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Monday, March 12, 2007
Mainstream Vs. Self-Contained: What’s Better?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Lately, I’ve been working on a story about the special education vouchers the Legislature is considering starting next school year, and one of the questions that keeps popping up is whether the program would segregate disabled kids from so-called regular education students.
The assumption here — at least for critics of the program — is that segregation would be a bad thing.
In Florida, where a similar voucher program has been in effect since 2000, I found parents of special needs children who felt their kids were not getting the attention they deserved when they were “mainstreamed” into regular public school classes. To remedy that, they took the voucher and sought out private school programs where children with special needs were in self-contained classrooms, surrounded by others with similar disabilities.
But, just as some experts think placing non-English speaking students in English-only classrooms improves language acquisition, some educators believe including disabled students in general education classes improves their chances of learning. I thought about this as I was reading a story about a local youth basketball league that includes deaf and hard-of-hearing children. On those teams, the learning goes both ways. The disabled kids get a chance to experience team sports, while the other players learn about children who are not like them.
So, at the end of the day, what’s better: mainstreaming special education students as much as possible or keeping them in smaller, self-contained programs?
