A more modern review of the data revealed that the measured effectiveness of full inclusion reached the same conclusion as the Affleck et al. study (Hechinger, 2007). Despite the lack of research based evidence to support this craziness, many school boards do embrace the practice of inclusion because it does save money to practice this unproven method rather than doing the right thing, which is to educate EACH child to their genetic potential.

Five years after the implementation of NCLB, the results of the educational effectiveness of NCLB, speaks for itself in that American students have just experienced SAT scores that are at a 31 year low (College Board, 2006). Can there be any doubt that these College Board figures represent a significant move, since the inception of NCLB in creating a populace that is less aware? If American citizens do not know what they have lost, they are less likely to question the shift of allegiance to regionalization on the way to global governance (i.e., North American Union). A side benefit to illegal immigration, to the global governance, North American Union crowd, is that America, through the practice of unrestrained illegal immigration, is being is flooded with millions of individuals who will never understand what is means to lose their American civil liberties, national sovereignty and what our forefathers fought and died for. There can be no doubt that the primary vehicle which is responsible for this betrayal of the public trust is NCLB. The generational effect of illegal immigration combined with the hordes of illegals that would become citizens through a McCain-Kennedy amnesty plan, would produce a multitude of less educated and largely ignorant Americans with regard to their heritage and civil liberties. It would certainly make it easier to usher in the North American Union under these conditions of general ignorance. Who will notice the ongoing loss of American sovereignty, college professors? Most will be dead in 20 years. As Thomas Jefferson stated, only an educated populace can maintain a republican form of government.  Fifty percent of our children cannot name the Vice President. Sixty five percent cannot locate Great Britain on a map. Need I say more?

I have been involved in the frontlines of education for over 25 years. I personally believe that all children should be educated to the full extent of their potential and each student should have the same educational advantages as every other student regardless of ability. However, NCLB continues the misguided practice of mainstreaming under the banner of full inclusion and it is clear that the vast majority of the parents of special needs students are not in favor of the NCLB dictates. In the “good ole days”, children with special needs were educated at their own pace and in small classes from which the student was more likely to receive the extra help they required to academically achieve to their potential. The test results of our children demand a return to this practice. The process of providing special education services is expensive and requires significant resource allocation. Yet, the process worked for many special needs children in the past. Only after the special needs child demonstrated enough mastery to have a reasonable chance of success in the self-contained classroom, was the child mainstreamed.  

Can you even imagine what it is like to be a teacher with the maze of new federal regulations contained in NCLB? Let us project this educational madness into a typical classroom. Just imagine that you are a present day teacher. You walk into your class and as you look to the left, you see 3-4 children who struggle with reading, writing and speaking English. The number of foreign language speakers has dramatically increased in the past several years and their numbers are increasingly inundating our classrooms. As a teacher, NCLB requires you to keep extensive and daily documentation of your specialized teaching techniques for these non-English speaking children. These specialized teaching methods are often based on the intervention techniques derived from pseudo, unscientific researched models which compare apples to oranges in support of NCLB’s inclusion programs. The teacher training programs that you, the teacher, will be forced to sit through on your personal time and on your nickel, focuses on language interventions with English Language Learner (ELL) students which is primarily based on prior research performed on school children who were fluent in English. I must have been absent on the day in my graduate school class in research methods when the professor told the class that the research conducted on one group can be bastardized and inappropriately applied to a different population with a very different set of demographics. Teachers are forced by state mandated interpretations of NCLB to take 45 hours of “SIOP” inservice instruction, which repeats the mantra, “If these instructional methods work for regular students, they will work for ELL children” (Echeverria, Vogt, & Short, 2004). Now keep in mind that the SIOP approach does not mandate that these ELL students work with a teacher who speaks the native language. Today’s teacher is merely instructed to use a variety of pictures, sign language, body gestures and simplistic vocabulary lists in a futile attempt to bring ELL students to the same level as native speakers in today’s classrooms. Ask yourself, if you were to relocate to a foreign country, how long would it take until you perform at the same level as the other students in the class? It takes years to learn to read and write the language. But relax, NCLB will not require you to become fluent in the over 100 languages presently spoken in American classrooms. Wait a minute, are not today’s Spanish, German, French, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew and Russian foreign language instructors required to be bilingual in order to teach American children a foreign language? Full inclusion for many ELL students is based upon pure unadulterated voodoo. It is almost mind numbing to imagine how all the Ellis and Angel Island immigrants of the 19th century quickly learned to speak English. How did they every survive without NCLB? And the American public buys this politically correct nonsense of full inclusion? As a teacher are you feeling overwhelmed with your newly mandated work demands? And you thought you only had to create lesson plans, teach the lesson, take attendance and grade some papers? But wait another minute; you have only been exposed to a small portion of today’s classroom experiences as we forgot to look to the right side of your classroom.

Again, you the teacher, teaching in a one-size fits all approach, looks to the right side of their class and you see students who are mentally retarded, speech-impaired, deaf, mentally ill, non-toilet-trained, disciplinary problem students, emotionally disturbed, abused and neglected children with a plethora of special needs in regular public-school classes. These children are supposed to pursue individualized curriculum with teacher aides, under the supervision of the teacher who is attempting to teach an overcrowded class of 30-40 students. Cramming so many children into a typically overcrowded classroom, would be like trying to give a speech to the United Nations General Assembly without the benefit of a translator. To accomplish this impossible task, the teacher would be expected to take special education classes in addition to the state- mandated SIOP English Language Learner classes, and again, on their own unreimbursed dime. Teachers are told that they can manage this daunting task by relying on an array of consultants and classroom aides to help defray the overwhelming, uncompensated increase in teacher workload. Yet, these consultants and certainly the aides are in very short supply. Further, the stringent NCLB requirements have disqualified most of the teacher aides based on a lack of educational attainment. As with the ELL children, you, the teacher, are required to attend specialized meetings outside of the teaching day for each of these children in your class. Additionally, you are also required to keep detailed documentation on your individualized interventions with each child from these various subgroups. Do you feel your teaching day becoming incredibly shorter? And of course, as you, the teacher, look to the center of your class, you see all the students who depend upon you to fully develop their potential while conforming to an arbitrary set of national and state mandated standards from which your district had no voice in establishing.