http://digital.nationalpost.com/epaper/viewer.aspx 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. __________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 5559 (20101024) __________ The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. http://www.eset.com ----------------------- To change your mail settings or leave the C-PALSY list, go here: http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?SUBED1=c-palsy