"The More Things Change,The More They Stay the Same"

Abstract

The decades-long movement to implement policies embracing a curriculum of inclusion, spearheaded by the passage of Public Law 94-142 in 1975, has resulted in far too little real improvement in the education of children with disabilities. The author's personal recollections of her own experience of special education in the 1950s, and the recollections of two young students growing up in the 1980s, illustrate the lasting educational, social, and psychological damage inflicted on academically competent students by separation from their nondisabled peers. The remarkable similarities between the author's experience, and those of her two students, despite a 20-year disparity in age, show the ineffectiveness of well-meaning policies if they are not rigorously and consistently implemented, regulated, and enforced. Changes in special education philosophy and policies must be matched with changes in teaching practices in the classroom, and the momentum for these changes must come from children and adults with disabilities and their parents.