Handicapping education.

RACHEL, a mentally retarded, speech-impaired 9-year-old with an IQ of 44 and a mental age of 4, sits in a California classroom, obliviously staring at a textbook that is upside-down in front of her. Across the country in New Jersey, Rafael, a mentally retarded 5-year-old with an IQ of 59 and a mental age of 2 who cannot speak intelligibly and who must be taken to the bathroom every 15 minutes, creates havoc with frequent outbursts, tantrums, and assaults on teachers, aides, and other students.

These scenes are the result of a movement called "full inclusion," whose supporters declare that putting children like Rachel and Rafael into separate classes is a form of illegal discrimination. Proponents argue that full inclusion is required by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which says disabled children should be educated with nondisabled children "to the maximum extent appropriate." Yet IDEA also requires that public schools provide highly specialized education "designed to meet the unique needs" of handicapped children. That is precisely what full inclusion fails to do.

Backed by ideologues in the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, full inclusion is the latest egalitarian fad to be imposed upon the nation's schools. The purpose is to eliminate the separate education of nearly all handicapped children and force them into regular classrooms, ignoring the objections of their parents and the recommendations of professional educators. In short, it represents a triumph of liberal ideology over education under the guise of civil rights.

In its most mindless form, full inclusion puts mentally retarded, speech-impaired, non-toilet-trained, extremely disruptive children with disparate needs in regular public-school classes. These children are supposed to pursue individualized curricula with aides, under the aegis of the teacher who is attempting to teach the whole class. To accomplish this formidable task, the teacher would be expected to bone up on special education and rely on an array of consultants.

In practice, the handicapped children would be denied the small-group, multi-sensory, carefully sequenced instruction, integrated with their various physical therapies, now provided by skilled certified teachers. The non-handicapped children would be denied their regular instruction and, to a greater or lesser extent, see their classes converted into special-education classes. This is an educational nightmare in which all the children emerge as losers.

"It gets complex when you have kids with a broad range of abilities," Mary Crampton, a teacher in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, recently told the Wall Street Journal. Miss Crampton had taught a seventh-grade social-studies class that included eight low-IQ children and a deaf child with cerebral palsy as well as several gifted students. She described the class as "a three-ring circus."

The American Federation of Teachers was so alarmed at the concept of full inclusion that it called for a moratorium on the practice in a December 1993 statement. "It's not just teachers who are paying the price," the AFT warned. "Inappropriate inclusion lowers expectations that any student in that classroom can get the education they deserve, and the student who needs the most help invariably suffers

Mr. Murphy, an attorney in Marlton, New Jersey, represented the school board in the Oberti case. the most. As inclusion is increasingly practiced, it bears no resemblance to what most well-wishing people think of as mainstreaming children with disabilities into regular classrooms. It places children who cannot function into an environment which doesn't help them and often detracts from the education process for all students."

The policy presumes that handicapped children benefit by being placed with non-handicapped children. There is no scientific basis for this belief Indeed, experience shows that such children are more isolated in the regular class, which imposes greater psychological pressure on them, resulting in behavior problems. Advocates of full inclusion respond to requests for substantiation of their claims by accusing critics of lacking sympathy for handicapped children.

Despite the dearth of evidence that full inclusion works, the policy has been endorsed by two federal appeals courts. In the 1993 case Oberti v. Clementon Board of Education, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that the school district had violated IDEA by placing Rafael Oberti in a separate special-education class. The court decided that Rafael could be satisfactorily educated in a regular classroom, despite his inability to communicate, his disruptive behavior, and his need for frequent trips to the bathroom. In the 1994 case Holland v. Unified School District of Sacramento, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Rachel Holland, staring at her upside-down textbook, was a fully participating member of the class.

Cases of this sort were anticipated by the U.S. Supreme Court as early as 1982. In Hendrick Hudson Central School District v. Rowley, Chief Justice William Rehnquist specifically warned against judicial interference with the formulation of educational methodology under IDEA: "Courts must be careful to avoid imposing their view of preferable educational methods upon the States. The primary responsibility for formulating the education to be accorded to a handicapped child, and for choosing the educational method most suitable to the child's needs, was left by the Act to State and local educational agencies."

The good news is that the cases decided in favor of full inclusion are law in only 2 of the nation's 11 federal circuits, and there is contrary case law in other circuits. The bad news is that the administrative bureaucracy that controls public schools in this country, striving to comply with guidelines from the Education Department's Office of Civil Rights and avoid lawsuits, sees these cases as the wave of the future. Whittier High School in Whittier, California, recently adopted a plan to integrate all children into regular classes, regardless of disability. Fred Zimmerman, Whittier's principal, told the Wall Street Journal, "With recent court cases, this will be the direction of all schools."

Suppose you are the parent of a non-handicapped child forced to attend quasi-special-education classes. Or suppose you are the parent of a handicapped child and want the special education to which your child is entitled by law. What recourse do you have? Congress can't help you, because there is nothing wrong with the law; it has simply been misinterpreted. Federal judges are not subject to the electoral process. The Supreme Court can't review Oberti because the school district did not appeal; it may review Holland, but that case does not present all the relevant issues. The Office of Civil Rights has the immunity of an entrenched federal bureaucracy.

It may take parents some time to learn what is happening to their public schools and that they are powerless to do anything about it. Once they wake up, they may choose to wait through a few years of chaos until the same federal courts tell them that the decision in Oberti was a mistake, that parallel instruction and full inclusion really are not mandated.

On the other hand, with the havoc of full inclusion added to gross inefficiency, court-ordered secularization, and the conversion of schools into laboratories for social experimentation, these parents may finally give up on public education and join the growing number of Americans who support school vouchers.

As the exodus from public schools continues, the public-school system could be downsized to accommodate the children of the liberals who support full inclusion--unless, of course, they are already sending their kids to