The ecology of special education: An exploratory study

Philosophical barriers separate regular and special education. Traditionally, educators for each environment operated independently with little interaction, understanding, or knowledge of the other classroom environment. Gradually, district funding, external influences, or inclusive programming changed the context of the educational environment. Trends to remove students with disabilities from self contained classrooms and include them in regular education classrooms fueled educational debates. The Least Restrictive Environment provided a legal impetus for inclusive education. Whereas, the Regular Education Initiative focused on encouraging special education to form a partnership with regular education and educate students with disabilities in regular classrooms. These developments create a paradigm shift for both regular and special educators. This created a need to understand the role of the classroom environment. However, research on the impact of the classroom environment has been limited.;A social ecological approach provides a useful prospective for inclusive education and educators. Developing classroom typologies for self contained classrooms and assessing the perceptions of adult staff and students promotes understanding about the impact of the classroom ecology. This research was designed to: (1) administer the Classroom Environment Scale-Special Education (CES-SP) to students and adult staff in three self contained classrooms; (2) administer the Classroom Environment Scale-Ideal (CES-I) to a panel of professionals; (3) interpret the panel results as criteria for determining variables critical to transition of students with Emotional Behavior Disorders (EBD) from a self contained class to an inclusive setting; and (4) compare the actual perceptions of students with EBD and adult staff perceptions of panelists.