Learning Centers

In 1975, Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (Public Law 94-142) which mandates an appropriate public education for all disabled children. The law provides for an evaluation of each child's needs and the design of an appropriate program for the involvement of parents in the design of their children's education, and for the allocation of necessary funds. Eight out of ten children in special needs programs are mentally retarded, learning-disabled, or speech impaired (Taylor, Asher & Williams, 1987)

The legislation on special needs children recommends mainstreaming defined as the integration of disabled and nondisabled students as much as possible (Taylor, Asher & Williams, 1987). Under mainstreaming, disabled children are in regular classes with nondisabled youngsters for all or part of the day instead of being segregated in special classes (Taylor, Asher & Williams, 1987).

Regarding the efficacy of the laws for special needs children, Gartner and Kerzner-Lipsky (1992) report that:

The positive contributions...are unquestionable in that all students do have access to programs, there is a general recognition and acceptance of entitlement to education of students identified with a disability, due process rights exist for students and parents, and many more students have been mainstreamed, especially in nonacademic areas. (p. 1)

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learning disability students where the key emphasis was upon language and experience. The learning center described by Fried (1990) was planned around three important language arts experiences: conversation, storytelling, and the language-experience arts (e.g. drama). Paraprofessional assistance was utilized as well as team teaching. Results evaluated by individual interview and standardized test achievement indicated that the center was doing an exceptional job in meeting the reading deficiencies of the pupils. Specifically, the reading achievement levels of students exposed to the center showed significant increases. The use of a learning center for learning disabled students at the Dowling Urban Environment Learning Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota has been reviewed by Raison (1995). He notes that the center serves a fully inclusive, racially mixed, middle school and concludes that providing center services is expensive but well worth the cost. This conclusion is based on a comparison by Raison of evaluative data with data collected at an ineffectively managed middle school without a learning center. According to Raison (1995), the learning center functions efficiently because it has a clearly defined purpose and c
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Approximate Word count = 3732
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)

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