Douglas Fuchs and Lynn S. Fuchs, Peabody College of Vanderbilt University; Patricia G. Mathes, University of Texas--Houston Health Science Center; Mark W. Lipsey and P. Holley Roberts, Peabody College of Vanderbilt University
Learning Disabilities Summit: Building a Foundation for the Future White Papers
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These concerns percolated more or less quietly in the U.S. Office of Education, state education agencies, and academe until the 1980s. Then two things happened to cause a much greater number of educators and politicians to question the validity of the LD construct.
Between 1977 and 1994, the number of students with disabilities increased from 3.7 million to 5.3 million "despite... [the fact] that overall public school enrollment [remained] roughly constant over this period" (Hanushek, Kain, & Rivkin, 2001, p. 7). These numbers represented an increase from 8.3 to 12.2% of the general student population. Virtually all of the growth came from increases in students classified as LD, a group that grew from 22 to 46% of all special-needs children over this period (Hanushek et al., p. 7). Hanushek and Rivkin (1997, cited in Hanushek et al.) suggested that "special education accounted for roughly 20% of the increase in per student spending during the 1980s, slightly less than double the share of special education students" (p. 7). These developments did not escape the attention of school boards, school superintendents, politicians, and other stakeholders in public education, some of whom began calling for an immediate downsizing of special education (e.g., Viadero, 1991).
Another event dramatizing and deepening LD concerns was the Regular Education Initiative (REI), a reform movement bold and comprehensive in design. One of its founders was Madeleine Will who, in the 1980s, was assistant secretary of Education in the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services. She was also the mother of a son with Down's syndrome and, more than anything else, she wanted to dramatically increase the number of children with disabilities in regular schools and classrooms. In 1986, she circulated a paper entitled "Educating children with learning problems: A shared responsibility," which became a manifesto of sorts of the movement. Will and other REI supporters (notably her friend, Margaret Wang, and Wang's colleagues, Maynard Reynolds and Herbert Walberg) were critical of what they perceived as special education's empire-building and profligate spending (e.g., Wang & Walberg, 1988); its use of putatively stigmatizing labels such as "mental retardation" and "behavior disorders" (e.g., Reynolds, Wang, & Walberg, 1987); and its separation of special-needs children from nondisabled peers, which they characterized as undemocratic (e.g., Wang & Walberg) and racist because of the overrepresentation of children of color in many resource rooms and self-contained classes (e.g., Lipsky & Gartner, 1989; Stainback & Stainback, 1988). Moreover, REI supporters claimed little was "special" (e.g., Sleeter, 1998; Spear-Swerling & Sternberg, 1998) or effective (e.g., Biklen & Zollers, 1986; Gartner & Lipsky, 1989; Wang & Walberg) about special education instruction.
The REI's distinctiveness, however, was not its litany of complaints against special education, or its goal of accelerating the mainstreaming of special-needs children. Instead, its noteworthiness was its broader aim of transforming general education into a more instructionally responsive system capable of accommodating a large majority of children with disabilities and thereby reducing the size and cost of special education. The Adaptive Learning Environments Model (ALEM; e.g., Wang & Birch, 1984), cooperative learning (e.g., Stevens, Madden, Slavin, & Farnish, 1987), reciprocal teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1984), and other instructional programs designed for mainstream classrooms were advanced as proven means to such an ambitious end. REI advocates believed that the remaking of general education would require (a) massive professional development, which, they assumed, would be financed by the dollars saved from downsizing special education, and (b) a redefinition of the role of special educators, away from direct service and toward "collaborative consultation" and "coteaching" alongside classroom teachers. Both the professional development and the new roles for special educators would require a major reconfiguration of separate administrative systems (i.e., general education, special education, Title I, and English as a second language) into a "unified" system (see McLaughlin & Warren, 1992).
Will and many other REI backers viewed children with LD as most appropriate among all students with disabilities for placement in transformed mainstream classrooms. There were at least two reasons for this. First, students with LD were understood by many to represent the mildest form of disability and, hence, they were seen as having the best chance of making it in the mainstream. Second, students with LD occupied the resource and self-contained classrooms coveted by advocates of children with mental retardation. In other words, some REI supporters reasoned that, if students with LD were mainstreamed, then many children with mental retardation could move from special schools to the more normal settings vacated by the children with LD. When LD advocates expressed skepticism about regular education's willingness and ability to accommodate the unique learning needs of many students with disabilities--a central assumption of REI supporters--a vigorous debate ensued (e.g., Bryan & Bryan, 1988; Fuchs & Fuchs, 1988a, 1988b; Hallahan, Keller, McKinney, Lloyd, & Bryan, 1988; Kauffman, 1989; Lloyd, Repp, & Singh, 1991; Reynolds, 1988; Wang & Walberg, 1988). This debate, in turn, further politicized the LD construct, as well as a good portion of LD research, which, deliberately or otherwise, contributed to the growing perception that LD was an invalid category of exceptionality.
At least three lines of research in the 1980s addressed the LD construct. The first documented considerable variation of LD definitions and operationalizations across states (e.g., Gerber & Semmel, 1984; Mercer et al., 1990). Definitions differed in many ways: (a) the operationalization of discrepancy (e.g., standard scores for IQ minus standard scores for achievement vs. the regression of IQ on achievement); (b) the size of the discrepancy (e.g., 1.0 SD vs. 2.0 SDs); and (c) the choice of IQ and achievement tests. A popular and provocative way of expressing the findings from this work was to say something like "a child qualifying as LD in one state very well may have been excluded from the category in a neighboring state because of varying state regulations" (see Gerber & Semmel, 1984). In certain cases, some argued, the LD designation hinged more on the school district than the state in which one resided because of differences in regulations between districts within the same state (e.g., Peterson & Shinn, 1997).
Second, related work showed that many teachers purposely disregarded definitional rules and regulations to ensure special education for their students (e.g., Gottlieb, Alter, Gottlieb, & Wishner, 1994; MacMillan, Gresham, & Bocian, 1998; MacMillan, Gresham, Siperstein, & Bocian, 1996; Shepard & Smith, 1983). Gottlieb et al., for example, randomly selected 175 children with LD from six school districts and 165 elementary and middle schools in a large metropolitan area. Ninety percent of this group received some form of public assistance. The mean IQ of the sample was 81.4 (SD = 13.9). Students with LD in resource classes had higher IQ scores (M = 86.6) than those in self-contained classes (M = 75.0). Such scores, as well as teacher interviews, indicated that "children...classified as learning disabled...exhibit[ed] a generalized failure in their academic work rather than specific inefficiencies of cognitive processes or deficiencies in circumscribed academic subject matter" (p. 458). Only 15% met conventional identification criteria. Gottlieb et al. wrote, "Were the significant discrepancy feature of the learning disability definition observed, it would be extremely difficult to obtain with IQ scores so low" (p. 458).
"Why," asked Gottlieb et al. (1994), "is the severe discrepancy component of the definition so frequently ignored by school professionals?" They responded, "Our...discussions...with urban practitioners suggest that discrepancies are knowingly ignored...to marshall...resources for low-achieving (LA) students. Assessment staff and decision makers acknowledge that much of the school failure exhibited by children is more likely attributed to the effects of poverty...than to a 'learning disability' as defined in state regulations. Nevertheless...an educational fiction is agreed [on] to provide eligibility for special education services and programs. The current state of urban education, so woefully underfunded relative to its needs, provides students little access to intensive resources outside special education" (p. 459).
A third area of research in the 1980s reported considerable overlap in performance on various aptitude and educational tests between low achievers with and without the LD label (e.g., Ysseldyke, Algozzine, Shinn, & McGue, 1982) and between students with LD and Title I (high-poverty) students (e.g., Jenkins, Pious, & Peterson, 1988). Ysseldyke and colleagues (1982), and others, concluded from this work that virtually no important educational difference existed between students with LD and garden-variety poor achievers, that LD was an "oversophistication" of the concept of low achievement (e.g., Algozzine, 1985; Algozzine & Ysseldyke, 1983). Such a claim motivated others to conduct similar research, a point to which we will return.
In aggregate, the research on the variability of state definitions of LD, teachers' disregard for these definitions, and the overlap in performance between low achievers with and without the LD label promoted a widely held view that an LD designation was essentially arbitrary (see Coles, 1987; Doris, 1993; Finlan, 1994; Klatt, 1991; Pugach, 1988; Reynolds, 1991; Reynolds, Wang, & Walberg, 1987; Skrtic, 1991; Sleeter, 1986; Wang, Reynolds, & Walberg, 1994/1995; Ysseldyke, Algozzine, & Epps, 1983; Ysseldyke, Algozzine, Richey, & Graden, 1982; Ysseldyke, Algozzine, Shinn, & McGue, 1982). Writing in 1983, following completion of a program of research associated with their federally funded, 5-year Institute for Research on Learning Disabilities, Ysseldyke and colleagues spoke for many when they wrote, "After five years of trying, we cannot describe, except with considerable lack of precision, students called LD. We think that LD can best be defined as 'whatever society wants it to be, needs it to be, or will let it be' at any point in time. We think [LD] researchers have compiled an interesting set of findings on a group of students who are experiencing academic difficulties, who bother their regular classroom teachers and who have been classified by societally sanctioned labelers in order to remove them, to the extent possible, from the regular education mainstream" (Ysseldyke et al., 1983, cited in Hallahan & Mercer, 2001, p. 50).
REI advocates, therefore, promoted the idea that all children with an LD label were simply low achievers. They further claimed that because so-called children with LD did not have unique learning needs, they, together with their nondisabled peers, could profit from the ALEM, cooperative learning, and other presumably proven instructional programs for the mainstream. To ensure all low-performing children's academic well-being, REI supporters argued that special educators should be retooled as consultants and coteachers. In these new roles, they would spend much of their time in the mainstream. The ALEM, cooperative learning, and similar programs, combined with in-class support, would in turn permit the responsible decertification of children with LD and a dramatic downsizing of special education. Despite such innovative ideas to strengthen mainstream classrooms and shrink special education, REI supporters could neither convince a critical mass of general educators to support their strategies (see Pugach & Sapon-Shevin, 1987) nor persuade important stakeholders in the disability community that general education would be willing and able to respond appropriately to the unique learning needs of students with disabilities.
Funding for NRCLD is provided by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special
Education Programs. Award No. H324U010004. Opinions expressed herein are those of the National
Research Center on Learning Disabilities and do not necessarily represent the position of the U.S.
Department of Education.
© 2007 National Research Center on Learning Disabilities
Last Updated: November 19, 2007
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