The general theme of this article is the reform movement of the special education system.  The problem with this system is that students with disabilities are not receiving the best educational opportunities because their special programs are not so special.  So, the more we delay the restructuring of our educational system, the fewer chances our students will receive at reaching their educational apexes.
     Kauffman gives two types of tasks for responding to this reform, short term and long term.  The first of the short term tasks has been to establish where to teach our children and how to restructure the class so that it benefits our students the most.  Some people believe that the mainstreaming of special education students would be our best answer, but there are positive and negative outcomes with this approach.  If we begin to mainstream our students we can give them the opportunities to see how regular students interact within the general education classroom.  It will try to relieve some of the social pressures they feel by  having a disability label placed on them.  Being around students without disabilities  helps to imitate positive social and educational behaviors.  We can improve their self identity by increasing their choices of relationships and friendships.  All of this creates a knowledge about and support for all students.  It also erases the differences between them while still valuing their individualities.            
     The negative aspect of mainstreaming is the cognitive gap between the special education student and the material being taught in the regular curriculum.  These students require more individual instruction that takes valuable time away from the rest of the class.  Further more, recent evidence according to Kauffman, shows that  the special education classrooms are not really that special so we might as well try to instruct all students in a mainstreamed class.
      Kauffman also proposes the choosing the "idea over the image."  This  simply means that we should have a set of strategies ready to engage the reform instead of setting outrageous goals that make the reform look good in the face of the people.  This idea could be unpopular with many since it forces us to look for answers to questions about our current field of special education that has not been productive.  One aspect of this idea that I see every year is the handing over of the IEP diplomas to students that just show up to class.  How can we give a diploma to a student who has not completed a standard curriculum?  Is this done just to say "Well we graduated this number of students this year so our program is successful?  Is this how we prepare these kids for the challenges they will face in the real world?
     The long term task that Kauffman proposes is the deaggregating of special education populations and the strengthening and repairing of the foundations of  education.
What we are talking about is not the dismantling of the special education programs, but the breakdown of the diverse sections of education so that we can better understand them.
Although we have streghthened our conceptual work (IEP, theory of instruction, policy changes, and ethics), we need to do better.  We can improve our system by only one means and that is quantitative and qualitative research.  We need to experiment different teaching techniques, programs, and policies.  The only problem with this is that this type of research takes too long.  
     If we were to borrow the guidelines of education from facilities that already incorporate the mainstreamed students with disabilities, we can produce a set of rules to which we can govern ourselves. As Kaufman says "our best guarantee of progress in special education may be to practice what we teach."  We want our students to think about thinking, to expand their minds, and to come up with answers to difficult questions. Why can we not  do the same to try to reorganize the structure of our special education programs?  We have some of the answers from other states where mainstreaming is successful, such as Massachusetts.  We need to sit down and devise a plan of reconstruction for our educational system because our children are being lost in it.