The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas Cooperative Teaching: The Renewal of Teachers Cooperative Teaching: The Renewal of Teachers

Abstract

ISSN: 0009-8655 (Print) 1939-912X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vtch20 Time may change me, but I can't change time -David Bowie, " Changes, " 1972 ittle has affected American education as dramatical-L ly as the growing sense that the way education has been structured in the past is less than adequate today and will be even more inadequate in the future. The increasing cultural, linguistic, academic, and behavioral diversity of America's classrooms is challenging long-established approaches to curriculum and instruction. In terms of cultural and linguistic diversity, the state of California may be the best example of what America will look and sound like in the future. As of 1997, stu-dents with limited English proficiency composed 25 percent of California's total school population, up from 15 percent less than ten years earlier (California Department of Education 1997). Such growth in diver-sity is increasingly common throughout the nation's schools. By the mid-1390s, of the nation's ten largest central city school districts, white enrollment ranged from a high of 31 percent (San Diego) to a low of 6 per-cent (Detroit) (Orfield et al. 1997). In fact, in several states, including California, Hawaii, New Mexico, Texas, and Mississippi, so-called minority students actually constitute a majority of the school populations (U.S. Department of Education 1396). As students with disabilities are increasingly placed in America's general education classrooms, teachers are also encountering greater diversity in student ability and achievement levels. During the 1995-96 academic year, 45 percent of students with disabilities received the entirety of their educational programs in regular classrooms, and another 29 percent were in resource room programs. Thus nearly three-fourths of students with disabilities received most or all of their education-al programs in general education classrooms. That trend is likely to continue in the foreseeable future (U.S. Department of Education 1998). The rapid increase in student diversity in classrooms and schools has reached the point where educators can no longer segregate students by their varied ability lev-els, cultural groups, and/or linguistic backgrounds. In fact, the fundamental efficacy of " pull-out programs " has come into question (e.g., Walther-Thomas et al. 2000; Vaughn, Moody, and Schumm 1998), as has the ethics of such segregatory practices (e.g., Stainback, Stainback, and Ayres 1996, 3 3) . Indeed, the 1997 fed-eral reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) explicitly requires that students be served within the context of the age-appropriate gen-eral education curriculum as the first phase of their individualized educational program (IEP). In addition, under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, public schools are expected to make " reasonable accommodations " in curriculum and instructional pro-cedures for many students who manifest disabling con-ditions but are not eligible for special education ser-vices under IDEA. More and more, the question is not whether students with diverse backgrounds should be included in the general education classroom. Instead, the more pro-ductive question is how instruction might be provided most effectively for all students, including those with diverse backgrounds and learning aptitudes.