The Special Education Paradox: Equity as the Way to Excellence

As a conclusion to this BookBuilder book, the remaining sections of the Skrtic article are summarized.

SPECIAL EDUCATION AS AN INSTITUTIONAL PRACTICE

The section “Special education as an institutional practice” uses the structural and cultural frames to reflect again on the four highly-debated assumptions on which the special education system is based (these four assumptions were laid out in the introductory summary).

From a structural and cultural perspective, the first two assumptions - that mild disabilities are pathological and that diagnosis is objective an useful -  are “inadequate and incomplete” (p. 228).  Participants in the REI debate believe that many students are wrongly identified as having a disability simply because the their needs cannot be addressed in a regular education classroom. From an organizational perspective, student disability can actually be seen as an “organizational pathology, a matter of not fitting the standard programs of the prevailing paradigm of a professional culture” (p. 228). From a structural perspective, schools are unable to adapt to students’ needs given the fact that the rational-technical approach to change constrains teachers’ ability to think in new and innovative ways.