How We Might Achieve the Radical Reform of Special Education

Abstract

Special education is experiencing great pressures toward change. We face three immediate tasks created by these pressures: keeping the issue of place in perspective, choosing idea over image, and avoiding fanaticism. To achieve substantive reform, we must disaggregate special education populations, repair and elaborate our conceptual foundations, and strengthen our empirical base. Lasting change is more likely to be achieved by persistent, mundane, but carefully chosen activities than by fashionable actions and images of radical reform.