all possible worlds, and may be impractical (thus leaving them without impact on non-impaired students).
Mainstreaming can have some positive impact, to very little impact, on non-impaired students in the middle school setting. In most mainstreamed middle schools, particularly in large urban settings, impaired students join unimpaired students in a mix which may also include students from different cultural, linguistic, and economic groups. Models of mainstreaming which tend toward full inclusion are more likely to impact non-impaired students than models in which mainstreaming leaves special students to sink or swim, so to speak, in the general classroom. In addition, because mainstreaming looses its effectiveness as grade levels increase, the middle school setting should provide a median ground between and elementary and secondary school for case studies regarding its impact.
The term mainstreaming is used here to mean the integration of regular and exceptional children in a school setting where all children share the same resources and opportunities for learning on a full-time basis. Full inclusion is the radical stance that special education teachers should unobtrusively cooperate with regular classroom teachers to team teach in the regular classroom. Full inclusionists believe that the socialization of impaired children is more important than the learning of course content; to this extent, friendships and peer tutoring between impaired and non-impaired students are more important educational goals than, say, coverage of the entirety of chapter five in the science textbook.
A survey of recent literature shows that, in most schools, general teachers believe that students should all be treated in the same manner. In other words, special preplanning for, or singling-out of, "special" students of any kind is rare. It has been seen that in large, urban settings, impaired children are one of many group...