Ethical Dilemmas in Special Education

Ethical Dilemmas in Special Education

The ethical issues involved in special education are manifold. In many cases, the students are unable to perform certain activities unimpaired, and in many cases they will not ever attain a legal majority or emancipation. This already puts the educator in a more proprietary position than the mere invocation of in loco parentis could ever hope to capture.

Yet this seems to point toward a greater degree of potential paternalistic condescension on the educators part, something which we might consider as a particularly bitter irony about the state of special education overall, based on the origins of the present system of special education in America as being among the legal and educational reforms prompted by the Civil Rights movement inititated by African-Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. Congress' 1975 passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children act would remedy the earlier shocking statistic that only one in five handicapped children in the United States received an education at all, and it was widely credited as an achievement made possible by the earlier pivotal justice provided in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Special education to a certain extent remains a civil rights issue, and a potentially contentious one.

I propose to conduct a literature review which focuses on this aspect of special education specifically, and to see if a survey of existing opinion provides us with any sort of consensus as to the present state of ethics in the profession.

Problem Statement

The more specific statement of the ethical issue to be addressed here is disparities in standards of treatment. This is a running theme, as I hope to demonstrate, throughout the available literature on ethical issues relating to special education. Anyone with even the most passing experience with special education is aware that it entails the question of "mainstreaming," but it is worth recalling that the opposite of such mainstreaming -- and the standard practice in special education in most areas -- is a certain degree of segregation. Whether or not this segregation is problematic in and of itself -- and the degree of "labeling" which necessarily accompanies it, and which may also represent an added source of grief for special needs children, as they discover their own educational classification becomes a term of abuse, and terms like "retard" and "short bus" are thrown around with knowing contempt and hatefulness.

Of course, there are larger issues involved in special education -- sometimes it involves questions of official medical diagnosis, or sometimes it involves a lack of uniformity in standards and practices, but in all of these cases the central ethical issue of special education continues to be, in some sense, how "special" it really out to be, and how "special" it is. An alarmist might worry that we are placing special needs children into "special but unequal" facilities, yet this is not the ethical issue that troubles most educators in the field.

Instead, I think issues of how to provide the best treatment for each individual student remains the pre-eminent ethical concern for most educators actually on the ground and working in the field -- the ethical issues surveyed here are really more related to policy and administrative level concern.

Literature Review

The ethical issues involved in special education are manifold, and so I have concentrated my survey of literature on three specific areas: the involvement of medical standards, the problems posed by minority groups within special education, and the general issues of diagnosis, labeling and segregation (which to a certain degree can be critiqued from the standpoint of either the medical profession or of the "civil rights" standards set by minority groups in the 1960s which would have the additional result of the passage of 1970s-era legislation mandating educational support for the handicapped and those with special needs.

From the standpoint of purely medical ethics, both Black and Subotsky and also Alderson and Goodey address the issue of special education specifically. Black and Subotsky address the issues of special needs education within the larger context of medical ethics for those treating young persons for any sort of psychiatric reason which might require educational segregation, a common theme in all ethics-related writings on special education. Although their survey is based on London and they write from a European perspective, their conclusions would apply to the medical community's approach to special education in America as well:

A more common set of problems arises when a child is classified as maladjusted, or more correctly, assessed as being able to benefit from the kind of special education provided in schools for the maladjusted. A number of ethical difficulties arise from this procedure, particularly when the needs of the individual child have to be evaluated in conjunction with those of his teachers and his classmates, and economic factors may also have to be considered. (Black and Subotsky 1982, 7).

As we will see, their concerns here -- intended to be generally for the psychiatric profession as a whole -- will be echoed by the various other writers surveyed, particularly in the ethical dilemmas found in balancing the needs of students vs. those of teachers, and also the problems related to economic issues (which may or may not correlate with issues of race as well. Meanwhile, Alderson and Goodey also consider special education from the standpoint of specifically medical ethics, claiming that "the relationship between medical and educational approaches to children with disabilities and other difficulties has a long history" in which "the educational profession has veered between optimistic, often successful experiments in teaching such children, and disclaiming responsibility for many of them as 'ineducable'," while "the medical profession has…a parsimonious view of their developmental potential" (Alderson and Goodey 1998, 49). In some sense, they imply that the medical profession itself is probably best left out of any debates over care, because it has emphasized a more consistent standard of medical care for the differently abled while not necessarily endorsing any specific educational philosophy or goal.

A survey of the literature on ethical issues related to special education, though, also turns up a persistent theme between issues of racial segregation and second-class treatment, and how they may blend over into issues related to the segregatory practices of special education. Talbert-Johnson (2001) focuses specifically on racial issues. But she rightly emphasizes that it is a profession-wide scandal that the inability to attract and retain qualified African-American teachers specifically within the special education. She argues moreover that "the scarcity of African-American teachers in special education limits opportunities for these individuals to know and communicate in more than one culture" especially when the official statistics she cites from the United States Department of Education are so troubling and potentially ethically problematic: "African-Americans comprise 6.8% and 9.6% of elementary and secondary special education teachers, respectively" but "by contrast, approximately 18.4% of special education students are African-American" (286). In terms of the ethical issues involved in her survey, though, Talbert-Johnson is most sharp about the tendency to mislabel or mistakenly segregate African-American students within the special education system itself: she cites an intensive 1993 journalistic survey whose analysis found that African-American students are more likely to be overrepresented in special education classes when they are students in predominantly White school districts. The report also documented a network of programs that regularly used subjective testing criteria that relied on funding formulas and identification procedures that funnel ever greater numbers of minority children into special education programs each year. In state after state, disproportionately high numbers of African-American children were misidentified for special education programs.

(Talbert-Johnson 2001, 289)

Talbert-Johnson seems to conclude here that it is the overall lower quality of services provided to minority groups such as African-Americans or Latinos that is to account for their additional sloppy service from special education professionals as well. Of course these issues relate to the more general ethical issues involved in segregative designations for special education students and the whole question of identifiying "special education" as a separate and non-integrated educational category. Connor and Ferri also place an emphasis on the linkage between the establishment of special education infrastructure and the larger civil rights movement, but including discussion of the landmark legal cases which would hinge on the same issues of race and segregation. The 1970 Diana v. State Board of Education case involved nine Latino children falsely classified as Educable Mentally Retarded by a Caucasian examiner but then "retested by a Hispanic examiner" who found eight of the nine to be normal; the Larry P. v. Riles case in 1979 would hinge on the "overrepresentation of minority children in Educable Mentally Retarded classes in the San Francisco public schools" found to be "due to educational practices, including teacher bias" (Connor and Ferri 2005, 108). Here the ethical issues involve perhaps a secondary level of treatment offered to both minorities and students with special needs, which corresponds to a shockingly low standard for the treatment of students at the intersection of both groups. Connor and Ferri identify a problem but they do not necessarily propose any easy or ready solution. Rose-Ackerman (1982) follows the same theme but focusing specifically on the ethical issues entailed overall with questions of "mental retardation" and policies intended to promote or foster their so-called "normalization." She notes with some irony the origins of the present system of special education in a widespread societal examination in the early 1960s of the overall condition of care for those with special needs, which to a certain degree corresponded with the overall movements in the time period for civil rights asserted on behalf of previously dispossessed minority groups -- in the same way that this movement had initially proceeded for African-Americans in the domain of education, so was the condition in the 1960s when many with special needs, as Rose-Ackerman notes, "had been excluded from school" altogether, so that a sort of civil rights campaign conducted on behalf of the developmentally disabled was conducted in which "the key slogans were deinstitutionalization, normalization, mainstreaming, and a developmental model of care" (Rose Ackerman 1982, 81). She also asks us to consider the ethical implications of wealth disparity as well, since the situation remains unchanged from the one she described almost thirty years ago in which poor parents, especially those from minority ethnic and racial groups with a high incidence of mild retardation face a special problem. Because of their poverty, they are likely to be less sympathetic to programs that favor the retarded over other poor people. Because of their minority group status, they will also wish to avoid programs that doubly label a person as both retarded and a member of a minority group. However, they would like to receive subsidies to supplement their meager incomes, and the general public may be more willing to aid the retarded than the poor. (Rose-Ackerman 1982, 91).

Rose-Ackerman also singles out the largest conceptual ethical dilemma when handling certain types of special needs clients, which is that frequently their legal status is such that they require guardians or advocates to do their decision-making for them, and will continue to do so even after they reach the legal age of majority. In some sense, making educational decisions is done "in the best interest" of the student, but not as the student would conceive his or her own "best interest" potentially.

These invocations of issues of race and civil rights can be more generally abstracted, though, into a concern with the issues of labeling and student segregation which are unavoidable in the practice of special education. Coleman notes the obvious necessity for "labeling": as he puts it,

Children identified as handicapped, by legal mandate, must receive special education assistance. As a result, labeling and special-class placement always occur together. Obvious legal and ethical issues prevent attempts at separating the influence of each event experimentally. (Coleman 1983, 4).

He goes on to demonstrate that ethical issues are further complicated by such facts once the separation and diagnosis has been made: that to a certain degree, the effect of what President George W. Bush rather grandiloquently termed "the soft bigotry of low expectations," in which it becomes an ethical matter as to whether the educational curriculum should be devoted to simpler tasks and "increasing instructional segregation" to "result in higher self-concept" (Coleman 1983, 5) The real ethical dilemma, he concludes, lies in the justification for this shifted basis in educational assumptions, which is that "enhanced self-satisfaction may foster motivation toward more complex achievments," but it does also raise the bar for the educator substantially in terms of the level of emotional engagement (and the risk of career "burnout" or exhaustion) required on a daily basis, if the ultimate goal of education is to improve the student's self-esteem rather than to impart usable and practical skills. Meanwhile Berkeley and Ludlow (2008) present illustrative anecdotes about the types of ethical dilemmas which those involved in special education face in rural areas, most of which relate specifically and directly to this theme even though the issues of race are left out and it becomes merely a question about segregatory practice. They begin with a set of four specific scenarios which they note are "familiar to most rural special educators (and we expect to special educators in other settings as well)" (5). These include a 14-year-old girl with "moderate mental retardation" subject to a state mandated transfer to a regional facility focusing on children with disabilities (requiring a one-hour bus ride and potential alienation from the community in which she resides which might grant "access to community-based training opportunities"); lawsuits involving such regional centers which "will limit opportunities for school and community integration"; a regional center which lumps together "five students who are deaf, three students with moderate mental retardation, two students with autism, two students who have visual impairments and some intellectual impairment, and three students with dyslexia…between nine and eleven years of age…re-assigned to a school in which they will all be educated together" (Berkeley and Ludlow 2008, 4-5). Edward J. Kelly writes to address the general question of ethical behavior in special education overall, noting that "the motives and ethics of many special education teachers are often suspect," due to the readily available federal funding which makes special education subject to the same political attacks and wild accusiations of socialism that adhere to any social welfare program for any disadvantaged group whatsoever. But he concludes that the profession requires a formal "operative code of ethics" to avoid disparities (Kelly 1979, 293).

I conclude with Kelly's analysis because it remains true to this day, and it will provide me with the basis for my concluding thoughts in this overall survey of issues related to the ethics of special education, and most particularly the issues related to special education considered as a "civil rights" style issue.

Conclusion

My chief recommendation in concluding summary of this survey of the various and complicated issues related to the question of ethics in special education as it exists in America today is to take seriously Edward J. Kelly's arguments in his 1979 paper on "Public Ethics vs. Personal Motives in Special Education." He is right that the profession of special education itself needs a codified set of ethical standards to prevent not only wide disparities regionally or by school district, but also to prevent educators from confusion or misguided assumptions. Kelly is particularly scathing about the misguided notions of some educators who take a "messianic" approach to the job, and assume that their activities can have some kind of radical change -- Kelly is just as attentive as Alderson and Goodey to the rather limited expectations given by many of these students within a specifically medical diagnosis, but it remains true that teacher emotional investment may in fact be the most useful thing for certain students, insofar as ability increases with self-esteem and self-confidence.

But it is clear that the segregation of special needs students is a particular area of concern. The literature marks the various ways in which this has a deleterious effect on the lives of both students and educators in the special education arena. In rural areas, educational segregation divorces students from the specific communities in which they will presumably one day hope to find employment and relative autonomy. In urban areas, educational segregation seems to lead to a degree of second class treatment more commonly associated with the treatment of minorities, and indeed there is a documented crossover between the short shrift given to minority families and to families of those with special needs children.

But again, the question of segregation also entails a question of "labeling" and it seems right to compare this issue with a more longstanding issue in medical ethics, about the ethical ramifications of disclosure. Fifty years ago, it was standard practice to deliver a cancer diagnosis to a person's immediate family but to conceal it from the patient himself; nowadays this policy is precisely reversed, so that a doctor or a hospital cannot divulge a patient's diagnosis for anything (including cancert) to any other parties without that patient's consent. The concern in medicine for personal rights and personal autonomy has shifted almost completely in favor of individual rights in the recent time period, but of course the issue of "consent" becomes tricky with large numbers of differently-abled students or students with special needs. A paraplegic will, of course, be able to participate fully in any issues of consent, and lacks only physical autonomy. But a student with Downs Syndrome is in another position altogether, and the idea of "informed consent" becomes more problematic. To a certain degree, doctors and educators alike are in the position of almost concealing the diagnosis from the patient, if we consider that self-image and perceived ability have a lot to do with determining what a special needs student thinks is possible in terms of education and future.