The current upheaval in public education creates possibilities to reimagine the role special educators can play in maximizing learning for all students.

At the beginning of my career, I was among the first wave of special education teachers who entered the field after the passage of the 1975 Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA, which later became the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA). At the time, I worked for an agency that had contracted with a large public school district to “take care of” adolescents who needed extensive supports. Both the district leaders and the head of the agency assumed that these young people could not learn and did not belong in the regular school system, so, in their eyes, my role was mainly custodial.

The next fall, when I took a public school position teaching adolescents with similar support needs, I found myself working in a self-contained classroom on its own campus, separated from other schools. Several of my students were in the public school system for the first time — and some had no previous experience in any educational setting at all.

In both of these positions, I found colleagues whose aspiration, like mine, was to be more than just a caregiver. For instance, numerous fellow teachers who saw the potential of “supported employment” (which assists people with disabilities in obtaining paid jobs) tried to find our students jobs in the community. One speech and language pathologist spent his own time and money to create such opportunities at a local greenhouse. At each turn, however, we ran into barriers erected by other adults who thought they knew what was possible (or not possible) for these young people.

Years later, in the late 1980s, I worked as a psychologist at an institution for people with intellectual disability. This euphemistically named “state school” was under a class-action lawsuit, which led to the requirement that staff implement a number of practices that were innovative for the time, such as positive approaches to behavior modification and person-centered planning. Nearly every annual planning meeting to define services and goals for each person resulted in a plan to move that person into the community — but, in fact, the staff never followed through on these plans. Nor, I came to realize, did they have any real knowledge of the people they were supposed to be supporting. For instance, at each planning meeting, staff were required to begin by listing the person’s strengths and abilities. I remember one such meeting, concerning a young man who had a wonderful laugh and a sunny disposition, as well as multiple disabilities and extensive support needs, where the only strength the case manager could come up with was his prepaid burial plan. Eventually, the lawsuit forced the facility to close, and many of the people who lived there were dispersed to other state-run institutions.

Why do I begin with my personal employment history? Simply put, my perspective on special and inclusive education was shaped by those early experiences working in segregated agencies, schools, and institutions. And my various professional experiences since then have only strengthened my belief that many of the systemic barriers that face students with disabilities can be traced back to a primary cause: other people’s assumptions about what people with disabilities can or cannot achieve.

A long history of segregation and inequality

I live just 26 miles from the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Topeka, Kansas. When you enter that museum — located in a brick school building constructed in 1926 as a segregated elementary school for African American children — the first thing you see is a plaque inscribed with these famous words from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling: “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” More than four decades later, in the landmark 1999 decision in Olmstead v. L.C., the Court made essentially the same point about the institutionalization of people with disabilities, ruling that this practice amounts to a discriminatory and unjust form of segregation, in violation of Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The segregation of students with disabilities, like the segregation of Black children, has a very long history in our country, and the effects of that history linger. Like the Brown decision, EHA represented an important victory, but it didn’t wipe the slate clean. For almost a century, school officials had argued that children with disabilities were uneducable and needed to be kept apart from their peers — kept apart, they said, both for their own protection and the protection of society writ large. These assumptions and biases were common in the late 1970s, when I started my career, and they’re still visible today.

These young people have helped me see more and more clearly that the field’s emphasis on “disability” has limited our efforts to serve students and lowered our expectations for them.

Our system of special education has a long history, too, predating EHA by many decades. The first recorded public school class for students who were disabled was established by Elizabeth Ferrell in the New York City public schools in 1899 (Kode, 2017); by the 1920s, hundreds of school districts in more than half of the states had established public school special education programs, almost all of them housed in separate classrooms or buildings (Ferguson, 2014). The special education programs of the late 1970s simply continued the practices that were in place long before EHA was passed.

Don’t get me wrong: EHA was a landmark civil rights act that opened the doors to public schooling for thousands and thousands of students who had been denied education prior to 1975, including some of the students I taught. The legislation was startlingly original, too, in asserting that students with disabilities should be educated with their nondisabled peers, if possible. But that revolutionary idea was quickly diluted by regulations that required schools to provide a continuum of alternate placement options, such as special classes and special schools. That is, the old assumption that some people “need” to be separated from others, ostensibly for their own benefit, lived on (Ferguson, 2014; Smith & Wehmeyer, 2022).

Toward strengths and self-determination

While my experiences have taught me to be wary of deeply rooted cultural assumptions about what people with disabilities can and cannot do, they’ve also given me hope. As a researcher and advocate, I’ve studied and sought to promote the self-determination of young people with disabilities. Perhaps more important, I’ve had many opportunities to listen to people with disabilities and learn about their own desire to live independent and self-determined lives. These young people have helped me see more and more clearly that the field’s emphasis on “disability” has limited our efforts to serve students and lowered our expectations for them. I think it is increasingly becoming evident that unless we adopt strengths-based approaches to the education of learners with disabilities, we will not achieve the goals that most of us desire for students.

The Supreme Court offered a similar argument in its 2016 ruling in Endrew F. v. Douglas County, a case that has already had profound implications for the field of special education:

When all is said and done, a student offered an educational program providing “merely more than de minimis” progress from year to year can hardly be said to have been offered an education at all. For children with disabilities, receiving instruction that aims so low would be tantamount to “sitting idly . . . awaiting the time when they were old enough to “drop out.”
It requires an educational program reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress appropriate in light of the child’s circumstances. (p. 14)

By arguing that special education students should be able to make progress that is more than just “de minimis” (i.e., lacking in significance, importance, or value), the Court set the bar significantly higher than it had in its 1982 ruling in Board of Education vs. Rowley, when it defined an appropriate education program as one from which a student might “reasonably benefit.” This vague and low-level standard made it all too easy for school districts to comply with federal requirements just by fiddling with their paperwork, without actually doing anything to improve (Voulgarides, 2018, 2022).

In Endrew F., by contrast, the Court made it clear that if students with disabilities were making only minimal progress, then they were not receiving an appropriate education. Instead, the Court stated that each “child’s educational program must be appropriately ambitious in light of his circumstances” and that “goals may differ, but every child should have the chance to meet challenging objectives” (p. 3). This fundamentally changed what it means for an education to be considered “appropriate” for individual students with disabilities, raising important new questions: How can we achieve this higher standard? Is that possible within the current special education system, or do we need to jettison that system and create a new one that is better equipped to provide more ambitious, challenging, and personalized supports, services, and instruction?

The limits of progress

I understand that it’s difficult to achieve meaningful change in public education and that it’s always easier to follow the letter of the law than to embrace it in spirit. This has certainly been the case in the field of special education.

The most recent Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) report on IDEA (U.S. Department of Education, 2020) indicated that 64% of the country’s students receiving special education services were educated in general education settings 80% or more of their day, which looks like great progress, given that just 47% of special education students met that benchmark in 2000. And it has been great progress for some students. Drill down a bit deeper, though, and the picture doesn’t look so positive, especially for students with intellectual disability: The 2020 data show that only 17.4% of these students spent 80% or more of their day in general education settings. In the 1992-93 school year, just 7.1% of students with intellectual disability met this benchmark (Wehmeyer, 2019). You could say that’s an indicator of progress, but an increase of 10 percentage points over 30 years doesn’t seem all that impressive.

I have now been involved in the special education enterprise for 40 years; IDEA and I grew up together. I believe that, as a field, we have much to be proud of: Many students have benefited from special education services, and, on the whole, we have contributed to the greater good. But we are nowhere near where we want to be, and our progress has been much too slow.

Special education (and education as a whole) continues to be plagued with the same systemic racism, ableism, and other discriminatory practices that exist in our society overall, as OSEP’s annual reports to Congress regularly demonstrate. For instance, the risk ratio for Black children ages 6 to 21 to be categorized as having an emotional disorder or intellectual disability is twice that of white children (U.S. Department of Education, 2020). Further, student outcomes remain worrisome for too many students with disabilities. In 2019, the graduation rate for all students was 86% (U.S. Department of Education, 2021), but only 72% for all disabled students and 61% for students with emotional disturbance (U.S. Department of Education, 2020). The dropout rate for all students that year was 5.1%; for students with disabilities, it was 16%. Employment rates for people with developmental disabilities hover around 20%, and postsecondary enrollment for youth with disabilities is under 50% (Wehmeyer, 2019).

The history of our field is one of incremental progress: more for some students, less for others. But this incremental approach results every year in tens of thousands of children continuing to be left out and left behind. Our efforts fall short for every one of those children. As difficult as it may be to achieve significant educational change, we must push ourselves even harder to meet the standard defined by the Supreme Court in the Endrew case: to ensure that every child receives an education that is ambitious and challenging and embodies personalized supports, services, and instruction.

Should special education be special?

One way to achieve this is to reconsider how schools can better serve all students. Education reformers have long called for radical reforms of an antiquated education system that was created for a society that was still largely agrarian, at a time when low-skilled factory work was the fastest-growing part of the labor market. The world today is simply not the same world we knew in 1975, when EHA was passed, much less the world of the 1920s and ’30s.

Today, public education’s leading voices celebrate student autonomy and ownership, curiosity and motivation, creativity and entrepreneurship, active engagement with new ideas and inventions, and “deep learning” rather than a shallow understanding of basic facts and skills (Fullan, Quinn, & MacEachen, 2018). A world-class education, according to Yong Zhao (2012, 2018), incorporates student voice in school governance; student choice in a broad and flexible curriculum; and a strengths-based focus on students’ unique talents, skills, and interests.

If this is what a world-class education looks like for all students, why should we expect anything less for students with disabilities?

The field of special education has long advocated for and pioneered many of the educational practices that the rest of K-12 education now views as cutting-edge. Over the last three decades, we’ve developed models of teaching and learning that focus on personalization, self-determination, and student engagement. We’ve thought deeply about how technology can contribute to student learning, and we’ve taken the lead in implementing Universal Design for Learning. We’ve long understood the value of formative assessment and relied on it to help us modify instruction. And over the last two decades, especially, we have begun to demonstrate what a strengths-based approach to education looks like and how it can benefit children.

If this is what a world-class education looks like for all students, why should we expect anything less for students with disabilities?

Still, nearly every reform initiative in our field — from mainstreaming to inclusion to multitiered systems of supports — has been criticized as an effort by special educators to foist their ideas and practices upon general education, without general educators’ consent, knowledge, or input. A number of years ago, my colleague Wayne Sailor, writing in Kappan (Sailor & Roger, 2005), pointed out something that most of us seemed to have missed: By focusing primarily on the “inclusion” of students with disabilities in the general education classroom, we missed an important chance to build bridges. Rather than advocating for the rest of the school to adopt practices that meet the needs of the particular children we serve, we should have advocated for schoolwide applications that ensure that “previously specialized adaptations and strategies are used to enhance the learning of all students” (p. 503). That is, what we’ve advocated for students with disabilities should be what we advocate for students, period.

I believe that the current movement to promote personalized and flexible approaches to teaching and learning provides a rare opportunity to align practices between special education and general education. And the current upheaval within public education creates possibilities for change that are qualitatively different from any in recent memory.

My own vision for the future of education has been greatly influenced by the work of my colleague, Yong Zhao, particularly his 2018 book, Reach for Greatness: Personalizable Education for All Children. Our existing school system, Zhao argues, relies on two flawed assumptions: first, that “there is a set of skills and knowledge everyone must have in order to live a successful life in the world,” and second, that “all children are capable of and interested in acquiring the skills and knowledge at a similar pace” (Zhao, 2018, p. 8). As a result, he adds, our school system “rarely cares about children’s individual passions or talents” (p. 17) but instead focuses mainly on teaching the “skills” of being a good student: following rules, doing homework, getting good grades, and passing tests.

Our norm-referenced, standardized approach to education implies that not all children can be great (since, by definition, half will be judged to be below average) and that some talents and passions are less important than others. The alternative, Zhao proposes, is to recognize that every child has a unique profile (a “jagged profile,” as he puts it) influenced by their particular experiences and opportunities and including many strengths and weaknesses. If each child is unique, then “there is no average . . . everyone can be said to be great in [their] own ways” (Zhao, 2018, p. 31). As he explains:

Today, in the new age, a majority of traditional routine tasks that required a homogenous set of skills and knowledge are now performed by machines, and human needs have shifted from basic needs to more psychological, aesthetic and intellectual needs. Thus, the full spectrum of human talents has become economically valuable. (p. 57)

If our current challenge is to build an educational system in which “all talents are worth developing and all passions are worth pursuing” (Wehmeyer, 2019, p. 30); in which we value all students’ self-determination, agency, and ownership; and in which we seek to respond to every student’s individual interests and needs, then we are building a system that requires the skills and knowledge that special educators possess. We have expertise in self-determined learning, as well as effective, validated models of professional development that help teachers promote student agency and self-determination. And we have vast experience in implementing practices that can be applied schoolwide to support all students, including students who’ve struggled in reading, math, science, and other content areas.

Toward personalization for all students

In short, I suspect we’ve outlived whatever utility there was to the term “special education.” What we provide is specially designed and personalized instruction, which is what ought to count as high-quality instruction for every student, whatever their strengths or areas of instructional needs — whether they are identified as autistic or neurotypical, deaf or hearing, cognitively disabled or gifted.

No doubt, we will have to modify some of our practices to ensure that they are, indeed, applicable to all students, particularly if they were developed explicitly or exclusively for students with disabilities. For example, I think we will want to move from our familiar three-tiered systems of support to systems that recognize that all children have “jagged” profiles — stronger in some domains, weaker in others — requiring us to provide different kinds of instruction and support at different times.

In a recent Kappan article on gifted education, Dante Dixson and colleagues (2020) came to a similar conclusion, arguing that schools should take a much more flexible and personalized approach to determining if and when students need opportunities for advanced or accelerated learning:

We propose a model of gifted education that is proactive and locally focused on students’ present needs in specific domains. [T]eachers and school staff must act as talent scouts, proactively identifying students who are underchallenged. That is, they should make it a priority to assess every student and then review the data to find those who are performing at a higher level than the material they are being taught. (p. 24)

It may sound unrealistic to expect our school systems to conduct the frequent, robust assessments of student’s various talents and needs that would enable us to create an individualized instructional program for each learner. In recent years, however, colleagues in special education (Karvonen et al., 2020) have pioneered the use of technology-assisted assessments that provide precisely this sort of nuanced information. And while these tools were originally meant to drive an alternate assessment process for students with the most extensive support needs, the approach has already been shown to have considerable promise for use with all students.

EHA was, first and foremost, a civil rights act addressing discrimination against children with disabilities. We absolutely must continue to ensure that the rights of all children and their families to public education are guaranteed and protected. But we must also heed the Supreme Court and go beyond de minimis standards for disabled children, beyond low expectations and segregated settings, beyond incremental changes, beyond what “special education” has come to mean for too many students. We need to move beyond just talking about where some children are educated — specialized or general education settings — and focus on making sure that all children benefit from the instructional strategies that our field has developed over the years. We need to move beyond compliance and toward proactive efforts to promote equity and belonging for all students. We need to move beyond a focus on disorder and impairment and toward an appreciation for strengths, passions, and abilities. And we need to move beyond the confines of special education and toward a unified approach to K-12 education, in which the goal is not to provide separate services for different categories of children but to provide personalized supports that enable every student to, as Dixson and colleagues put it, “maximize” their talents.

References

Dixson, D.D., Peters, S.J., Makel, M.C., Jolly, J.L., Matthews, M.S., Miller, E.M., . . . & Wilson, H.E. (2020). A call to reframe gifted education as maximizing learning. Phi Delta Kappan, 102 (4), 22-25.

Ferguson, P.M. (2014). Creating the continuum: J.E. Wallace Wallin and the role of clinical psychology in the emergence of public school special education in America. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 18 (1), 86-100.

Fullan, M., Quinn, J., & MacEachen, J. (2018). Deep learning: Engage the world, change the world. Corwin Press.

Karvonen, M., Kingston, N.M., Wehmeyer, M.L., & Thompson, W.J. (2020). New approaches to designing and administering inclusive assessments. In U. Sharma & S. Salend (Eds.), The Oxford encyclopedia of inclusive and special education. Oxford University Press.

Kode, K. (2017). Elizabeth Farrell and the history of special education (2nd ed.). Council for Exceptional Children.

Sailor, W. & Roger, B. (2005). Rethinking inclusion: Schoolwide applications. Phi Delta Kappan, 86 (7), 503-509.

Smith, J.D. & Wehmeyer, M.L. (2022). Good blood, bad blood: Science, nature, and the myth of the Kallikaks (2nd ed.). American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.

U.S. Department of Education. (2020). 42nd annual report to Congress on the implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Author.

U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2021). The Condition of Education 2021. Author.

Voulgarides, C.K. (2018). Does compliance matter in special education? IDEA and the hidden inequities of practice. Teachers College Press.

Voulgarides, C.K. (2022). The promises and pitfalls of mandating racial equity in special education. Phi Delta Kappan, 103 (6), 14-20.

Wehmeyer, M.L. (2019). Strength-based approaches to educating all learners with disabilities: Beyond special education. Teachers College Press.

Zhao, Y. (2012). World class learners: Educating creative and entrepreneurial students. Corwin.

Zhao, Y. (2018). Reach for greatness: Personalizable education for all children. Corwin.

---

This article appears in the March 2022 issue of Kappan, Vol. 103, No. 6, pp. 8-13.