Developmental Disabilities and
the Concept of School Readiness

This paper reviews the concept of school readiness as it applies to children with disabilities. It is argued that children with disabilities are of two primary types: normative and non-normative. The majority of children in special education are in the non-normative category, whose definition is based on failures in children's early encounters with the educational system. Classification of such children as "not-ready for school" is a function of bureaucratic definition, teacher variability, and the child's ethnicity and social class. The authors have taken the position that children in both disability categories should be considered appropriate for regular general education and that the readiness concept which appears to be most appropriate for children with labeled special needs is actually not appropriate for any child.

Prior to the revolution in public education precipitated by the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (Public Law 94-142) in 1975, many children with significant developmental needs were categorized as permanently "not ready" for school. For those who were fortunate to be viewed as capable of benefiting from a formal educational experience (e.g., children with a significant impairment in vision or hearing in association with presumed normal intelligence), specialized teaching was available in adapted learning environments. Others, such as children with moderate to severe mental retardation, were labeled "ineducable" and sentenced to a life that provided at best "training" or most commonly simple custodial care.

As the legacy of universal educational entitlement first established by federal law in 1975 has evolved, subsequent legislation and landmark court decisions have refined the concept of a fundamental right to a publicly-supported education for all children, regardless of their special needs. In 1986, the Amendments to the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (Public Law 99-457) extended that right to young children beginning as early as 3 years of age. In some states, under the auspices of the reauthorized and renamed Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), an entitlement to publicly-supported education for children with developmental vulnerabilities begins at birth. Within this policy context, the continually evolving approach to the education of children with special needs over the past two decades provides a clarifying set of lenses through which generic issues related to the concept of school readiness can be examined for all children.

The premise of this paper is that when the term school readiness is applied to children with disabilities, it is shown to be inappropriate and misleading for all children, serving to deflect professional attention away from the central purposes of early education. The notion that children can be lined up at a starting gate and made roughly equivalent at a particular developmental point, after which education can begin, has little empirical support. In fact, much of the loss for children who have problems achieving in school is sustained after school entry (Entwistle & Alexander, 1990). For example, a recently published longitudinal study of more than 1,200 poor elementary students in Chicago concluded that the children gradually learned less and less each year following kindergarten until by fourth grade, they were achieving only six months of academic growth for each year in school (Reynolds & Bezruczko, 1993). The losses these children exhibited came about after school entry, perhaps as a consequence of the school experience; they were not far behind when they entered the school environment.

The dual assumptions that the child owns the problem and that the obligation of professionals is to fix him/her—often before school entry—have particularly tenacious hold in special education (Harry, 1992b). Of perhaps greater concern, this paradigm has been generalized, so that now the numbers of students who are forecast to need fixing in some way or another has grown large.

In Great Britain, the Warnock report, published in the late 1970s, estimated that by the end of high school one in five children were going to have "special needs" that required the provision of extra or different educational services (Hegarty, 1987). These became known as the "20%", although only 2% of the general population of children have disabilities such as blindness, deafness, autism, orthopedic impairments or severe mental retardation, for whom adapted instruction is an absolute necessity. Tomlinson (1982) has categorized this 2% of the child population as occupying "normative" categories of disability in the sense that normative agreement about them is possible; most lay persons and professionals would agree that these individuals require special help.

The remaining 18% of the child population considered to have special needs constitutes a more difficult group to understand. Their categorizations result from their interactions with societal expectations (often first expressed through the organized educational system). These are the students who bear such labels as "learning disabled," "mildly mentally retarded," "speech or language impaired," and "attention deficit disordered." Seldom do professionals refer to these children as differently abled; instead their learning styles are viewed, by definition, as pathological. These are non-normative categories (Tomlinson, 1982), and their definition depends more on the values, beliefs, and interests of those making the judgments than on any qualities intrinsic to the child.

It is difficult to make precise comparisons between countries, and in the United States we do not have data that would tell us how many children will need special educational provisions ever in their school career. We do have data, however, on the numbers of children served in any one year, which are tabulated annually by the US Department of Education and reported to Congress (Snyder, 1990). It appears that over the 13 years from 1976 to 1989, in any one year, about 10% of the school-age population had been given official labels and were being served in federally supported special education programs. The number of children receiving special services has been increasing gradually each year, so that over that same 13 year period there was a 25% increase in total enrollment in special education categories in the public schools. Although a portion of this increase is related to the inclusion of 11 "preschool handicapped" as a category, there also has been an increase in the number of children placed in non-normative categories.

Each year in the United States about 1.5% of the population is designated with categories that fall into the normative categories of disability, close to the Warnock estimates of 2% (the figures may be almost exactly the same since in the United States children with severe mental retardation are included within the general mental retardation category). The distribution within the various categories related to this group has remained fairly stable, with the exception of an increasing proportion of those labeled seriously emotionally disturbed. The same cannot be said for the other groups of children with special educational needs who have both increased in total number and redistributed themselves among categories since 1976, the year after the passage of PL 94-142.

In 1989, there were almost 400,000 fewer children labeled as mentally retarded and 350,000 fewer children who were speech impaired as there were in these categories in 1976. That's the good news. On the other hand, 1,200,000 more children were categorized as learning disabled in 1989 than in 1977. Thus, since the passage of P.L. 94-142 and P.L. 99-457, there has been an overall increase in the total number of children who are labeled as belonging to one of these three categories, and the distribution among the categories has fluctuated markedly.

The fluctuation in these latter categories is important because it speaks directly to what is fundamentally wrong with the concept of school readiness. The three established non-normative categories—learning disability, mild mental retardation, and speech impairment—together with a broad diagnosis of "attention deficit disorder" and the recent call for a new category of: "troubled children and youth" or "socially maladjusted" (Nelson, Rutherford, Center & Walker, 1991) depend for their definition on social consensus. Consequently, such categories of special need are less a function of discernible differences within the children and more related to contemporary societal definitions of normal behavior. As Gelzheiser (1987) has pointed out, the definitions of such disabilities reflect an agreement to divide continuous variables, like achievement and intelligence, into categories. Over the years this agreement has clearly not been stable, and children with troubling behaviors have been shifted from category to category based on court decisions, funding priorities, and political pressures.

Moving from the notion of labels to the term "special needs" does not change the fundamental dilemma. As Tomlinson (1982) has noted, "Needs are relative, historically, socially and politically. The important point is that some groups have the power to define the needs of others and to decide what provision shall be made for these predetermined needs" (p. 75). This observation relates to the broader sociological perspective of phenomenology, represented most succinctly by Berger and Luckman (1966), in which it is argued that social order is a human product, and society (as well as its categorizations of people) exists only as a product of human activity and not as a biological given.

In contrast, the notion that there are actual differences among children (a structural-functionalist perspective) that can be identified by better science and more specialized knowledge is at the root of the readiness concept (Tomlinson, 1982). This assumption then leads to much of the current activity with regard to special populations. Considerable effort has been expended recently, in the "decade of the brain," to identify physical markers of school readiness. For example, the Gesell School Readiness Test, GSRT, (which is predicated on the concept of physiological maturation as the basis for readiness) has been adopted by entire school systems and used to justify the development of multiple forms of repeating kindergarten. Additionally, since the passage of PL 99-457, much attention has been invested in extensive "child find" programs and diagnostic centers and teams, leading to the possibility of reifying and making permanent transitory developmental states.

There are several perplexing issues about these societal definitions and the concept of readiness for the vast majority of children in the non-normative category who receive a special education label early in their school careers. These include concerns about the instability of early categorizations, the consequences of school isolation, the role of teacher variability and the influence of ethnic and socioeconomic factors.

Unstable early categorizations. The recent report of Shaywitz, Escobar, Shaywitz, Fletcher, and Makuch (1992) underscores the danger in creating arbitrary divisions of the achievement continuum. They followed 414 Connecticut children who entered kindergarten in 1983 and found that only 28% of the children classified as having "dyslexia" in Grade 1 retained the classification in Grade 3. Shaywitz et al. concluded that reading difficulties are part of a continuum that includes normal reading ability and reflects the wide variability in children between the ages of 4 and 7. Inappropriate early classification, ostensibly for the purpose of providing specialized instruction, may actually serve to thwart the normal developmental process by stabilizing an abnormal state that would otherwise be transient.

The dangers of premature labeling have been well established. Labels become attached to children and are inevitably pejorative, what Wolfendale (1987) calls the "perfidious effects of the label" (p. 3). Labels cause children to be treated as objects rather than unique individuals. Walker, Singer, Palfrey, Orza, Wenger and Butler (1988) followed children in three sites who were being served in special education programs in kindergarten through sixth grade and found that only 17.2% of the children moved out of special education services during the three years of the study. Once identified, a child is unlikely to be unlabeled.

Quiet labeling is occurring for children who are classified as not ready for kindergarten by such means as the Gesell School Readiness Test (GSRT), even if these children are not officially labeled. Porwancher and DeLisi conducted a three year longitudinal study on a school district that recommends placement in different levels of kindergarten depending on children's developmental scores on the GSRT. In general, children classified as developmentally older were also chronologically older and had higher verbal IQ test scores (on the WPPSI). At the end of first grade instruction, however, there were no statistically significant differences in achievement among the groups of children, after controlling for verbal IQ. Porwancher and De Lisi argue that the instruction in these transitional programs is not appropriate and that classification under the guise of "readiness" is actually a function of lower IQ scores. The consequence is to force some children to spend one extra year in the elementary grades and, in effect, to retain them before they fall, which is equivalent to early tracking. They strongly urge school systems to rethink using developmental tests to determine readiness and call for a more flexible curriculum that will be responsive to the needs of a wider variety of children in the general setting.

Isolation. Labeling often leads to isolation of the child from the experiences of other children for at least part of the day. Moreover, the services provided for children with different labels are generally quite similar, so that the specific label appears to serve little function except to remove the child from the classroom. As noted by Bowman (1992, p. 106), "Through screening and testing, retention and grouping practices, we have segregated young children from one another in the false belief that they are so different from one another that they cannot learn together." Reynolds, Wang and Walberg (1987) reported that as far back as 1982, the National Academy of Sciences called for the use of labels on young children only if they were justified by different educational practices that followed each specific label. The Academy then asserted that there are no unique strategies for children with mild retardation or learning disabilities. In fact, Salisbury (1991) analyzed the best practices recommendations of early childhood special education, the National Association for the Education of Young Children, and early childhood general education, and found remarkable similarity in what was recommended for teachers and classrooms in all three groups, suggesting that most of the components of a facilitative classroom are general and appropriate for different groups of children.

Teacher variability. Labeling is particularly troublesome when marked variability in definition can be demonstrated. In such circumstances, what a child is called in one system has relatively little to do with the child and much more to do with the system, although removal from the classroom is the same result. Most often, the first step toward a diagnosis is a teacher referral. The child has to come to the attention of the teacher as having a special need before the process of placement in a special education program can begin. Thus, what the teacher determines to be indicative of the need for special education is critical. In a study of first grade teachers, Fedoruk and Norman (1991) concluded that "the prerequisite competencies required in one classroom by one first grade teacher may be vastly different than those required in another classroom by another teacher" (p. 262). For example, teachers differed greatly in how they viewed the importance of such variables as letter reversals, ability to follow directions, having difficulty sitting still, and disruptive behavior in the classroom. For some teachers, these behaviors were viewed as absolute contributors to student failure; for others they were seen as either neutral or actually contributing to a child's success. Fedoruk and Norman argue that teacher receptivity may be far more crucial to determine readiness for school than measuring student characteristics.

Relationship to ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Finally, a very troubling aspect of early definitions of who is "not ready" for regular education involves their entanglement with ethnicity and social class. Sleeter (1986), in an analysis of the changing definition of learning disability and its relationship to different social contexts reported: "By the early 1960s, children who failed in reading were divided into five categories, differentiated by whether the cause of the problem was presumed to be organic, emotional, or environmental, and whether the child was deemed intellectually normal or subnormal. They were called slow learners, mentally retarded, emotionally disturbed, culturally deprived and learning disabled" (p. 27).

Prior to 1973, 98.5 percent of children with diagnosed learning disabilities were white, and 69 percent were from middle class or higher SES backgrounds. Subsequently, the pressure on schools to eliminate the "cultural deprivation" label and the court ordered redefinition of mental retardation, which terminated the category of "slow learner," meant that more students were classified as learning disabled and that more of these students were of ethnic minority status.

Harry (1992a) has presented convincing evidence that poor and minority students, especially African-Americans, are grossly overrepresented in non-normative categories of special education. She has shown that rates of placement rise as the numbers of minority students in a state population increase. White students, on the other hand, are overrepresented in the "gifted" and "talented" categories as well as in the category related to specific learning disabilities. Having observed that special education does not seem particularly effective in educating young, poor, minority students, she noted:

"Since there is doubt as to the benefit of special education placement, a conservative approach to such placement would be appropriate. If minority students are being placed in special education classes in disproportionate numbers, this should be considered a problem since many of these students are already at a social and economic disadvantages (p. 84)

Early intervention for the 2 percent of the population with significant impairments has existed to some degree for a long while and was studied extensively in the federal Handicapped Children's Early Education Program during the late 1970s and 1980s. However, despite intensive intervention efforts focused on cognitive readiness (i.e., fixing the child), many such children still were not welcome in ordinary public school kindergartens. Consequently, some special educators focused on other skills children needed in order to function effectively in the mainstream. Termed CNE, or "criterion of the next environment," these included such skills as functioning in a large group and orienting more to peers and less to teachers. This effort, in its operationalization, actually continues the "within-child-problem" focus of mainstream special education. As Fowler, Schwartz and Atwater (1991) have pointed out, the effort can become quite trivializing, as when one of the nine activities addressed in a "skills for school success" preschool program was an ability to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Moreover, CNE was often abused as these identified skills were used to exclude children from entry into the public schools rather than to facilitate their adaptation to the classroom. Salisbury and Vincent (1990) have tried to lead the field of early childhood special education back to the original focus of CNE by emphasizing that the point is not to exclude children but to help them as they make the transition into regular public kindergartens, where they belong.

A focus on prerequisite skills of any type ignores the fact that one of the primary sources of children's school difficulties is the education system itself (Hegarty, 1987). Apple (1982) has written forcefully of the need to recognize that, rather than minimizing differences among children, schools serve to amplify differences and to create and perpetuate deviance. Thus, when schools exclude those who are demonstrably in need of special help (e.g., those with physical and/or medical needs), they focus on an increasingly homogeneous group of children. As more and more types of children are excluded because they are deemed "not ready," (e.g., placed in "developmental kindergartens" or "Y-5" programs), smaller differences among the remaining children will be accentuated, and new categories will be developed for "poorly motivated" children, children who are "differently-interested," or those who are "questionably socially tractable."

Alternatively, the requests by Reynolds, et al. (1987) and Hegarty (1987) to restructure both special and regular education demand consideration. Comparable to the concept of block grants for social services, there are benefits to be gained from eliminating the fragmented and multiple sets of programs for categories of children with special need and providing general funding to enrich the educational environment for all children. Reynolds et al. have termed the current state of services for children with special needs as "disjointed incrementalism," unwarranted by either their foci or their effects on children. Hegarty calls for the creation of schools that provide differentiated education for the full range of students' educational needs within a single context.

Many now argue that even children with the most severe disabilities can be served successfully and appropriately in regular classrooms, if those classrooms can be reformed so that they are responsive and positive places for all children (e.g., Salisbury & Vincent, 1990). Rather, it is asserted that if public education would open its doors to all children and abandon the differential "readiness" notion, then schools might be more successful as they are granted more autonomy and a greater infusion of funds to handle special populations. Within this context, the search for methods to create an appropriate classroom environment for a wide range of abilities would identify best practices for all children and could serve to renew the teaching profession. As noted by Hegarty, (1987, p. 189):

"It is not a question of persuading teachers to give more consideration to a small group of pupils who have hitherto been marginal, important though that is. It is much more to do with giving teaching its proper regard as one of the most worthwhile and challenging human activities, instrumental in securing the stability and prosperity of the nation, but—more importantly—of intrinsic value in its own right."

Children with special developmental needs challenge both the concept and the process of assessing an individual's readiness for school. Their unique requirements highlight a number of generic issues that affect all children at the point of school entry. Three critical themes are particularly worthy of careful examination.

The first theme focuses on the need for acceptance of human diversity and a recognition of the potential adverse impacts of early labeling of those who are different. Children with significant developmental impairments are the most vulnerable to the consequences of a stigmatizing label and its associated social and educational exclusion. For those whose needs are more subtly expressed, a designation of "unreadiness" for school may be followed by inappropriate stereotypic attributions and self-fulfilling diminished expectations. When the availability of resources for public education is limited, systematic discrimination and scapegoating may be particularly problematic for any child who deviates from expected norms.

A second critical theme for special populations is the responsibility of the school to be ready for the child. Because of their differences, children with unusual educational requirements alert us to the fundamental mission of publicly-supported schools to be ready to accommodate and respond in a constructive manner to a broad range of variation in personal characteristics, learning styles, health status, and individual educational and social requirements. Children whose needs fall beyond the boundaries of the bell-shaped curve (at either end) require an educational environment that has the flexibility and creativity necessary to meet a variety of demands. This requirement for flexibility and creativity, and the capacity to reach a mutual accommodation between a child's capacities and the school's ability to nurture and facilitate those capacities (however far from the mean they might be), highlights the essential challenge of public education for all children in a pluralistic society.

A third generic school readiness issue that is made more explicit by special populations is the need for educators to work collaboratively with families to assure that the school experience is positive for all children, that it complements and respects the diversity of values that families hold, and that it reinforces (or expands) individual child and family aspirations. Variability in child competence demands that a school system have the capacity to respond effectively to promote a broad range of individual goals. When that variability is extreme, the criteria for determining educational success or failure must be flexible and highly individualized. Indeed, the recognition that success can come in many different forms is at the core of the philosophy of "special education." As such, our nation's response to the needs of special populations can have a powerful influence on our general approach to the question of educational readiness for all children.

The irony of much of the current debate over school readiness is that many of the perceived difficulties could be avoided if we had a more coherent and coordinated infrastructure of support for children and their families during the first five years of life. The tragedy is that we have the knowledge to do much better, yet seem to lack the political will to apply what we know.

Respect for individual differences and attention to individual educational needs are important issues for both special and non-native populations of children. If our national goal of universal school readiness by the year 2000 is conceptualized as the extent to which each child will be able to conform to a narrow band of demands and expectations, then many children will never be ready for school, all children will be constrained by their educational experiences, teachers will not be challenged, and we will fail to achieve our goal. Alternatively, if the concept of readiness is viewed as a reciprocal accommodation in which a flexible and creative educational system seeks to nurture individual growth and the development of competence for a highly diverse population of youngsters, then the goal of universal readiness by the turn of the century will prove to be worthy of our best efforts. Within such a system, teachers will grow professionally, parents will trust that their children are valued and respected, and, most important, all of our nation's children will be given a better chance to become the best that they can be.

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