Championing Inclusive Education: A Season of Progress and Advocacy with Lou Brown ~ 701

Tim Villegas:
Typically, I hang up as soon as I know it’s going to be a sales call, but this one was different. It was from my alma mater, Azusa Pacific University. They were persuading alumni to update their contact information for a networking book. It sounded harmless enough, so I gave the voice on the other end of the line my details. As she was inputting the data, she told me how wonderful it was that I was a special education teacher. And in the very same breath, she exclaimed, “Isn’t it awful how people are trying to put students with disabilities in the same classrooms as everyone else?”

I immediately responded, “Sorry to burst your bubble, ma’am, but I am one of those people.”

So why would someone have a problem with students with disabilities being educated side by side with their non-disabled peers? For those of us who are familiar with the decades of research that support inclusive education and who have experienced success with authentic inclusion, it’s easy for us to see that it works. For almost everyone else, though, it appears to be a near-impossible concept to grasp.

So despite all the research and resources that are available for schools and districts, why are we continuing to fight an outdated mindset over inclusive education?

Here is my short answer: the creation of special education services has become synonymous with separate education services. For most of the 20th century, severely disabled family members were institutionalized. Though this has become less acceptable over time, the damage has been done. Just as we had awoken to the realization that people with disabilities deserve an education and a living space, we didn’t know how to provide the supports within the context of a broader non-disabled world. So we created separate systems.

This wouldn’t be so bad if these separate systems had evolved with our culture’s attitudes toward civil and disability rights, but that is not the case. Today, we have fragments—pockets of schools and communities—that do inclusion well.

The vast majority of places, however, are either unwilling to implement inclusive practices or lack the knowledge and resources to know where to start.

The long answer to this question of “why” is what we are devoting the podcast to for our seventh season.

But hold on. Isn’t special education working, you might ask? Well, it depends on both your expectations and how you define “working.” The promise of self-contained or segregated special education classrooms and schools does not provide the most benefit for the most children. And this is by no means the fault of the teachers who work in these classrooms. I was one of those teachers, and I’m in the unique position of having taught in a separate classroom for 13 years and at the same time promoting inclusive practices. It can be done.

Also, there are schools and districts right now that are rejecting the mindset that separate or special is better and educating a wide variety of learners in the same spaces at the same time.

Let me quickly share with you my vision for educating students with a wide range of abilities—and you will hear me talk about this throughout the whole season.

Imagine there’s no special education. Nothing special or separate. One educational system that supports all students. Every teacher gets the same training on intervention strategies as every other teacher. Some states and teacher training centers have already started this dual certification process.

And then there’s the funding. Instead of special ed funding and general ed funding, there’s only education funding. Segregation is over—if we want it.

Today on the podcast, our first guest of the new season is Lou Brown, co-founder of TASH, an organization that advocates for human rights and inclusion for people with significant disabilities and support needs. He’s also Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin. We discuss what supports for students with significant disabilities looked like before 1975 and the progress that we have made since then.

My name is Tim Villegas. We are so glad you are here with us. After a short break, our interview with Lou Brown.

How do you know you’re an inclusionist?

In 1997, Ellen Brantlinger from Indiana University first used the term “inclusionist,” which for many means someone who wants to get rid of special education. Decades of research show better outcomes for people with disabilities when they are included. And authentic inclusion is happening in schools and districts around the country and the world—some nearing 90% inclusion rates or above.

For many years, this progress did not just happen, but was the result of careful planning led by educational visionaries and the implementation of strategies that promote effective inclusive education.

It’s time to bring back the moniker of “inclusionist.” To me, a collaborator for inclusive practices—not simply someone who wants to throw the whole system away without replacing it with something better.

If this resonates with you, you are an inclusionist. And do we have the newsletter for you. The Weekly-ish is for inclusionists. Subscribe at weeklyish.substack.com.

Lou Brown:
Hi, my name is Lou Brown, and you’re listening to the Think Inclusive Podcast.

Tim Villegas:
One of the things that people may not know about you is your connection to the disability rights movement.

Lou Brown:
In January 1965, my wife and I and our one-month-old son moved to Western Carolina Center. My job there was to do diagnostic stuff, which was essentially meaningless. Then I worked on a ward with people who were non-ambulatory, and then on another ward with people who were ambulatory but couldn’t speak—basically couldn’t speak. The job was to do something.

On one particular ward, there were 40 ambulatory people in one big room all day. We said, “We’ve got to get them out of this room. We’ve got to break them up.” I learned a very important lesson: we must increase the number of environments in which people with disabilities function. The fewer environments, the more problems they have—and everybody else.

The second thing is, they can’t be with each other. You have to heterogeneously group. The whole field was based on homogeneous grouping—schools for this, schools for that, classes for this, classes for that. We realized you can’t put three kids with autism in one place. You can’t put ten kids with severe physical disabilities in one place. Homogeneous grouping had to go.

Then I went to a doctoral program at Florida State with Jim Bolshie and Ben Allen. I worked at the Sunland Training Centers around Florida for three years. It was the same thing. What I tried to do at Sunland was the same thing I tried to do at Western Carolina Center: increase the number of environments in which people function and try to teach them something.

In 1969, my wife and I and our young son moved to Madison and the University of Wisconsin. I remember driving up and saying, “What are we going to do?” She couldn’t find Wisconsin on the map. I had never been there or heard much about it except for the interview. I said, “We’re just going to have to get out of the institution business. We’re going to have to close them down. Make sure nobody has to go there. They’re just no good for people with disabilities.”

Lou Brown:
The people we worked with at the institutions were considered too disabled to attend the institution school. So we set up teaching programs for them in bathrooms, hallways, and closets. We just had to get them in school. They all had to go to school.

If you think about the principles involved in closing institutions—well, they’re essentially closed now. Kids were once considered too disabled to go to school. Now, nobody is considered too disabled to go to school anymore.

Of course, we didn’t know the people in Pennsylvania or Massachusetts—Martha Ziglar, Elena Elkind, Tom—but we were going our own way, independent of a lot of others. Still, we were a clear minority.

We adopted some rules. One: we must increase the number of environments in which people with significant disabilities function. That’s critical. Two: those environments can’t be overloaded. We have to go to a natural distribution. If 1% of the population has a significant intellectual disability, then no environment should have more than 1% of people with that level of disability. And three: no homogeneous grouping. That’s a killer.

That’s how we came about it and got involved. We’ve been involved ever since.

Tim Villegas:
It’s interesting. These are the things you outlined in the late ’60s, and they still seem to be the barriers for students with disabilities in schools.

Lou Brown:
Yeah, people are still functioning from that mindset. They’re still confining environments. They’re still violating natural distribution and overpopulating certain environments. And they’re still homogeneously grouping. Autism is a good example.

Tim Villegas:
Autism is a great example. So why do you think that, if these are the things we’ve been working on for so long, there’s been so little progress?

Lou Brown:
Let me step back a little. The definition we adopted and tried to live by is that we are advocates for the lowest intellectually functioning 1% of the population. These are the people who were excluded from schools before 94-142 in 1975. They were considered too something—too autistic, too physically disabled, too behaviorally disordered—to go to school with everybody else.

There were over 300,000 people in institutions. Most of them stayed at home. They functioned in few environments. They had terribly restricted social lives. The only people who interacted with them were family, other people with disabilities, and people you paid.

That was the population. I think that was the original TASH population. There’s more inclusion now, but that’s the group we were primarily concerned with.

What did they have in 1970? Activity centers. Some had sheltered, segregated workshops. Some stayed at home all day. We said, “That’s not good enough.”

We started working in the Madison schools with kids with significant disabilities, and we followed them. We’re still following them to this day—those who are alive. When they finished school, what did they do? They went to a sheltered, segregated workshop or segregated activity center, or they stayed at home. We said, “That’s not good enough.”

A few years ago, we wrote a paper called “Hey, Don’t Forget About Me.”

We said the criterion of ultimate functioning should be the goal. If you start with young kids and stay with them throughout their lives, what’s the outcome that makes sense?

We said the criterion of ultimate functioning is to live, work, and play in an integrated society. Anything you do that prepares people with significant intellectual disabilities to live, work, and play in an integrated society—you do. Anything that interferes with that—you don’t do.

That became a guiding rule for us. Of course, that put us in conflict with a large percentage of the population and institutions.

What progress have we made since 1975? Well, now we have schooling for all. Thanks to the parents in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, Ed Martin and his group, the federal government, senators, and Congresspeople who passed the legislation. When parents, lawyers, Congresspeople, and professionals get together, you can do wonderful things.

Now, very few people in the country—320 million people—probably fewer than 25,000 are in institutions, and most of those are in nursing homes. On the institutional front, we’ve made progress.

We have integrated work. Every year, more people with significant disabilities leave school and do real work in the real world. It’s no longer said that it can’t be done. It used to be that if you couldn’t do the sheltered workshop, you stayed at home and did nothing. People always came up with reasons why these people couldn’t function in an integrated society. They were wrong.

Now we have university programs. There were no teacher training programs before. CEC had programs to train teachers to work with the “mentally retarded,” but these kids were considered too sub-trainable for those programs. There were very few university programs that dealt with students with severe intellectual disabilities.

Now we’ve increased the environments. It warms my heart to go around Madison—or anywhere—and see people with obvious disabilities on a bus, working at a restaurant, in the library, just walking the streets. You couldn’t see that when segregation was the rule.

Even social relationships have improved.

Tim Villegas:
What is one of the major problems that you see in education?

Lou Brown:
There are several. One of the major problems is the learning and performance characteristics of the population we’re talking about. There is pervasive ignorance of—or denial of—the learning characteristics of these students.

For example, they’re not that smart. What does that mean? They’re going to learn fewer skills in a unit of time—a month, a week, a school year, a career—than 99% of the population. So what does that mean?

You have to pick the most important things to teach them. You can’t waste time. You can’t teach them something that will be obsolete by the time they learn it.

Lou Brown:
The second characteristic of the population is the level of difficulty. You see some of these IEPs and they’re wonderfully exciting and stimulating. They’re beautifully filled out, downloaded from all these checklists. It’s great. The problem is, what they’re talking about is out of the difficulty range. They’re too complicated for the students of concern. They didn’t select from what the students are capable of learning.

So now you have to pick an important skill in the difficulty range—the highest part of the difficulty range—of an individual student.

Another problem is that people want a reason to say that someone is significantly intellectually disabled. It takes them longer to learn than everybody else. We refer to this as the number of trials to acquisition. How many trials is it going to take to teach this particular student a very important skill in her difficulty range?

Let’s say you say a hundred. Well, if you only get in fifty before you go on to the next skill, she doesn’t learn anything. So there’s no accumulation. This is a tremendous problem—over time, building the repertoire.

The next problem that I think is dishonored is practice. If they don’t practice what they know, then they forget. So now you have what we call vertical practice, which is classic general education for smart kids. You do addition, then subtraction, then multiplication, and you keep going up and making things more complicated.

The problem with that vertical development strategy is that you hit the top of their difficulty range. They can count to this, but when you start adding on, they have to count again. They can’t do it.

So what do you do? You go horizontally. You teach them to use what they know in different activities, in different environments. If I teach her a skill in school, I make sure she uses it in a game, make sure it’s a functional skill, make sure she uses it at home in some way. Then you build in practice and reduce forgetting.

The other major problem that’s almost completely ignored by educators is the problem of generalization. No one has ever said, “The more intellectually disabled you are, the better you generalize.” Everyone knows the more disabled you are intellectually, the more problems you have generalizing.

So it’s senseless to teach somebody a skill in school and then expect them to use that skill someplace else. It just doesn’t work.

What you have to do is build generalization into your instructional programs. Get a commitment from parents or friends or anybody so that if I teach them this skill in school, they’re going to use it elsewhere. That way they won’t forget it, and you don’t have to worry about deficits in generalization.

Another problem that’s been ignored is imitation. We know the overwhelming majority of our students are imitative. They can imitate. The ones who can’t—we teach them to imitate. We’re really good at teaching kids to imitate.

So now we’ve got kids in school or in therapy programs, and we teach them to imitate. Then what do we do? We put them with other kids who self-stimulate, who can’t talk, who can’t move. It’s crazy to spend your resources teaching imitation skills—something we know how to do—and then put them with horrible models.

We want to put them with the best possible language, behavior, social, and work models. In schools, where are the best models? They’re not in special education settings. They’re in the general education setting.

Tim Villegas:
We will hear more from our guest, Lou Brown, later on this season. If you would like to hear the entire unedited interview with Lou Brown, consider becoming a Patreon subscriber at patreon.com/thinkinclusivepodcast.

Follow the Think Inclusive Podcast on the web at thinkinclusive.us and tell us what you thought of the podcast via Twitter @inclusive_pod, on Facebook, or Instagram. You can also subscribe to the Think Inclusive Podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, or on the Anchor app. We’d love to know that you’re listening.

Also, a reminder that you can support the Think Inclusive Podcast either through Patreon or anchor.fm with a monthly contribution so that we can continue to bring you in-depth interviews with thought leaders in inclusive education and community advocacy.

On that note, thanks to patrons Donna L., Kathleen T., and Renee J. for their continued support of our podcast. Also, a special shout-out to my producer and love of my life, Brianna—she will always be number one in my book. And one more shout-out to my boys—you know who you are—for all the encouragement. I greatly appreciate it.

Next time on the Think Inclusive Podcast:

Erin Studer:
It’s a major problem. If you tell me that a child with an intellectual disability in California will spend 80% of their K–12 experience only with other children with disabilities—that’s a problem.

Tim Villegas:
Thanks for your time and attention. See you next time.