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The Inclusive Education Series: A conversation with Doug Fuchs · DiveIn: Diving into Special Education's Most Complex and Pressing Debates

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From the Division of Research of the Council for Exceptional
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Children. This is Dive in, the podcast where we
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ask difficult questions about the education of students with disabilities and
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occasionally we pretend we have the answers. I'm your host,
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Federico Beitola, professor at the University of Filimois,
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Chicago. So, are you ready? Let's dive in.
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Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to our second episode of
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the fourth season of Dive In. Well, the World cup is
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over and I'm done crying about Argentina losing the final.
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Well, almost, almost. I'm getting there,
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I'm getting there. But I need to get back to work. If you have been
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following us, you know we're doing a series of inclusive education this
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season. Today we have our second interview in this
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series. If you have not been following us, well, what have
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you been doing all this time this summer? No, seriously, I encourage you to check
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our first episode with David Connor talking about inclusion. I also encourage
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you to explore our large inventory of episodes.
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I am sure if you're a professor you can find great materials for
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your courses to teach this year. In our large inventory we
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cover a wide range of topics. I'm sure you can find something.
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I know many of you are in summer vacations, but I
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assure you also that diving is the perfect companion for your run,
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your gym, your morning coffee, or for just pretending
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you're busy so your kids or significant other do not bother you. So for
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example, dad, I'm hungry. Oh, sorry love. I really
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need to listen to this podcast right now. It works perfectly.
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Done it plenty of times. Neglect of my kids.
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Just listen to my own voice on my own show.
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So back to the show. Anyway, I promise that we will have different perspectives
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and today I bring you a different perspective from our last interview.
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The person I interview needs little presentation.
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He's the professor in the Department of Special Education and
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Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University.
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He. He is the co author of more than 500
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articles in peer reviewed journals and 80 book chapters.
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And he was identified by Thomson Reuters
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as among the 250 most frequently cited
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researchers in the social sciences. His name is Doug Fuchs.
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I'm very excited and thankful he agreed to an interview.
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As always, I pushed back and asked him about what critics say
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about his work and we had a lively and respectful discussion.
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Last thing, I'm going to give our Discord
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channel another try this season. But I'm going to put a little more effort and
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I'm going to try to figure out the problems that we have last
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time. I will post it in the show description and we will check
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it weekly to engage in a conversation with you so you can tell me about
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what you like about the show or also engage in a discussion about
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inclusive education or any other topic. I hope you enjoyed this
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show and I hope you enjoyed the rest of the summer.
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Well, thank you so much, Doug, for being with us on the show.
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It's such a privilege and honor to have you here. Thank you. It's great to
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be here. So we're doing this series on inclusive education,
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and one of the first things that I would like to do is try
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to make sense the term in any sense.
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We're debating so much about this topic, and there's so many controversies
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of inclusive education that my first question is, are we talking about the
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same thing? Right. Are we arguing about the same thing? So my first
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question to you is, like, how do you define inclusive education?
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Yeah. So I think that
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that's a really important. This is a really important way to kick
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off the conversation so that we make sure that we're talking about
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the same thing and not talking past each.
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I think about inclusive education in
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terms of. Well, I can talk about it in a lot of different ways,
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but I think the clearest, most straightforward way is to
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say that my understanding of inclusion is
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related to the least restrictive environment, which implicitly
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invokes the continuum
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of special education and general education placements and services.
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So my view
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over many decades and the view of my colleagues is that.
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The presumptive placement for all children, for all children,
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literally all children, should be the general classroom. And serious
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effort should be expected on the part of educators to
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make the general classroom work for all kids.
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But equally importantly is the recognition that many
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general classrooms will not be a
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place where children with and without disabilities
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get a, quote, unquote, appropriate education.
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And so for the kids who are failing, doing poorly
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for whatever reasons in the general classroom, despite quote,
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unquote, best efforts on the part of educators,
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alternatives need to be considered.
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And once an alternative to the general classroom.
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And by the way, I'm not talking. I want to be clear, I'm not saying
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that because there's a student who is not
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doing well in general class, we need to consider a
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special school.
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Lots of options in between the general classroom and a special
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school. And once a child,
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and not only that, we're oftentimes talking about a
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placement outside of the general classroom, not for the whole day, not for a majority
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of the day, for a relatively small portion of the day for many,
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many kids who are not making it in the general classroom. So those
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are, I think, Important qualifications or aspects
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of how I think about inclusion. And once a child is
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placed in a separate placement for regardless how
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much time, there should be a conscious effort to
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strengthen the child, improve the child, make the child feel better about herself,
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all of that to get the child back into the general classroom
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as quickly as possible. That's a definition.
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Yeah. Very tied to the lra. Right. It's a, it's a very,
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very tight. Due to our legislation.
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What do you say when, when we, you know, we think about the
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students that are not working, you know, with these, with the general education confinement.
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The, one of the, the ways to make it
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inclusive for what I hear from you is like we got to put in a
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setting that works better for the student. Right.
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Doesn't that leave the general education classroom kind
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of in touch and kind of give them a free out of jail card
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to not have to deal with certain tank kids? Yeah.
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So I, I am supportive of
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the, the law as it's currently written and regulations
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which require the general, which require building
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based personnel to work in the general
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classroom with the child who is struggling to try
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to make changes to the general classroom that
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are reasonable before seriously
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considering a separate placement for however long a period.
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So it's not. I understand what you're saying about an out of jail card.
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I don't view it that way. I view that there is strong
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need for modifications and accommodations. And in fact,
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and this has to do with, and, and in the paper that I mentioned
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to you before we went on air. Yeah.
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I detail a lot of the efforts on
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the part of so called segregationists like
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me, so called,
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to work with general educators to
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change their classrooms, to introduce all kinds of curricula
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and technology and instructional programs.
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I mean that's what my colleagues and I have done for 40 years. We've tried
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to develop instructional programs that are inclusive
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and that benefit a much larger proportion of the student
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population. I mean just as one example is peer assisted learning strategies where
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we use, where we've develop, you know,
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programs in reading and math that depend in
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part on children working constructively with other kids to increase,
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to strengthen their performance. So it's,
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it's not, I think it's, it's an important point that you're raising. My position
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is not to
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have a kind of hands off policy with respect to general education.
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General education is not doing well. The first important question is how do we
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make it better and how do we make it more inclusive. But there's always the
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recognition, always the recognition that most general
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classrooms will not be able to accommodate
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literally all kids. And that puts me and many others like
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me in opposition to
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those who have argued for decades for,
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quote, unquote, full inclusion. Now, I know that there's been relatively
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recent, I'm going to say backing away, others may not like that
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phrase, but backing away from full inclusion,
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calling, referring to full inclusion differently
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or allowing that maybe not full inclusion in the
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traditional sense, but for decades there
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have been many who have said we need
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to close down special education programs and we need to dedicate
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ourselves to make the general classroom inclusive for everybody.
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And as long as we have general, as long as we have special ed classrooms,
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that is, they would argue that has been the out
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of jail card. So that's interesting.
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Yeah, I know. I got. Later on, I'm going to make a question about how
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you see a field now, but I'll pass on that because he kind of mentioned
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a little bit that there's been some changes. So to clarify
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to you and some of your colleagues that are doing similar work,
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that have been doing work for decades and decades, no matter how
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hard we work, no matter how much research we do and try
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to transform the general education classrooms, there will be always
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cases that it won't work. Is that a correct statement?
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Yes. Okay. You know,
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a similar argument is that,
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you know, some of the scholars and advocates who have pushed
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for inclusive education often argue that the inclusive
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ed debate is about rights, belonging and social justice.
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And yes, educational research is,
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of course, important, but they need to be
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geared towards those horizons that maybe we have focused too much on academic
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outcomes as the measure to see if it worked, didn't work.
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Ignoring issues of belonging, participation,
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social justice, you know,
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preparation for a tool, Horan, democracy, et cetera, et cetera. How,
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how do you respond to those? So,
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Federico, I'm going to say something. I want to be
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very careful about this because I don't. I'm not looking for,
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I'm not looking for confrontation, certainly not with you or with
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anybody else. Let me first say that
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I strongly, I have strongly supported the
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efforts on the part of advocates
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for children and youth with intellectual disabilities or
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however you want serious, you know, support needs for,
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for a very long time, I have been supportive of their efforts to,
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to not just place such students
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in general classrooms, but to try to make the general classrooms
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environments that promote the principles that you've just
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described. Okay. I have always been supportive of that.
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In reading folks, as I have closely over
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the years, advocates, these advocates, as I've been,
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as I've read many of these advocates work over the years and listened to them
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in various venues. I've been struck
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by how much of the discourse,
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implicitly or otherwise,
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revolves around children and youth with intellectual disabilities
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and rarely, rarely discussion of
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how various suggestions and policies might
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play with children and youth with other
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disabilities. And I
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years ago came to the conclusion that,
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and not just me, but others came to the conclusion that many,
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not all, but many of the advocates of children and youth with intellectual
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disabilities have not focused on or have not taken up the
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plight, the difficulties, the failures of
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children with learning disabilities, behavior disorders, speech and language problems,
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hearing impairments and so forth, because they
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have not considered those kids to be truly,
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truly special needs children. They have discounted,
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consciously or otherwise, they have discounted the seriousness of
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the learning challenges that these students have
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faced and continue to face. And so when
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you correctly attribute to some the
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feeling that academics have been overplayed,
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what goes on in my head is yes,
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because you think that
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I for one, am spending way too much time
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and effort and taxpayer dollars on trying to improve the
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academic performance of, of these kids because
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they don't appreciate or don't want to recognize
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the tremendous challenges that these kids have and that if they're not given
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more intensive and expert instruction, they will fail and they will
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fail miserably, not just in college, but in life. So I think
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there's a profound under appreciation
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for the learning challenges that
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lots and lots of other kids have with different labels, which is not to gain,
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say, the importance of finding appropriate solutions
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for children and youth with intellectual disabilities.
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That's interesting. You know, that brings me to like a follow up question because you
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mentioned, like many different groups of disabilities may have different
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views or different interests or different standpoints towards
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or attitudes towards inclusive education or inclusion. Have you worked
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with advocates or even better
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with students with disabilities or people who went through the special education system themselves,
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who have argued actually that they
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rather be a separate classroom
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or separate intensive instruction rather than inclusion in the
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general education culture.
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I have worked with many children
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and youth and parents of students who have gone through special
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education. Some have expressed
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with learning disability, behavior disorders,
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speech and language impairment labels.
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I have the complaints that I have heard. The upsetness
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that I have heard about special education has
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had more to do with the quality of instruction than
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with the separateness to generalize
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across many, many cases.
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The feeling that I have is that if special education
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were stronger, were of higher quality,
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if special education was more effective and perceived
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as such, many of these people would
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feel satisfied and would say, as I've heard some say
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explicitly, look the separateness.
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If my child is getting the instruction that
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she really needs in a separate
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setting, irrespective for how long or where,
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an hour a day, an hour and a half a day in a resource room,
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whatever the separateness is, is worth it. Is worth
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it. I think that another way of thinking about this is that many advocates
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of students with learning disabilities and so forth,
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the so called software disabilities that some
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advocates of children with intellectual disabilities describe them
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as having soft meaning. Debatable now
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I forgot what I was going to say.
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It's not separateness so much as
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a serious concern and legitimate concern about special education
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as not providing the benefits that it promises the
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children and the advocates.
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You know, I had some similar discussions
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lately with David Connor interview also. It's going to be in the series and
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one of the things that I say is like I think parents are face
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sometimes impossible choices, meaning choices that are set in
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a context that they have not chosen to be. And sometimes they either
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need to choose between a child allocation classroom, who sometimes is not prepared
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for the child, or a separate setting. And they may choose
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a separate setting just because the other option
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is not a good option. It's almost like when you need to go and vote
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and you have two bad politicians, which often happens, and you ended up
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choosing one. It's not the structure choice that you want to have,
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but it's what you got and you got to make sense of that and make
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certain choices. And I think we're
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putting parents in front of choices that they
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don't want. Would you agree or comment on that? Yeah,
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I would. I think that Naomi Zigman,
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who used to be at the University of Pittsburgh before she retired,
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wrote a wonderful piece, a qualitative
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research paper describing the education that a particular elementary
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school age boy with a learning disabilities label got
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concurrently in general education and special education.
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And what she did in this article in learning disabilities research
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and practice was to document just
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how poor the education was in both settings.
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And she has always been, she, her position
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has always been similar to my position that the continuum
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of placements and services is necessary to provide a good.
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So what undermines a lot of this is exactly
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what you're saying. The quality of education has been,
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generally speaking, inadequate and not
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just in special education. I will be the first to say that I
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think special education has improved in some respects dramatically
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over the decades. But is special education where it needs
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to be as a service delivery system? No.
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On the other hand, general education. I sometimes feel like when
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I hear you suggest you're
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trying to Represent some others points of view, which makes good sense when you
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say that, you know, some of these folks argue strenuously and passionately
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for social justice. What I think is I
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spend a lot of time in general classrooms and it is
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hard for me to reconcile the expectation
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that general ed will deliver social justice
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with what I see. Because general education now
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in many places, and I'm not being melodramatic here,
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Frederico, it's in shambles.
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It's in shambles. And we
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have teachers, many teachers, certainly not all, but many who
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are poorly instructed in
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their schools of education. They are ill prepared, they are not prepared for
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the challenges of the classroom. And so,
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you know, when I hear certain people
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kind of wax poetic about, if you will, about the general classroom,
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I say to myself, what classroom are you talking about?
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No, you know, I think with
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that point, I think that's a point of agreement of both sides of this argument.
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I do believe that. I think both sides
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will heavily critique the general education classroom. And I know in
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the last decades I've seen, including myself, a lot of thinking
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about, yeah, we can critique a special ed as much as we can, but where
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exclusion is really happening from the get go,
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it's in the general education classroom and that is not working. And there is,
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you know, she's looking critically inside, but also looking outside,
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incredible amount of very prestigious and
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recognized researchers that does work in the general education classroom
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who pay zero attention to disability and who may have advanced
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many practices and in sense of racial justice or
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cultural response instruction without really attending to its ability and
24:11
therefore contributing to a parallel system
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to me. And that's, it's one of my critiques. So I, you know, I think
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that would be a point of convergence if I, if I would have to find
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a form of conversions where I can bring these, these debates would be,
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we got to work on the general education classroom. That is where exclusion
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happen. And, and that is our point of leverage.
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Well, and I would, I would certainly agree with what you said,
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but I would also add, and this is probably where we diverge,
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which is okay, that we need to continue to
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work simultaneously with special education. Because in my view,
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even if we were to dramatically improve general
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education, in my view, there will always
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be a need for special education and there's
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a lot of evidence for that that stares us in the face. So there
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has been a lot of research in the last. Well,
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I mean you, you, you are very well aware of response to intervention.
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Mtss. MTSS was, was jump started
25:20
by response to intervention. Response to intervention became
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Increasingly back in this is going back 20 some
25:28
odd years, 2000, the year 2000 or so it
25:34
became obvious response to intervention was
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essentially a response to the repeated
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failure of, among other things,
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researchers like me, many people like me coming up
25:51
with instructional programs that were demonstrably effective
25:56
for a large number of kids, but never all kids.
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There is no silver bullet. There is just no silver
26:04
bullet, instructionally speaking. There will always be children who are
26:08
responding for whatever reasons, inadequately,
26:11
insufficiently. Sometimes they're referred to as non responders.
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What do we do? We have to have a plan B and
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a plan C. And for in my way of thinking, special education
26:24
ideally represents valid plans
26:29
B and C. And so
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I think that's a little, there's some nuance in terms of
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combining your point of view and my point of view in
26:43
that we kind of agree. I do think there is a need for
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that kinds of, I want to say, I don't
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know if it's calling specializing social. We don't call it inclusive instruction.
26:54
But what I think is that
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the field have spent an
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incredible amount of resources and research and not
27:07
offer negative sense, but to do individualized
27:11
interventions rather than spend maybe the
27:15
research, the funds to try to think about how those interventions
27:20
and maybe this will be the next step, can be embedded within the
27:24
broader design frameworks
27:28
in inclusive settings. Right. What of
27:32
the, the RTI work, the interventions that
27:36
were there, a lot of them and all of their real interventions were
27:40
mostly trying to achieve, you know, individual change.
27:44
Right. I, I think they're mostly geared to individuals rather to the
27:48
redesign of the entire instructional design.
27:52
So, so what I would say, I think in response
27:56
is that one of the things that I, I,
28:00
I, I have gone on record as being both for
28:05
response to intervention and critical of aspects
28:09
of it. So I don't take this pie
28:13
in the sky view of it or mtss, but one of the things that
28:17
I supported about RTI and mtss
28:21
in principle, not necessarily in practice, but in principle is the
28:26
tiered structure. So you've got multiple
28:30
tiers of presumably increasingly intensive instruction as
28:34
you go from tier one, which is typically referred to as the general classroom,
28:38
as you know, and then so forth. The reason for my
28:42
support of a tiered structure is that practically
28:46
speaking, if you have five kids in
28:51
a general classroom, tier one, who are not responding to
28:55
the instruction there, it is more
28:59
efficient and therefore more likely that
29:04
these five could be grouped together with a different,
29:07
a somewhat different instructional approach, hoping that
29:12
a majority of them will respond and will more easily
29:16
fit back into the general classroom than if you
29:20
took each of the five and worked with them individually.
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I mean, if you think about it, I mean the demands are
29:29
less net speaking net
29:33
wise. You know, you're more likely, I think,
29:37
to be able to provide individualized instruction to
29:41
the very few kids who really need it because that by definition is extremely
29:46
intensive and requires lots of expertise. Where are we going to get all
29:50
of these people capable of delivering that service?
29:54
So in principle, I like the idea of a tiered structure.
29:58
It's got its own problems, but I like the idea for that
30:02
reason. But you also was to say it was interesting. I remember even my
30:06
doctoral years reading your first articles with lean talking about RTI
30:10
back on. I think it was actually early 1990s if I'm not mistaken.
30:16
But you also have critique in the,
30:20
in the following years,
30:24
the response to intervention rti. Where do you see the limitations
30:28
of that for creating inclusive classrooms and where do you see
30:32
the opportunity for that?
30:37
There are people, there are well known advocates of students
30:42
with intellectual disabilities like Wayne Saylor who have
30:46
come out and said MTSS is
30:52
the key to truly inclusive, genuinely inclusive education.
30:58
And the problem with multi tiered
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systems? Not the problem. An important problem is
31:09
its complexity and school buildings difficulty
31:13
in trying to take a complex
31:17
and unavoidably complex service delivery system like
31:21
MTSS and making it work in their schools there.
31:26
In 2015,
31:29
a private research group based in
31:33
New york City called MDRC received
31:39
20 million bucks at least to do an evaluation,
31:43
a national evaluation of MTSS. This was
31:47
in 2015. And they found like 147 schools,
31:51
146 schools that had been using it for three years. And on
31:55
that basis and some other bases, they chose
31:59
those schools to follow to
32:03
evaluate. And long
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story short, MDRC did a very poor evaluation.
32:11
They came up with the conclusion that MTSS does
32:15
not work. This was their evaluation. It actually,
32:19
they say it actually hurt kids in first grade and had
32:23
no effect on kids in second and third grade. So Lyn and I read
32:27
the 300 some odd page technical report and we thought that
32:31
the conclusions were just simply unjustifiable
32:36
given how poorly the evaluation was conducted. However,
32:41
the technical report went into great detail describing
32:45
how the building based personnel in
32:49
these 146 schools struggled to
32:53
make it work. That would be,
32:57
that would be one of my biggest concerns
33:01
about mtss. It is very complicated
33:05
when you're talking about everything that needs to be considered.
33:09
Changing the school, changing,
33:13
redefining the general classroom is basically
33:16
what MTSS does. It basically redefines general
33:20
education going From a room to
33:25
a multi tiered opportunity to provide instruction.
33:29
In principle, great. Just great.
33:33
In practice, really, really hard to do.
33:38
Are we underestimating, you think, sometimes the
33:42
capability of schools in the sense that we think some things are,
33:46
they are not being done, but maybe sometimes they're not being done because
33:50
lack of resources, funding, for example, you know,
33:54
lack of amount of human resources in the school, lack of expertise,
33:58
you know, shouldn't we be focusing on trying
34:02
to build that, you know, the human capacity,
34:06
lack of resources in schools so those practices that have
34:10
potential to bring more inclusive environments can, can flourish in schools
34:14
rather than say, you know, this is not, it's not going to work in school
34:18
because the resources are not there, the teacher capacity is not there. So let's
34:23
try to do, focus on more, you know, different kinds of interventions that
34:27
will not be in the general education classroom. I'm 100% with you.
34:30
And here's another point of potential
34:34
convergence within the disability
34:38
community, if you will. It is for all of us to recognize
34:43
that the Republican party has successfully
34:49
defunded the public schools for the past 15 years.
34:53
And they have done so in the name of trying
34:57
to monetize education,
35:00
privatize it, monetize it. And they don't
35:04
care if in the process millions of children fail.
35:09
They don't care. And so I
35:13
think that that sentiment, and I don't mind saying that to you,
35:20
And there is no false equivalence here. I mean, it's not
35:25
like the Democrats and the Republican. It is the Republican Party in
35:30
a large handful of states that is in the process
35:34
of destroying public education. And the
35:39
education community is relatively silent. The disability community is relatively
35:43
silent. And for the reasons you stated, the disability community should
35:47
be anything but silent. And I think that people who
35:51
would spearhead that effort would find strong support across the
35:57
disability community. I think
36:00
I agree. I would think that would be. And I have here that this is
36:03
an area of convergence of things that, that would be in agreement.
36:07
You know, I have seen. I know, and I have a question related
36:11
to this, where you see the field right now, because I have seen
36:16
a lot of people that, or a certain
36:20
amount of scholars that, you know, are, you know,
36:23
identify themselves as disability studies, being much more
36:27
defending of idea lately. And I think this
36:31
is a recognition that we need
36:36
whatever critique we have for this policy, special education,
36:40
we need it because the kind of attacks
36:44
that have been happening in the last years towards special education would
36:48
basically leave a vacuum that would
36:52
be very harmful for students with disabilities.
36:56
I'm thinking, for example, moving funds
37:00
to voucher products, for instance, with little legislation
37:04
and support and little civil rights support. So I think
37:09
there is an area of conversion. I think idea
37:15
these days. I think it has a wide support.
37:18
I would say when maybe I would say a couple of decades, a lot was
37:22
much more heavily criticized. Where do
37:26
you see the field in this continuum between, you know, you call it abolitionist versus
37:30
conversionist, you know, where, where, where do you see it? Do you see, like it.
37:34
It's coming more to the middle. Do you see still heavily divided.
37:38
I think it's still heavily divided. It's.
37:42
It's possible that there is some. That there is some movement on the part of
37:45
some to move. To move toward the. The center
37:50
is not the right way to put it, but you know what I mean?
37:51
To. To look for more convergence. But I think it's
37:56
still heavily divided. I. I think that.
38:02
I think it's still heavily divided. And,
38:05
and I think that. And I'll come back to something I said before.
38:09
I. I think that the, the concert, the people
38:13
that I refer to as conservationists, meaning to conserve the continuum
38:16
of special ed placements and services. I think that
38:21
in my experience, the vast majority
38:25
of those people would like
38:29
to say to advocates of children and youth with intellectual disabilities,
38:32
hey, we are willing and able to
38:36
work with you to try to get the general classroom, to the
38:41
extent possible, more accommodating of
38:46
the children that you care about, the children and youth you care about most.
38:51
We are all for your efforts to try
38:55
to achieve genuine inclusion.
38:58
And I know that genuine inclusion means more than simple
39:03
placement,
39:06
but they would say, please do not,
39:10
do not demand, continue to
39:15
demand that the continuum be dismantled,
39:19
because without the continuum, you are taking away from us
39:24
the options that we hold dear. And the conservationists
39:29
would say to the abolitionists that these two
39:32
points, willingness to work hand in hand with
39:36
the people I'm calling abolitionists to help them achieve
39:40
their goals is not mutually exclusive from what
39:45
the conservationists want to see for the kids that
39:49
they care about most. There just has not been. And this
39:53
gets back to a point that you raised earlier. This gets back to the
39:58
absence of dialogue between the
40:02
people I'm calling abolitionists and conservationists. There is.
40:06
There. There is virtually no opportunity.
40:10
And this is, this is an outlier. What you're doing is,
40:13
is I, as I said earlier, this is wonderful, but there's
40:16
hardly any opportunity for people who are working, who are work,
40:21
who seem to be working across purposes, but who I don't think necessarily have to.
40:26
So let me just say one more thing. And I think that this is important
40:30
and I want to make sure we get to it. I,
40:33
I've thought long and hard about all this stuff and for
40:37
better or worse, and I
40:42
think that. So I'm going to say something rather provocative
40:46
here, but I don't mean to be provocative. I mean to be great. So we
40:50
get more audience. I want a more provocative. So we get more audience. Right,
40:54
I get it. So what I would say
40:58
to strong advocates
41:03
of students with intellectual disabilities is
41:10
that look at
41:15
the Office of Special Education Program data, the most recent
41:19
report to Congress, the 2024 report to Congress on
41:24
placement, school placement,
41:28
and go past the top line
41:32
figure, which is that roughly 2/3 of children
41:36
and youth with disabilities are placed in general classrooms
41:40
for 80% of the school day or more. Get past that look to
41:44
see what proportion of students
41:48
with specific disabilities are
41:53
spending how much time in the general classroom. And a good
41:57
number of people know this. I'm not, I'm not pretending that I'm,
42:00
you know, flashing new information here.
42:05
A lot of people know this, but I'll reiterate because it's an important point.
42:09
Speech and language, kids with speech and language labels, close to
42:13
80% of those kids are in general classroom for 80%
42:17
or more of the school day. What about students with intellectual disabilities? Much lower.
42:22
I think it's 16% or something like that. It's actually somewhere
42:26
in the 20s, 20%, 25%,
42:28
26%, something like that.
42:34
And so despite all of the incredibly
42:38
hard work that advocates have shown,
42:43
demonstrated over the years, they still have, in that,
42:47
in that respect, in that narrow respect, they still don't
42:51
have a lot to show for it. And the frustration and disappointment can
42:56
be read. When you read people like Wayne Saylor and colleagues
43:01
and Connor and colleagues,
43:05
there is understandable frustration and disappointment.
43:10
Saylor goes so far as to say it's time to get rid of idea.
43:15
We just have to get rid of it. It's the reason why
43:19
we've got only 20 some odd percent of our kids in general classrooms.
43:25
Well, that's not going to happen.
43:27
IDEA is not going to be thrown away because
43:31
the vast majority of the disability community will lay down
43:35
in the streets if necessary to preserve idea.
43:41
So what I think about this is this
43:48
fact should be something that the
43:52
disability advocates should think seriously about.
43:55
And when I was writing this paper that I talked to you about, I talked
43:59
to you about, I began to realize that.
44:03
I think, I propose that there
44:07
has been an unfortunate conflation of
44:12
strategy and goal. Strategy and
44:16
goal. The goal for the People that I refer to as
44:20
abolitionists has always been integration,
44:24
meaningful integration. And in the paper that I am
44:28
continuing to reference, I take it back as far as the
44:34
great work that Blatt at Syracuse
44:39
University did. And when he and a colleague wrote Christmas came out
44:43
with the photographic essay Christmas in Purgatory, when he was showing
44:48
the horrible images of adults with
44:55
mental retardation and
45:00
that I think contributed, if not jump started the deinstitutionalization
45:06
movement in the United States. The inclusion movement I
45:10
see as an outgrowth of the deinstitutionalization.
45:14
So integration has been the goal.
45:18
Full inclusion has been the strategy.
45:22
That's how I think of the. There's a. In my head, there's a difference between
45:27
goal and strategy. The strategy has been full
45:31
inclusion. The goal has been integration. The goal,
45:34
the integration. Who can argue against. Who in their right mind could argue against
45:38
meaningful integration of all kids?
45:42
But the. But the strategy was and is a
45:46
bad strategy. Full inclusion is a bad strategy.
45:50
It has not worked for the advocates and it has not worked
45:54
for. It has not worked for the advocates of children
45:58
and youth with intellectual disabilities. And it has not worked. It has inflamed
46:03
other members of the disability community.
46:07
So my. And I don't say this
46:11
as a kind of gotcha or anything
46:15
like that. My. My what? I am attempting to be
46:20
helpful in suggesting that there should be
46:24
other ways explored by abolitionists
46:28
and conservationists to achieve meaningful integration.
46:33
When you mean full integration, you mean. Also I'm. I'm. I'm sure I'm.
46:37
I'm. You're meaning like adult life, right? And full participation in society.
46:41
Are you. Are you kind of gearing there?
46:43
Okay. Yeah. Okay.
46:47
Yeah. I mean, I guess. I guess the. I want to clarify that because you
46:51
said mental retardation, but this is not a video, so I know you did quotations
46:54
and you were referring to that particular time of time when those images
46:58
were coming. So I want to clarify that and that.
47:01
But the counterargument to that is like how you can have, you know,
47:05
a fully person integrated in society when,
47:10
you know, has lived in a separate school system for
47:15
most of their life where we're not interacting with
47:20
peers in the general education or
47:24
typically developing peers or even students with other disabilities.
47:29
And it was spend most of our schooling years
47:33
prepare. Isolated from you. Can. Can really that prepare you
47:37
to an adulthood where you are fully integrated? No.
47:41
No. Okay. No. I mean, as I said
47:46
before, I mean, I and most quote unquote,
47:49
conservationists would be willing to work hand in hand with Abolitionists
47:54
to help achieve the
47:58
integration of children and youth with intellectual
48:02
disabilities and as many other children with disabilities
48:06
in the mainstream of education.
48:10
You know, before we close, I skipped a question because our dialogue
48:14
took us somewhere else, very interesting places. And it's the
48:19
methodology part of research, because you've been, you know, you've been.
48:24
You have critiqued advocates, I mean, what you call abolitionists,
48:29
for being more ideological than evidence
48:32
driven, and you have emphasized the importance of empirical
48:37
and rigorous research. My question is
48:42
there is a value judgment there to me on
48:46
the kind of outcomes that you value and as well
48:50
as the kind of evidence that you privilege
48:54
over other. So, so when you look at that evidence, what.
48:58
What are you looking at? What counts as strong
49:02
evidence to you to make the arguments that.
49:06
That you are making? Okay, so I, you know, we don't, we don't
49:10
have the time to talk about research in a. In.
49:14
In. In broad terms, so let me narrow
49:18
the discussion if I can. The work that I and
49:22
many of my colleagues have done for a long time has been to
49:26
try to develop and then rigorously evaluate instructional
49:31
programs designed to strengthen the reading and
49:35
math performance of children who were doing terribly.
49:41
And so when I say develop and evaluate,
49:46
what evaluate means is conducting
49:50
studies that are
49:55
as free as possible from confounding influences.
50:01
So that when we're looking at the data at
50:06
the end of the study and we see that the treatment group
50:11
outperformed the control group, to be simple about this in
50:17
a meaningful way, it gives us confidence that
50:21
that instructional program, if, if applied the way that
50:26
we researched it, evaluated it,
50:30
will have benefit to not all,
50:34
but to many. So there
50:38
are specific ways of going about designing
50:43
that kind of evaluation study. There are specific ways of implementing
50:47
it. There are specific ways of analyzing the data and reporting it.
50:51
And so research
50:55
defined, as I've just defined it, requires that
51:00
kind of rigor for us in order to go to
51:04
parents and teachers and advocates and policy people and say,
51:08
this program, We've looked at this program, evaluated this
51:12
program in an iterative way over four years, and we can now say
51:17
with confidence that if it implemented the way we implemented,
51:22
will have benefit to many, not all, but to many.
51:25
Now, there are other ways of defining research. There are
51:29
other research. There are other, many, many, many other kinds of research questions
51:32
that don't necessarily involve randomized control trials,
51:37
which is what we tend to do. Randomized controlled trials
51:41
makes no sense if what you're trying to do is to
51:45
understand a group of students or parents or
51:50
whomever through intensive interviews. And so Forth and
51:54
so on. So there's lots of different research.
51:57
But yeah, I mean, for what
52:02
I am trying to do, I deliberately privilege
52:07
randomized control trials. Not only that, if I didn't do
52:11
randomized control trials, I wouldn't have gotten the money to do it in the first
52:15
place. Yeah, so, so, and from that perspective,
52:19
I mean, and you have written, I think about this, you do not find,
52:22
or, or you find a very inconclusive empirical base for inclusive
52:27
education. I, I, I didn't understand what you said. Sorry.
52:30
From that perspective that you bring, you know, the kind of research you do or,
52:34
or the lengths that you bring to research, you find the,
52:38
let's say, an inconclusive empirical
52:42
base to support full inclusion or inclusive education.
52:46
Yes, the short answer of the question, the short answer to your good question is
52:50
yes, I do. Because when claims have been
52:54
made over 50 years that studies show
52:58
that students with
53:02
disabilities in special classrooms do considerably worse than
53:07
students with disabilities in general classrooms and
53:11
to base policy on that finding, to me that's a
53:15
huge mistake. In part because of what's
53:20
referred to as selection bias. The children who
53:24
are being the two groups of students with disabilities being compared,
53:28
one in special ed, one in general ed, are different
53:32
from the start. And that's why they were
53:36
chosen by or assigned placed by
53:40
their teachers in special ed versus in general ed.
53:45
The ones placed in general ed were placed there because on the
53:49
basis of, I guess you could say expert opinion, they belong there,
53:53
they could benefit from the instruction there. The kids who
53:57
were not placed there and were placed in special ed were placed
54:01
because of the belief that they needed something more or something different,
54:04
that if they had been placed in general ed, they would have done badly.
54:07
So when you're comparing those two groups and across
54:11
75, 80, so called efficacy studies,
54:15
efficacy of special education studies. When you're comparing these two groups and
54:20
you're finding generally that the kids who were placed in general
54:23
ed performed better, well, they performed
54:27
better in part because they were stronger students
54:31
to begin with. And that's what I mean by selection bias.
54:34
Comparing those two groups is a classic example of
54:39
apples versus oranges, if you will.
54:42
Your argument is you're not comparing similar students,
54:46
you're comparing total different group of student population.
54:49
All right, well, we work offended. We're going to let you go. I know you're
54:54
busy or maybe she's in vacation. I want to enjoy your time. You don't want
54:58
to talk to me, which is also very valid reason. So I always end
55:02
these interviews asking people to dream we're
55:06
living in very, let's say, difficult times for education,
55:10
as you well pointed out. So help us dream
55:14
and tell us what are your hopes and dreams for the next five,
55:18
ten years in regards to the education of students with disabilities?
55:22
Well, I think I can be pretty concise.
55:25
I. It has bothered me on a personal level.
55:29
It has bothered me for a long time that there's been
55:33
this divide in the disability community. And I think that a
55:39
very, very important goal for all of
55:43
us should be to try to find ways of,
55:46
to try to find areas of agreement. We may not
55:50
agree on everything. You know, I don't believe in Kumbaya.
55:55
You know, everyone, everyone standing around a
56:00
campfire holding hands. I mean, I'm not. Look, that's not my vision,
56:03
but my vision is that there is greater mutual
56:08
respect and even efforts to work together
56:12
in certain, on certain things at certain
56:16
times across the community. Because it
56:22
there, you know, in my view, there's a big bad world out there and,
56:27
you know, if we're divided, we're not going to, we're going to
56:31
get eaten up by that big, big bad world. So there's, there's good
56:35
reason for everyone to try to find areas of, of agreement,
56:40
commonality and potentially areas to
56:44
work, to work with each other in. Yeah, I hope so too that these,
56:48
these very difficult times actually bring us together and at least to work in the
56:52
areas that there are some consensus, some agreement.
56:56
So we'll leave it like that. And I thank you. A thousand thanks,
57:00
Doug. Thank you for being on the show. I truly enjoy
57:04
and learn from this conversation. Thank you, Frederico.
57:07
I enjoyed speaking with you. Take care and good luck with the. And good luck
57:11
with the podcast. Thank you for listening to Thai
57:16
Federation. I hope you learned from this episode as much as I
57:20
did. Please help us to spread the word about the show.
57:23
See you next time.