When it comes to
public education, parents, especially, as well as community advocates and a good
many educators hold tightly the belief that every student must be treated equally. The application of Equality within school is given
assumption that all children and adolescents possess personal characteristics of
mind and behavior within a narrow range of sameness for the same chronological
age and given structure in the concept and substance of grade levels
kindergarten through twelfth and in common grade curriculum and curriculum
outcomes.
Equality, while a
truly noble sentiment emanating, especially during and subsequent to the 1950’s,
as a fierce reaction to the American brand of slavery, segregation, and
institutional and popular discrimination, unfortunately in my view, gave rise
to the assumption that nearly all enrolled can “fit” equally well into the same
organization of school and keep the process from bogging down with too many
special cases of ill fit. However, there
are those who ill fit the common school finding themselves removed from the
equality of personal attributes and at odds with the common structure and
demanded habits. These youngsters are
offered modifications, accommodations and other “supports” to help them fit-in.
For those perceived as radically deviating from sameness, public education
separates then from mainstream schooling and places then in self-contained
instruction. Yet, there is a nagging
sense, especially on the part of these parents, that those separated from
mainstream classes are being treated less than equally from their peers in the
mainstream. Thus, an acute tension has developed in parents, educators and
public education governors between the notions in practice of treating all the
same because all need to be roughly the same, Equality, and treating those who
are different differently with educational service based in and on being that
different.
The 1954 Supreme Court's Brown v Board of Education, Topeka, KS, declared
“separate but equal” public education unconstitutional, but the custom of
separate especially for children of color and from poverty continued and those
who were separated understandably and correctly demonstrated the separation as
inherently unequal and offensive to the basic notions of fairness and equal
opportunity. So much so was the offense taken that even in the
original disability education law, “Education for Handicapped Children (1975)”
mainstream inclusion, seen as the epitome of fairness and equality, was to be
sought as the best of policy and such was confirmed in the first and renewals
of the Individuals with Disability Education Act as the definition of “the
least restrictive environment”, Consequently, equality was established
to the universal view and policy that all
children and adolescents publicly educated are to be schooled in the same type of physical
spaces, in the same foundational courses of study which must produce the same
outcomes at the same time.
Yet, even Federal
Education Law acknowledged significant child differences from mainstream
cognition and behavior require different means to accomplish the same
outcomes. However, separate, self-contained instruction under
IDEA is only granted to those whose “disabling” conditions are too severe for
inclusion with supports.
As it is turning out, under
the combination of parents of children different from easy mainstream assimilation
looking for their children to be mainstream normal and normally treated, of
established Federal and State Law, Rule and Regulation of mainstream as the
definition of equality and of fiscal pressure on school districts consequent of
federal, state and local governments’ retreat from their obligation to fully
fund public education, the mainstream classroom has become the place where
everyone is dumped, even those with diagnosed “disabling” conditions, creating
classrooms with the widest array of child conditions, with which the system
was/is not constructed to manage well at all.
There are exceptions
made for some who are the best at mainstream instruction.
They are granted separate but equal schooling as being Gifted where they are segregated
from mainstream but undertake more of the same courses of study as mainstream and
in the same instructional manner as mainstream, but paced faster than regular
education classes.
But, in some quarters,
as in New York City, a good many folks, including public school governors, have
detected in Gifted separate but equal an Animal Farm application of Some Being
More Equal Than Others as it has been observed that it is to social and
economic circumstances which predispose those found to excel in conventional
instruction rather than the genuine merit of biologically inherent personal
attributes. Consequently, these unfair,
unequal, exceptions are to be eliminated and students who would otherwise be
segregated will be folded into mainstream classes.
At this point, only
those who most disrupt the order to the mainstream classroom, especially the
emotionally disturbed, are offered separate, self-contained instruction. And since Federal Law and State Law following
the Federal sanction separate from mainstream for the severe, separate,
self-contained will be retained for them.
But, the number of those found that severe may lessen as the pressure
for equal treatment in an inclusive, mainstream classroom and the further lack
of separate, self-contained funding are felt in public schooling.
