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Providing special education without special classes
Journal of School Psychology Vol. 10, No. 2, 1972
PROVIDING SPECIAL EDUCATION WITHOUT SPECIAL CLASSES' Milton B u d o f f Research lnstitu t~for Educational Problems Cambridge, Massachusetts Summary: The impetus and logic for maintenance or reintegration of marginally inadequate students in regular class programs is discussed. Flexible supporting systems must be developed to provide for the students' special educational needs to replace sole reliance on segregated classes. Nongraded school organization, broad age span, achievement, and ability levels allow for more flexible educational options. Provisions for continuing in-service training and support for teachers and administrators is mandatory. Psychologists can be primarily responsible to formulate strategies for alternative educational plans for marginally inadequate students.
The trend to segregate children needing special education services into isolated, intact programs is reversing. There is an active search for alternative organizational strategies which can maintain these children in a regular class but provide them access to the specialized help they may require for portions of the school day. Until now this principle of integration has been applied mainly to the perceptually handicapped; those identified as mildly mentally retarded tend to be segregated. Historically, special classes for the mildly retarded were established to promote homogeneity among children who were deemed able to profit from the academic curriculum. It was assumed that segregated groupings of slow learners would provide a more comfortable and secure environment where they could learn without the prospect of continuing failure and peer rejection they had experienced in the regular grades. Placement was made primarily on the basis of a low IQ score, which confirmed the child's low probability of successful academic school completion. Usually there is no "special" curriculum, few special educational materials, and little individualized instruction in these classes. Children are often denied access to other remedial services-remedial reading, speech, perceptual handicap or counseling help-and to art, music, manual arts, homemaking, and physical education. State reimbursement practices and regulations often mandate segregated programs and may perpetuate some of the mild mental retardation observed in schools. While the simmering dissatisfaction with segregated programs has been brewing for many years (.Johnson, 1962; Dunn, 1968 ), a potent crystallizing influence has been the disenchantment of the now-vocal poor with the educational and psychological damage accorded their children by placement in segregated programs, especially for the mentally retarded. Ross, DeYoung, and Cohen (1971) have reviewed the legal suits challenging the use of IQ tests for placement, the discriminatory network of practices related to children classified as mentally retarded, and the competence of school 1This paper was supported by Grant OEG-8-080506-4597 (607) from the Research Branch of the Bureau for the Handicapped, U. S. Office of Education, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. These comments were based in part on a discussion of these issues presented to the annual meeting of the American Association of Mental Deficiency, Houston, Texas, June, 1971. Journal of SchoolPsychology,Vol. 10, No. 2, 1972
199
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Milton Budoff
psychologists to make the often difficult differential diagnosis. In Massachusetts, these suits have effectively begun to influence school system and professional practice.
A LOGIC FOR REINTEGRATION OR MAINTENANCE IN REGULAR CLASSES
Two major reasons are advanced for maintenance and/or reintegration of the child in need of special education services in the regular school program. Most important is the desire to improve the educational opportunities offered the child. With proper support the regular class may aid the child psychologically to continue to want to learn. It also removes the debilitating effects of the stigma attached to his placement in the segregated class. Efficacy studies of special classes largely have shown that segregated children make the same or smaller academic gains as those maintained in regular classes who received no special education help (Kirk, 1964). Children in special classes are more at ease, but the greater comfort may be a function of the child's reference group. Folman and Budoff (1971) reported more special-class adolescents feel equal or superior in ability to their special classmates. They felt markedly less confident about their ability when they compared themselves to chronological age peers in the regular grades. Special classes serve to exclude "deviant" children from the lock-step graded structure of traditional schools, which allow two options, accommodation within the one teacher/25-child classroom or expulsion into a segregated class for deviants, e.g., mentally retarded, emotionally disturbed, etc. Generically, a support system that provides for the special educational needs of these children is required to integrate educationally handicapped children in regular class home rooms. The child must maintain his base within a regular classroom, like any other child, but get his special educational needs fulfilled outside the classroom as necessary. The formal label which has such debilitating consequences for children in school can be abandoned. Staying in a regular class home room allows the child the normalizing experiences of being with other children his chronological age. Socially, the child may feel that while he may not be as good a student as others, he is still fit to associate with other children during the an-important school hours. He can develop social skills in association with his peers and learn to live in the society of man, as opposed to accommodating himself to a deviant social status as "retarded" or "disturbed." Educationally, programs have to be arranged to fit his needs. The child may spend most of his school day in various specialized educational arrangements, e.g., remedial reading groups and/or a shop or a gym class to improve motor functioning if that would help him socially and/or academically. Empirical-manipulative curricula would allow him to learn science, math, or social studies in a way that minimizes reliance on his poor verbal-expressive or reading ability. Successful attainments in manipulative, minimally verbal units might well change his concept of himself as a student. It might provide leverage for the teacher to engage him to work with subject areas he finds more difficult, e.g., reading. Retaining the child in regular class or reintegrating him allows for grouping students by level of functioning in particular subject areas. Availability of these alternate program options results in additional services for other educationally needy children, not only the retarded. The support system shoulfl include a broad cross-section of
Providing Special Education without Special Classes
201
children, not only those potentially special-class students. Teachers who understand that a support system is available to help them in programming laggard children, regardless of IQ or diagnostic category, will participate more enthusiastically. Many children are clumsy, need remedialreading, could benefit from manipulative science or math studies, less reading-dependent social studies, etc. It is critical not to establish special educational support programs only for the handicapped child. One must seek ways to include a broad range of children. We do not want to develop a new type of low track, nor do we wish to lose the social energizing power provided by children who have specific educational problems but who have not been more or less total academic failures. The concept requires trying to find a way to make the school organization attuned to the heterogeneous needs of children. This process is especially critical for children from poor urban and rural areas. Integration of children with special educational needs into the regular classes requires a school with a broad range of educational options, preferably one that is philosophically and structurally organized to deal with heterogeneity among children. Logically, this type of school should tolerate a broader range of diversity, even of misbehaviors and lower intellectual potency. "Deviancy" is defined phenomenologically by teachers and administrators, although it is also a reflection of the school structure. Empirically, it probably can be related to frequency of referral for possible placement of children in classes for the emotionally disturbed, the mildly retarded, etc. All children cannot be accommodated within general education, no matter how flexibly organized. The critical issue in considering integration programs for the educationally handicapped is to find ways of determining the extent to which various types of school structures can be stretched to accommodate the great diversity of educational needs of its students. However, there are limitations to this stretch. Regardless of the viewpoint of the teaching staff, psychotic, extremely hyperactive, moderately and severely retarded, or multiply-handicapped children may not be able to be accommodated within the formal academic portions of the school day, though they may be included in various nonacademic programs-music, gym, homemaking, shop, art, and perhaps recess and lunch. They may be assigned a regular class home room and participate in one or more nonacademic assignments, but cannot be bonafldely integrated into the regular class. Even when behavior problems are not a critical dimension, these children will not progress at a rate that will provide sufficient satisfaction for the regular class teacher, and be fair, in proportion of time and energy they require, to the other children in the group. More importantly, unlike the mildly handicapped child, these children relate with great difficulty to other normal children in nonacademic areas that may provide them with some prestige, e.g., socially, athletically, heterosexually. Essentially intact class programs for children whose behavior and/or learning potential dictates the need for very specialized care and educational help, or who have very limited adult prognoses will stillbe required. While flexible school structures-nongraded or open concept schools, team teaching areas-are ideally suited philosophically and organizationally to integration programs, various other options are being tried. The Minneapolis and Syracuse schools have been using resource teachers in traditional schools to tutor children individually or in small groups who would otherwise have had to be placed in segregated programs. Gottlieb, Leodas, and Budoff (1971) have described a Remedial Learning Center in which the remedial knowhow available within the traditional or nongraded school is concentrated under an umbrella structure. This allows coordinated planning among specialists within the building-remedial reading, speech, perceptual handicap, special
202
Milton Budoff
class teachers for the mildly retarded and disturbed, school psychologist, social worker-permitting formulation of clearly articulated goals in light of the educational needs of the child. It establishes channels of communication among specialists so each can learn from each other and plan with each other for specific children. Also, close communication can be established with classroom teachers, resulting in mutual support and a flow of materials and ideas from the Remedial Learning Center specialists into classrooms. There are many other experimental programs at present.
CONSIDERATIONSREGARDINGINTEGRATION Some general considerations that relate to the feasibility of integrating handicapped children into a school structure are: 1. The flexibility o f the school structure. Quite clearly, open and nongraded schools give the teaching staff more flexibility in arranging individualized programs for educationally needy children than schools that are traditionally organized with self-contained classrooms. 2. The amenability o f teachers in the regular classes to accommodate children within their rooms who have been formally defined as mentally retarded or emotionally disturbed. Amenability is partially a function of the mythology that children classified as mentally retarded are unable to learn and that the emotionally disturbed child cannot be educated because he needs the care of a psychologist, psychiatrist, etc. By contrast many teachers are quite willing to deal with children with "severe attention problems" or "severe phonic difficulties" and with many types of management problems when they have not been formally labeled with the brand of mental retardation or emotional disturbance. When one integrates these labeled children into schools, even with well-intentioned, weU-meaning teachers who verbally indicate they will try to work with the child as they would any other child, their fears and hesitations and their sense that they will get little payoff from their efforts often work against them. In a number of integration arrangements we have been observing and evaluating, we have seen the urgent need to support the teachers on a continuingbasis. 3. Administrative support b y the principal and/or higher echelons o f the school bureaucracy. 4. A broad age range within the school. A K-S school provides fewer opportunities for flexible programming than a K-8 school. The greater spread of school competencies in the K-8 school allows one to tap the social power of older students to serve as teachers of younger students. Even though the older child may read poorly, he can tutor younger children on letters, simple words, or arithmetic processes. The available evidence shows marked increases in both the tutor and tutee's achievement levels. We have failed to understand systematically how to utilize constructively the intrinsic attractiveness to children of other children helping them. Properly conceptualized, the more prestigeful status can positively influence the older and the younger laggard students to the fulfillment of the school's goals. 5. The ability and achievement range in the school. Inner-city schools, unlike suburban ones, contain a broad span of academic skill competence and a high incidence of low achievement in any one grade. So-called mildly retarded children, even those who are completely illiterate, can be grouped functionally with higher IQ children who are performing equally poorly within their grade. Integrating IQ-defined mildly retarded students in suburban schools is inherently more difficult because the average
Providing Special Education without Special Classes
203
functioning level at any grade is high, and there is a narrow range of achievement levels at any given grade level. Also, a large proportion of mildly retarded segregated suburban children are organically damaged children from middle-class homes. By contrast, almost all children in segregated programs in urban schools are poor children who have failed to progress academically. Many have '%ehavior" problems. 6. The implications for testing. The focus of testing must change from the preoccupation with ultimate outcome as represented by the IQ. The low IQ score obtained by the mildly retarded child foretells his probable academic failure, barring a dramatic change in educational demand or the child's own ability to cope with school. It acts to reinforce the teachers' disinclinationto teach academic materials in a manner that will challenge the child, since, ostensibly, he will not profit from the instruction. But given his probable continuing failure, if the same conditions continue, is the child intrinsicially or environmentallydumb? Can he profit from appropriate instruction if the demands, contents, and situation are dramatically altered? Budoff (1969) described a learning potential assessment procedure in which the child is tested on nonverbal reasoning problems prior to and following tuition on principles relevant to solution of the problems. A large proportion of IQ-defined retardates, who come from low-income homes and have no history of brain injury, show marked ability to solve these tasks when they are presented in the learning potential assessment format. The data indicate that the more able students by this criterion are educationally, not mentally, retarded, and the ability they demonstrate prior to or following tuition is not specific to the particular learning potential task. These distinctions have implications for the educational approach to the more able students (Budoff, Meskin, & Harrison, 1971).2 If there are a broader set of educational alternatives than the dichotomous regular or special class alternatives, the psychologist would be less concerned with classification, and focus on data required for formulating an educational plan for the child. These data would be available to an educational planning team which includes the child's teacher and a broad range of specialists.
CONCLUSION Segregated classes were developed as a means of providing special help to the child who was too difficult to teach academically or manage behaviorally in the regular classroom. This need still exists. One teacher, trained as a generalist, can only provide so much for a diverse group of children. However, if the only acceptable alternative to special classes is to work with the classroom teacher to help her accommodate the educationally needy child within her own classroom (Lilly, 1971 ), special classes will continue to plague us and deny general education the range of educational options required to reduce the high incidence of school failure. Designing integration programs for handicapped children requires that administrators think flexibly about the needs of all their children, both instructionallyand socially. The more positively the child feels about himself and his status as a student, the more he will achieve (Semler, 1960). It requires administrators to conceptualize the school as the complex social system it really is and to organize it so that it fulfills its purposes for the broadest diversity of children. 2Space does not allow more specificdiscussionbut appropriate reprintsprovidingsupport for these statementsare availableon request from the author.
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There is a remarkable isolation and lack of professional communication among regular class teachers regarding children who present educational or management problems. Since all change ultimately involves people, in this instance, teachers, principals, administrators and school psychologists, the integration program must be conceived carefully, and provision for staff support and development are an absolute imperative. In-service training programs to help teachers learn how to communicate and work together and to acquire proficiency in individualizing instruction represents an essential ongoing process. Integration, by whatever set of options, is an administrative or organizational solution. Recent research indicates complex social and personal responses to integration. While the child feels better about school (Gottlieb & Budoff, 1972), he may not feel better about himself and tends not to relate verbally with his teacher or his peers (Gampel, Harrison, & Budoff, 1971). The push toward integration requires careful consideration of the social and personal impact of the child's new status, as well as the instructional strategies. As psychologists we should consider whether we build a chronically failing child's sense of competence as a student more rapidly by facilitating and assuring success in meaningful learning or by counseling him to "understand" his failure. My prejudice is that successful achievements beget an increasing personal sense of competence as a student. This sense of competence should have generalizing and self-generating power, if the dosages of success are carefully administered. But frustrations also must be introduced, and the child must learn to cope with challenges that are within his reach, if he wiU reach for them. School psychologists must rethink their roles as testers and counselors and begin to think of themselves as learning facilitators or learning engineers in the broadest terms. They must learn to think collaboratively and imaginatively with teachers about how a specific child's problems might be solved and must become less obsessed with ultimate outcomes. Most of all, they must discard the very narrow range of options they entertain. School psychologists may be the professionals in the school who can most easily contribute this point of view to the educational planning process and add a very appreciable increment to the educational and socializing power of the urban school.
REFERENCES Budoff, M. Learning potential: A supplementary procedure for assessing the ability to reason. Seminars inPs~ychiatry, 1969,1 278-290. Budoff, M., Meskin, J., & Harrison, R. H. Educational test of the learning potential hypothesis. AmericanJournalofMentaiDeficiency, 1971,76, 159-169. Dunn, L., Special education for the mildly retarded-ls much of it justifiable? Exceptional Children, 1968, 35, 5-22. Folman, R., & Budoff, M. Attitudes toward school of special and regular class adolescents. Studies in Learning Potential, 1971,2, 32. Gampel, D. H., Harrison, R. H., & Budoff, M. An observational study of segregated and integrated EMR children and their nonretarded peers: Can we tell the difference by looking? Studies in LearningPoten~al, 1971,2, 27. Gottlieb, J., & Budoff, M. Attitudes toward school of segregated and integrated retarded children: A • study and validation. Proceedings, APA 80th Annual Convention, 1972, 713. Gottlieb, J., Leodas, C., & Budoff, M. The Remedial Learning Center: A prospectus for organizing special education services, 1971, mimeo. Johnson, G. O. Special education for mentally handicapped-a paradox.Exceptional Children, 1962, 19, 62-69. Kirk, S. A. Research in education. In H. A. Stevens & R. Hever (Eds.), Mentalretardation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964. Pp. 57-99.
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Lilly, M. S. A training based model for special education. Exceptional Children, 1971,37, 745-749. Ross, S. L., DeYoung, H, G., & Cohen, J. Confrontation: Special education placement and the law. ExceptionalChildren, 1971,38, 5-12. Semler, I. J. Relationships among several measures of pupil adjustment. Journal @Educational Psychology, 1960,51, 60-64.
Milton Budoff Director Research Institute for Educational Problems 12 Maple Avenue Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
PROVIDING SPECIAL EDUCATION WITHOUT SPECIAL CLASSES' Milton B u d o f f Research lnstitu t~for Educational Problems Cambridge, Massachusetts Summary: The impetus and logic for maintenance or reintegration of marginally inadequate students in regular class programs is discussed. Flexible supporting systems must be developed to provide for the students' special educational needs to replace sole reliance on segregated classes. Nongraded school organization, broad age span, achievement, and ability levels allow for more flexible educational options. Provisions for continuing in-service training and support for teachers and administrators is mandatory. Psychologists can be primarily responsible to formulate strategies for alternative educational plans for marginally inadequate students.
The trend to segregate children needing special education services into isolated, intact programs is reversing. There is an active search for alternative organizational strategies which can maintain these children in a regular class but provide them access to the specialized help they may require for portions of the school day. Until now this principle of integration has been applied mainly to the perceptually handicapped; those identified as mildly mentally retarded tend to be segregated. Historically, special classes for the mildly retarded were established to promote homogeneity among children who were deemed able to profit from the academic curriculum. It was assumed that segregated groupings of slow learners would provide a more comfortable and secure environment where they could learn without the prospect of continuing failure and peer rejection they had experienced in the regular grades. Placement was made primarily on the basis of a low IQ score, which confirmed the child's low probability of successful academic school completion. Usually there is no "special" curriculum, few special educational materials, and little individualized instruction in these classes. Children are often denied access to other remedial services-remedial reading, speech, perceptual handicap or counseling help-and to art, music, manual arts, homemaking, and physical education. State reimbursement practices and regulations often mandate segregated programs and may perpetuate some of the mild mental retardation observed in schools. While the simmering dissatisfaction with segregated programs has been brewing for many years (.Johnson, 1962; Dunn, 1968 ), a potent crystallizing influence has been the disenchantment of the now-vocal poor with the educational and psychological damage accorded their children by placement in segregated programs, especially for the mentally retarded. Ross, DeYoung, and Cohen (1971) have reviewed the legal suits challenging the use of IQ tests for placement, the discriminatory network of practices related to children classified as mentally retarded, and the competence of school 1This paper was supported by Grant OEG-8-080506-4597 (607) from the Research Branch of the Bureau for the Handicapped, U. S. Office of Education, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. These comments were based in part on a discussion of these issues presented to the annual meeting of the American Association of Mental Deficiency, Houston, Texas, June, 1971. Journal of SchoolPsychology,Vol. 10, No. 2, 1972
199
200
Milton Budoff
psychologists to make the often difficult differential diagnosis. In Massachusetts, these suits have effectively begun to influence school system and professional practice.
A LOGIC FOR REINTEGRATION OR MAINTENANCE IN REGULAR CLASSES
Two major reasons are advanced for maintenance and/or reintegration of the child in need of special education services in the regular school program. Most important is the desire to improve the educational opportunities offered the child. With proper support the regular class may aid the child psychologically to continue to want to learn. It also removes the debilitating effects of the stigma attached to his placement in the segregated class. Efficacy studies of special classes largely have shown that segregated children make the same or smaller academic gains as those maintained in regular classes who received no special education help (Kirk, 1964). Children in special classes are more at ease, but the greater comfort may be a function of the child's reference group. Folman and Budoff (1971) reported more special-class adolescents feel equal or superior in ability to their special classmates. They felt markedly less confident about their ability when they compared themselves to chronological age peers in the regular grades. Special classes serve to exclude "deviant" children from the lock-step graded structure of traditional schools, which allow two options, accommodation within the one teacher/25-child classroom or expulsion into a segregated class for deviants, e.g., mentally retarded, emotionally disturbed, etc. Generically, a support system that provides for the special educational needs of these children is required to integrate educationally handicapped children in regular class home rooms. The child must maintain his base within a regular classroom, like any other child, but get his special educational needs fulfilled outside the classroom as necessary. The formal label which has such debilitating consequences for children in school can be abandoned. Staying in a regular class home room allows the child the normalizing experiences of being with other children his chronological age. Socially, the child may feel that while he may not be as good a student as others, he is still fit to associate with other children during the an-important school hours. He can develop social skills in association with his peers and learn to live in the society of man, as opposed to accommodating himself to a deviant social status as "retarded" or "disturbed." Educationally, programs have to be arranged to fit his needs. The child may spend most of his school day in various specialized educational arrangements, e.g., remedial reading groups and/or a shop or a gym class to improve motor functioning if that would help him socially and/or academically. Empirical-manipulative curricula would allow him to learn science, math, or social studies in a way that minimizes reliance on his poor verbal-expressive or reading ability. Successful attainments in manipulative, minimally verbal units might well change his concept of himself as a student. It might provide leverage for the teacher to engage him to work with subject areas he finds more difficult, e.g., reading. Retaining the child in regular class or reintegrating him allows for grouping students by level of functioning in particular subject areas. Availability of these alternate program options results in additional services for other educationally needy children, not only the retarded. The support system shoulfl include a broad cross-section of
Providing Special Education without Special Classes
201
children, not only those potentially special-class students. Teachers who understand that a support system is available to help them in programming laggard children, regardless of IQ or diagnostic category, will participate more enthusiastically. Many children are clumsy, need remedialreading, could benefit from manipulative science or math studies, less reading-dependent social studies, etc. It is critical not to establish special educational support programs only for the handicapped child. One must seek ways to include a broad range of children. We do not want to develop a new type of low track, nor do we wish to lose the social energizing power provided by children who have specific educational problems but who have not been more or less total academic failures. The concept requires trying to find a way to make the school organization attuned to the heterogeneous needs of children. This process is especially critical for children from poor urban and rural areas. Integration of children with special educational needs into the regular classes requires a school with a broad range of educational options, preferably one that is philosophically and structurally organized to deal with heterogeneity among children. Logically, this type of school should tolerate a broader range of diversity, even of misbehaviors and lower intellectual potency. "Deviancy" is defined phenomenologically by teachers and administrators, although it is also a reflection of the school structure. Empirically, it probably can be related to frequency of referral for possible placement of children in classes for the emotionally disturbed, the mildly retarded, etc. All children cannot be accommodated within general education, no matter how flexibly organized. The critical issue in considering integration programs for the educationally handicapped is to find ways of determining the extent to which various types of school structures can be stretched to accommodate the great diversity of educational needs of its students. However, there are limitations to this stretch. Regardless of the viewpoint of the teaching staff, psychotic, extremely hyperactive, moderately and severely retarded, or multiply-handicapped children may not be able to be accommodated within the formal academic portions of the school day, though they may be included in various nonacademic programs-music, gym, homemaking, shop, art, and perhaps recess and lunch. They may be assigned a regular class home room and participate in one or more nonacademic assignments, but cannot be bonafldely integrated into the regular class. Even when behavior problems are not a critical dimension, these children will not progress at a rate that will provide sufficient satisfaction for the regular class teacher, and be fair, in proportion of time and energy they require, to the other children in the group. More importantly, unlike the mildly handicapped child, these children relate with great difficulty to other normal children in nonacademic areas that may provide them with some prestige, e.g., socially, athletically, heterosexually. Essentially intact class programs for children whose behavior and/or learning potential dictates the need for very specialized care and educational help, or who have very limited adult prognoses will stillbe required. While flexible school structures-nongraded or open concept schools, team teaching areas-are ideally suited philosophically and organizationally to integration programs, various other options are being tried. The Minneapolis and Syracuse schools have been using resource teachers in traditional schools to tutor children individually or in small groups who would otherwise have had to be placed in segregated programs. Gottlieb, Leodas, and Budoff (1971) have described a Remedial Learning Center in which the remedial knowhow available within the traditional or nongraded school is concentrated under an umbrella structure. This allows coordinated planning among specialists within the building-remedial reading, speech, perceptual handicap, special
202
Milton Budoff
class teachers for the mildly retarded and disturbed, school psychologist, social worker-permitting formulation of clearly articulated goals in light of the educational needs of the child. It establishes channels of communication among specialists so each can learn from each other and plan with each other for specific children. Also, close communication can be established with classroom teachers, resulting in mutual support and a flow of materials and ideas from the Remedial Learning Center specialists into classrooms. There are many other experimental programs at present.
CONSIDERATIONSREGARDINGINTEGRATION Some general considerations that relate to the feasibility of integrating handicapped children into a school structure are: 1. The flexibility o f the school structure. Quite clearly, open and nongraded schools give the teaching staff more flexibility in arranging individualized programs for educationally needy children than schools that are traditionally organized with self-contained classrooms. 2. The amenability o f teachers in the regular classes to accommodate children within their rooms who have been formally defined as mentally retarded or emotionally disturbed. Amenability is partially a function of the mythology that children classified as mentally retarded are unable to learn and that the emotionally disturbed child cannot be educated because he needs the care of a psychologist, psychiatrist, etc. By contrast many teachers are quite willing to deal with children with "severe attention problems" or "severe phonic difficulties" and with many types of management problems when they have not been formally labeled with the brand of mental retardation or emotional disturbance. When one integrates these labeled children into schools, even with well-intentioned, weU-meaning teachers who verbally indicate they will try to work with the child as they would any other child, their fears and hesitations and their sense that they will get little payoff from their efforts often work against them. In a number of integration arrangements we have been observing and evaluating, we have seen the urgent need to support the teachers on a continuingbasis. 3. Administrative support b y the principal and/or higher echelons o f the school bureaucracy. 4. A broad age range within the school. A K-S school provides fewer opportunities for flexible programming than a K-8 school. The greater spread of school competencies in the K-8 school allows one to tap the social power of older students to serve as teachers of younger students. Even though the older child may read poorly, he can tutor younger children on letters, simple words, or arithmetic processes. The available evidence shows marked increases in both the tutor and tutee's achievement levels. We have failed to understand systematically how to utilize constructively the intrinsic attractiveness to children of other children helping them. Properly conceptualized, the more prestigeful status can positively influence the older and the younger laggard students to the fulfillment of the school's goals. 5. The ability and achievement range in the school. Inner-city schools, unlike suburban ones, contain a broad span of academic skill competence and a high incidence of low achievement in any one grade. So-called mildly retarded children, even those who are completely illiterate, can be grouped functionally with higher IQ children who are performing equally poorly within their grade. Integrating IQ-defined mildly retarded students in suburban schools is inherently more difficult because the average
Providing Special Education without Special Classes
203
functioning level at any grade is high, and there is a narrow range of achievement levels at any given grade level. Also, a large proportion of mildly retarded segregated suburban children are organically damaged children from middle-class homes. By contrast, almost all children in segregated programs in urban schools are poor children who have failed to progress academically. Many have '%ehavior" problems. 6. The implications for testing. The focus of testing must change from the preoccupation with ultimate outcome as represented by the IQ. The low IQ score obtained by the mildly retarded child foretells his probable academic failure, barring a dramatic change in educational demand or the child's own ability to cope with school. It acts to reinforce the teachers' disinclinationto teach academic materials in a manner that will challenge the child, since, ostensibly, he will not profit from the instruction. But given his probable continuing failure, if the same conditions continue, is the child intrinsicially or environmentallydumb? Can he profit from appropriate instruction if the demands, contents, and situation are dramatically altered? Budoff (1969) described a learning potential assessment procedure in which the child is tested on nonverbal reasoning problems prior to and following tuition on principles relevant to solution of the problems. A large proportion of IQ-defined retardates, who come from low-income homes and have no history of brain injury, show marked ability to solve these tasks when they are presented in the learning potential assessment format. The data indicate that the more able students by this criterion are educationally, not mentally, retarded, and the ability they demonstrate prior to or following tuition is not specific to the particular learning potential task. These distinctions have implications for the educational approach to the more able students (Budoff, Meskin, & Harrison, 1971).2 If there are a broader set of educational alternatives than the dichotomous regular or special class alternatives, the psychologist would be less concerned with classification, and focus on data required for formulating an educational plan for the child. These data would be available to an educational planning team which includes the child's teacher and a broad range of specialists.
CONCLUSION Segregated classes were developed as a means of providing special help to the child who was too difficult to teach academically or manage behaviorally in the regular classroom. This need still exists. One teacher, trained as a generalist, can only provide so much for a diverse group of children. However, if the only acceptable alternative to special classes is to work with the classroom teacher to help her accommodate the educationally needy child within her own classroom (Lilly, 1971 ), special classes will continue to plague us and deny general education the range of educational options required to reduce the high incidence of school failure. Designing integration programs for handicapped children requires that administrators think flexibly about the needs of all their children, both instructionallyand socially. The more positively the child feels about himself and his status as a student, the more he will achieve (Semler, 1960). It requires administrators to conceptualize the school as the complex social system it really is and to organize it so that it fulfills its purposes for the broadest diversity of children. 2Space does not allow more specificdiscussionbut appropriate reprintsprovidingsupport for these statementsare availableon request from the author.
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Milton Budoff
There is a remarkable isolation and lack of professional communication among regular class teachers regarding children who present educational or management problems. Since all change ultimately involves people, in this instance, teachers, principals, administrators and school psychologists, the integration program must be conceived carefully, and provision for staff support and development are an absolute imperative. In-service training programs to help teachers learn how to communicate and work together and to acquire proficiency in individualizing instruction represents an essential ongoing process. Integration, by whatever set of options, is an administrative or organizational solution. Recent research indicates complex social and personal responses to integration. While the child feels better about school (Gottlieb & Budoff, 1972), he may not feel better about himself and tends not to relate verbally with his teacher or his peers (Gampel, Harrison, & Budoff, 1971). The push toward integration requires careful consideration of the social and personal impact of the child's new status, as well as the instructional strategies. As psychologists we should consider whether we build a chronically failing child's sense of competence as a student more rapidly by facilitating and assuring success in meaningful learning or by counseling him to "understand" his failure. My prejudice is that successful achievements beget an increasing personal sense of competence as a student. This sense of competence should have generalizing and self-generating power, if the dosages of success are carefully administered. But frustrations also must be introduced, and the child must learn to cope with challenges that are within his reach, if he wiU reach for them. School psychologists must rethink their roles as testers and counselors and begin to think of themselves as learning facilitators or learning engineers in the broadest terms. They must learn to think collaboratively and imaginatively with teachers about how a specific child's problems might be solved and must become less obsessed with ultimate outcomes. Most of all, they must discard the very narrow range of options they entertain. School psychologists may be the professionals in the school who can most easily contribute this point of view to the educational planning process and add a very appreciable increment to the educational and socializing power of the urban school.
REFERENCES Budoff, M. Learning potential: A supplementary procedure for assessing the ability to reason. Seminars inPs~ychiatry, 1969,1 278-290. Budoff, M., Meskin, J., & Harrison, R. H. Educational test of the learning potential hypothesis. AmericanJournalofMentaiDeficiency, 1971,76, 159-169. Dunn, L., Special education for the mildly retarded-ls much of it justifiable? Exceptional Children, 1968, 35, 5-22. Folman, R., & Budoff, M. Attitudes toward school of special and regular class adolescents. Studies in Learning Potential, 1971,2, 32. Gampel, D. H., Harrison, R. H., & Budoff, M. An observational study of segregated and integrated EMR children and their nonretarded peers: Can we tell the difference by looking? Studies in LearningPoten~al, 1971,2, 27. Gottlieb, J., & Budoff, M. Attitudes toward school of segregated and integrated retarded children: A • study and validation. Proceedings, APA 80th Annual Convention, 1972, 713. Gottlieb, J., Leodas, C., & Budoff, M. The Remedial Learning Center: A prospectus for organizing special education services, 1971, mimeo. Johnson, G. O. Special education for mentally handicapped-a paradox.Exceptional Children, 1962, 19, 62-69. Kirk, S. A. Research in education. In H. A. Stevens & R. Hever (Eds.), Mentalretardation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964. Pp. 57-99.
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Lilly, M. S. A training based model for special education. Exceptional Children, 1971,37, 745-749. Ross, S. L., DeYoung, H, G., & Cohen, J. Confrontation: Special education placement and the law. ExceptionalChildren, 1971,38, 5-12. Semler, I. J. Relationships among several measures of pupil adjustment. Journal @Educational Psychology, 1960,51, 60-64.
Milton Budoff Director Research Institute for Educational Problems 12 Maple Avenue Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139