RESEARCH ON TEACHER ATTITUDES TOWARD MAINSTREAMING
At risk students are those students with special needs who require programs and services over and above those provided to the general body of students. At risk students in the United States, therefore, may be those students who are handicapped (mentally or physically), those students with limited English language proficiency, or those students from lower socioeconomic groups who are susceptible to educational risk. This research is concerned specifically with the issue of mainstreaming at risk students who are handicapped mentally or physically.
Public Law 99-457 prohibited discrimination against handicapped persons in a variety of contexts including education. In the context of education, this law requires, to the maximum extent possible, that handicapped students receive the same educational opportunities as are available to all other students. Although there are important exceptions to the rule, to a great extent, education for the handicapped student tends to be assessed according to many of the criteria previously applied to cases that involved charges of discrimination based on race or ethnic background. One implication of this approach to the assessment of educational opportunity is that the concept of separate but equal, in and of itself, is not a justifiable basis for the exclusion of handicapped students from the general classroom. Thus, in the absence of cogent and supportable reasons why the integration of handicapped students into general classes should not occur, the mainstreaming of handicapped students into general classes must occur according to the law.
In is relatively easy to conceptualize situations in which the integration of a physically handicapped student into a general physical education class might be unsuitable from the perspective of the handicapped student, because such mainstreaming might actually deny equal educational opportunity to the...