Support Urged for Programs in Jewish Schools for the Learning Disabled

An authority on special education has called for increased Federation support of programs in Jewish schools for the learning disabled, declaring that three out of four such children “will be able to return the investment made in them by the Jewish community.”

Dr. Bennett Rackman, a teacher trainer for the New York City Board of Education’s Division of Special Education, bases his projection on the fact that “at least 75 percent of the special education population about whom Jewish educators are concerned” is comprised of children who are “minimally handicapped.”

Writing in the current issue of the Pedagogic Reporter, professional journal of the American Association for Jewish Education, Rackman says “the American Jewish community of the 21st Century” will have as great a need for “committed followers” as it will have for leaders. This need can be met its part by today’s minimally handicapped students who, he says, have the potential to “become contributing members to UJA and Federation as adults.”

CITES NEED FOR COMMUNITY SUPPORT

While stressing the efficacy of Jewish special education for these children, Rackman cites an accompanying need for community support of “earmarked programs serving the Jewish retarded.” He notes, however, that the funding required for these programs, “which might be considered ‘gemilut hasodim'”(pure charity), is “quite small by comparison with the amount of money needed to help the marginally impaired.”

Rackman says that because of Jewish education in several cities throughout the country (e.g. Chicago, Washington, Atlanta) have been successful in establishing community wide Jewish special education programs. But he says the preponderance of parents who want some Jewish education for their learning disabled children are faced with bleak, and sometimes tragic, alternatives.

“Not many school administrators are knowledgeable in the area of special education and may seek to hide their ignorance by stating they cannot help such children,” Rackman says. Subsequently, many parents who receive no guidance from the Jewish community “turn away disheartened” and “may even turn to other religions for solace and help,” he says, adding: “Whole families may be lost to the Jewish people under these circumstances.”

On the other hand, Rackman says some parents insist that their special child be enrolled in a Jewish school, with the result that the child, particularly if he is not a troublemaker, “may slip into a class unnoticed.”

THE ISSUE OF ENVIRONMENT

When this happens, he says the school generally places such a child in what the educational community calls the “least restrictive environment”: a setting in which — as part of a prevailing philosophy that “heterogeneous grouping is superior to homogeneous grouping” — special children are “allowed as much opportunity as possible to relate to and mix with their more ‘normal’ counterparts.”

In this attempt to “normalize” the special child through integration, “the best we can hope for is that he may benefit in terms of cognitive and experiential learning, “Rackman says. “But as a Jewish special educator, I am convinced that youngsters could benefit much more if schools were geared to meet the needs of each individual child.” Unfortunately, he says, “the schools are presently not equipped to do so.”

To overcome this problem, Rackman advocates the training of “a cadre of administrators and ‘master special teachers'” who can evolve curricula and develop strategies for special education in both Jewish day and supplementary schools. Moreover, he maintains that this new curricula “need not and should not follow existing curricula in Jewish studies”; rather, he urges that it “focus on the concrete, on doing,” instead of on the abstract and theoretical, in order to best meet the needs of handicapped learners.