Kathleen Maria Hulgin

The rapid growth of special needs vouchers has been accompanied by the loss of historic civil rights and protections under the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). We examine three of the largest special needs voucher programs in the United States: those in Florida, Georgia and Ohio. We find that these programs and the largest private special education schools within these states are silent on the right to education in the LRE. This study focuses on how silencing the right to be educated in the least restrictive environment (LRE), thus inclusive education, is taking place. Using Huckin's framework of textual silence and critical discourse analysis, we identify this silence as manipulative, drawing connections between historical segregation, neoliberal ideology and the rhetoric of market choice in the United States. We discuss implications regarding segregation, equity, and education policy.

This article examines inclusive education in view of the current US policy climate. The No Child Left Behind Act provides the opportunity to examine dominant social forces and the underlying theories of mechanism and positivism that run counter to a constructivist approach to inclusive education. The incompatibility of these theories is explored in terms of four factors that influence efforts to implement change: images of teaching and learning, images of organisation, approaches to policy and organisational characteristics. This framework provides a means of clarifying and working to restore the movement towards inclusive education within local schools and communities.

Although the concept of person-centered services has gained much popularity, there are significant discrepancies in the extent to which service agencies are actually implementing it. Eight organizations, each of which was successfully providing person-centered services to at least some individuals, were examined. Some agencies were implementing the approach with significantly higher proportions of individuals receiving their services than were others. Interviews and participant observations were used to examine how the various organizational contexts contributed to these differences. Some organizations were found to be well-suited to the approach, whereas others posed significant limitations to the number of individuals who benefited or the rate at which they were likely to benefit from this approach.