The Ground Game in Special Education
LESTER MANN, Ph.D. Superintendent of Schools Office Montgomery County, Pa. A considerable period of time has elapsed since I first expressed concern for what I regarded to be special education's overcommitments to differential psychoeducational assessment and programming (1967); and in fact since the preparation of my article for this symposium, which more precisely directs itself to special education's overemphasis on the identification and training of "abilities" and "disabilities." Add to this the time required to establish an appropriate board of respondents and then to receive responses-and I was fearful that this symposium might suffer from that most grievous disqualification of the present scenus americanus: irrelevancy. From the quality (and intensity) of our respondents' remarks, it appears happily (or unhappily?) that my fears were unwarranted. My rebuttal will be presented in two parts. The first will deal with the major issues raised by my respondents; redundancy of rebuttal will be avoided except in the interest of maintaining the narrative. The second part will consider an alternative to the ability-disability approaches that I have criticized: the ground game in special education! Before proceeding to deal with my respondents, I would like to state certain pojnts of my present position. 1. I believe that ability constructs are potentially useful; they have been overused and abused these past years; they really have not proven their validity as presently employed. 2. I am in favor of differential assessment and precision in measurement. I do not believe, however, that the instruments we have at present (certainly not the standardized tests) permit the "pinpointing" (a favorite term of the differential psychoeducational assessment movement) of ability and