Licensure as a Special Education Teacher Pre-K to 9th Grade

¶ … disappointments of educational reform in recent memory has been the failure of the mainstreaming of special-education pupils. This disappointment arose because the idea of mainstreaming held - at least for some educators and families, at least for a while, such a bright promise for so many children who were markedly different from their peers. For years such children had been denied access not only to the educational opportunities available to other students but also to the social interactions that are also such an important part of the school experience.

Moreover, mainstreaming seemed to often an end to some of the worst of stigmatization that children with development difficulties had been made to suffer. However, it was very soon apparent that the promises of mainstreaming - an appropriate education for all - were illusory. Children with developmental challenges were not being adequately served in classrooms in which there were too many children for the teachers to attend to, especially if some of these students had special needs.

In part because those children (and their parents) who were relatively more independent tended to receive less attention from teachers in classrooms with special-needs children, they began to resent the special-needs children. This often resulted in situations in which there was a greater degree of resentment and stigma against the special-needs children than there had been before.

This mother of a boy with Down syndrome talked about the experience he had being mainstreamed - before she changed school districts so that he could once more be enrolled in a separate special education class. For about the first three days we thought that this was a wonderful thing for him. Finally he could meet more boys his age, get the kind of social contact that he needed. His verbal skills simply were not progressing, in part because there were simply no other boys his age in his class.

He didn't talk in part because of developmental problems, but mostly because he was lonely. And so mainstreaming seemed a god-send. And then after a few days we realized that mainstreaming meant sticking him in the back of the classroom with coloring books. He was in fifth grade and he was treated like a toddler. No, he was treated like someone who did not deserve an educational because he was different.

It was out of precisely such failed educational chances that the idea of self-contained special education classes was born - or rather reborn, for the idea of segregating those children who could not learn in a traditional classroom format was in certain ways a return to the pre-mainstream status quo. However, fortunately for pupils, their families and teachers as well, schools had learned something from the mistakes of both the earlier, highly stigmatized segregated classes and the problems of mainstreaming as well.

Which brings us, more or less to the present. There are currently two major sets of challenges facing teachers of self-contained special education classes. The first of these is to create a curriculum that is appropriate for the members of the classroom. This can be a challenging task indeed given the widely varying developmental levels that usually exist together in a class as well as the range of ages.

Adding to these challenges, which have long attended the special-ed teacher, is the additional challenge faced in many special-ed classes today of children whose first language is not English. The complexities of working with immigrant children are substantial in and of themselves; when these immigrant children also have developmental problems, the complexities of reaching them and providing an appropriate educational can indeed seem overwhelming at first. The second set of challenges facing the special-ed teacher lies in the issue of the stigma that.