I meet a lot of teenagers with disabilities who have chosen a special ed setting for high school and/or job training after having been mainstreamed and say they are so happy they are not always the only person with issues („in this school, everyone’s got something and it’s so liberating!“).
This is a really important point. Our district has two high schools that provide vocational programming. Last year, the board decided they needed to save those kids from the horror of exclusion and re-integrate them into the regular high school system. Each high school would add a course or two designed to meet the needs of "those kids" (ahem). The kids themselves raised holy cain, for exactly the kinds of reasons you quote above. Many of them described (hmmmm.... just like our gifted kids do when they finally get into a gifted classroom) feeling for the first time in their life like they belonged, like they weren't freaks or defective, and that they were actually both learning and discovering they were capable of working hard and succeeding. Under no circumstances did they want to go back to being "included" in their community.
Board staff kept calling it "segregation", with all the happy connotation of that word. But the kids called it choice and belonging and success.
I believe our system is convinced that if we don't label anyone, then no one will be labelled. But our kids
are labelled, by others and by themselves, when they don't fit in, when they can't do the work others are doing, when they struggle to be like the others and fail. And those labels tend to be pretty awful. We need to ask the kids, and
listen to them - because it seems to be the parents who are terrified of the labels, not them. Most of the kids I've heard speak embrace their labels, because they help them access an environment designed to enable them to be successful.
ETA: And that's another throw-back to the even worse old days - - - when a label got you dumped in a back room and written off. There are reasons parents are terrified of labels, and their own educational experiences are high among them. I spend a lot of my time trying to convince scared parents that an LD label is a wonderful thing, as long as it is being used to help your child, not give up on them.
