Thirty years ago, Congress announced that more than half of American children with disabilities were not receiving appropriate educational services. Today, American schools have a world-class system for differentiating instruction for all students, regardless of cognitive, emotional or physical limitations. That's quite an accomplishment, and something about which educators should be proud.
Alas, there's a rub. While children with disabilities are now welcomed into classrooms with open arms, it can be hard to find educators embracing the kind of frank discussions that normally accompany such a sea change in instruction. Whether it's because teachers and administrators are all leery of being called prejudiced, embarrassed about some of their past policies or simply too overwhelmed with day-to-day work to get their arms around the bigger issues, the result is the same: There are a number of seemingly insurmountable challenges in special education, and not much is being said about them. Issues like racial disproportion. Abysmal teacher morale. Nonexistent academic programs. Paperwork roulette. The good news is, some districts have found ways to rectify, or-at the very least-cope.
Culture Change
The issue: Not all special ed students have gotten the education they deserve.
If educators are going to be really honest, they must admit they have let a lot of special needs kids down through the years. Say what you will about NCLB, but prior to its enactment a lot of children in special education classes were simply not being exposed to academics. Gerry Altieri is the technology coordinator for special education in the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, and he's seen it firsthand. "Three, four years ago," he says, "we had a lot of special ed teachers with nothing in their classrooms. The first thing we had to do was to make sure that [these] teachers had textbooks."
And even if there were textbooks, that didn't mean everyone was using them appropriately. "We'd say we wanted to increase the reading skills of our students," says Susan Kelch, director of special education in the Socorro Independent School District in El Paso, Texas. "But students in seventh grade who started at a second-grade reading level would work on the same second-grade reading book in eighth and ninth grade. We didn't offer materials that would actually improve reading skills."
Kelch's district took a three-pronged approach to increasing student achievement, beginning with aligning the SPED curriculum and creating a benchmarking system. "Now we can see how students are progressing," she says. The district also replaced special ed aides with teachers, pairing general and special ed teachers in inclusion classrooms.
"If educators are going to be really honest, they must admit they've let a lot of special needs kids down through the years."
And the district began using the Response to Intervention model of instruction. Historically, students having difficulty in a general ed classroom would have to fail before they could receive services. RTI starts before failure occurs. For instance, Kelch says, the district now runs a "reverse inclusion" preschool program in which general ed kids (called "language masters") are asked to join a group of kids who are struggling with language skills. Another innovation has helped El Paso's large number of ELL students not be placed in special services because of language problems. The district now runs dual-language schools to expose non-English-speaking students to English speakers to bolster their skills.
Some Teachers Left Behind
The issue: Special education teachers are often considered second-class citizens.
"The two most ego-satisfying jobs in the world are a D.J. and a teacher," says Joye H. Thorne, a consultant and former special education administrator for the Aldine (Texas) Independent School District. Thorne says a classroom teacher is the boss and that "special education teachers are considered something of a threat." What's more, she thinks general ed teachers have a notion that special educators have some kind of "magic" way to reach special needs students-and therefore, only special ed teachers should work with them.
It's ironic that at a time when so many teachers feel disrespected due to NCLB's highly qualified teacher provisions, their colleagues feel general ed teachers treat them disrespectfully. "Regular ed doesn't like to be told what to do by special ed," says Sam Dempsey, director of the Exceptional Children's Program in N.C.'s Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools. "By and large, they feel they know education better than we do."
