Inclusive Education

Inclusive education refers to a way of structuring educational services so that all students, regardless of labels or putative disabilities, are educated together in a shared community. Inclusive education is not only an administrative arrangement but also an ideological and philosophical commitment to a vision of schools and societies that are diverse and nonexclusionary. As such, inclusive education can be viewed as a civil rights issue, akin to ending racial segregation in schools. Although inclusive education originally was used specifically to describe the inclusion of students with disabilities in general education classrooms, a more comprehensive definition of inclusion can be extended to discuss the ways in which education is provided that recognize, honor, and respond to other demographic differences—race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion, language, sexual orientation, and family configuration—in addition to differences in students' skills and assumed abilities. All students [Page 1148]have multiple identities; for example, a student may have an identity stemming from having cerebral palsy, but also identify himself or herself as a Spanish-speaking student from a single-parent family. Many of these multiple identities intersect and interact. An inclusive classroom is responsive to all student characteristics.

An ideal model of inclusive education is at odds with other practices of commingling students of varying ability—mainstreaming, dumping, partial inclusion, and the practice of framing inclusive education as a continuum. Mainstreaming gained prominence after 1975 when the U.S. Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) that required all students with disabilities to be placed in the least restrictive environment. This was interpreted to mean that students with disabilities could be returned to the regular education setting when they were deemed eligible—able to learn and make progress in the traditional classroom. Under the mainstreaming model, the responsibility to change and adapt was placed on the student. An ideal model of inclusion implies that the classroom organization and the curriculum and instruction of the general education classroom should be designed in order to meet the needs of a wide range of students. The model embodies the belief that students should not have to earn the right to be educated in an inclusive environment; rather, all students should be entitled to be educated with their chronological peers in their neighborhood school or the school they would typically attend if they were not consigned to a special category and given a label. Dumping refers to the practice of placing students in typical classrooms with no preparation or training for their teachers and without a system of ongoing support and resources. Partial inclusion is problematic ideologically and logistically, given that full membership in a community implies that the student is “there” the majority of the time and has his or her learning needs met within the context of the classroom community.

Inclusive education can also be contrasted with education that seeks to provide what is a called “a continuum of services,” a series of placement possibilities that range from full inclusion to full exclusion from the typical classroom. Offering a continuum of services leads to the continuing exclusion of many students with disabilities. Because there are “choices” about where a student will be placed, there is little impetus for systematic change. Structural change and decisions about placement are often based on limited and prejudicial assumptions about what students are capable of doing and learning. This creates a tendency to fill all the available placement options, thus impeding the development of a unified, comprehensive structure.

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