ABSTRACT
Rather than being an evaluation of inclusive education, this study focuses only on news media narratives about inclusive education as a policy and its implications for the US education system.
[...] After moving from a suburb of Chicago in 1994, Roxana and Joseph Hartmann enrolled their 9-year-old son in second grade at Ashburn Elementary School in Loudoun County, VA. Offi cials of the northern Virginia school district reported that Mark hit, pinched, screeched and threw tantrums when placed in a standard classroom. Despite having reduced the class size and having an aide work individually with Mark, his behaviour made learning and classroom management problematic, according to school authorities. By the school year’s end, offi cials concluded that the autistic youngster should be removed from a regular class and placed in a Leesburg school with four other autistic students in a ‘mainstream’ programme. In this type of ‘mainstream’ programme, the Leesburg school placed students with autism in regular classes only for music, art and gym classes. Mark’s parents refused to accept this decision (Lewin 1997; Wilgoren 1994 a,b,c). They agreed that their son’s experience at Ashburn had been a disaster:
but they blamed the school system for not providing enough training to Mark’s teacher and full-time instructional aide. They pointed to Mark’s progress at an Illinois school, where he attended kindergarten and fi rst grade, and they argued that it was crucial to Mark’s social development that he go to school with his nondisabled friends.
