Inclusion.
Clearly inclusion carries a lot of baggage, much like other high-sounding expressions–racial integration, affirmative action–that have become battlegrounds.
A friendly man with a short brown beard, Cohen sits in shirtsleeves in his 22nd-floor office on West Washington explaining the intricacies of inclusion law with the patience of a Talmudic scholar instructing the uninitiated. This is no easy task. Not only are the concepts multifaceted, but the very language of special education has undergone radical change in the past 20 years. “Handicapped” as the generic, descriptive word has been replaced by “disabled,” and practically every organization in the field has changed its name to reflect that fact. (The Family Resources Center on Disabilities, for example, was once the Coordinating Council for Handicapped Children.) Even history has been rewritten: the Education of All Handicapped Children Act has become the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The mentally retarded are known as “cognitively disabled” or, even more euphemistically, as “cognitively delayed,” the crippled are now “physically disabled,” the blind are “visually impaired,” etc. Practically the only remnants of the old language are “EMH” and “TMH”–to distinguish the “educable mentally handicapped,” with IQs between 85 and 55, from the “trainable mentally handicapped,” with IQs between 55 and 35–but they’re usually used only in acronym form and rarely spelled out.
“What we need,” says Cohen, “is a general starting assumption that a child belongs in a regular school and is the responsibility of the regular staff and principal. If adaptations are necessary to supplement or support instruction, let’s have them. But don’t begin with the assumption of separateness and make the child prove that he deserves not to be segregated.”
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He couldn’t get a job at 19 because of his long hair and wrinkled clothes.
One of Cohen’s more publicized cases involved Nathan Carter, an eight-year-old boy from Peoria with Down’s syndrome. Determined to give him as normal an education as possible, his parents enrolled him in their neighborhood kindergarten in August 1991 without informing school officials of his disability. But he lasted only eight days before his teacher complained of his “impulsive, tantruming behavior.” A school-ordered social-development study and a psychological evaluation categorized Nathan as “trainable mentally handicapped” and recommended placing him in a class at a special-education cluster site some distance from his home. His parents, who have seven children, four of whom are adopted and have special needs, contacted Cohen, and a yearlong struggle began. The Carters obtained an independent evaluation that indicated Nathan could obey instructions and act appropriately, though he required “a little more time” than his nondisabled peers. Placing him in a TMH setting would require a 20-minute bus ride to school, argued Cohen, and it would greatly limit his instructional opportunities by denying him regular interaction with nondisabled children who could serve as role models for behavior and language development. The school district, however, produced testimony from teachers who portrayed Nathan as a veritable terror (“screams during play or nap time . . . writes on table . . . reported for throwing food . . . flooded the bathroom area . . . runs around the classroom . . . does his own thing”). The authorities argued he belonged in a secluded TMH environment, though they acknowledged he could benefit from some contact with normal students at lunch and in art and music classes.
