Individual Differences and Research Pluralism
Special education today is extensive and diverse. It is also rife with controversy. Notably, much of the controversy reflects issues and problems that gave rise to the multifaceted, responsive educational system that emerged temporarily in the United States around the turn of this century (Cronbach, 1967; Doris, 1986). This was a time when various school districts adjusted to the needs of the most recent waves of immigrants and of their poorer residents by reorganizing their schools, as well as creating special classes for pupils with handicaps. A benign example might be the comparability of transition programs then and now. A possibly more complicated, yet comparable, situation emerges around programs of language training for immigrants. Much more complicated, vexing, and controversial are special education programs that intersect issues of race, ethnicity, and cultural values, particularly as these matters are confounded and compounded by poverty. Most unsettling are the relationships of these issues to programs for the mild handicapping conditions, particularly due to the fact that recent definitions and criteria for inclusion in these categories often result in high incidence figures. The contemporary controversy that has emerged from this variety of concerns ranges from confrontations at the most abstract level of ideals, involving educational excellence versus educational and social equity (Gerber, 1989; Kauffman, 1989) and political confrontation (Kauffman, 1989), to professional and programmatic disputes (Chalfant, 1989), up to and including the question of whether special education should continue to exist in anything like its present form (cf. Fuchs & Fuchs, 1988a, 1988b; Wang & Walberg, 1988). Recently, Algozzine and Korinek (1985) argued that "social, political, and economic factors create the problems" (p. 293) of distorted incidence figures; they conclude that "the Mother Liberty mentality that established America's first special class homes for the down-trodden and disabled may now be an outdated perspective that has made today's special classes overpopulated havens for the hard-to-teach" (1985, pp. 393-394). Is this a harbinger of the end of the democratic spirit in American schools or special education? If so, it appears to be a remarkable analog to certain historical reactions to general "social, political, and economic factors" in American history, which, as in the present circumstances, were tremendously exacerbated by increasing population pressures. Fierce struggles for wealth and rights of disparate groups both in urban centers and on the frontier in the mid-19th century and, from around 1870 to the 1930s, the rising tide of immigration with its changing com-