Inclusion: The Right Thing for All Students
Cheryl M. Jorgensen, Ph.D., is a member of the affiliate faculty with the National Center on Inclusive Education at the Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire. In 2008 she received the National Down Syndrome Congress Education Award for her leadership and pioneering research supporting the inclusion of students with Down syndrome. She has written this open letter to Shael Polakow-Suransky, the chief academic officer for New York City schools.
It’s time to restructure all of our schools to become inclusive of all of our children.
We have reached the tipping point where it is no longer educationally or morally defensible to continue to segregate students with disabilities. We shouldn’t be striving to educate children in the least restrictive environment but rather in the most inclusive one.
Inclusion is founded on social justice principles in which all students are presumed competent and welcomed as valued members of all general education classes and extra-curricular activities in their local schools —
Eleanor Roosevelt Has an Ivy League Visitor
“Are you anxious about getting into college?” Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania, asked 200 high school juniors and seniors on Thursday.
With attitude, the students returned a chorus of yeses, their jangly nerves almost palpable.
Dr. Gutmann was visiting Eleanor Roosevelt High School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Forty percent of the school’s students are first-generation Americans, and 40 percent will be the first in their families to attend college.
“You’re not human if you’re not anxious,” Dr. Gutmann responded.
One of four female presidents in the Ivy League, she began by describing her own high school experience. She