Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning,
11-280, Ontario
Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto,
252 Bloor
St. West,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada. M5S 1V6.
Tel: (416) 923 6641 ext. 2449
Fax: (416) 926 4746
email:
ajordan@oise.utoronto.ca
Abstract
In 1995, Ontario commenced a series of educational reforms that has broad implications for students with disabilities. Five principles of educational reform under conservative economic policies are drawn from the literature: diversification (privatisation), contestability (competition), decentralisation, prescription/surveillance (through standards-based reform), and parental choice. The five principles are matched to the special education reform initiatives in Ontario. The results of this analysis are then examined to address whether the special education reforms reflect characteristics of social justice and human rights through the provision of appropriate educational programs and services. These are represented by the right to inclusion in regular classroom placements, the design of appropriate IEPs containing curriculum goals and expectations, the right of parents to represent the interest of their child, and to hold the school system accountable for student outcomes, and the provision of adequate support for students in meeting curriculum standards. This report card for Ontario is compared with the reforms that have characterised other jurisdictions, notably, the U.S.A., New Zealand, England and Wales.
The Ministry of Education and Training of Ontario recently implemented standards-based reforms which include a centrally-prescribed curriculum and province-wide testing to assess the relative standing of students and schools on the prescribed curriculum standards, at grades 3, 6 and 9 (ages 8, 11 and 14). It is currently implementing a literacy test at grade 10 (age 15), which students will be required to pass in order to receive their Ontario Secondary School Diploma in Grade 12. Other innovations, which are characteristic of educational reforms that represent a model of market-driven controls, include the introduction of elected school councils at each school to guide local policy directions, increased parental choice in selecting schools, and the publication of school scores on the province-wide tests. A standard report card was also introduced which returns to recorded grades linked to the prescribed curriculum objectives. In special education, the Ministry introduced a standard format Individual Educational Plan (I.E.P.) (1998) which is attached to the new report cards, and which allows schools to exempt students with special needs from participating in the high-stakes provincial assessments. The I.E.P. may be used as the reporting mechanism to parents in lieu of the provincial standards. The Ministry of Education and Training also introduced a categorically-based funding structure for students with special educational needs .
Given the history of similar reforms in the U.S.A., England and Wales, and Australia and New Zealand,
a). How do Ontario's reform initiatives, with reference to Special
Education, compare with other jurisdictions?
b). What can be learned from
the legal, political and social consequences of similar reforms in other
countries?
In order to address these questions, I propose to use a framework for comparison that is a synthesis of Mitchell's (1996) and McLaughlin and Rouse's (2000) lists of principles that characterise the reforms taking place in many English-speaking countries. Many governments have initiated a closer link between the economic forces of market competition and government-controlled agencies such as school systems. These principles, listed in Table 1, are
The reflection of these principles in recent reforms to Ontario's education law and policy, with emphasis on special education provisions is described (Table 2), and then compared with how the principles have been approached and amended in other English-speaking countries, in particular in the United States, Britain and New Zealand. The discussion that follows will address the principles necessary for effective inclusion, proposed by Booth (2000), under five questions; (Table 3),
Canada, like Australia, is a federation of provinces, each of which has its own Education Act. The prevailing Government in each province sets the provisions in the Education Act and its regulations, by which the school boards (districts in U.S. terms, L.E.A.s in British terms) create their policies and procedures. Of the 30.6 million Canadians, 11 million live in Ontario, and of these, 3.4 million do not speak English or French as their first language (Government of Ontario web site, 1998 data).
It is helpful for comparative purposes to know that of the 2.1 million children in Ontario schools, 194,000, or 9.24% were designated as exceptional, by 1997 Ministry of Education and Training data. 7.12% of the children in elementary schools, and 12.12% in secondary schools are designated as exceptional. Children with learning disabilities constitute about 50%, gifted 16% and the remaining 24% are categorised under ten other disability syndromes. (Statistical services section, Policy Branch, Ministry of Education and Training for 1997, cited in Weber and Bennett, 1999). Further, there is evidence that a high proportion of students, who have not officially been designated as exceptional through the Identification, Placement and Review procedures, are receiving remedial assistance. While total numbers are not available, teachers reported that 15,500 of the 129,000 students taking the provincial test at Grade 3, or 8.3%, of non-exceptional students, for example, were receiving assistance in reading at the time of the province-wide testing of students in grade 3 in May, 1998, and of these 35% were given additional time to complete the tests (E.Q.A.O., 1998 data, reported by Demeris, 2000).
2. Recent history of special education reforms.
Phase 1 1980-1991.
Amendments to the Education Act, (Revised
Statutes of Ontario, 1980; more commonly referred to as Bill 82) brought into
place mandatory instead of permissive requirements for special education,
including a committee procedure for determining the eligibility of students for
special education placement. The 1980 Act was also innovative in mandating
universal access, and a right of appeal provision whereby parents could appeal
the designation of their child as "exceptional" and the proposed educational
placement for the child. The 1980 Act included a provision for parental choice,
with an appeals and Tribunals hearing procedure to deal with disputes between
the board and parents, but the system was biased in over-representing the
School Board on the Appeal hearing panel, and the only issues open to dispute
were the designation as exceptional and the placement of the student. Parents
could not, and still cannot, appeal the nature and content of the programs or
services provided by the school within the placement (Metcalf, 1987). In
Booth's (2000) terms, the Act provided for access to but not participation in
educational programs. This was challenged in the Ontario Court of Appeal
(Dolmage v. Muskoka Board of Education and the Ministry of Education, (1985),
49 O.R. (2d) 546 (Div. Ct.)) in which the parents lost, but not without an
obiter dictum statement in the judgment that led to further Tribunal hearings
and challenges in the courts (Barger v. North York Board of Education, 27th
June, 1984, Regional Special Education Tribunal; Ormerod v. Wentworth (County)
Board of Education, 5 June 1987,Regional Special Education Tribunal; Hysert v.
Carleton Board of Education, 8752, Ont. H.C.) that loosened the restrictive
qualities of the right of appeal provision.
The Education Act (R.S.O.1980) was fully implemented in 1985 after a phase-in period, concurrent with the repatriation of the Canadian Constitution to Ottawa from Westminster, and the establishment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The latter contains an equity clause, 15, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of, among other things, disability. Since 1985, the courts have been the major recourse for parents who had disputes about the provisions supplied to their children with disabilities. Foremost among these have been claims for inclusive educational placements, with appropriate programs and support services, such as the landmark case heard at the Supreme Court of Canada (Eaton v.Brant County, SCC #24668, 7 Feb. 1997).
Phase 2 1991-1995
Under a left-leaning provincial government
, elected on an equity and social justice platform, the out-of-court settlement
of one such court case led to a statement by the Ministry of Education in June
1994, that was the first official indication that Ontario schools should
consider inclusion; "the integration of exceptional pupils into local community
classrooms should be the norm in Ontario, wherever possible, when such a
placement meets the pupil's needs and where it is according to parental
choice...We recognize that an integrated setting will not be appropriate for
every child" (Memorandum to Directors, Superintendents, and Principals, June
9th 1994). The Ministerial statement was a small concession to parents, since
it allowed inclusion at the request of the parents, but this still had the
restriction of being defined as a placement, not as the provision of programs
and services within the placement. Therefore parents still could not challenge
whether the program and services provided within the placement met their
child's learning needs. In effect, the Ontario Education Act, as amended in
1980, promoted categorical identification, programs that were at the discretion
of the school system, and parental choice that was limited to the two
technicalities, the categorical designation of the student as exceptional, and
the placement of that student. Both of these could be stated in terms such as;
"the student has a learning disability and will be placed in a class for
students with learning disabilities". The parents' rights to challenge the
decision recommended by the school board were limited to that wording and not
to any of the programs and services available in that classroom. Further, the
school system was under no requirement to open to parental scrutiny the program
and services offered to the pupil. Special education programs and services
appeared in the Act only as definitions and were not mandatory, leaving their
implementation to the discretion of the school board. Consequently, the
provisions in the I.E.P. including such services as speech training and
counseling, and personnel such as interpreters, social workers and consultants
to teachers for hearing impairment, low vision and behavioral difficulties
could not be challenged by parents through appeals.
The twelve categories of disability, under five headings (intellectual, communicational, behavioral, physical and multiple) were defined by the Ministry, (Handbook for Special Education, 1984) and their use was required during annual school board reports of category counts, even though the prevailing government had made a major shift in recognising the rights of parents to have their child placed in inclusive settings. The categories continue to this day to be the criteria used to allocate special educational resource supplements to the school systems in Ontario.
Phase 3, 1995-present.
While the legislation created in the
1980s remains in place, with its limits on parental involvement, the current
government was elected in 1995 on a platform of lowered taxes, school reform
and greater public accountability. It represents a major swing to the right
compared with earlier governments, and is committed to balanced budgets,
increased competition and privatisation, devolution of control to local school
councils of elected parents, while retaining resource allocation at the centre
with stringent auditing. Thus the authority of the middle management school
boards, which had previously enjoyed a great deal of latitude and autonomy in
deploying their funding and in creating policy, has been curtailed if not
eliminated by the new governance structure. In this context, the government
changed an essential driver of school policies from input (legislating the
conditions by which the school boards provided educational programs and
services) to output (the publicly-available results of province-wide testing of
the newly prescribed curriculum standards) (Mitchell, in press). Introducing
standards-based reform with province-wide testing at grades 3, 6 and 9 (ages 8,
11 and 14), a curriculum with supporting materials that specifies content,
skills and outcomes, and a mandatory literacy test for all students at Grade 10
as a condition of receiving a Secondary School Graduation diploma, the
government has found substantial support from voters. On the other hand, the
new provisions for special needs leave many questions unanswered.
3. How do special education provisions in Ontario reflect the principles governing reforms in similar jurisdictions?
In Table 2, the five principles of market-driven educational reforms are listed and the Ontario initiatives with reference to special education are grouped under each.
a). Diversification.
The allocation of resources. The principle of diversification takes the form of a system of financing school boards that dispenses funding at the government level or centre for programs and services initiated at the school board or middle and school or local levels. Ontario schools receive funding for their special education programs and services through two allocations; the Special Education Per Pupil Amount (SEPPA) which is based on the total enrolment of students in the school system, and an Intensive Support Amount (ISA) which is allocated on a case-by-case basis. The SEPPA per-pupil amount is small and is expected to meet the needs of students who require a specialized program for up to 50% of the day. The school system applies for the ISA amounts by documenting how individual pupils fit the pathology-based, categorical criteria set by the Ministry of Education and Training guidelines. ISA applications are audited by the Ministry to ensure that applications comply with the ISA criteria.
ISA Level 1 is an allocation for special equipment that can be requested to supplement other funds. Eight of the 10 categories of exceptionality are specified under 2 levels of severity. These are problematic. To secure funding, school boards must document how individual students match categorical criteria that require justification for program modification for between 51% and 80% of the school day (I.S.A. level 2), or for more than 80% (I.S.A. level 3) (2000-2001 Resource Manual for the Special Education Intensive Support Amount, Ontario Ministry of Education and Training). The former generates funding equal to the salary of a half-time Educational Assistant and the latter a full-time E.A. Two further allocations are available; ISA level 4, is provided to students in care and treatment and correctional facilities, and the Special Incidence Portion (SIP) is available for students with extraordinarily high needs for staff support to ensure classroom safety.
The cases are prepared at the local level and adjudicated at the centre. The local schools prepare their cases for the school board-level administrative team, which vets each case in matching it to the criteria. Those cases accepted at this second level are submitted to the Ministry of Education and Training for final approval. Any claim deemed by the Ministry to fall outside the criteria is rejected and the funding withheld. A further round of stringent audits may occur after the completion of the funding allocations, to determine that the students meet the criteria and that they are spending the required 51 to 100% of school time in one-to-one care of the E.A. There are no input controls in the form of an allocation of funds per school board within which the cases are reviewed, but rather an output control in which school boards compete to reach the largest number of accepted cases before the allocation is exhausted In this respect, the second principle of contestability (Table 1) is also reflected.
The funding criteria contain no provisions for developmental changes from grade to grade, so that the same criteria for interfering behavior and physical dependence apply equally, for example, to a child with an intellectual disability in kindergarten as in high school. This begs the question of why teachers would work to decrease such symptoms, at the risk of disqualifying the student from being eligible for the resources.
In four of the eight categories, (behavioral and/or emotional disorder, learning disability, autism or other pervasive developmental disorder, moderate and severe intellectual disability) the school board must prepare documented evidence that the student is behaviorally disruptive, with interfering behaviors which range from lack of impulse control to being life-threatening to him/herself or to others. The categorical, pathology-based criteria also require documented testimony from medically-qualified personnel to support the case. I have watched as the parent of a well-adjusted, low functioning adolescent with Down's Syndrome was dispatched to the pediatrician to get some acceptable proof in writing that her child is having "difficulty with impulse control" and "difficulty with social interactional skills" in order to qualify for a half-time E.A. A student with a severe intellectual disability must be non-verbal, with an IQ measured at or below 40 and "great difficulty with impulse control and behavior management" to qualify for a full-time E.A. The outcome has been the endorsement both of categorical criteria for eligibility, and of the medical-pathological perspective of disability. The funding thereby exclusively specifies resource support as the one-to-one pairing of an Educational Assistant with a child, in a segregative rather than inclusive relationship, (Giangreco, Edelman, Luiselli, & MacFarland; 1997) and without support for the teacher other than to relieve the teacher's responsibility for working with that child.
Most problematic is the dependence of the eligibility criteria on two sources of data to justify each funding claim. I.Q. scores are required for both intellectual and communicational disabilities. Learning disability, a uniquely North American construct, is defined as a discrepancy between assessed intellectual potential or I.Q. and current level of achievement (ISA Resource Manual, 2000, p.43). This so-called "discrepancy hypothesis" has been the subject of intense debate and research and has largely been discredited, ironically by internationally recognized Canadian researchers such as Keith Stanovich (Stanovich, 1991, 1994, 2000) at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/U.T., and Linda Siegel (Siegel, 1989a, b) at the University of British Columbia.
As indicated in Table 2, the funds are not discretionary at the school or school-board level, so that fluctuations in enrollment and unanticipated cases due to situational or medical emergencies beyond the annual deadline have not to date been covered by the funds. The assumptions inherent in the funding criteria are that a disability is a permanent and largely inherent characteristic of the student.
b). Contestability is marked not only by the funding structure but also by the publication in the media of school scores on the Province-wide standards-based tests at Grades 3, 6 and 9. Schools are publicly rated, as in England and Wales, creating a sub-industry for property valuations. In theory, parents are assisted in selecting a school for their children. Booth (2000) argues that some countries have developed a two-tier system where a large private sector caters to the privileged, while the state remains responsible for education of the less privileged. In this latter tier, education is usually of low quality and is inherently exclusionary. I have argued elsewhere (Grossman & Jordan, 1998) that the combination of decentralization of decision making to local Ontario school councils, coupled with the centralization of resources, the bypassing of middle level policies set at school boards, and the competition between schools for parental attention on the basis of achievement scores, place Ontario high on Booth's list of two-tier systems. We see this increasingly in North America as several states in the U.S. and provinces in Canada move toward the establishment of charter schools , and as the publication of school results on state-wide tests, with their high-stakes consequences for funding, allow some schools to draw the top students and reject others, while the inner-city schools seek to establish a specialized reputation for disabilities, students for whom English is a second language, refugees and indigenous people. Great Britain and New Zealand have also gone through similar transitions in the paradigm shift to contestability and market-driven economics.
c). Decentralization.
Another outcome of the establishment of
local school councils at the individual school level is the possibility that
the interests of students with disabilities will not be well served in their
local schools. There is evidence that in some schools, should the parents
enroll their children with disabilities, parents will face opposition from
other parents who see their presence as a threat to the educational
opportunities of their own, non-disabled children (Sharpe, York & Knight,
1994; Vaughn, Schumm, Jallad, Slusher & Saumell, 1996). A recent incident
in a school which serves a high socio-economic area of Toronto, illustrates
that bigotry exists despite any Canadian constitutional law and provincial
Human Rights codes to the contrary. In a widely-publicised meeting, the parents
of non-disabled students confronted the parents of a high achieving child with
cerebral palsy, claiming that her inclusion limited their own children's
opportunity to learn.
d). Standards-based reform/ prescription and surveillance.
i. I.E.P.s. McLaughlin and Rouse (2000) define this principle
more broadly than Mitchell (1996) in terms of surveillance through quality
control procedures using quantifiable outcome indicators. Mitchell's principle
focuses on curriculum standards and standards-based assessment as mechanisms
for surveillance and quality control. The principle applies to Ontario's
introduction of curriculum standards and province-wide assessments linked to
the prescribed curriculum standards that are used as the basis for reporting to
parents. The U.S. has initiated the Goals 2000 project (McDonnell, McLaughlin
& Morison, 1997; McDonnell & McLaughlin, 1999; McLaughlin, Nolet, Rhim
& Henderson, 1999) to require the inclusion of students with impairments in
the delivery of the prescribed curriculum and in the related standards-based
assessment. The results of the assessments are to be incorporated into the
cycle of program planning, adaptation and delivery that is represented on the
I.E.P. Parents are an important part of the surveillance process, as long as
the regulations and policies give them sufficient power to influence the
delivery of services to their own children. This means that, in most countries,
the State assumes responsibility for ensuring that the rights of these pupils
are met through equity clauses in education legislation upon which parents are
able to draw. As yet, Ontario offers parents only weak provisions within its
Education Act, that are complex for parents to understand, expensive to
implement and largely discretionary upon the school board.
In Ontario, prior to the current reforms, the Individual Educational Plans (I.E.P.s) were written and locked away as evidence of compliance with the input controls required in the prevailing regulations. As noted above, parents had previously had no role in planning and implementing a special education program and related services, and no rights of appeal for what the schools chose to offer. I.E.P.s were made a regulatory requirement in O.Reg. 181/98, although without requiring the details of the U.S. legislation. I.E.P.s are now to be designed in co-operation with parents, and the progress of the student documented on the I.E.P. and attached to the report card at the three reporting times in the school year. As a result, the I.E.P. can potentially form a working contract between the parents, student and school. However, unlike the U.S.A. there is no policy or legislation of the form taken by IDEA 97 that the achievement of a student with a disability is to be recorded in relation to the provincial curriculum standards and that student's progress assessed in terms of the curriculum-based standards. In Ontario, schools are permitted to exclude students with special needs, as well as students with other characteristics such as ESL (EQAO) from participating in the standards-based assessments, and the use of curriculum objectives in IEPs is suggested but not mandated (IEP Resource Guide, 1998). Because the province-wide assessment includes the publication of each school's average scores, schools are strongly motivated to exempt students with special needs from the provincial tests, raising the number of students who are "on I.E.P.s". Furthermore, schools may now develop I.E.P.s for students who have not been considered formally for identification as exceptional and for placement, and hence they are technically "regular students". As such their parents have none of the rights of parents of exceptional students to be consulted about the special provisions being offered to their child, nor to give written permissions for assessments and placements. Parents of students deemed exceptional also have a right of appeal, although as I have noted above, that this is limited to technical issues of classification and placement. Parents of children with I.E.P.s but no designation as exceptional do not have even this limited right of appeal.
ii. Mandatory literacy testing. A comment is needed regarding the yet-to-be implemented provision in Ontario that all students must pass a test of written English and English reading fluency in Grade 10 in order to graduate with the Ontario Secondary School Diploma at the end of Grade 12. Clearly the intent of this regulation is to create accountability to prospective employers and the public in general that the taxpayers' dollars are being used to produce literate graduates. I conjecture that the students with disabilities will form the majority of those denied a graduation diploma. Unlike the U.S., there are no provisions for linking the I.E.P. to the requirements of the test, or for ensuring that remedial instruction is available to allow the students to have a reasonable opportunity to succeed (Pullin & Zirkel, 1988).
Ultimately, the Ontario education system will be challenged to address who has the responsibility for providing the educational programs and services which allow a student the opportunity to participate and learn. The structure of the current eligibility criteria for funding programs and services vests total responsibility with the students and parents to show that the child fulfills the categorical criteria to merit the resources of the Intensive Special Education Amounts. Further, having established that a student is eligible, the Individual Educational Program is separated from the curriculum standards and the accountability criteria linked to them in the standards-based assessment, again leaving the responsibility for monitoring that the child is receiving a challenging program to the parents as part of the required consultation and reporting process for the I.E.P. There appears to be little chance that parents are able to fulfill this task under the current policies and with the structure of Canadian government at three levels of jurisdiction, as I will explain below, and therefore the only recourse for parents, who are knowledgeable and can afford it, seems to be through the courts.
e). Parental say.
This criterion should be viewed as a
mechanism for fulfilling the previous principle of prescription and
surveillance. By specifying curriculum standards, and charting the progress of
students on them, parents are able to monitor the school's programs and
services, and in principle, influence how they are being provided, through
local parent councils, and possibly through the media and the courts. Under the
principle of parental choice (Table 1), schools are, held accountable to
improve their instruction and services. In practice, however, parents of
students with disabilities are likely to find themselves in an unvoiced
minority without power or influence.
Factors which contribute to this powerlessness were considered under different principles above, including;
i). The rights of parents of children with disabilities to challenge the
quality and appropriateness of educational provisions is curtailed in cases
where their children with disabilities have been excluded from high-stakes
assessment.
ii). Publication in the local media and on the internet of
school results on the Provincially-administered high-stakes assessments coupled
with parental choice of schools disadvantages parents of students with
disabilities,
iii). The rights of appeal by the parents of students deemed
'exceptional' as set out in the Ontario Education Amendment Act (1980) are
restricted to technicalities of designation as exceptional and to
categorically-based placement but not programs and services;
Equally worrying is the emerging practice in some school systems of exempting students from provincial standards assessments, without formally admitting them to special education, a move which denies the parents of those students the alternative rights of due process, legislated in the Education Act and in the regulations which govern special education.(Ontario Regulation 181/98).
4. To what extent do the special education reforms in Ontario reflect the characteristics of social justice and human rights that have driven similar initiatives in other jurisdictions?
I have illustrated how Ontario's educational reforms have mirrored the letter of similar reforms in other countries. They clearly introduced the mechanisms for increased competition, increased accountability to stakeholders, and decentralization of controls to the local level. In this section I will examine how Ontario stacks up against other countries in fulfilling the intent of such reforms. To what extent have other governments implemented their reforms with safeguards for the rights of people with disabilities, for a system of surveillance that gives parents adequate power and control to affect quality and performance, and for the potential to move the school systems forward with inclusion and with increased opportunity for all students to benefit?
1. Where is responsibility located for ensuring equity in educational
access for students with disabilities?
The Salamanca Statement and
Framework for Action (UNESCO, 1994) stated that "the development of inclusive
schools as the most effective means for achieving education for all must be
recognized as a key government policy and accorded the privileged place in the
nation's development agenda". Booth (2000) documents the principles of
inclusive education, and the gains made as a result of the articulation of
those principles. He distinguishes between the barriers to learning and
participation which are created by social structures, and the characteristics
of learners which contribute to their diversity. He makes the case that
barriers result from factors such as oppression, poverty, racism, sexism and
abuse, and from illness, impairments and linguistic and cultural difference
that are situationally created as a result of the learner's environment rather
than an inherent or permanent characteristic of him/her. Such barriers are
socially created and are the responsibility of the society in general rather
than the sole responsibility of the learner. Impairment and other individual
characteristics are not of themselves barriers to receiving an appropriate
education until social structures conspire to create them as barriers. This
viewpoint is shared by a number of authors who subscribe to the position that
disability is a social construction that serves the interest of the abled
(Smith, 1999; Danforth & Navarro, 1998).
Booth advocates a number of measures for enhancing the schools' responsiveness to inclusion. These include making government responsible for developing national policy that protects people with disabilities. Booth argues that governments must take the initiative to develop inclusionary policies and to reduce the distinctions between groups in the society that politicizes inclusion and exclusion as part of the distribution of wealth and privilege in the society. Inclusionary policies include improving the conditions for learning by developing an inclusive culture underpinned by shared values, developing local policies that minimize barriers to learning and participation, and increasing the capacity of all staff to respond to the diversity of learners.
When governments do not legislate equity in educational access and opportunity they renege on their responsibility. In Canada, one by-product of our overly cumbersome government structure is that the laws which address social justice and equity are administered and enforced at the federal level, while education is under the jurisdiction of the provincial level. In the Ontario Education Act, there are no explicit requirements to include students with disabilities except in terms of their physical placement and not according to their educational needs. The shift to outcome-based accountability and local level policies combine to exclude the interests of minorities from the resources and conduct of education. One recourse is for parents to exercise their power and authority to ensure that the interests of their children are addressed. But as we have seen, parents of students with disabilities have very limited powers of appeal. There have been attempts to use alternative legal routes, by lengthy and expensive cases that lead to the federal level Supreme Court or the provincial Human Rights Tribunal. To date these have had limited success, and have resulted in, for example the Ministerial statement that required that placement for students should include integration into the regular classrooms, upon parental request. This form of parental surveillance and quality control is clearly limited to those who can afford to pursue legal means. Families in poverty and those from backgrounds in which parents are typically not active as advocates do not pursue these extreme forms of recourse. Currently, immigrant families for whom English is the second language of the home contribute about half of the students to the urban classrooms of Toronto. On moral grounds, Ontario's government must take a responsibility for strengthening the Education Act to support the rights of students from minority groups, including those with disabilities.
2. Where is responsibility located for providing the opportunity for
students with disabilities to learn?
By focusing the funding structure
on criteria that quantify the degree of deficit in a pupil, Ontario has missed
the opportunity to abandon the categorical model which is based on questionable
if not erroneous assumptions of medical pathology, an opportunity which England
and Wales has been taking since the Warnock report (1978). I am not claiming
that British school systems have been successful in moving away from the
assumptions of disability as a pathological state that resides solely in the
individual. Rather, in a system where the policy enables the providers to
examine their own responsibilities in providing enabling conditions, as Ainscow
(1995) notes, there is room for growth compared to a system where the
responsibility lies with the student and parents to document and support the
case that the student is sufficiently "deviant from the norm" to merit
resources.
For the last 12 years I have been engaged in studies of teachers' assumptions, attitudes and beliefs about students with impairments, and how these relate to teachers' efficacy and practices. In a study conducted in the early 90s, about 20% of the Ontario teachers with whom we worked held a medical-pathological perspective, that student impairments are inherent and structurally-fixed, and therefore students with impairments should be taught by specialist teachers preferably in withdrawal or segregated settings (Jordan, Kircaali-Iftar & Diamond, 1993). A further approximately 20% held the view that student diversity is part of teaching, and that it is their responsibility to meet the needs of each pupil in whatever ways they can. The remaining 60% of teachers fluctuated between these two perspectives. I would like to believe that, by the middle of the '90s, the balance of beliefs had begun to swing strongly toward the end of the continuum that believed that teachers take responsibility for the outcomes of included students, and I have informal data to support this. We have examined the factors in schools which influence the perspectives which teachers hold. We find that level of teaching efficacy (the belief that one is able to get through to any student), level of resource support (provided in the classroom as opposed to withdrawing the student), and the perspective of the principal (head teacher) are significant contributors to the teacher's constellation of assumptions and beliefs (Stanovich & Jordan, 1998). While some teachers will be intransigent believers in the pathology-based perspective, the interventionist teachers can be strong advocates for the removal of barriers for students with impairment, given supportive schools and adequate training to be confident of their perspectives and skills.
Further, we have shown that the belief constellation is closely aligned to differences in teachers' practices. Teachers with pathology-based perspectives tend to avoid students with impairments, seldom or never calling on them in large-group activities, and monitoring their behavior and task completion during seatwork while attending to the construction of conceptual understanding in their other students (Jordan, Lindsay & Stanovich, 1997). When they ask for resources and support, it takes the form of asking for assessment to confirm the category of disability, and for withdrawal or suspension of students from the regular classroom. On the other hand, teachers who hold themselves responsible for meeting the needs of all students also share some common practices. They include their students with disabilities in the main work of the classroom, adapting their instructional presentations and the format by which their students respond, often in ways that are invisible to the other students. They use a variety of teaching techniques that are accessible to all students while specifically useful to some, along the principles of Universal Access and Universal Design (McDonnell, McLaughlin, and Morison, 1997). When they ask for resources and support , they anticipate that a resource teacher will work alongside them in the classroom, suggesting alternative teaching techniques and supplying resources that will allow a student to participate more fully. For them, assessments are to identify more effective ways to get through to students.
The difference between those schools that have the inclusionary ethic and those that do not is in part influenced by the expectations set out by the principal/head teacher (Stanovich & Jordan, 1998). His/her assumptions and beliefs about inclusion and the responsibilities of staff for students with impairments is a significant predictor of the overall quality of teaching practices of staff, irrespective of which students they are teaching.
The Ontario policies for special education create a press for segregation in two ways. They fail to recognize that the best investment of resources is to support the teacher by enhancing the ability of that teacher to respond to the diverse needs of all students. This is accomplished through creating an ethic that teachers are responsible for providing an enhanced opportunity for all students to learn, and that the best way to do so is to resource the teacher through an in-house model of prevention and intervention designed to equip teachers to accommodate differences among learners. This model, of collaborative, consultative teacher support, was becoming established across Ontario by the mid-1990s, the focus of school board training for resource and classroom teachers and, in some cases, the route to promotion to positions of leadership in the school board. With the reforms which focus on student deficits for eligibility to special education, and which pin resources to individual students rather than teachers, together with budget cuts that affect so-called non-classroom staff such as resource teachers, the government has squarely pinned the responsibility for special learning needs on the students themselves, and to their parents as their sole advocates. By reinforcing the medical or pathology-based conception of disability, the easy solution, to blame the student, has returned in force. This is happening at a time when medical and pharmaceutical agencies are doing a roaring trade in elixirs and potions designed to calm energetic young boys, who have become the largest growing subgroup of learning disabilities under the label Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD), and to supply anxious parents with neurologically-based explanations of learning difficulties ("Keeping kids healthy", Macleans Magazine, May 15th, 2000). Educators are losing the hard-won gains of the 80s and 90s to move away from the pathologizing of disability.
3. How effective is parental say as a mechanism for surveillance and accountability for students with disabilities?
Among Booth's (2000) principles upon which inclusionary policies and practices depend, and supposedly a component of increased surveillance and accountability in educational policy reform, are providing power and influence to parents and advocates for people with disabilities. In addition to the right to appeal, parents have a role in accountability as the recipients of information about a school's ability to reach provincial curriculum standards. An inclusive approach to raising standards is for government to provide support to enable schools to encourage the highest achievement of all learners in the neighborhood. National policy, or in our case provincial policy, would reflect a commitment to the inclusion of all students in the assessment-teaching-learning cycle, and would advocate for those students who are neither privileged nor able to compete in high standards of achievement. An education system that is exclusively driven by principles of what the market will bear is antithetical to this principle. Booth notes that such policies place an additional pressure on learners in economically poor areas.
Unfortunately, the eligibility criteria in Ontario are the head end of a process without a tail. Students admitted under the funding formulae for extra provisions and resources are typically excluded from province-wide testing, and while their I.E.P.s are now attached to their report cards, parents are still not party to how their child's progress compares to the curriculum standards for his or her functional level.
In terms of the prescribed standards for curriculum and the provincial standards-based assessment of students, the Ontario policies have mirrored the letter but not the intent of the legislation in other English-speaking countries. While U.S. federal law enshrines the mechanistic focus on deficits as the criteria for eligibility for special education, the right of every student to receive an appropriate education is in part guaranteed by the inclusion of all students in the high stakes assessment procedures in each State (McDonnell, McLaughlin & Morison, 1997). This is, of course, at odds with each school's investment in keeping its assessment outcome averages high. But, by legislating Goals 2000: Educate America Act (P.L. 103-227), and funds obtained under Title 1, the U.S. federal government has taken the position that schools must provide opportunities for all students to acquire the knowledge and skills contained in challenging state content standards. Assessments must be disaggregated by race, gender, English proficiency, migrant status, disability and economic status (P.L. 103-328, s1111). Efforts to improve student outcomes have included increasing the inclusion of students with disabilities in general education classrooms, ensuring access to general education curriculum and assessments, and preparing I.E.P.s that state the annual measurable goals, including bench-marks and short-term objectives related to meeting the child's needs, and the special education programs, services, supplementary aids and supports to be provided to assist the child to meet those goals. More recently, the amendments to IDEA (P.L. 105-17, 1997) makes statutory changes that presume that students with disabilities should have access to general curriculum, including its assessment and accountability components (Florian & Pullin, 2000).
The policies developed in England and Wales seem to have come from the opposite direction, to arrive at a point similar to that of the United States. Following the Warnock report (DES, 1978) all children were participants in the prescribed National Curriculum, and only in 1992 were specific guidelines produced (N.C.C., 1992) which allowed for the disapplication and modification to parts of the National Curriculum for students with severe disabilities. However according to McLaughlin and Tilstone (2000), teachers were reluctant to use such methods, believing that full participation in the National Curriculum is desirable for all students if they are given help.
Although the guidelines for the IEP (Ministry of Education, IEP Resource Guide, 1998) propose that "Exceptional students be given every opportunity to achieve the learning expectations set out in the Ontario curriculum"(p.20), there are no requirement that their IEPs are designed to reflect such standards, and no training of school staff to do so. A first step would be to include students with special needs in the provincial testing program, in order to identify the curriculum goals and expectations which would be the appropriate starting point for designing the IEP. Lack of such requirements may well violate section 15 of the 1985 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as well as the intent of The Standard Rules for the Equalization of Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities (United Nations, 1994), the World Declaration on Education for All (Interagency Commission, 1990), and the Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action (UNESCO, 1994) (Mitchell, 1997).
In addition, the new requirement for students including those with disabilities to pass the literacy test in Grade 10, places a burden on students and schools that is not relieved by resources to assist them to meet the standard. In the United States, in a court case concerning the federal constitutional rights of students with disabilities, a federal appellate court found that students with disabilities could not be denied diplomas for having failed the state's competency tests, because their program of instruction (I.E.P.) was not developed to meet the goal of passing the minimum competencies tested (Brookhart v. Illinois State Bd.of Educ., 697 F.2d 179, 187 (7th Cir.1983) cited in Pullin, 1994). A similar decision was reached also in 1983 in a case which struck down the Florida statute requiring students to pass a minimum competency test in order to receive their high school diploma (Debra P. v. Turlington, 644 F2d 397,404; (5th Cir.1981); 730 F.2d 1405 (11th Cir 1983). The decision stated that the State's compulsory attendance law and the state-wide curriculum guaranteed students a constitutionally-protected expectation that they would receive the diploma. Students must receive adequate notice of the examination in order for them to have sufficient opportunity to prepare for the tests and for school district to prepare and implement remedial programs (Pullin & Zirkel, 1988).
These decisions squarely locate the responsibility for the instruction of students with special needs on the school system, to allow the students to reach a level of proficiency to be able to meet curriculum standards. These decisions do not to imply that every student has a right to a high school graduation diploma, but rather that schools must be accountable to students and parents for the programs which they provide to students. Recalling the landmark Rowley case, (Board of Hendrick Hudson Cent. Sch. Dist. v. Rowley, 458 US 176, 189, 1982) the U.S. Supreme Court defined "a free appropriate public education" as one in which a personalised instruction is being provided with sufficient support services to permit the child to benefit from instruction. The special education package and services should be reasonably calculated to enable the child to receive educational benefits.
Again, in Ontario, we see the letter of the law fulfilling the principle of creating standards and requiring schools to meet them, but there are no supports for doing so. The policy allows students to retake the literacy test as many times as he or she wishes, but the locus of responsibility rests with the students, and therefore with the parents, to prepare the students for success. Responsibility has been decentralized to the point that parents of students with disabilities lack the legal and social support to require that schools take responsibility for, at the least, providing programs and services that are reasonably calculated to provide the students with an opportunity to succeed.
4. How well do the reforms equip teachers to supply equitable opportunity for students with disabilities to learn and participate?
Booth's (2000) set of prescriptions for fulfilling the inclusionary principles of the United Nations Standard Rules for the Equalisation of Opportunity, the Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action, and the World Declaration on Education for All, includes the development of human resources to support inclusion. Booth notes that change has to proceed at all levels and sectors of the system, and that it has to be a priority for resource allocation. The pathology-based expectations of the many members of the teaching profession are rooted in history. Such beliefs arise from the unchallenged assumption that it is the impairments in the students and not they that create the barriers to educational opportunity. In Sarason & Doris's (1979) words, they assume that "once a child has 'it', 'it' becomes focal and all else fades into the background". Changing their beliefs cannot be accomplished by legislation, policy shifts or appeals to their humanity. Teachers need to be supported in changing their day-to-day practices, to be coached in trying those practices, so that their beliefs might catch up with their skills (Pajares, 1993). They need to find themselves effective in doing things that they have never tried before, as Giangreco et al. (1993) so succinctly reminds us in "I've counted Jon". This requires a large commitment to resources training and in-house support, an initiative that is variously implemented through collaborative resource support in North American Schools and is a current focus in the training of resource teachers in New Zealand. South Africa too is undertaking a "training of trainers" model for disseminating teaching practices and professional development in the townships. When resources are supplied in the Ontario system, they are specifically earmarked for teaching assistants. They are not available for teacher in-service training and professional development. They are not to be used for non-classroom based resources such as special education resource teachers who could, if deployed, be the in-house teacher training and support agent in each school. Here they could, at least in theory, provide support and training to classroom teachers, to enable them to work with both students with special educational needs as well as the culturally, linguistically and economically diverse students that characterize Canadian classrooms. We were writing about this in 1994, as was Thomas(1992 ) and a large U.S. cohort who looked at classroom collaboration as the way to enhance teaching skills, and initiative that is dying on the vine in Ontario, just as New Zealand commences training for resource teachers in exactly this role (Moore, Macfarlane, Anderson, Brown, Timperley, Thomson, & Glynn, 2000).
In Ontario, teachers are carrying the brunt of the reforms. As of the date of writing there is a proposed amendment to the Education Act known as the Education Accountability Act 2000, which requires that all teachers undertake mandatory professional development on their own time. This could exacerbate the fragmentation of skills among school staffs. Meanwhile there is no new funding announced for teacher training and development, and the resources so far allocated through the I.S.A. grants are being used exclusively to supply teaching assistants. The Ministry may require evidence at any time that a student is spending the requisite 51 to 100% of time in a one-to-one exclusive pairing with the teaching assistant. School boards have reduced the number of segregated classrooms since they have to subsidize the teacher to fulfill the resource allocation criteria, and more inclusive boards have reduced or done away with the resource teacher that used to be available to teachers in each school as an in-house staff development and support person. The resource role cannot be filled through the categorical terms of the grant formulae, and since the role is defined as non-classroom based, it is subject to other cuts to comply with new staffing formula. The lack of support for teachers other than through the E.A. has given rise to all of the issues raised by Giangreco et al (1993) in criticizing the "hovering" role of E.A.s in North American classrooms, and their questionable usefulness as the major provider of support services to classrooms containing students with special educational needs.
5. What are the implications of the current policies for the future direction of special education in Ontario?
Inclusive classrooms have become the norm for fiscal rather than moral reasons. Ontario teacher morale is at an all time low. Teachers are leaving the profession in significant numbers fueled in part by an early retirement incentive, but also by a professional perspective that is at odds with the paradigm shift to the right. They do not know how to cope with the multiple innovations being demanded of them. In 1997 eight major reform initiatives were implemented that touched every corner of the teaching profession, and in the Fall of 1998 the province's teachers staged an illegal work stoppage, illegal since they walked out on their contract with their employers, the school boards. They took this route since they had no other mechanism for collectively voicing their anger with the policy shifts at the central level. They are facing new public hostility generated by the government's public justification of its accountability requirements which includes a barrage of combative criticism of the teaching profession through paid political messages in the media. It appears likely that the province-wide teachers' strike in October, 1998 will be followed by another this fall.
In the short time between the introduction of mandatory special education legislation in 1980 and the 1995 commencement of an economy-based model of educational delivery, Ontario teachers had made considerable gains in accepting the concept of inclusion, and retooling their assessment and program delivery skills to meet the needs of students with special needs. The shift was marked by the gradual assumption of responsibility for adapting instruction to learner needs (Giddens, in preparation; Stanovich & Jordan, 1998), and although in its infancy, the attitudes of teachers to inclusion had become more positive. The inclusion movement was beginning to be viewed as a route to professional growth. The swing to the right since then has left the education system dispirited, confused and in disarray. Nor does there seem to be much light at the end of the tunnel. It may take a major political upheaval, or a series of lengthy and costly legal challenges to return to the optimism of the mid-90s. If this is the only route, then the Ontario special education system will become separated from the regular education system in what Sebba, Thurlow and Goertz (2000) refer to as a separation of attitudes. This results from the splitting of educational accountability where the courts at the federal level assume the responsibility for establishing accountability for special education, as a result of serial challenges to the federal courts, while regular education remains primarily accountable to the legislation and policies of provincially-controlled education. The evolution of separate systems in the United States and England and Wales has compounded the implementation of inclusive practices, pitting teachers against teachers and parents against parents. My hope is that the lessons learned in other jurisdictions from the results of similar policies can be heeded as we develop our legislation and policies in Ontario.
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