Conceptual Models and the Future of Special Education

Abstract A medical model has advantages over a legal model in thinking about special education, especially in responding supportively to difference, meeting individual needs, and practicing prevention. The legal conceptual model now dominates thinking about special education, but a medical model promises a brighter future for special education and for children with disabilities. ********** In 1974, my colleague Dan Hallahan and I published an article in Exceptional Children pointing out the virtues of the much-maligned medical model (Kauffman & Hallahan, 1974). Although I believe the basic arguments that we made in favor of the medical model are still sound, a note of caution is in order. Among our statements is this: "The 'medical' model, now being placed by its critics in the position of explaining all that has gone wrong with special education, is a straw man" (p. 101). I do not want to substitute one straw argument with another. Specifically, I do not want to blame the legal model, which I believe now dominates our thinking, for all of special education's ills. We cannot eliminate the law, nor should we want to. In fact, we need the law, although I do not believe it is the best model for approaching or solving most of special education's problems. I raise issues about which model should play the more influential role in the way we think about special education, which one should play the dominant role in guiding our practice, and which one bodes better for our future and for our students'. The Nature of Conceptual Models "Conceptual model" means the way we think about things, not the actual practices themselves. In subsequent paragraphs when I refer to a structure or system I mean the conceptual model that guides our thinking and provides rules for practice. My primary concern is the way we approach problems and their resolution. Special education is necessarily closely aligned with general education. In fact, special education is an integral part of general education and vice versa. Nevertheless, the future of special education may well hinge on its consistent gravitation toward a particular conceptual model, not its association with general education. The conceptual model of another profession may shape our ways of thinking and suggest the types of decisions that we believe should guide our practices. Other than education itself, the two social structures or systems and their rules that play the most prominent roles in special education are law and medicine. I am concerned about whether we think about the problems of special education primarily in terms of evidence-based instruction or primarily in terms of legal protections of the rights of children to appropriate education. Both ways of thinking are important, and I am not suggesting that we should follow either the medical or the legal model exclusively. Nevertheless, the way we conceptualize and respond to problems has profound implications for how we proceed in practice, so we need to consider carefully whether thinking first like a lawyer or first like a physician would serve us better. Conceptual Models and Societal Problems All highly organized societies have developed social structures or systems and rules for dealing with problems that they define as social deviance or physical illness. That is, all modern societies, including those frequently called underdeveloped or third-world, have legal structures and rules for dealing with threatening and intolerable behavior and medical structures and rules for responding to illness. Although in some instances social authorities judge a problem to be clearly a matter of social deviance or clearly a matter of physical illness, in other cases the problem is not clearly one or the other. In these cases, the society's authorities make an ambiguous judgment or assign joint responsibility to law and medicine. In most cases of ambiguity or joint responsibility, either law or medicine takes the leading role or is assigned primary responsibility for dealing with the problem, usually depending on the situation. …