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.
What you are describing aeh would be shot down instantly in my city as not-inclusive. Pretty much any mention of clustering or grouping is a no-go because it isn't deemed inclusive. That in itself isn't the issue but when specialized programs are cut without adding ANY supports for children who are now all back in the regular classroom it becomes an issue. Much cost-cutting has taken place under the inclusion banner and teachers are expected to be able to differentiate and support all of these kids with a couple hours of special education training. Students are never grouped by ability and teachers are expected to differentiate to the wide variety in their class as well as provide any accommodations required. There is very, very little remediation and for accommodations it is generally up to students to figure out what works for them and teach themselves how to do it.
Another wrinkle where I am is the French Immersion factor. I live in one of the more bilingual cities so only 38% of grades 1-8 kids are not in immersion. Guess where most spec ed kids (excluding gifted) are? This ends up with some pretty interesting classes to teach because the ratios are the same regardless and these are by definition not special education classes. Attempts to add any sort of resources to support these teachers don't pass budget discussions and even admitting that this is happening is a dirty secret. Teachers in the non-immersion streams often have the majority of their classes with IEPs (I have a nephew in a class where 17/20 kids have IEPs for example). For extra supports there are special education teachers but they generally support a whole school or for a larger school maybe half of a school. Most of these classes have 1 teacher to 20 or 25 students (depending on age) and that is pretty much it for supports.
Some numbers focusing on grade 1-8 (these are from a local board that actually has the most specialized classes remaining, the other local board has far fewer specialized classes and is very proud that it is even more inclusive).
English stream - 38%
Full time gifted classes - 1% (this is rapidly being shut down under the inclusive banner. Unless something drastically changes it will be gone in a few years)
Development Disabilities program - 0.7%
Special Education classes 1.7% (note many of these are part time inclusive) Doing the math you can see that these are reserved for the most extreme cases - a mildly dyslexic kid is not going to be in there.
All kids that are not in full time inclusive classes - 3.5% (includes both ends of the spectrum)
233 special education teachers supporting 2515 classroom teachers who teach just under 40,0000 students. Again, do the math and think about how much time a "just LD" kid is getting with a spec ed teacher a year.
All that to say, we have a lot of room for improvement to be an inclusive utopia (although I do appreciate Tigerle's perspective since it is easy to wallow in our problems and forget that it could be much worse).
