Ethics and special education

Focus on Exceptional Children, Sep 2001 by Paul, James, French, Peter, Cranston-Gingras, Ann

Special education is under attack from outside the profession and is experiencing considerable dissention from inside as well, The challenges from outside are concerned with costs and accountability. Cost comparisons with other education services have led some to argue that the social benefits do not justify the costs of special education services (Dillon, 1994; Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, 1997). Dissention inside the profession involves longstanding differences in perspective regarding fully integrated versus pull-out service delivery models (Fuchs & Fuchs, 1995; Shanker, 1994) and, increasingly, differences among researchers about the nature and representation of knowledge.

Ethical issues lurk sometimes subtly behind and sometimes boldly in front of professional challenges in special education interventions, policies, research, and teacher education. Special educators rely on a complex foundation of justifying reasons for what they do, and how they do it. Everything from how disability is defined to the educational objectives and the knowledge privileged as foundational for practice reflects a priori considerations saturated with values and cultural meaning.

It is surprising that a field so replete with such complexities of interests has devoted so little attention to the study and development of applied ethics. In a survey of doctoral programs in special education in 1995 only one required a course in ethics, although most said that ethics content was embedded in the content of different seminars (Paul, Kane, and Kane, 1996). A few respondents suggested that content in ethics was not needed in a Ph.D. program in special education.

We believe that lessons learned in professional psychology with respect to the study of ethics are instructive for special educators. Increasingly, over the past three decades, doctoral programs in psychology have required courses in ethics because the approach of embedding ethics content lacked a foundational perspective, lacked continuity, and, for teaching purposes, relied too much on ethical issues emerging randomly in class discussions and internships. Special education teachers, researchers, teacher educators, and policy-makers need more education and training in ethics to be able to address current moral dilemmas in assessment, instruction, curriculum, work with families, instructional competence, philosophy of service delivery, funding, and research. The articulation and application of ethical theory needed to support practice and policy development are critical to the future of special education.

Rather than enumerate the myriad of ethical issues in special education and ethical theories to address them, we have elected to focus on four major ethical challenges to the field.

1. The need to examine the moral and political stories, and ethical frameworks within which to understand them.

2. The need for articulating character morality to complement the more familiar choice morality that is used to think about ethical dilemmas in special education.

3. The need to examine special education in the context of a liberal democracy.

4. The need to develop an ethical basis for discourse on the nature and representation of knowledge.

THE HISTORY OF SPECIAL EDUCATION: HOW MORAL IS THE STORY?

Are special educators part of a moral story, doing good things for children and families? Or are we part of a story in which we, however unwittingly, bring harm to children with disabilities as a function of the roles we play and the cultural meaning of the story we are in? Or are we in a confused and complex story, intending good, yet knowing that some special education policies can harm children? One can find in that some special education policies and popular literature alike an find in the response to each question (Fuchs & Fuchs, 1995; Johnson, 1969).

All of us would hope to be part of a moral story and certainly would affirm our intention to do good for children and their families. Special educators, after all, tend to be advocates and defenders of the rights of children with disabilities. The thought that we could participate in any way in anything harmful is appalling. Yet the narrative of special education suggests that we have, and that, in some ways, we still do. Although we do not participate by informed choice, the effects are the same. We will briefly describe selected issues in the modern history of special education and examples of tensions surrounding the nature of the story.

Special education is viewed in different ways depending on the political and social context. Some have viewed it as a valued set of programs with an empirically validated knowledge base for practice (Carnine, 1991), meeting the unmet needs of children in school who otherwise would be unserved in the general education system (Kauffman & Hallahan, 1995; Lieberman, 1992). Others have viewed special education as having served a purpose in the history of education but now as defeating the social egalitarian goals of education by keeping some students away from their age peers and the general education curriculum (Gartner & Lipsky, 1987; Pugach & Warger, 1996). Still others have been more harsh, damning it as a racist bureaucracy, stigmatizing and segregating African American boys, and violating the rights of children (Granger & Granger, 1986; Grossman 1998; Johnson 1969)-and ineffective at best (Van Doninck, 1983). So what is special education's story?