chapter2

CHAPTER 1 introduced you to the many faces of talented children who struggle with a continuum of social, emotional, or behavioral problems. Each of these students has experienced emotional and behavioral challenges that have disrupted their lives, affected their families, and interfered with their ability to prosper in school.

Challenging behavior in schools is nothing new. Parents and professionals have been dealing with disruptive behavior for as long as children have been required to go to school. Interestingly, society’s response to the problem has been a reflection of the times. This chapter takes a look back at some of the important historical events that have taken place and led us to where we are today. Also, this historical review shows us that now is a great time to transform the education of children with social, emotional, and behavioral differences.

• How have children with challenging behavior historically been served in school?

• How has the education of children with challenging behaviors evolved over time?

• What were the groundbreaking laws and Supreme Court decisions that have helped transform education for children with challenging behaviors?

• How have No Child Left Behind and other laws affected school programs for children with challenging behaviors?

Looking back through the history of the education of children with challenging behavior informs the current understanding that multiple systems must work together to effectively serve children with social, emotional, and behavioral difficulties. The historical view also makes clear why school team discussions about how to intervene and address behavior problems can be so complex. Grassroots efforts have inspired parents and professionals to pursue creative and effective treatment, education, and programming for children who are identified with or at risk for developing emotional and behavioral disorders. And although we have a long way to go, the education of children with emotional or behavioral difficulties has come a long way in a relatively short time.

The battle cry for improved public education makes sense. The United States is producing citizens less able to compete with its foreign neighbors in a global economy. As Europe and Asia begin to dominate the information age, the United States’ decreasing ability to produce a well-educated population predicts a scary future, which will require a competent and innovative work force. When contemplating legislation, Congressional discussion about public education has included the premise that public education has been a dismal failure, especially in the major urban areas of this country (Knitzer & Olsen, 1982). In an effort to reform public education, legislation demanding greater accountability from schools, teachers, and students has culminated in robust legislation including the 2004 reauthorization of No Child Left Behind and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act, discussed later in the chapter.

The good news is that in less than 100 years, this nation has progressed first in attitude and second in practice so that assumption about segregation is no longer the norm; children with disabilities are entitled to a free appropriate public education (FAPE) in the least restrictive environment (LRE), and the national consciousness has awakened to the realization that there is a relationship between public education and participatory government. Looking back at the legislative history of special education, great progress has been made, but there is still a long way to go.

School systems have struggled for years to find the proper mix of services to support emotionally vulnerable children so that they could succeed in school. Parents and school staff do not often agree with how school success is defined for children with emotional challenges. Many children with serious underlying psychiatric illnesses struggle in school for their entire academic careers. For some children, the ability to be safe (physically and emotionally), tolerate the school day, come home, and participate in family life is considered success.

For other children, managing anxiety while performing at a high level is defined as success. It really depends upon the student and his particular situation. School systems typically define success as it relates to performance on high-stakes testing and rates of graduation. School system personnel will openly say that their job is to educate the child, not provide for his emotional well-being. The “art and craft” in serving these children and creating successful outcomes is tied directly to the instructional and support staff in the building, which starts with the school district leadership and the leadership of individual school administrators.

This chapter is important to school success because it reminds us all of where we have been, which in turn is important for future policy makers and program developers, teachers, parents, and students to understand as the need for innovative programs grows. Going forward while learning from the past is important because the history of educating kids with challenging behaviors should not be repeated.

Children with emotional and behavioral disorders historically have been educated in one of two ways: (a) completely included in general education with minimal supports and services or (b) totally excluded from the general education classroom. There were many important events and legal decisions that have led us to where we are today. The following section provides some of the major historical events that shaped legislative efforts for children with emotional and behavioral challenges.

In prehistoric times, mental illness was seen as the result of magical beings inhabiting humans that needed spells and rituals or exorcisms by religious leaders. Sometimes, holes would be drilled in the skull of the afflicted person, to let out the spirits responsible for the person’s behavior, as evidenced by skulls dating back 10,000 years found in Europe and South America. The first psychiatric text was written during the 20th century BC in Ancient Egypt, which is a location of the first known psychiatric hospital. Centuries later another psychiatric facility was found in Egypt, showing that Egyptians used opiates to induce sleep for dream interpretation, as a way to deliver prayers to gods.

In the 6th century, Judaism viewed mental illness as an expression of sin, and treatment ranged from fasting to self-flagellation. The Islamic view of mental illness was supernatural, but not necessarily evil. Song, dance, and narcotics were used to induce different states of mind. Islamic scholars wrote texts in the 10th century, El-Mansuri and Al-Hawi, including definitions and academic discussion of mental illness. In Europe at the same time, institutions for people with mental illness were feared because of the belief that people were possessed by the devil.

In the Middle Ages, it was commonly thought that demons took up residence in the bodies and souls of certain people. The natural thing to do was make it inhospitable for them exist; hence, all sorts of unpleasant remedies were created to exorcise the spiritual interlopers. Witch-hunting started, along with the movement to segregate people with mental health problems in asylums in the 16th century. By the early 1400s, the first known psychiatric hospital, Bethlehem Royal Hospital (called Bedlam), was founded in London, and by the 1800s, citizens could pay one penny to visit the “insane” “idiots” or “lunatics.” Also around this time, the first belief that the person’s environment contributed to mental health problems emerged. “Moral management” allowed psychiatric facilities to have beds, pictures on the wall, and more of a home living environment than the penal-like institutions years before. Phrenology introduced study of the shape and size of the brain related to mental health problems.

Jean-Baptiste Pussin and Philippe Pinel literally and figuratively took the shackles off patients, and their studies of different disorders and talk therapy contributed to improving attitudes in other countries, including the United States. At around the same time, a tireless advocate named Dorothea Dix lobbied legislatures across the U.S. and in other countries for the humane treatment of the mentally ill and “feeble minded,” and the first U.S. psychiatric hospital was formed in New Jersey.

In the mid-1800s, the Civil War left many military men mentally affected. The public’s empathy for their soldiers attracted interest and a soft heart for people with behavior disorders. This occurred in the later decades as well.

At the end of the 1800s, in response to the rising number of children being jailed because of behavior problems, the first community mental health clinics were developed, staffed by social workers to provide counseling to students. In 1909, the National Committee for Mental Hygiene was developed, along with other organizations interested in the education of youth with special needs such as the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC). Elizabeth Farrell founded CEC in 1922, and as its president, adopted goals to forward the interests and rights for education of “special children.”

Around this time, White House committees on child welfare were formed, acknowledging the importance of education for youths with behavior problems. All states had compulsory attendance laws by 1918, so children who had been home were required to attend school as never before. By 1922, more multisystem services were being developed in conjunction with the juvenile court systems and this led to the development of the first formal education programs for children with behavior problems (Stullken, 1931).

Educational opportunities for individuals with emotional disturbance were on the decline just prior to World War I. The 1916 Bureau of Census Report indicated that the numbers of children being institutionalized were on the increase because the global conflict overseas resulted in unprecedented numbers of head injuries. Additionally, soldiers were returning from the war with “invisible injuries,” emotional and behavioral injuries, caused by the stress of war (Cruickshank, 1967).

The issue of “battle fatigue” has become a popular and troubling subject once again as huge numbers of soldiers are returning from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan suffering from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Every day there are sad stories in the newspaper and on the Internet about veterans and their struggle to return to civilian life. World War I was important because it served as a turning point in American history. People from all over the United States had willingly and enthusiastically left their families and communities to go to Europe and fight in a very popular war. Like the Civil War, many soldiers returned very different than how they left. This led to a greater understanding of, and compassion for, people with mental health and behavior challenges, and set the stage for the next decades, which brought needed changes to the school systems.

Between 1907 and 1939, forced sterilization in the U.S. led to more than 30,000 sterilizations in almost 30 states, to “purify” the genes away from behavioral and mental disorders (Selden, 2000; Snyder & Mitchell, 2006). By this time, lobotomy, a medical procedure that initially allowed people to forget traumatic events, was common. Electroconvulsive and insulin shock were primary therapies being used along with the frontal lobotomy.

Freud’s influence is paramount in the mental health field beginning in the 1930s. His areas of interest included hypnotism, dream analysis, psychoanalysis, and disorders such as Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. His influence can be seen in modern interventions where the unconscious is believed to motivate behaviors.

The American Psychological Association began the national method of classification and diagnosis of behavior and emotional disorders by publishing the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I) in 1949. The fourth edition is being used as of the writing of this book, and the fifth edition is being discussed among professional organizations. Diagnoses are discussed in great detail in Chapter 10.

Between the 1930s through the mid-1950s, the first educational programs specifically designed for children with emotional and behavioral disorders were developed (Bullock & Gable, 2006). Loretta Bender, a psychiatrist at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital, was responsible for establishing classrooms for students with emotional and behavioral disorders in 1935. Over the next 20 years, across the United States, educational programs for students with challenging behaviors were developed by an innovative group of reform-minded professionals such as Bruno Bettleheim, Fritz Redl and David Wineman, Nicholas Hobbs, and Eli Bowers (Albrecht, 2009).

The inclusion of group therapy within a “structured, psychologically sound environment” (Algozzine, 1977, p. 55) was a fundamental element of a therapeutic milieu (Algozzine, 1977; Redl, 1959; Swap, 1978) that could produce positive changes for children in academic settings. The shift toward the creation of programs that cared for the psychological needs of students through the development of psychologically and emotionally safe treatment environments embedded within the school setting marked a turning point in programming for children with challenging behaviors. An ecological perspective started to more strongly emerge that acknowledged the role of the child’s family or community systems and environment in behavior.

Students were either fully included in their neighborhood schools or institutionalized in psychiatric and other separate residential schools. There were only two choices, or “two boxes,” for children with challenging behavior. This “two box theory” represented the continuum of services for many years: all or nothing.

Between World War II and 1975, the collective conscience of America became resolved to legislate equality for all of its citizens. Legislation led to, and continues to lead to, research on mental health issues. The Great Depression, World War I, World War II, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars had left generations of American families and communities forced to deal with large numbers of emotionally and physically wounded individuals. The number and magnitude of people affected by the 45-year period between the Great Depression and the end of the Vietnam War profoundly affected and changed America’s attitude toward people with disabilities, specifically children with problem behaviors. At the same time, major changes occurred in the fields of behaviorism, psychiatry, and psychology.

In the 1960s, behaviorists and the scientific community forwarded Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) as a way to incorporate the philosophies of positive reinforcement and stimulus control. In reaction to a perceived negative emphasis on manipulation of consequences and antecedents in ABA and other methods, the positive behavior supports (PBS) movement unleashed a campaign for its use in the 1980s and 1990s (Baer, Wolf, & Risley, 1987; Carrie, Dunlap, & Horner, 2002; Kutash et al., 2006; Sugai & Horner, 2002).

While the PBS leaders were advertising its use in businesses, medical facilities, schools, and other places, the ABA proponents argued that the PBS methods were too broad and not based in science. To this day, there seems to be a great deal of variation in professional and parent interpretation of ABA, as many believe it is a method of working one-on-one with a child and providing discrete trials and intermittent reinforcement. From our perspective, both movements are important because both apply a problem-solving model that focuses on the individual, a theme that will be continued throughout the chapters that follow. Also, both ways of thinking currently are used in schools.

In the early 1960s, U.S. public images through art and literature painted pictures of horrors of treatment of children and adults in institutions. Deinstitutionalization was a sweeping effort to put people back into the community. At the time, mental hospitals were viewed as the least desirable solution to the problem of mental illness, both from a humane point of view and an economic one. The Community Mental Health Centers Act, signed into law by John F. Kennedy on October 31, 1963, demanded a national system of care to meet the needs of severely and persistently mentally ill (SPMI) individuals and allow for a range of services outside of the hospital. Unfortunately, individuals were not prepared to lead independent lives or take advantage of community-based services. The medical and psychiatric community’s strength grew.

At the same time, a movement to the medicalization of the treatment of children with mental health problems emphasized psychiatric, medically based treatments in hospital settings, where the public money allocated was used up for hospital treatment, leaving little for the community-based model that had preceded the medicalization model (Cohen, 1983). The effects of this movement can still be seen in how the insurance, juvenile justice, education, and mental health services systems fund and support school-based programs. Great confusion continues between this community, or school-based, model and the medical model, even at the school level, about who is responsible to provide what school-based service to support school success.

The antipsychiatry movement was led by Thomas Szasz, who wrote The Myth of Mental Illness in 1974, which stated that mental illness was not a disease. Proponents contended that mental illness is not medical, but has its roots in social, political, and legal areas. Researchers, writers, and protestors firmly believed that psychiatric illness is purely a social construct, benefitting doctors but not patients.

Riding the coattails of the Civil Rights Movement, the American people spoke through their congressional representatives, and a kinder, more compassionate attitude evolved toward people with differences. As shown in Table 1, the cry for civil rights for people with emotional and behavior challenges were expressed through Supreme Court decisions and federal legislation that was designed to provide rights and protection to all individuals (Bradley, Henderson, & Monfore, 2004; Forness & Kavale, 2000).

Table 1

Supreme Court and Other Legislative Decisions Affecting Students With Disabilities Before 1975

Supreme Court Case/Legislation	Decisions
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954)	Considered the first landmark piece of Civil Rights legislation, it is also one of the earliest pieces of federal legislation requiring equal education for all children. To deny children of color or of disability an equal education was a violation of that child’s due process rights (Cullinan, Epstein, & Lloyd, 1983)
Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, 1965)	This law, passed by Congress in 1965, was the first major piece of legislation that required the federal government to subsidize direct services to select populations in public elementary and secondary schools.
PARC v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (1971)	The Pennsylvania Association of Retarded Citizens (PARC) represented more than 50,000 children with intellectual disabilities during the 1960s. The PARC contested a Pennsylvania law that permitted local school systems to deny school enrollment to children who had not achieved a mental age of 5 years by the time they would enroll in the first grade (Cullinan et al., 1983; Martin, Martin, & Terman, 1996; Reynolds, 1978; Sage & Burrello, 1994). The consent decree that followed the court case required that the state of Pennsylvania provide full access to a free public education to children with mental retardation up to age 21.
Mills v. Board of Education of the District of Columbia (1972)	Advocates representing seven children between the ages of 8 and 16 with many different mental and behavioral disabilities sued the District of Columbia school system for refusing to enroll or having expelled these students based solely on their disabilities. It was later determined that the District of Columbia schools had denied educational services to approximately 12,000 children with disabilities because they did not have funding available to provide the necessary services. The court ruled that these children were protected under the Fourteenth Amendment, stating children with disabilities could not bear the burden of insufficient funding more heavily than other children (Cullinan et al., 1983; Martin et al., 1996; Reynolds, 1978; Sage & Burrello, 1994).
The Rehabilitation Act of 1973	Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 maintained that any recipient of federal financial assistance (including federal and local agencies) must not discriminate with regard to access to services for people with disabilities. The law also prohibited discrimination in housing, employment, architectural accessibility, other social services, and education (Cullinan et al., 1983; Martin et al., 1996).

Building upon the momentum of the previous 45 years, the 94th Congress passed the landmark Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (EHA). Decades of parent advocacy to transform education for children finally become a reality. For the first time in U.S. history, robust and funded federal legislation was passed designed to protect the educational rights of all children with disabilities.

EHA was the culmination of a powerful grass roots movement of concerned parents and educators that had been gaining momentum and picking up supporters for years. This law was more than a piece of Civil Rights legislation. Beyond access to education programming for children with disabilities, EHA was the first law to federally mandate equal access to a continuum of educational opportunities for all children with disabilities.

2. the development of an Individualized Education Program (IEP) for every child;

4. students with disabilities are to be educated with their nondisabled peers to the extent appropriate;

5. tests and other assessments must be fair, and not discriminate on the basis of race, culture, or disability;

6. due process procedures must be in place to protect the rights of students with disabilities and their parents; and

7. the federal government must provide some funding to states to help offset the costs involved in educating students with disabilities.

Since 1974, EHA has been amended by Congress numerous times. These amendments have expanded the range of children who are entitled to special education and related services and diversified the array of services provided under the law (Luckasson & Smith, 1995). Since 1975, EHA has morphed into the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and has been reauthorized numerous times. Parent participation and protections for children with interfering behaviors have been enhanced. Figure 1 summarizes important laws affecting children after 1975.

• 1975: Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA): Free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment for all children with disabilities

• 1986: Amendments to EHA: Authorized Part C for infants and toddlers

• 1990: Amendments to EHA: Guaranteed that all children with disabilities have available to them a free appropriate public education focusing on special education and related services that are designed to meet their individual needs

• 1997: Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA): Established framework for current discipline procedures and provided for prevailing party’s ability to recover attorneys’ fees as a result of dispute resolution actions

• 2004: Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act: Reauthorized IDEA and dramatically changed provisions related to discipline, evaluation, appropriate education, and procedural due process

Figure 1. Important laws affecting
children with disabilities since 1975.

In the 1980s, massive deinstitutionalization and funding cuts took place. These changes led to the closing of many mental hospitals and further reliance on local community care. Many former patients, instead of reintegrating successfully into society or receiving community treatment, became homeless. In 1980, the Mental Health Systems Act was signed into law. It outlined the basics of a national system for mental health community care and treatment. The Americans with Disabilities Act and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1990 continued to spur civil rights of those with emotional, behavioral, and mental disorders.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) is the nation’s most recently passed, and at times most discussed, general education law. It amends the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and has brought big changes to the nation’s educational systems. The terms Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), Response to Intervention, and highly qualified have been added to the educational vocabulary in recent years because of NCLB. Schools and parents around the country sit on the edge of their seats each summer waiting for their children’s schools’ report cards and test scores to be revealed. Schools in states that have not opted out must meet a defined standard to meet AYP standards. As a result, schools either avoid financial and control consequences or earn financial reward.

Despite being bright, capable students, children with challenging behavior routinely do not perform well compared with their peers (Reid, Gonzalez, Nordness, Trout, & Epstein, 2004). Children in separate classes for students with behavior challenges face particular academic difficulty as a result of NCLB’s requirements, because traditionally their education has mainly focused on managing and controlling behavior. Teachers in the field of emotional and behavioral difficulties have been notoriously untrained and have a high burnout rate. NCLB attempts to remedy that with the “highly qualified” requirement; under this requirement, a parent now has a right to know the qualifications of all staff working with her child.

The lack of focus on academics and curriculum acquisition in classrooms designated for challenging behaviors has created a large gap between the achievement of children with behavior challenges and their peers. NCLB requirements also may be contributing to a national problem with teens with challenging behavior dropping out of school altogether—after teens realize that the requirements for a diploma are too difficult without the right type of support.

Laws such as No Child Left Behind, and research such as we will explore throughout this book, have further highlighted the lack of teacher preparation for students with challenging behaviors. At the same time, NCLB has led many school districts to the provision of providing services for children for which they may not be equipped or trained to work effectively with children with challenging behaviors. The reduction of separate classrooms has meant that fewer smaller and more structured classroom options are available.

The net result of this has been an increase of numbers of students with interfering behaviors in the general education classroom. And some districts have described either an increase in the suspension of students as an effort to remove students with disruptive behavior, or a resistance of administrators to suspend students in order to make AYP requirements. Overall, the effect of eligibility of NCLB has been a move away from specialized and individualized interventions in separate settings, placing more students with challenging behaviors of all age levels in the community in general. NCLB has failed to improve achievement for children with disabilities (Kauffman & Konold, 2007). The flaw common to NCLB and its predecessors is that there is no one systematic process that will uniformly lead to improved academic achievement for all students.

Classwork came easy to Jamal. He excelled in every sport he played, and was a good guy to be around. Standardized testing beginning in the third grade found him to be performing at the advanced level. Something happened in middle school. His attitude turned sour, his grades slipped; he became withdrawn and isolated from his friends and family. In January of seventh grade, Jamal got into an argument with a teacher about his cell phone. When the teacher snatched it out of his hand, Jamal jumped up and punched her in her face. Jamal was immediately suspended. Jamal needed the protections of a child with a disability. Because so many schools are using the RtI model for tracking academic performance and behavior, the team had only recently agreed that Jamal should receive targeted interventions as an “at-risk student.” Jamal was ultimately sent to the district’s alternative school for at-risk kids. There he met and buddied up with a whole new group of friends with whom he got into even more trouble.

Jamal is like many other highly gifted youngsters with challenging behavior who are stuck in general education classes with teachers who don’t receive the type of support they need to support his challenging behavior. The students misbehave, the teacher and parents react, and the students react to the adults’ reactions. Without the positive behavior supports and interventions explored in this book, the adults and students do the dance of misunderstanding and confusion and together spin further away from the real issue. The effect of failure to identify and appropriately educate children with challenging behavior has been powerful.

Students with challenging behaviors and students with disabilities have not done well on benchmark or high-stakes testing. Many school districts have shifted the focus of their instruction to preparing for the yearly assessments, basically “teaching to the test” and failing to focus on individualized instruction. There is growing resentment for groups of children who fail to meet the standards. The intent of NCLB is to bring a high expectation to all children regardless of income level. The law is designed to bring quality education to all children in schools that must be staffed by highly qualified teachers in an environment where academic standards are high. The curriculum must be challenging, and teachers must change perceptions of students with behavior challenges, as discussed in the next chapter.

Table 2 represents a constitutional recognition that children with challenging behaviors have as much right to a quality education as any other child in the United States. Because litigation is the impetus for scientific progress, these important court cases have not only shaped the legal landscape, but also have contributed to the explosion of understanding that allows us to take hold of the education of children with social, emotional, and behavioral difficulties.

Table 2

Supreme Court Decisions Since 1980 That Have Affected Students With Disabilities

Supreme Court Case	Decisions
Board of Education, Hendrick Hudson Central School District v. Rowley (1982)	The Supreme Court stated that educational programs must be designed to provide “some” educational benefit to children with disabilities. This case is considered the first major challenge to EHA.
Burlington School Committee v. Department of Education of Massachusetts (1985)	The Supreme Court found that a school district that fails to provide a special education student FAPE under IDEA may be required to reimburse the student’s parents for private school expenses.
Honig v. Doe (1988)	The Supreme Court decided that a proposed suspension of greater than 10 days is considered a change in placement, which triggers IDEA procedural safeguards.
Schaeffer v. Weast, Superintendent, Montgomery County Public Schools, et al. (2005)	The burden of proof in an administrative hearing challenging the evaluation, identification, IEP contents, or placement of a child with a disability is properly placed upon the party seeking relief, whether that is the disabled child’s parents, or the school district.
Forest Grove School District v. T. A. (2009)	The Supreme Court decided that parents of special education students may seek government reimbursement for private school tuition when a public school fails to provide FAPE and the private school placement is appropriate, regardless of whether the child has previously received special education services through the public school system.

Although the definition of emotional and behavioral disorders or disabilities is fully explored in Chapter 8, a word about how emotional or behavioral problems have been defined is important here. Organizations such as the Council for Exceptional Children, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR), National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Maternal and Child Health Bureau of the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), and National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) have advocated in different ways to change the current definition of emotional disturbance. NASP (2005) supported the definition developed by the National Mental Health and Special Education Coalition, found below:

Emotional or Behavioral Disorder (EBD) refers to a condition in which behavioral or emotional responses of an individual in school are so different from his/her generally accepted, age appropriate, ethnic or cultural norms that they adversely affect performance in such areas as self care, social relationships, personal adjustment, academic progress, classroom behavior, or work adjustment. (para. 3)

The past 100 plus years have seen landmark decisions, grassroots movements, and advocacy awareness that have changed understanding, appreciation, and fundamental belief systems regarding educating children with challenging behaviors. The time to transform educational opportunities for children with challenging behaviors has arrived. The great work of pioneers in education along with an explosion of discoveries in neuroscience, evidence-based interventions, and ecological factors have transformed this nation’s collective public consciousness to demand that more citizens be productive and self-sufficient. The next chapter will further discuss how perceptions can influence educational decision making, in our quest to discover how best to deliver to children with challenging behaviors an education for success in life.

Myth	Truth
Children with challenging behaviors have been provided with all of the supports they need to be successful in school.	Children with challenging behaviors have traditionally been excluded from schools.
Funding and providing mental health services is not the responsibility of the school system.	The school system is responsible for providing services that are needed so that students can make meaningful progress, access curriculum, and be prepared to lead independent lives.
Challenging behavior in the classroom is not an issue for most general education teachers.	General education teachers are dealing with more challenging behaviors than they have ever seen before because Response to Intervention (RtI) efforts require long periods of data collection.
Children with challenging behaviors historically have been well provided for by local school systems.	Schools success for children with challenging behaviors has evolved through the grassroots efforts of parents and pioneers in education.
Public education has always protected the rights of all children.	The Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (PL 94-142) was the first federal law that entitled children with disabilities the right to a free appropriate public education (FAPE) in the least restrictive environment (LRE).
Children with challenging behaviors have low IQs and come from broken homes.	Children with challenging behaviors may be gifted and talented and come from all facets of society.