Special Education Should Stay Special
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why special education supports should be carefully tailored rather than applied to every student.
Key Takeaways
- Special Means Tailored - Special education exists to provide specific supports that meet an individual student's needs, not to create universal exceptions.
- Universal Flexibility Backfires - Practices like flexible attendance or behavior responses may fit specialized settings but can undermine learning in a typical school.
- Alternative Models Don't Always Scale - What works in an alternative school often depends on conditions that would be ineffective in a mainstream environment.
- Behavior Needs Context - A student with an IEP who lashes out due to overstimulation needs a different response than students engaging in ordinary misconduct.
- Protect the Core of Schooling - Principals should preserve the routines and expectations that make learning possible while making narrow, thoughtful accommodations.
Full Transcript
The thing about special education is it's special. The thing about alternative schools is they're alternatives. And if we lose sight of what makes a normal school function in the normal ways, and we try to incorporate every special education and every alternative education idea into a typical school, we end up with something really incoherent
and really ineffective. And I've been saying this for a while about alternative schools, that there typically is at least one feature of an alternative school That doesn't work in a typical school, right? There's some sort of flexibility that the student population of that alternative school needs that just wouldn't work in a mainstream school.
So, for example, if you don't have consistent attendance, there are alternative schools that have a model that can kind of work with that in a way that a normal school can't.
And when it comes to special education, a lot of the comments I've been seeing lately on my videos about behavior have accused me of, like, erasing special education. Say, well, oh, I guess you've never heard of special education. Well, no, I've heard of special education.
The thing about special education is it's special. There is an exception that is made for a student because of their needs that would not work if you just gave it to everybody who didn't need it, right? That's the whole idea of special education.
is that it is special, it is tailored for that student to give them what they need to give them the opportunity to learn. But I think we've tried to maybe destigmatize too much. I think we can not stigmatize special education without doing, without making these mistakes.
But I think there's, there's this idea that we can just kind of make everything universal, right? Like, oh, you don't have consistent attendance. Well, we'll just, we'll just make attendance flexible for everybody.
Well, that's a disaster, right? Attendance has to be consistent. you know, to maximize learning. When it comes to flexibility with behavior, like, yes, you have students who have IEPs who have real needs that make you realize, okay, this behavior that I'm seeing, you know, a student gets overstimulated
and they lash out physically, that's not the same thing as just kids who get in a fight. Like, these are special circumstances that need to be treated specially. And yet, that special treatment doesn't need to be applied to everyone else.
That would ruin the learning environment. So, I think we've got to be smart about this. We've got to not try to apply things that should be narrowly tailored for the students who need them to everybody. And it's kind of like prescriptions, right? If you need a prescription medication, you should get that prescription medication. It should be administered carefully.
Your doctor should be thoughtful, especially if the medication is powerful enough to be We can't put painkillers, you know, powerful narcotic painkillers in vending machines because there needs to be care, because there needs to be careful tailoring of that special circumstance. That's the whole basis of prescriptions.
If you just take every medication whenever you feel like it, like, bad things will happen. And I think that's what's happening in education is we're trying to say, well, Because some students have special needs, we'll just toss out all of the things that make learning possible in a normal school.
And I think that is a mistake. Let me know what you think.