Realizing the Equity-Minded Aspirations of Detracking and Inclusion: Toward a Capacity-Oriented Framework for Teacher Education

Abstract

Inclusion and detracking policies seek to remedy the pervasive inequality of educational opportunities in U.S. schools by building classrooms that are integrated across the lines of race/ethnicity, class, and disability and that offer all students access to a rich and challenging curriculum. In practice, however, teachers often struggle with the implementation of these reforms. Drawing on ethnographic research in detracked and inclusion classrooms, this article analyzes the nature and sources of the tensions and dilemmas felt by teachers working in intentionally heterogeneous settings. It argues that the implementation of these policies is not often accompanied by a serious interrogation of the taken-for-granted understandings of ability, standards, and structural inequality that pervade educational discourse inside schools. This failure to challenge dominant discourse about these three issues is at the root of the tensions and dilemmas felt by teachers working in detracked and inclusion classrooms. Drawing on lessons learned from research, the authors propose a capacity-oriented framework for teacher education that might better prepare teachers working in intentionally heterogeneous classrooms to meet the equity-minded goals of these reforms.

Notes

Notes

1 We put quotation marks around the word ability because we are critical of the commonsense notion of ability that permeates school discourse—the idea that children have inherent, identifiable, and hierarchically ranked “ability” levels.

2 Learning diversity is part of every classroom; however, it is rarely acknowledged as such. We refer to inclusion and detracked classrooms as intentionally heterogeneous because these policies explicitly address the issue of the diversity of learners.

3 We must note here that we are primarily discussing inclusion of children with mild or moderate cognitive disabilities, as the goals for students with severe cognitive disabilities are not to have them meet similar academic standards.

4 For the purposes of argument, we are drawing an artificial line between fixed and malleable views of capability and intelligence. These ideas are interwoven in the academic and everyday discourses about human cognition. Academic research about human cognition recognizes that environment deeply shapes performance. However, school discourse often fails to take account of this relationship. Intelligence/ability, as a measurable quality that exists in the shape of a normal curve, is a taken-for-granted, almost unquestionable tenet of educational thinking at the school level. And even pre-service teachers are routinely exposed to the idea that children can and should be categorized in relation to a normal curve.

5 We have become very much aware of how often we hear the pre-service teachers in our programs refer to children as “classified”: they often appear to view the children as not simply children with specific disabilities, but as different kinds of people.

6 Inclusion for students with severe cognitive disabilities does not aim to have all students meet the same academic standards. In this case, the goals are aimed at social interactions between children with and without disabilities that aim to support their membership in society at large.

7 Importantly, advocates of bottom-up reforms take a different stance and would use standards as frameworks within which local professionals can develop high-quality, innovative curricula and pedagogy tailored to individual students and particular communities (see Darling-Hammond, 1997; Meier, 2000; Sizer, 1992; Wheelock, 1998).

8 John Dewey wrote in a similar vein of the moral equality of all humans being located in what he called “incommensurability” of all human work (1922/1966).

9 We offer this example because one of us has extensive experience with the Prospect processes as a teacher and teacher educator, and has conducted research on this work (Abu El-Haj, 2003).

10 A lengthy description of the format of these processes is beyond the scope of this article (see Himley, 2002; Himley & Carini, 2000).

11 See note 7 for the goals for children in special education.