She believes that her severely mentally handicapped son has the capacity to be a self-sufficient adult, despite ample evidence to the contrary, and has successfully advocated for his inclusion within the general ed population (albeit many years behind age) throughout his educational career, often with a full time aide and other specialized professionals. It is ludicrous to think that more than $75K/year has been directed to staff the shared delusion of a misguided parent and a cowed administration for over 12 years, when compassionate and appropriate care could have been provided for less than half the cost! .
This is probably one of those cases where inclusion has prevailed as an ideological imperative rather than one value that needs to be weighed against other values. Though I disagree about the proposed solution because I hold this value dear as well:
When I conducted a scan of the offerings at K-8 schools in our largest public school board, ALL mentioned inclusion and diversity as their primary objectives. Only three of about 40 even mentioned academic excellence among their operational imperatives. .
It is a scandal - if academic excellence isn’t a value proposed by the school, is it even a school? An educational establishment? Or could it just as well provide compassionate and appropriate care?
But if you believe in academic excellence in education, in offering every child a chance to maximise their academic potential, compassionate and appropriate care is not enough for anyone, not even the severely mentally handicapped. Maximising academic potential in this case could mean being able to read simple words, so they can read street signs, make sense of a bus schedule, recognise danger signals and gauge the importance of written communication even though they have to ask someone for help in understanding it. The question should bem in which educational setting might this happen best?
If one were to recognise both values, inclusiveness and academic excellence, one could also see the weighing shift according to the age level. 3-6 is where social learning has much greater weight than academic learning and where full inclusion can prevail, high school is when academic learning needs to be the priority in a conflict between those values. Elementary level might go one way, middle school level another.
But educators and others who insist on inclusion for social without even acknowledging that academic concerns might exist scare me.
We play very well to the middle.
I respectfully disagree, given provincial PISA score trends in Canada. We play to the second quartile and aspire to the median.
Can you elaborate in that? In an international context, Canada appears to successfully play at least to the third quartile (from the bottom), if not the top. Am I misunderstanding the metaphores here?
