Disability and the Education System
Disability and the Education System
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残疾与教育系统
DOI：
10.1353/foc.2012.0007
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发表时间：
2012
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
P. Loprest
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Laudan Aron;P. Loprest
教育对所有儿童都很重要，但对残疾儿童更是如此，因为他们的社会和经济机会可能有限。在这篇文章中，劳丹·阿隆和帕梅拉·洛普雷斯特评估了美国的教育系统为残疾学生提供的服务。阿隆和洛普雷斯特追溯了美国特殊教育系统的演变，从世纪中期民权运动的起源开始。他们注意到联邦立法的双重性质，既保证符合条件的残疾儿童有权“在限制最少的环境中接受免费、适当的公共教育”，又建立了一个联邦资助方案来帮助实现这一目标。然后，他们审查了这些儿童从婴儿期到成年早期所获得的服务和便利的类型，特殊教育系统使残疾儿童有更多的机会接受公共教育，建立了教育他们的基础设施，帮助早期识别残疾，并促进这些儿童与非残疾同龄人的更大融合。尽管取得了这些进步，但仍存在许多问题，包括对某些学生群体的过度识别和识别不足，识别和服务学生的延误，以及官僚主义，监管和财务障碍，这些障碍使每个参与者的计划复杂化。更重要的是，作者表明，特殊教育学生在教育成就方面仍然落后于非残疾同龄人，通常被期望较低，不太可能在高中学习完整的学术课程，更有可能辍学。关于特殊教育服务的有效性或如何提高这一重要学生群体的学习成绩的证据有限，改进这一系统需要更好地理解和衡量特殊教育连续体的两端，即特殊教育儿童需要和接受什么服务，以及这些学生取得什么学习成绩。Aron和Loprest认为，如果没有更有力的证据将系统的这两个方面联系起来，研究人员将无法衡量目前提供的服务的功效，也无法对整个系统进行有效的改革。
Education is important for all children, but even more so for children with disabilities, whose social and economic opportunities may be limited. In this article, Laudan Aron and Pamela Loprest assess how well the nation's education system is serving students with disabilities.Aron and Loprest trace the evolution of the special education system in the United States from its origins in the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. They note the dual character of federal legislation, which both guarantees eligible children with disabilities the right to a "free, appropriate public education in the least restrictive setting" and establishes a federal funding program to help meet this goal. They then review the types of services and accommodations these children receive from infancy through young adulthood.The special education system has given children with disabilities much greater access to public education, established an infrastructure for educating them, helped with the earlier identification of disabilities, and promoted greater inclusion of these children alongside their nondisabled peers. Despite these advances, many problems remain, including the over- and underidentification of certain subgroups of students, delays in identifying and serving students, and bureaucratic, regulatory, and financial barriers that complicate the program for everyone involved.More important, the authors show that special education students still lag behind their nondisabled peers in educational achievements, are often held to lower expectations, are less likely to take the full academic curriculum in high school, and are more likely to drop out of school. Only limited evidence is available on the effectiveness of specific special education services or on how to improve student achievement for this important subgroup of students.Improving the system will require better ways of understanding and measuring both ends of the special education continuum, namely, what services special education children need and receive, and what academic outcomes these students achieve. Without stronger evidence linking these two aspects of the system, Aron and Loprest argue, researchers will be unable to gauge the efficacy of the services now being delivered or to formulate effective reforms to the system as a whole.