August 2011 Archives

While the school year hasn't quite started for thousands of students, many are in the throes of the school year. Some of the teachers and staff who work with students with disabilities will be learning along with their students, or already are.

They'll be sharing their adventures, mishaps, frustrations, and triumphs at the Center for Exceptional Children's Reality 101 blog, which is written for new special education teachers, by new special education teachers.

First-year special education teacher Allisence—who is changing careers after double-majoring in journalism and Spanish—is working in a self-contained classroom in a high-poverty school in Phoenix. Her students, who range from kindergarteners to 6th graders, have language delays and impairments.

Jessica is a resource specialist at a rural school in California who works with fully included students in kindergarten through 8th grade who have mild or moderate disabilities. She says her path toward special education "has been a serendipitous one, involving my own children, a job opening, and a superintendent who took a chance."

This is the third class of new special education teachers and staff writing for the blog, which is also intended to provide a glimpse into the special education world for those still in college or considering a special education career, said Anna Baker of the CEC.

The others this year include Richard, a first-year middle school special ed teacher whose students have emotional and behavioral disabilities. He works with them in a self-contained classroom in Georgia. His most recent post is about experiencing the realities of the No Child Left Behind law.

Theresa is a third-year a special education teacher in the Chicago area who graduated with a degree in psychology, but was inspired to teach students with disabilities after giving private swim lessons to a girl with Down syndrome. She has the most experience of the quartet of bloggers, but as she said in a recent post, "I wonder if I missed the finish line where one becomes less of a new teacher and more of a veteran teacher."

Then she had this experience.

"I recently met with my former coach because I wanted to discuss some plans I'd made for centers, scheduling, and progress monitoring for this upcoming school year. After I shared everything that I had come up with, she looked at me and said, 'You have this all figured out, you didn't need my help at all.' I explained that I simply needed to get some feedback: My ideas sound really great in my head, but when I share them with my dogs I don't usually get much of a response besides, 'Can we go for a walk now?'."

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By 2030, English-language learners are expected to make up 40 percent of America's school population. With some states experiencing a 700 percent growth in the number of English learners in their schools between 1994 and 2005, the department expects the number of English Learners with disabilities to increase, too.

So how should schools work with a potentially growing number of students learning English who also have a disability? (Shuttling too many students learning English off to be evaluated for disabilities has been a longstanding problem, although one state had the opposite issue.)

The U.S. Department of Education is soliciting ways to address this issue. They're offering $1.2 million for three projects that will figure out ways to best work with English-language learners who have a disability or are at risk of having one. The request for proposals sounds like it's encouraging projects that use the principles of response to intervention.

"The purpose of this priority is to support the establishment and operation of three model demonstration projects that will adapt, refine, and evaluate multi-tiered instructional frameworks as well as their components—progress monitoring, culturally responsive principles, reading instruction, and reading interventions..." the Federal Register notice reads.

Each idea for working with these students would have to be able to be demonstrated at five elementary schools where at least 40 percent of students are learning English. Three proposals will get awards of about $400,000 each.

A separate Federal Register notice lists an offer of $3 million for a developer of free educational materials, including textbooks, for students who are visually impaired and print-disabled and attend elementary, secondary, postsecondary, and graduate schools.

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A new collection of stories from Education Week explores the state of online and virtual learning, or e-learning, for different groups of students. The whole package puts a special emphasis on students with disabilities.

My colleague Michelle Davis wrote about how online education is focusing more on autism. She writes:

"For some students with autism, online education can be the right fit, taking away the sensory overload and social stigma that can occur in a brick-and-mortar school and allowing them to pursue subjects they're passionate about, above and beyond what they'd get in the classroom. For students who aren't as high-functioning, lacking language and motor skills, more-traditional online classes often aren't an option."

She also wrote a piece about the professional development needs for teachers who work in an online special education environment.

For gifted students, online learning can offer the ideal environment. It can open the door to a vast array of expanded course selections, individualized attention for students, and the flexibility for students to move at their own pace—all factors that make virtual learning environments an attractive option for this particular group of students, writes Katie Ash. And as budget cuts threaten to drain funding from programs for the gifted, more schools—and students—may be looking to online education as a way to fill the gap in offerings, according to experts in that field.

My piece is about the growing use of online and virtual classes for students with disabilities. As useful and accessible as some online classes can be for students with disabilities, not all online classes are welcoming to this group of students. The courses may not be accessible to them, or the students may never be offered the courses in the first place.

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The National Center for Special Education Research now has its second director. Deborah Speece, a 27-year special education professor at the College of Education at the University of Maryland, was named to the post this week.

"Scientists who claim special education as their field of study are among the finest scholars in the country and I am eager to work with them, the special education community, and our colleagues in sister disciplines who are interested in addressing the challenges faced by children and youth with disabilities, their families, and their teachers," Ms. Speece said in a statement.

The National Center for Special Education Research, or NCSER, is under the umbrella of the Institute of Education Sciences. It was established in 2004, when the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was reauthorized. NCSER's mission is to explore how to best design instruction to meet the needs of each child with a disability.

Aside from her work at the University of Maryland, Ms. Speece's experience includes her work as co-editor of Learning Disabilities Research & Practice and associate editor of the American Educational Research Journal. She also worked on NCSER's Technical Working Group for the Evaluation of Response to Intervention Strategies in Elementary Reading. She taught students with learning and behavioral disabilities in Ohio public schools.

Edward J. Kame'enui, the first commissioner of NCSER, is now a professor at the University of Oregon. He served from 2005 to 2007. Since his departure, Lynn Okagaki, who is also head of the National Center for Education Research, had filled on an interim basis. Ms. Speece's appointment is for six years.

Bryan Cook, a special education professor at the University of Hawaii, praised her appointment.

"Dr. Speece has experience as a public school special education teacher, is widely respected for her high quality research in areas such as language and reading intervention for students with disabilities, and has managed successfully numerous federal grants," he told SpedPro. "With the reauthorization of IDEA and [the Elementary and Secondary Education Act] looming, as well as the threat of serious budget limitations, we'll need a devoted special educator advocating for the continued importance of special education research."

For more on the appointment, read the Inside School Research blog.

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A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds that the percentage of children ever diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, increased from about 7 percent in 1998 to 9 percent by 2009. The findings mirror a study from late last year.

In the Midwest and the South, the diagnosis rate was even higher, rising from 7.1 percent to 10.2 percent in the Midwest, and from 8.1 percent to 10.3 percent in the South.

Children with ADHD have trouble paying attention, may sometimes act without thinking about what the result will be, and may are overly active, according to the CDC's descriptions. At school, children with ADHD often have a plan that is similar to an Individualized Education Program for other students with disabilities, but is called a 504 plan, or they may have an IEP. The causes and risk factors for ADHD are unknown, but genetic factors may play a role. Diagnosing ADHD involves a medical exam; a checklist for rating ADHD symptoms based on reports from parents, teachers, and sometimes the child; and an evaluation for coexisting conditions, according to the CDC.

Boys are still more likely than girls to be diagnosed, but diagnoses for both genders have increased, with about 12 percent of boys and 6 percent of girls now carrying the ADHD label.

The study also found that while ADHD prevalence was once more varied among children of different races, those differences narrowed from 1998 through 2009.

In the earlier study, which was based on surveys conducted from 1998 to 2000, non-Hispanic white children had a higher ADHD prevalence compared with other racial groups. In the study released this week, based on surveys conducted from 2007 to 2009, ADHD prevalence was similar among non-Hispanic white and non-Hispanic black children.

Researchers also found that, while in the past, ADHD was diagnosed at similar rates among children of all income groups, the data from the 2007-09 surveys shows the diagnosis was more common among children with family incomes less than 199 percent of the poverty level, compared with those whose income was greater than or equal to 200 percent of the poverty level.

Their conclusions are based on the National Health Interview Survey, which includes about 40,000 American households that are representative of the demographics of the entire country. The prevalence of ADHD was determined based on how many adults answered yes to a question about whether a doctor or health professional had ever told them that their child had ADHD.

Ruth Hughes, chief executive of nonprofit Children and Adults with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, told the Wall Street Journal that the findings suggest that increased awareness, outreach groups, and improvements in health care are encouraging more low-income parents to have their children diagnosed.

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Yet another study shows the growing popularity of response to intervention.

Response to intervention, or RTI, is a strategy that involves identifying students' learning problems quickly and using a series of focused lessons, or interventions, to address those problems before they become entrenched. The intensity of the interventions increase if a student doesn't respond. In this survey, full implementation of RTI involved universal screening of students at least three times a year, the use of clear decision rules to move students between tiers of instruction, and regular monitoring of students' progress based on their learning needs.

In a survey of nearly 1,400 school- and district-level workers, 68 percent said they are either in full implementation or in the process of districtwide implementation. The survey showed that districts with 10,000 or more students were significantly more likely to be in full implementation than smaller districts.

GlobalScholar conducted the survey. The company describes itself as being comprised of the education solution offerings of Scantron, GlobalScholar and Spectrum K12. The survey was also sponsored by the American Association of School Administrators and the National Association of State Directors of Special Education, among others.

The survey also reaffirmed what other studies have found: of schools planning or implementing RTI, most are elementary schools. Among survey respondents who said they are using or considering RTI, 98 percent said they already use or are planning to implement it in the elementary grades.

Also, the survey found, a majority of districts report that putting RTI into place is a unified effort between special education and general education. In districts where the effort is coming from a single area, general education is a little more likely to be leading.

RTI has been credited with a decline in the number of students identified as having learning disabilities in recent years. This survey found that in 35 percent of districts, using RTI cut referrals to special education by at least 10 percent, and in some districts it was as much as 50 percent.

Something I haven't heard about much: 14 percent of those surveyed said that RTI has been the focus of legal proceedings, such as due process hearings or official complaints.

Also interesting: 11 percent said using RTI has led to an increase in the number of schools in the district making adequate yearly progress under the No Child Left Behind law. That's up from 5 percent last year.

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Another bill that would task the federal government with spending more on special education is in the works.

Congressman Jared Polis, D-Colo., said Tuesday he will soon introduce a bill that would eventually require the federal government to pay for 40 percent of the cost of educating students with disabilities. The money would come from cuts to defense spending.

"This legislation keeps our promise to special education students and families and provides much needed fiscal relief to cash-strapped states and local school districts," Mr. Polis said in a statement. "Rather than wasting taxpayer dollars on costly and ineffective defense programs, this legislation reinvests in America's children and our economy."

When the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was first passed in 1975, Congress was authorized to spend up to 40 percent of the cost of teaching students with disabilities. But the federal government has never come close. This year, Congress contributed 16.5 percent, or about $11.5 billion.

Mr. Polis' Defending Special Education Students and Families Act would boost spending by cutting $18.8 billion in defense spending during the next five years, including measures such as replacing projected purchases of Navy and Marine Joint Strike Fighters with cheaper options, canceling the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, and reducing the number of aircraft carriers and Navy air wings by one.

His approach is different from a Senate bill introduced earlier this year by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, that also would boost special education spending. That bill proposes boosting the federal contribution $35.3 billion by 2021, mostly through the doubling of taxes on cigarettes and small cigars.

Rep. Polis' bill was a surprise to some members of the IDEA Full Funding Coalition, a group that includes the American Association of School Administrators, the American Federation of Teachers, the Council for Exceptional Children, the Council of the Great City Schools, the National Association of Secondary School Principals and the National Education Association. The group has been working on another bill that would be a companion to the Harkin bill.

An aide to Rep. Polis said the congressman did not work with any one particular group, but did work closely with Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who has introduced a similar bill for several years.

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A computer mouse for the foot? An electronic system that keeps a wheelchair user from getting into an accident? A mobile math dictionary that uses sign language and "morphemes"?

These futuristic-sounding creations are now closer to reality. With $75,000 in grants this month by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, small businesses are developing these and several other new forms of assistive technology for children and adults with disabilities.

(These grants are separate of the State Grants for Assistive Technology program which is intended to get assistive technology in the hands of individuals.)

The NIDRR, which is under the umbrella of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, awarded the grants specifically to prompt companies to research and develop technology that makes life and learning easier for people with disabilities.

This grant program has two parts. After these initial grants, which are intended for six months of work and are used to decide how realistic these ideas are, there will be a second round of grants worth up to $500,000 for two more years of work to further test and develop them.

"These projects are designed to help people with disabilities maximize their job productivity and economic self-sufficiency," said Alexa Posny, assistant secretary for the office of special education and rehabilitative services, in a statement. "This is the first step of research and development in several areas that will enhance independent living and employment for individuals with disabilities."

These are some of the projects in the works:

• A remote schedule management and monitoring system to support personal scheduling for people with intellectual and cognitive disabilities;

• An interface that would make Facebook accessible for people with intellectual disabilities;

• A computer mouse that could be controlled by foot;

• An automatic accident prevention system for wheelchair users;

• A mobile signing math dictionary that uses morphemes for the deaf and hard of hearing. (Morphemes, I now know, are the smallest meaningful unit in the grammar of a language. So unladylike would have three morphemes: un, lady, and like.);

• New web-accessibility technology that would make the web more user friendly for people with visual impairments.

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The U.S. Department of Education won't cut South Carolina's share of federal special education dollars by $36 million—at least not yet—prompting questions about whether such penalties for states that cut education spending without federal approval are meaningful.

South Carolina faces the cut because it slashed special education spending by the same amount during the 2009-10 school year. But the department didn't think the reduction was justified. Federal rules say states must maintain special education spending amounts from year to year, or increase them, regardless of financial crises. The rule is intended to buffer students' with disabilities from the ups and downs of the budget and keep services and staff they need in place from year to year.

In recent years, several states have asked to be exempt from this rule because their budgets have taken a beating from the economic downturn, and some have been granted their requests. If states slash special education budgets without getting the OK, they face a matching cut in federal special education dollars.

The Palmetto State is the first to try to appeal this penalty, and one of only two states to even face one. (Iowa is the other.)

South Carolina won a reprieve for the 2008-09 school year. The state was allowed to cut special education spending by $20 million that year because of financial woes. For 2009-10, the state cut about $67 million, but the Education Department said in June that only $31 million of that cut was because of the state's financial plight. For 2010-11, the state cut another $75 million in spending on students with disabilities, which the department outright rejected. Before the end of the fiscal year, South Carolina scrambled to restore this money, saving itself from a $75 million annual penalty.

But with the 2009-10 school year long over, the state couldn't restore the $36 million cut from special education spending that year, and faced losing that much money by Oct. 1 and every year going forward.

At the time, the state said it would fight the penalty. In an Aug. 1 memo to state Superintendent Mick Zais, South Carolina Department of Education General Counsel Shelly Kelly said the federal government "abused" its authority and took too long to issue a decision about the 2009-10 school year. Also, Kelly wrote, the department found that South Carolina met its obligations under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, despite the reduction in spending.

Kelly went on to say the state should request that the cut be a one-time reduction, not a cut that would be repeated every year.

Then suddenly this week, the Education Department sent Zais a letter indicating that it would delay the cut to give school districts more time to prepare for a reduction in special education dollars.

"In order to provide the state, and its local educational agencies, additional time to take whatever steps are necessary to plan for the reduction and ensure that a [free appropriate public education] is available to all children with disabilities residing in the state, ... the reduction will occur" on Oct. 1, 2012, wrote Alexa Posny, assistant secretary for the office of special education.

South Carolina views the backpedaling as a victory.

"Dr. Zais' action on behalf of the state has apparently persuaded the U.S. Department of Education to postpone their $36 million cut a full year to allow a full and fair hearing of our appeal," said Jay Ragley, a spokesman for the South Carolina Department of Education.

For what it's worth, the U.S. Department of Education tells me they didn't know of South Carolina's appeal until after issuing a letter notifying them of the delay.

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Some of the 91 special education parent training and information centers around the country learned Friday that they have won more than $5 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Education.

The department split the $5 million among 19 centers in 13 states and Puerto Rico. The centers, which are primarily supported by these grants, are available in every state.

They offer training, information, and assistance to families of children with all disabilities, from birth to 26, and those who work with these individuals. There's also a national center and six regional centers.

Some of the centers work with special groups of children, such as a New Mexico center that works with parents of Indian children with disabilities.

"Parents, be strong, hold on, and don't be afraid to utilize the resources available," parent Latanya Pinto, who is Alamo Navajo, said in a newsletter about her experience with that center, Education for Parents of Indian Children with Special Needs, or EPICS, helped her advocate on behalf of her young son. The center won a $1 million grant last year. "EPICS helped me to understand what I needed to do, they taught me about advocacy. EPICS helped me find my voice," she said.

The grants awarded Friday went to centers in Alabama, Florida, Nebraska, and New York, among other states. Parent training and information centers have been supported by the department for nearly 35 years, spokesman David Thomas said.

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A North Carolina high school football player with Down syndrome is off the team.

It's not because Brett Bowden can't play well—in fact he rarely played at all, according to several news reports.

But Mr. Bowden, 19, is too old to be a part of the team at Hobbton High School in Newton Grove, N.C., southeast of Raleigh. He's been on the team for two years.

Although the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act allows children to have educational services through their 22nd birthdays, that's not case for state rules about sports eligibility in many states.

That's in part because of safety issues; older players could be significantly stronger or larger than typical high-school-age students. Mr. Bowden will be a junior this year, which would have have been his third year on the team.

In North Carolina's case, a state board of education rule keeps players who turn 19 before Aug. 31 from playing, said Rick Strunk, associate commissioner of the North Carolina High School Athletic Association.

A hardship provision allows the NCHSAA to make exceptions when students' attendance or academic records don't meet requirements to play. But there are no exceptions for age, Mr. Strunk said. The rule about being ineligible to play at 19 has been on the books in North Carolina since 1974. Mr. Strunk added that in the last few years, the association rejected a request by a 19-year-old student who wanted to play, too. The rules apply to all sports, and all students, regardless of whether they have a disability.

"I hope we can get this worked out," Mr. Strunk told me. "We'd like to see him participate."

Nearly 17,000 people had signed onto a Facebook page called "Let Brett Bowden Play," as of Wednesday afternoon.

In reality, Mr. Bowden's participation involved suiting up for games. As a concession the NCHSAA said he may wear a football jersey and pants on the sidelines, but no football pads— to indicate he's not a player. Otherwise, ineligible players suited up for games could trigger another team to request a forfeit.

But that isn't enough for Mr. Bowden, or his family.

"It's not like Brett even plays; he just enjoys warming up with the team, practicing, putting on that number 11 jersey and pads," a statement from his family on the Facebook page reads. "This is what he looks forward to when school starts."

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Students with disabilities or health problems are more likely to be the target of bullies than their classmates, according to a study published this month in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Researchers found that "children with special health-care needs had lower motivation to do well in school, more disruptive behaviors, and more frequent experiences as a bully victim. They experienced significantly lower academic achievement, as measured by grades, standardized testing, and parental-assessed academic performance."

The study involved 1,457 4th, 5th, and 6th graders in two rural Maryland counties and one rural West Virginia county.

Students with special health care needs were more afraid of other girls and boys than students without a disability, but they were also slightly more likely to have attacked someone else at school or tell someone they would hurt them.

As part of the solution to these issues, the researchers suggested schools use anti-bullying programs—which many do, (and bullying has been the focus of much attention from the federal government lately, too), providing in-school mental health counseling, and referring students to community services if their needs can't be met in school.

And, they said, schools should provide a continuum of mental health care that connects families, primary medical care, communities, and schools.

"Unfortunately," the authors said, "there are few examples of such comprehensive, co-ordinated, and linked school-community initiatives."

However, one small school district in Minnesota said this week it will put mental health counselors in all 15 of its schools, in part because the district found that nonacademic issues, including depression and family upheaval, were affecting how students did in school.

"In addition to specific academic interventions, schools should provide abundant opportunities for children with a (health issue or disability) to develop confidence in their ability to learn and succeed in school, choose educational experiences that they value, and develop positive interpersonal relationships at school," the study authors concluded.

But they said the well-being and academic performance of these students is a joint responsibility of schools and the medical community.

"Health and school professionals will need to work together to identify these children much earlier, ensure that they receive appropriate supports and services, and monitor the effectiveness of services on children's health and school outcomes."

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Seven years after the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was renewed with a provision allowing response to intervention to be used when deciding if a child has a specific learning disability, a new study shows 71 percent of school districts use the strategy in at least one school.

IDEA requires the U.S. Department of Education to have the Institute of Education Sciences review how states and districts put the law into place, separate of annual reports submitted by the department to Congress on the implementation of the law. The latest national assessment, released in late July, found that response to intervention is used in 61 percent of all elementary schools, 45 percent of middle schools, and 29 percent of high schools.

RTI involves identifying students' learning problems quickly and using a series of focused lessons, or interventions, to address those problems before they become entrenched. The intensity of those interventions increases if the student doesn't respond.

It's not entirely surprising that RTI is growing in popularity, and it is probably in wider use than reflected in this study, which looked at RTI use in the 2008-09 school year. Earlier this year, one of my colleagues wrote about this trend, nudged along by the 2004 reauthorization of IDEA, which says states must allow districts to use RTI as a tool for determining if a child has a specific learning disability. And a recent report from the National Center on Learning Disabilities attributes the use of RTI as part of the reason behind the decline in the number of students found to have a learning disability over the last 10 years.

Building on this report, the Institute for Educational Sciences is working on a more in-depth evaluation of RTI that will describe how its practice for early grade reading varies across schools and how academic outcomes, including reading achievement and special education identification, vary with elementary schools' adoption of these practices.

Other findings about IDEA in the report:

• Almost 90 percent of special education teachers for preschool-age children with disabilities and school-age children and youth with disabilities are considered "highly qualified," but the definition of highly qualified varies sharply from state to state.

• About 5 percent of preschool-age and school-age special education teacher full-time positions were vacant during the 2008-09 school year. Among the districts that said qualified applicants were hard to find, more than half had difficulty finding qualified special education teachers who serve children in high school. In addition, it was particularly hard to find teachers to work with students with autism and emotional disturbances.

• For both young children and school-age children, the number of requests for due process hearings was far more than the number of due process hearings that actually took place. When parents have a complaint about the services their child receives, they can request one of these hearings to try to resolve their concerns. While the number of requests for these hearings stayed about the same from 2003 to 2008—about 22 requests for every 10,000 students with disabilities—the number that actually took place dropped by more than half, from 3.36 for every 10,000 students in 2003-04 to 1.61 in 2007-08.

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More than 30 years after passage of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, schools are still working on including students with disabilities in all facets of public school. And in many places, they remain segregated for at least part of the day, says Wayne Sailor.

"This has been a major uphill battle," Mr. Sailor, a professor of special education at the University of Kansas, told a group gathered in Arlington, Va., this week during a conference hosted by the U.S. Department of Education's office of special education programs.

He is still fighting those battles because of his firm belief, based in research, that students with disabilities almost surely cannot be successfully educated "if these kids are not engaged with kids who don't have their needs."

For many years now, Mr. Sailor has been working with public schools in the District of Columbia and East Palo Alto, Calif., as well as Kansas City and New Orleans, on changing the fundamental culture of how students with disabilities, and really all students, are taught.

By combining response to intervention and positive behavioral interventions and supports and destroying any opportunity for a student with disabilities to be segregated from other students, along with a host of other measures, the professor told a crowd Tuesday, all students can benefit, and achieve.

He rejects what happens in many schools now, when working with students with disabilities. They are diagnosed, then treated, often in separate classrooms for at least part of the day.

"It's not what a kid is; it's what a kid needs," he said. "If there's one term I could leave you with today, it's 'instructional match.' "

He's so forceful on this point that he said when his strategies are employed at a school, the work begins with a map of the school that is used to determine every available space. No classroom or office or any other space is allowed to be set aside for special education students exclusively.

He has the results to prove his approach works: At White Church Elementary in Kansas City, for example, the percentage of all students who were proficient on a state reading test in 2000 was 40 percent. Ten years later, it's 90 percent, and at one point, this school with many low-income students and where about 9 percent of students have disabilities outperformed schools in which students came from wealthy backgrounds.

"The real power going on at this school was, it had a powerful culture," Sailor maintained. But the change took time. Parent involvement and engagement is a critical piece of his approach, called "SAM," or Schoolwide Applications Model. He said districts looking for a magic bullet to improving outcomes for students with disabilities often hear his approach and say, "Don't call us; we'll call you."

SAM entails even providing services like speech or physical therapy in a group setting, where general education and special education students are mixed together. At some of the schools in D.C., he said speech therapists teach lessons that are part of the curriculum, helping students with and without a specified need for therapy. It may be preventive for students who are on the cusp of needing help, and the students who need therapy are reached as well.

It means that some of the therapists are volunteering their time to make this happen, working beyond the hours they are paid. That's a logistical issue that is due in part to the way most of special education works: based on hours or the amount of services a specific child must receive, he said. Some students' individualized education programs may even specify that they must receive their therapy in a separate setting, something he'd like to see changed.

"We really need to have more flexibility," he said.

At SAM schools, all students take part in the same physical education classes, with students who don't need adaptive equipment using it anyway.

"General education kids like all those gadgets, along with the child that really needs it," he said.

Fully changing a school culture and integrating instruction for all students, as well as getting parents involved and engaged, may take years, he said. But it works.

"We're for serving all the kids, no exceptions."

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