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“I’m going to say something you’re not going to like…”
This was my reluctant response to a group of 35 elementary school teachers during a recent professional development session.
We were brainstorming barriers to implementing inclusion in their building and, overwhelmingly, the number one concern they identified was a lack of staffing. I did not agree.
I had worked closely with this school for some time now, visiting classrooms, providing training, and delivering instructional coaching support. Ironically, immediately preceding the professional development session that morning, I had a conversation with the school principal about how well-resourced the school was and what a benefit their robust staffing would be when moving towards an inclusive model.
As I stood in front of the group of teachers, I hesitated and collected my thoughts before proceeding. “Staffing is not the problem here,” I offered, “It is the way the staff is being used.”
The conversation I had was not unique to this building. It seems that regardless of the type of school system I support - affluent or low income, well resourced or under-resourced, urban, suburban or rural - staffing arises as a concern.
I will “asterisk” this blog with the statement that there are certainly schools where staffing is a legitimate problem. What is interesting to me, however, is that nearly every school I support believes they do not have enough staff, even those for whom an objective, outside observer would judge otherwise.
Why, then, does staffing consistently come up as a challenge, even when it seems like the grown-ups are tripping over each other?
It comes down to this simple fact - absent an unlimited budget, schools cannot effectively and efficiently run a dual special education model.
The term dual special education model refers to attempts at implementing inclusive service delivery models of special education while simultaneously running self-contained, separate classrooms for disabled children. I refer to these efforts as implementation “attempts” because rarely are they effective. Most often, inclusive practices are not executed with fidelity. This results in half-hearted implementation with sporadic special education teacher support that is subsequently abandoned when it “doesn’t work.” Let’s examine why the dual model approach is ineffective…
Flaw : You can’t split the special education teacher in half.
When schools run dual models - models where some students are included and others go to special education classrooms for large chunks of the day - staffing is going to be a problem because we can’t split the special education teacher in half. In other words, the special educator is either with one group of students in an inclusive classroom or with another group in a self-contained setting. Because the "inclusive" class already has a general education teacher instructing the classroom, the default role for the special educator is teaching in self-contained.
An extension of this problem is the unrealistic expectations it places on special educators. How can they be expected to teach all day in separate settings while simultaneously monitoring the inclusion of students with disabilities in general education, AND writing IEPs? How??? Someone is getting the short end of the stick in this situation.
To remedy these problems, we must consider collapsing some of the separate classrooms and reducing the amount of time students spend in exclusionary settings. When this occurs, we begin to free up special education teachers and paraprofessionals to support more inclusively. We also must look at restructuring the role of the special educator to more accurately reflect the demands of an evolving role.*
Flaw: The "continuum of placement alternatives" provision of the law is relied upon while other segments of the law are ignored.
Many systems justify the heavy investment of special education teachers and paraprofessionals in separate programs through the argument that the law requires a continuum of alternative placement options for students with disabilities. This argument of providing a continuum for the sake of the law, takes a segment of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, out of context to justify separate classrooms.
While IDEA does reference a "continuum of placement alternatives," it also has quite a bit to say about what has to happen before we head down the path of removing a student from general education to a separate setting. Most notably, the statute states:
"Special classes, separate schooling, or other removal of children with disabilities from the regular educational environment occurs only if the nature or severity of the disability is such that education in regular classes with the use of supplementary aids and services cannot be achieved satisfactorily."
We can't cherry-pick the portions of the law that we like without considering ALL of our obligations under the law. Schools that invest heavy resources into separate programming in the name of "providing a continuum" build up one end of that continuum - more restrictive, separate classrooms. This diverts resources from the provision of supplementary aids and services within general education.
Rather than flooding the more restrictive end of the continuum with additional supports, we must embrace the "Least Restrictive Environment," or LRE, cornerstone of the federal special education law first. When we critically analyze what supplementary aids and services can be provided in general education before jumping to self-contained placements, we minimize the need for more restrictive, separate settings.
Flaw: There is a belief that all children with disabilities require support in the form of an adult.
When students with disabilities are included in general education, we often assume that their participation in that environment cannot be achieved without the support of an additional adult. This is not always the case. Consider for example, the student with a learning disability in math who is automatically assigned to co-taught classes for all academic areas when that level of support is really only needed in one. When every child with a disability is scheduled for the "inclusion class" or the "co-taught classroom," it results in classroom compositions that are more homogenous than diverse. Those classes have heavy enrollment of children with academic and behavioral challenges because it was assumed they all needed the same thing simply because they each have a disability. In this instance, assignment to a classroom with a higher level of adult support creates an additional problem rather than solving it.
Another consideration is related to the use of paraprofessionals. Reflect on the student with an intellectual disability who has been assigned a one-to-one paraprofessional since pre-school and subsequently becomes "prompt-dependent" because there is always a grown-up nearby to intervene. The unintended consequence of well-meaning adult support is learned helplessness.
While adult support may be reasonable and warranted in some cases, the automatic assignment of additional staff can do more harm than good. Individual student needs must be examined when considering additional adult support.
Flaw: Resources are heavily funneled into separate special education classrooms.
The premise that guides this approach is that if the most disabled children are all in a room together, that’s where we need to put the most staff. While this may appear to make sense on the surface, closer examination reveals a multitude of problems. First, classrooms consisting of only students with disabilities generally have caps on the number of children who can be enrolled in those programs, as dictated by law. These classrooms are usually assigned classroom teachers and often have one or two classroom assistants. On top of that, there may be students enrolled in these programs whose IEPs indicate they need one-to-one personal care assistants. This can lead to “over-supported” special education classrooms with low student-teacher ratios and “inclusive” classrooms that lack support in the form of human resources. There are only so many people to go around and we can’t put them all in one place.
Flaw: Self-contained settings do not deliver on the promise of increased academic achievement and more positive behavioral and social outcomes for students with disabilities.
If our schools were doing an amazing job of educating students with disabilities in separate classrooms, we could argue that the investment of a high number of teachers and paraprofessionals in those settings is justifiable. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Study after study, decade after decade, the research reveals the same thing - students with disabilities educated in separate settings are subject to lower expectations, spend less time on instructional tasks, are suspended and expelled at greater rates than their peers, and have poorer academic achievement, behavioral outcomes and social engagement than those in inclusive settings.**
Special education guru and former director of the Office for Special Education Programs, the late Dr. Thomas Hehir, shared this perspective years ago:
“Kids who have been included in general education have higher reading scores, do better in mathematics, and are more apt to be employed and live independently when they leave school. People still debate whether it’s the right thing to do. Stop the debate. The evidence is in.”
Flaw: More of the same does not equal fundamental change.
When we accept at face value that the special education structures and models currently in place need to remain in place, the answer is more. More special education teachers! More paraprofessionals! More behavior specialists! But when we keep adding more of the same without adjusting our structures, practices, and policies, we are only perpetuating the problem. These actions result in a “band aid” approach that maintains an ineffective status quo rather than one that transforms a system in dire need of repair.
The last word…
Maybe you believe that we should just keep doing what we're doing and accept that more staff is needed. Maybe despite all the research, you still can’t get behind the idea that inclusion creates better educational and post-school opportunities, and in turn, a better world. I realize everyone is not as idealistic as I am. If you fall into that camp, I’ll offer you a purely pragmatic argument: money.
Redesigning our special education programs and effectively allocating our resources not only results in better outcomes for students, it promotes responsible financial stewardship. The traditional model of self-contained special education does not work. This is not opinion - it is fact, supported by voluminous research.
Why then do we continue to pour resources into something that has been proven time and time again to be ineffective?
If we are so research-based and evidence-based in all other areas of education, why not with this one?
More is not always better. Let’s stop assuming it is and take a hard look at what really needs to be done.
*For more information on restructuring the role of the special educator, check out the chapter on realigning service delivery in Reimagining Special Education - bit.ly/rufo1
**Go to www.empoweredschool.org/research for your free, downloadable guide on inclusive education research.
If you are ready to take the next step in redesigning your school's special education programming, contact Jenna at jenna@empoweredschool.org for specialized offerings and administrative trainings on resource allocation, staffing, and scheduling. Our Leading Inclusion Administrative Series is one of our most popular offerings!
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