I remember talking to the teacher who taught the special needs kids at my middle school … Mr. Gibson was the only black teacher in the school and he was far more qualified than any of the others. It also helped that he had the patience of a saint: I doubt any other teacher there could last more than a day with the kids he looked after. At some point in the decades since I was in school, the powers-that-be decided that integrating all the children together was the right decision. By any sensible reckoning, it has been the worst thing they could have done, both for the special needs children and all the other children, as GenX Anecdotes relates on Substack Notes:
GenX Anecdotes didn’t include this in her post, but I thought it to be appropriate, in a way.
Having worked in schools and hearing my daughter’s experiences, it just can’t be the case that a tiny minority of extremely disruptive kids ruin the learning for all the others. Yet I have seen time and time again how one or two disruptive kids with severe behavioural issues can derail a whole lesson.
The dogged insistence that all the kids must be thrown together regardless of capabilities and behaviour is insane to me.
I have seen the amount of time, effort and extra staff required to deal with just ONE kid who clearly needs “round-the-clock” close supervision.
I have often thought those kids should not be in a “normal” class or school. They need to be somewhere else where they can get specialist support. And I don’t care how many times you shout “inclusivity” at me. Those kids would be better off somewhere else too.
I have watched kids who, during lunchtime, will smash up a whole table of kids’ lunches and try and run out of the school gates; kids continually shouting in lessons; bully and “hit” other kids repeatedly; demand all the other kids play games exactly as THEY want them to be played; derail a whole lesson and be continually brought out of the classroom, but only to be brought back in again!
Then I see the adults pander to the disruptive ones time and time again and expect all the other kids to suck it up and put up with their bullshit. All under the guise of some “neurodivergent” excuse. If their “neurodivergence” continually negatively impacts everyone around them, then they need to be removed from everyone else. Sorry. It’s not everybody else’s responsibility to put up with it.
Time and time again, the needs of a minority of kids prioritise the needs of many.
I remember when I worked in one junior school, attending a training day for teachers and support staff, which was conducted by the school head teacher.
When I raised this issue, he just went over to his laptop and brought up that “equity” meme of the three people standing on boxes looking over a wall onto the big screen and said THIS is why.
He didn’t like the fact that I had brought this up, especially since some of the teachers agreed with me. He very quickly shut me down, and his whole tone was this kind of patronising and smug “you don’t understand at all do you?” Like he was having to explain basics to me. There were a thousand things I wanted to say about it, but I didn’t.
What really got me was how all those teachers who had agreed with me looked at the meme and were nodding! They were impressed by it and acted like they hadn’t seen it before. It was beyond infuriating. I SO wanted to get up and go over to the laptop and find the other “equity in reality” meme, which is far closer to the truth.
But I didn’t, because I didn’t want to derail the whole thing and be the only “disrupter” in the room.
It was close to lunchtime, and it was already running over, and everyone was clearly eager to get out of there, so I didn’t want to turn it into an ideological battle of wits. In hindsight, I wish I did.
But I wasn’t brought up to be that person. And yet, ironically, here we are. Raising a generation of people who WOULD totally hold everyone up and much worse.
I left that job soon after that. It wasn’t just that. It was a lot of things related to this. I watched daily as things that I thought could actually be quite easily made better with some practical adjustments were continually and self-evidently made worse for EVERYBODY because of an adherence to this arrogant and utterly insane ideological bullshit.
It drove me nuts.
