Special Education: Ethical Issues and Challenges

Introduction

Disabilities can be mental or physical, and they create a lifelong impact on a child's social, emotional, and mental health that must be addressed during the early years. Parents and teachers are crucial, as they are the primary educators for children with special needs. This paper explores the common issues and challenges that arise when working with individuals with disabilities, the methods of overcoming them, and the ethical and legal implications involved.

Common Issues and Challenges While Working With Individuals with Disabilities

Inclusive classrooms, teacher motivation, working with students from different cultural backgrounds, and managing mixed-ability students simultaneously — such as slow learners and high achievers — are among the most common challenges identified when working with students with disabilities.

Rather than excluding people with disabilities, social inclusion is a concept that emerged with a positive orientation, encouraging the removal of social barriers and promoting the participation of disabled people in society. The inclusive classroom is one such inclusionary step. However, the availability of adequately trained teachers for managing inclusive classrooms remains scarce. Teachers are often insufficiently prepared to handle classroom challenges such as managing the behavior of disabled students, addressing social interaction difficulties with peers, and creating lesson plans that keep disabled students progressing at a pace comparable to other learners (Ahammed, 2021). Continuous adaptation is required to meet the needs of disabled students, particularly because curricula are usually produced by mainstream administrative offices (Zemba & Chipindi, 2020).

Mixed-ability classrooms already pose a considerable challenge in regular educational settings, where students of different capacities, abilities, and learning paces must be kept on the same trajectory (Al-Subaiei, 2017). This challenge is amplified in inclusive classrooms. Managing diversity adds further complexity when classrooms contain students from varied cultural and racial backgrounds. Studies have corroborated that teachers frequently lack sufficient knowledge to cope with mixed-ability students and those with disabilities within a single classroom (Siddiqui et al., 2021). Teachers sometimes lack suitable support and are deprived of the training needed to run such classrooms effectively. They face difficulties assembling worksheets for diverse groups — whether diversity is defined in racial or ability terms — and find marking assessments for mixed-ability students that include disabled learners particularly challenging.

Despite some benefits of mixed-ability inclusive classrooms for disabled students — such as peer support from high-achieving learners and the opportunity to work in groups with gifted peers — teachers still struggle to develop lesson plans, assessments, and class materials for such groups (Hove, 2022). Teachers report that students with higher academic abilities find it difficult to consistently support those with disabilities and must be continuously motivated to do so. Teachers also feel they cannot attend to every student's particular need simultaneously, creating additional pressure (Hove, 2022). Curriculum differentiation can become an unwanted obstacle that teachers feel unable to address due to a lack of classroom aids and insufficient direction from higher authorities (Hove, 2022). Additional stress arises when parents of high-achieving students express concern that their child feels bored or overlooked while the teacher focuses on disabled students (Hove, 2022). Ensuring that high-achieving students do not feel excluded, while also not appearing to force them to work with disabled students, is an ongoing challenge.

Maintaining the morale and motivation of teachers who work with disabled students is another significant issue. Teachers need to be encouraged to provide the basic educational right to disabled students, and this motivation largely depends on salary equity and promotional opportunities (Aziz et al., 2015). When teachers understand that professional advancement is available in their specialized field and that their efforts are recognized, they become more willing to assist students with greater needs. If teachers of disabled students are deprived of autonomy, control, and professional empowerment, their job satisfaction declines. School administrators play a vital role in this dynamic, and those who do not fully appreciate this element tend to adopt a more authoritative approach that further diminishes teacher morale (Aziz et al., 2015).

Ethical and Legal Aspects of the Identified Challenges

The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 states that individuals with disabilities must not be excluded from social participation, and those who deny such individuals this right are subject to legal consequences (IDEA, n.d.). The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 similarly prohibits discrimination against disabled individuals, particularly in public schools, affirming that this population is entitled to overall federal financial assistance (IDEA, n.d.). The ADA was enacted to guarantee that individuals with disabilities have the same societal, educational, national, religious, and ethnic rights as non-disabled citizens. The rights to use public transportation, access employment opportunities, and ensure that their children receive quality education were among the Act's primary aims — goals shared by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

IDEA is specifically designed to ensure that students with disabilities are eligible for an appropriate public education, built upon the foundations established by the two laws above (IDEA, n.d.). The challenges outlined in the previous section must be viewed in light of IDEA, since discrimination on the basis of race, culture, or learning capacity — particularly within inclusive or mixed-ability classrooms — is strictly forbidden by law.