changes are proposed to something in which we have invested a great deal. But the broad field of education debate has lots of people looking at the big picture convinced that what they have in mind will not hurt anyone so long as it is not intended to hurt anyone.

I watch with alarm our growing societal intolerance towards accommodating difference, whether those differences are philosophical, linguistic, political, racial or sexual. When we cease to accept differences with an open mind, we contribute to a world in which sameness becomes a virtue, and difference quickly becomes deviance. In our good intentions to reform schools to help them cope with this turbulent world, let’s not inadvertently make serving children with special needs any more difficult than it already is.

(Heather-jane Robertson is Director of Professional Development Services for the Canadian Teacher’s Federation in Ottawa. She is also the mother of a nine-year-old daughter with a disability.)