I would agree that lack of funding and implementation fidelity are huge factors in the success or failure of inclusion. The most successful settings I have seen have staffed all inclusion settings with a minimum of one content (general education) teacher, and one special education teacher, and had ongoing training and follow-up with general education teachers on universal design. Also, inclusive settings are not supposed to ever go over 50% students with special needs.
I'll quibble with platypus a little in that inclusion does not mean that 25 different special needs students are now split across 25 different classrooms. They are typically clustered in inclusion settings like those described above. This ought to apply to both ends of the spectrum.
I would also disagree that the majority of LD students cannot be instructed appropriately in some form of inclusion, -properly implemented-. Perhaps one of the confusions here is that inclusion is not all-or-nothing, and it differs by grade level. We have nearly 100% inclusion in a secondary setting with most of the exceptionalities (other than the lowest-functioning multiply-handicapped or profoundly intellectually impaired). But our inclusion settings are all staffed with two teachers, with class sizes of well under 20. And our learning standards no longer focus on basic skills, so developing fluency with accommodations and compensatory strategies (including AT) is a much more significant dimension to our specialized instruction than remediating decoding and basic calculations (though that does exist for a small minority of students). At earlier grade levels, the role of focused direct service is, of course, greater, but still can allow for at least partial inclusion for many LD students.
I am fully aware that our setting is not representative of all public schools, so I'm not disputing the problems with inclusion as it currently is implemented in many buildings, but I did want to point out that the model itself is not as weak as the implementation, for most learners with exceptionalities.
