The fight for inclusive education has made enormous gains from when the National Association of Retarded Children was established in 1950 to 1990 when the public law called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), P.L. 94-142, was revised. Educational systems have moved from not providing education at all for the disabled to providing schools for the disabled separate from non-disabled students. Recently "normal" schools have been practicing inclusion and have free rein to determine exactly how. The problem facing policy makers today is whether or not all disabled children should be inclusioned. If the policy makers would just observe the disabled students being inclusioned and ignore all the rhetoric being presented to them, they will find that not all disabled children benefit from inclusion.

On July 13,1996, Omer Zak compiled several articles the deaf and professionals who work with the deaf had submitted to him and presented

Are the average American students being overlooked in this whole process of inclusion? One quick look at the change in public school budgets will answer that question. In 1967 at least 80% of public school budgets where devoted to "regular education" while in 1996 that percentage rate dropped to 58.6% (Ratnesar). The 22% decrease is a result of absorbing the cost for special education and inclusion. The extra attention given to a severely disabled child that is inclusioned into a regular classroom is drawing away the resources and efforts of the teachers that would normally be directed to the average student. What a waste of precious resources when a child's disability is so severe that they can not truly benefit from inclusion. Supporters of full inclusion claim that the biggest obstacle they face is the attitudes of those involved (Mejia). There are schools that are very successful at applying inclusion practices. What enabled the success of these schools were the attitudes of the staff. Likewise, many of the failures of inclusion can be attributed to poor attitudes. Tim McConnell has been quoted for saying "the key to successful inclusion is deciding to make inclusion successful." When administrators change their negative attitudes toward inclusion and begin to follow the proper procedures for implementing inclusion it will be successful.

As mentioned above, having students with certain disabilities in a normal classroom session can violate the rights of the non-disabled student. For example, a severely autistic child can be very difficult to control and can quickly turn a classroom into a chaotic mess (Mejia). Autistic children need to have a structured environment with very little disturbances. When a disturbance does occur such as an announcement over the P.A. system or a fire drill the autistic child will most often experience a form of a panic attack causing them to become very disruptive and difficult to manage. As a result, valuable lesson time is wasted on calming the autistic child down. This is not only disturbing to the other students in the classroom but can be dangerous to them as well. An autistic child will often get violent during a tantrum and may throw something or do something that will injure other students. If a tantrum occurs during a fire alarm the autistic child could prevent the rest of the class from safely exiting the building.

Deaf children growing up in segregated schools are most often taught American Sign Language (ASL). ASL is an entirely different language than English just as Spanish or French is. The problem is that if the deaf person lives in America everything from instructions to the closed captions on TV are written in English and not in ASL. Teaching the deaf to read and write proper English will help them to function in the community more freely. The same holds true with autistic children as well. Teach them young enough how to function in a normal classroom setting and they will behave accordingly. According to the Authors of Listening To Their Voices inclusive practices benefit the average student as well. The book provides a

Some topics in this essay:
Zak Murray, Listening Voices, Christine Smetzer, Hager Cohen, Mejia Autistic, IDEA PL, Tim McConnell, , ASL Teaching, North School, deaf student, disabled students, autistic child, regular classroom, restrictive environment, classroom instruction, learn restrictive environment, classroom setting, answer question, learn restrictive, supporters inclusion, public school budgets, disabled deaf student, regular classroom setting, deaf student interpreter,