Has special-ed inclusion backfired?
On Hechinger Ed, Sarah Butrymowicz questions whether students with special needs are best served by spending all or most of their day “with a teacher who likely knows little about how best to teach them.” Federal mandates that students must be educated in “the least restrictive environment” possible. Some classrooms are led by a general-education teacher helped out by a special-education teacher, in a team-teaching model. In other cases, however, students with special needs receive instruction from specialists only a few hours a day or week in pull-out sessions. That is, many special-education students spend the bulk of their days being taught primarily by general-education teachers. Yet a typical general-education teacher-in-training only takes one or two courses about special education. Some teacher-prep programs don’t require a single course focused on teaching students with disabilities; half of secondary programs don’t require field experience with special education students. Is m
