In 1974 the U.S. Comptroller General released a report that said 60 percent of American children with disabilities were not being appropriately educated and one million were being excluded entirely from the public school system. In 1975 the federal Education for All Handicapped Children Act was passed. It guaranteed a “free and appropriate public education” in the “least restrictive environment” for all children with disabilities.
So in 1980 Rogers and others created the master’s in special education program at Loyola, designed to produce teachers dedicated to integration. But at this point Rogers believes that her once-proud creation has become a monster, the opposite of what it was meant to be, and should be put to death, after “a decade of rancor.” So she’s going over the heads of her department and the school of education, organizing advocates for the disabled to pressure the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) to decertify the program, effectively shutting it down. Rogers says the department hierarchy has taken the program so far adrift philosophically from the original intent that it would be better–for teachers, students, and the future of special education in Chicago–if it weren’t there at all.
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“I tell people we have segregated schools here,” Hehir says, “and they don’t believe me.” He’s trying to make up for lost time by turning several neighborhood schools into model “inclusive schools,” with the architectural and programmatic flexibility to accommodate all kids geographically eligible to attend them. His goal is to create such schools in all districts.
In Rogers’s eyes another fatal flaw is the teaching clinic at Loyola: special ed students are brought to campus for interaction with and observation by enrollees. This is yet another segregated, controlled environment, she argues, which does nothing to prepare teachers for life in the regular public schools. “The students are handpicked to meet the expectations of the teachers. It’s a fake school. It’s like trying to learn to ride a horse on a fake horse. You can get by for a while, but sooner or later a real horse is going to do something that the fake horse isn’t programmed to do. You’re coming out of the textbook, the clinic, and the ivory tower.”
The state doesn’t seem to know what direction it wants to take. On the one hand, the ISBE has undertaken innovative programs like the Regular Education Initiative and Project Choices. The Regular Ed Initiative is a training series in which special ed and regular teachers find ways to teach cooperatively in an integrated regular classroom setting. Project Choices provides technical and financial assistance to Illinois schools that want to try alternative special ed approaches, and the more creative and inclusive the better.
Harding says that the softening and eventual elimination of the teaching-certificate and teaching-experience requirements for enrollees were also a matter of coping with reality rather than changing philosophy. “We hoped we could attract people who taught. But it was hard to get teaching jobs in the 1980s. People weren’t giving up their jobs to get a master’s.” She knows of no other master’s program with such requirements, and adds that they are not mandated by state law.
