Are We There Yet?

Critical Issues in Urban Special Education: Improving Outcomes for Students with Disabilities

Harvard Graduate School of EducationA 2006 Retrospective

Presenter: Mary Beth Rolak-Sieracki: NBCT: Project Collage

Illinois Reading Council Springfield, IllinoisOctober 3, 2014

My Background

From July 18 to July 22, 2006, I joined the Chief Officers and representatives from Specialized Services, Literacy, Math, Language and Culture, and the Area Instruction Offices of Chicago Public Schools at the Critical Issues in Urban Special Education Institute held at Harvard University.

I wrote the summary report of the Institute for CPS.

Conference presenters shared findings of their extensive research related to serving the needs of all children – from birth to graduation.

Two robust themes emerged and were interwoven throughout the research presented – relationships and access – critical factors in ensuring that all students benefit from their schooling experiences.

Jack Shonkoff, M.D. Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University

Author of:“The Science of Early Childhood Development”

“Closing the Gap Between What We Know and What We Do to Promote Early Learning During the Early Childhood Years”

Social, emotional, and cognitive development are highly interrelated.

•Healthy development depends on the quality and reliability of a young child’s relationships with the important people in his or her life, both within and outside the family.

•Even the development of a child’s brain architecture depends on the establishment of these relationships.

Preparing children to succeed in school requires that we pay as much attention to children’s emotional well-being and social capacities as we do to their cognitive abilities and academic skills.

Children who develop warm, positive relationships with their kindergarten teachers are:

•More excited about learning,

•More positive about coming to school

•More self-confident

•Will achieve more in the classroom.

Essential features of “effective interventions”

Individualization of service delivery

Provider knowledge, skills, and relationship with the family.

It’s all about relationships. “You can’t provide state of the art intervention if you don’t have state-of-the-art knowledge.”

Quality of program implementation

Family-centered, community-based, and coordinated orientation.

“Children are not educated by curriculum; they are educated by people.”

Broad access to high-quality preschool for 3 and 4 year olds, with proactive enrollment from low-income families, can be an effective strategy to reduce early inequalities in opportunity.

It’s morally wrong for children to begin life with limited opportunity.

Warm hearts and a bag of toys are not effective interventions.

Margaret J. McLaughlin, M.D.

Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of Exceptional Children and Youth at University of Maryland

Author of:“The School as the Unit of Improvement”

“Moving Beyond the IEP”

From from the mid to late 1980s, we had a model that solidified the “separate

system” of educating children.

During this time special education’s focus is on uniform implementation of a complex law and solidifies itself as a separate program with its own policy goals and practices.

The “inclusion” years followed in the 1990’s.

Assessment and accountability “hit” schools and general education teachers begin to lose control over curriculum and pedagogy. Special educators maintain control over special education through the IEP.

During the NCLB years (2000 - ) “accountability” hits special education.

Improving test scores, not just assessment participation, becomes the policy goal.

All children must now attain an adequate level of achievement of the state standards.

The Result:

Special educators sense a loss of control over the IEP and tension between individual versus school accountability and improvement emerges.

Special education begins to grapple with its identity.

What do we see inside good schools?

Curriculum is linked to standards and all teachers know what is in the curriculum.

General education teachers know what they are to teach and how to teach it (strength observed in using strategies in large and small group settings).

Collaboration and communication is fluid and almost informal.

Special educators have strong pedagogy and work in flexible support roles.

Curriculum access is becoming the driver of special education-the IEP supports access to the curriculum.

The focus of special education is to support the student learning important and challenging knowledge, skills, and processes, therefore special education must be organized as a curriculum support – not simply reactive to individual needs.

Creating the conditions for access to the curriculum…

Develop “collective responsibility”. Expect that every teacher accepts responsibility for all children’s progress in the curriculum and in the social and behavioral domains.

To provide real access to the general education curriculum…

Teachers must understand the “intended” curriculum (related to standards) as distinguished from the “taught” curriculum (modified).

IEPs must align with the intended curriculum and goals must reflect a systematic scope and sequence of a knowledge domain.

Teachers must distinguish between accommodations and modifications

Accommodations are supports or services that do not alter the construct being taught or assessed.

Modifications change the content and/or performance expectations in the intended curriculum.

Remember…Special education is a service, not a place.

Thomas Hehir, Ed.D Professor of Practice in LearningDifferences at the Harvard Graduate School of Education

Author of:“Effective Inclusive Schools”

“Designing Successful Schoolwide Programs”

In an age of standards-based reform and inclusion, what is the proper role for general education, and to what degree are regular educators accountable for students with disabilities?

Are the only important results of our efforts performance on standards-based assessments, or do we have a more robust agenda?

•Negative cultural assumptions about disability continue to have a pervasive influence on the education of children with disabilities, contributing to low level of educational attainment and employment.

• The assumption that disabilities must be “overcome” means that school time is devoted to various therapies that may take away from the time needed to learn academic material.

•The reasons for the lack of acceptable educational outcomes for students with disabilities are complex. The main symptom of dyslexia is the failure to learn to read, and yet dyslexic children are not the only children who struggle with reading.

•Some students’ failure to read may be due to poor instruction.

•There is evidence that of the 12 to 18 percent of the K-1 student population that has the most difficulty learning to read, research-based interventions are effective with 70% (Lyon et al., 2001).

•These students are described in the literature as those who fail to respond to intervention (RTI).

•Most experts agree that dyslexia, the most common disability served by special education, is a life-long disability (Shaywitz, 2003).

•The point is that dyslexia is highly responsive to context (how reading is taught) and that some students may be functionally disabled due to educational and environmental deprivation.

“I believe the role of special education should be to minimize the impact of disability and

maximize the opportunities for children with disabilities to participate in general education

in their natural community.”

The importance of integration into general education environments should be a central consideration.

•Special education teachers teaching subjects they are not qualified to teach is a common practice that likely increases the impact of a disability.

•Using the analogy of architecture, we often attempt to retrofit the children with inappropriate interventions after they have failed in school rather than design the instructional program from the beginning to allow for access and success.

Given the centrality of competent reading to all educational

attainment, is it possible to design reading programs that prevent reading failure among those at

risk, both disabled and non-disabled?

Loujeania BoostDirector and Co- Principal Investigator at National Dropout Prevention Center for Students with Disabilities

Intervening early and getting students “back on track” to graduation will not only reduce drop-out rate but will positively impact:

Middle grade and high-school test scoresAttendance

Learning environment

Academic solutions include:

Remedial education/fast-track curriculum models

Language! (corrective and strategic reading)

Institutionalizing the curricula (relates to Tom Hehir’s concept of universal design)

From a developmental perspective, academic engagement is the key to dropout on the personal side of the equation. (Alexander, Entwisle, $ Horsey, 1997)

Engagement has been describe as the critical variable in dropout prevention and intervention efforts (Grannis, 1994).

Guiding principles of dropout prevention initiative:

Think about your end goal – a focus on school completion encompasses a broader view than simply preventing dropout.

Engaging students in school and learning is a key ingredient in preventing dropout and keeping kids in school (participation, identification, social bonding, personal investment in learning).

Use evidence-based practices and interventions.

Measuring the effectiveness of your efforts is essential to assessing progress and replication by others.

Begin early – high school is too late!

Some effective strategies:

Establish systems to routinely monitor alterable variables.

Help students build relationships at school.

Increase family engagement and school involvement.

Invest in improvements in early childhood education – reading and math.

Invest in mentoring and tutoring.

Provide enhancements that increase school-wide social competence-positive behavioral supports.

Improve quality of instruction that leads to academic success.

Karen Mapp Ed.DSenior Lecturer on Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE)

Author of:“The Why, What and How of Effective School, Family and

Community Partnerships”

Parent and community involvement that is linked to

improved student learning has a greater effect on achievement

than more general forms of involvement.

The keys to building partnerships:

•When programs and initiatives focus on building trusting and respectful relationships among school staff, families, and community members, these programs are effective in creating and sustaining meaningful partnerships.

•Programs that effectively connect with parents evidence the three-step process: Welcoming, Honoring, Connecting.

Overall finding: There is a positive and convincing relationship between family involvement and benefits for students, including improved academic achievement. This relationship holds across families of all economic, racial/ethnic, and educational backgrounds and for students of all ages.

Four years after publication of the findings presented at The Critical Issues in Urban Education Institute and using the best they know about a field still evolving:

What practices/policies in classrooms and schools best minimize a student’s disability and maximize his/her participation with grade level peers?

Fast forward to 2010…

During the same year that brought Common Core State Standards to more than 40 states, I attended:

The 25th Annual Learning Differences Conference

Harvard Graduate School of EducationPrograms in Education:

Overview of 25 Years of Research and PracticeMarch 19 – 20, 2010

The 25th Annual Learning Differences Conference

Harvard Graduate School of EducationPrograms in Education: Overview of 25 Years of Research and Practice

Presenter: Mary Beth Rolak-Sieracki: NBCT

Originally presented: March 26, 2010Chicago, IL

Dr. Lynn

MeltzerDr. Thomas

Hehir

Dr. Robert Brooks

Dr. Donald Deshler

Dr. Kurt Fischer Dr. David Rose

Dr. Robert Sternberg

Conference Presenters

Dr. Lynn MeltzerPresident/Director of Research at the Research Institute for

Learning and Development; Associate Professor of Education: Harvard; Past-president and fellow of the prestigious International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities

Dr. Thomas HehirProfessor of Practice at Harvard Graduate School of

Education; Director of the U.S. Dept. of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs (1993-1999); played a leading role in developing the Clinton Administration’s proposal for the reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)

Dr. Robert BrooksFaculty: Harvard Medical School; former Director of the

Dept. of Psychology at McLean University

Dr. Donald DeshlerReceived a presidential appointment to serve as a member

of the National Institute for Literacy Advisory Board; advisor to U.S. State Department; Distinguished Professor of Special Education and the Director of the Center for Research on Learning (CRL) at the University of Kansas

Dr. Kurt FischerCharles Bigelow Professor of Education at the Harvard

Graduate School of Education and Founder and Director of the Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) program

Dr. David Rose

Lecturer: Harvard Graduate School of Education; Specialist in developmental neuropsychology and in the universal design of learning technologies; Founder of CAST (the Center for Applied Special Technology) in order to expand opportunities for students with disabilities through the innovative development and application of technology

Dr. Robert SternbergProfessor of Psychology: Tufts University; IBM Professor of

Psychology and Education and Management at Yale University; a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; past-president of the American Psychological Association (APA)

25 years of Theory and Practice: Innovations Based on Lessons Learned

• This panel of experts discussed changes over the past 25 years in our understanding of learning difficulties as well as our methods of assessment, diagnosis, and treatment.

• The panel explored the ongoing challenges that educators will need to address in our 21st century schools and the accommodations that need to be made for students with learning and attention problems across different grade-levels and content areas.

• Instruction should focus on content area “content knowledge” and classrooms of peer-support strategies.

• Instruction should include hands-on and project-based learning.

• Instruction should include self-regulation strategies.

Learning Differences research has moved toward an emphasis on instruction and practice.

There has been a rush to move children from Tier One to Tier Three.

-Deshler

“Print can be part of a disability. David Rose considers print to be a major part of a student's disability.”

The Performance or Achievement Gap is the difference between skills level and the demands of the curriculum

The Performance Gap needs infrastructuresupports that include:Literacy Leadership TeamsData mechanismsBehavioral supportsFlexible schedulingStrong building leadershipDistrict SupportInternal accountability mechanisms

What are the defining features of success?

1. A coordinated school-wide literacy approach

1. Strong administrative leadership

1. On-site capacity building literacy support

1. Even though not all teachers are reading teachers, every teacher needs to teach their students to read in their content class.

-Deshler

Fast Forward again to 2014.

Think about the students in your learning community:

Is special education in your building serving as a vehicle for access to the general education curriculum and as a support for relationship building?

Are you there yet?