Have negative, unforeseen consequences occurred in connection with school reform efforts in your community? How might these outcomes have been foreseen or avoided?.
Yes, negative unforeseen consequences have occurred in connection with school reform efforts in my community. One such example of this includes mainstreaming. Mainstreaming is a school reform effort where special education students are taken out of special education classrooms and are put into the regular classroom for instruction part of the day or all of the day, depending on the severity of the student. The objective of mainstreaming is socialization and motivation. Special education students could learn with their peers and the regular education students could help with peer instruction.
When mainstreaming was put into action, teachers, parents and students complained and disagreed with the idea. Many teachers argued that they were unequipped to deal with special education or that they had no training with how to teach special education students. Other teachers argued that the special education students were too much of a disruption in the classroom, thus taking away from their valuable instruction time to deal with discipline or behavior problems. On the contrary, advocates for mainstreaming argued that special education students would perform better in a regular classroom setting with their peers to motivate them.
Some of the negative and unforeseen consequences that occurred in connection with mainstreaming included; taunting or teasing of the special education students by the regular education students, unfair treatment to the special education students by teachers who were biased or against mainstreaming, inadequate or poor instruction to special education students due to teachers" lack of experience or training in dealing with special education. Some of the unforeseen consequences occurred when parents would complain and even remove their kids from the school if they did not agree with the mainstreaming school reform effort.
