Tolerance and Technology of Instruction: Implications for Special Education Reform

Mounting criticism of special education policy and practices has resulted in controversial recommendations for reform that often appeal to the questionable authority of the National Academy of Sciences' report (Heller at al., 1982). Until now, there has been little response to this frequently cited report from a special education perspective. The present article discusses a theory of tolerance and seeks to identify the critical problems associated with the position taken in the NAS report and subsequent reform initiatives. Specifically, it is argued that brute force attempts to absorb, current special education functions into regular classrooms will necessarily fail. Regular classroom teachers, confronting often extreme variability in students' learning characteristics, cannot be equally effective with difficult-to-teach students without either substantial increases in usable instructional resources or adoption of powerful instructional technologies.