Going Back to the Future? (Re)encountering the Rhetorics of Exclusion in Special Education Research

• In Event: Fifty Years of Push and Pull: Challenging Assumptions about Inclusion Within Traditional Special Education Discourse

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to not “unforget” the history of segregation-by-disability within the field of Special Education, particularly some of the most vulnerable children and youth, e.g. Students of Color with disabilities, and Students with Complex Support Needs (SWCSN). By analyzing the arguments, rationales, perspectives, and paradigms of traditional leaders within Special Education, I illuminate ideologies that continue to be unacknowledged (Brantlinger, 1997) and provide a constructive critique of pro-segregation arguments.

Perspective
The passage of the Educating All Handicapped Children of Act (1975) increased the field of Special Education’s credibility, galvanizing it into a distinct discipline exerting great influence over research, teaching practices, and professionalizing educators into a separate category of “special” to service a segregated system. A decade later, in keeping with the desire of the Disability Rights Movement, the inclusion movement sought to integrate students with disabilities into general education settings with supports and services (Lipsky & Gartner, 1997), provoking ire and cynicism of many leaders within Special Education who dismissed inclusion as merely ideological (Kauffman & Hallahan, 1995). Decades later, some leaders still assert the need—and preference—for a separate field while actively undermining research on inclusive education (Fuchs et al., 2025) This paper engages with the following questions: (1) What are some recent ways in which segregation-by-disability continues to be justified in Special Education? (2) What assumptions undergird such claims, and what research evidence is provided?

Methods and Data Sources
I use a theoretical framework that draws from Critical Special Education (Lewis & Mason, 2025), Disability Studies in Education (Baglieri & Bacon, 2020), and Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2020). These theoretical lenses combine to analyze ways in which language is employed to create and sustain power dynamics within Special Education, particularly the ideologies that undergird the field’s foundational knowledge, goals, and core concepts. Data sources consist of three recently published special editions of high-profile journals in our field, the first two critical of inclusion (Exceptionality’s “How Can We Achieve the Promise of IDEA?” and The Journal of Learning Disabilities’ “Full Inclusion—Beliefs, Practice, & Evidence.”) The third special edition advocates for increased inclusivity, providing a counterpoint to the first two (Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities’ “Why Aren’t Students with Severe Disabilities Being Placed in General Education Classrooms?” In total, 26 articles are analyzed.

Results
This work is currently in progress. Emerging findings include: struggles within Special Education to constantly (re)define itself in the wake of the inclusion movement; insistence on privileging a narrow set of research methods; rejection of intersectional experiences; and negation of instructional methods such as Universal Design for Learning and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy. In contrast, researchers advocating for SWCSN continue to “push back” on Special Education’s conflation of perceived competence and “appropriate” placement.

Scholarly Significance
Fuchs et al. (2025), and others, seek to reframe “the most important special education policy debate in 50 years” (p. 257), alluding to where vs. how to educate students with disabilities. By exploring the limitations of what is an artificial binary, counter arguments against segregation-by-disability are made.

Author

• David J. Connor, Hunter College - CUNY