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aaArticle rank 23 Oct 2010 The Gazette Meeting special needs
needs special care Education Minister Line Beauchamp has shown a welcome
sense of humility in inviting 100 educators to Quebec City to take stock of
how well, or badly, special-needs students are being integrated into
Quebec's classrooms.
Provincial governments, regardless of party, have tended to issue orders
from on high in this field, and then failed to provide the resources needed
to integrate learning-challenged students. The result has been a painful
mess for those students, other students, parents, and teachers. 

On Monday, representatives of the school system can tell the government
what's going wrong, and how it should be fixed. The Quebec Provincial
Association of Teachers, whose 8,000 members teach in English-language
public schools, will tell the minister that integration has already gone too
far and it's time to pull back - for the sake of the students as well as
teachers. Francophone teachers' unions and others will say the same thing. 

Special-needs students now make up nearly one-fifth of public-school
enrolment. This distressing figure is collateral damage from Quebecers'
eagerness to send their children to private schools. Over 18 per cent of
Quebec high-school students are now in private institutions, which accept
few students with learning disabilities or physical handicaps. 

This is by any measure a challenge for public schools, school boards, and
the government. But the response has been disappointing. Instead of
investing to help public education compete, including investment in special
education for students with disabilities, the government has for years
chosen to limit budgets tightly, while promoting the moneysaving "
inclusion" of special-needs students in regular classes. 
Nancy Heath, a professor in McGill University's education faculty, told The
Gazette's Brenda Branswell that inclusion can't work with the " ridiculous"
number of students who are struggling. Among other problems, she said, is
that parents of other students believe their children are being shortchanged
while teachers are disproportionately busy with those who learn more slowly.


Monday's meeting will hear that solutions to these problems exist, but are
not cheap. The ideal that all students could learn at their own pace is no
longer science fiction. Progress in brain research coupled with
technological advances will let educators devise tailor-made educational
programs for every child. If you doubt this, look back one or two
generations and see how much progress has been achieved since the days when
dyslexia was undiagnosed and developmentally-delayed children were shunted
off to special " homes." 

Progress can continue only if the education department permits it to.
Shepherding students of wildly different abilities and needs into a
classroom with a single, overworked teacher is a recipe for failure - for
almost everyone. 

The government needs to decide realistically on a dividing line between
students who belong in regular classrooms and those who need special
attention ( and in the process needs to do more to stimulate gifted
children, too). 

This means finding the money to provide school experiences more carefully
tailored to each student. There is no cheap way of doing this, but not doing
it will ultimately prove more costly to society. 

 

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