The Green Cup

I answered a question for myself this week. It was a longstanding, nagging question that cut to the core of what I do as a special ed teacher. I can’t remember exactly how it was phrased, but in my own words it was something like this:

Under what circumstances is it justified to remove a special education student from inclusion in the general education classroom?

One of the teachers at my school has a daughter who is majoring in education in college. The daughter volunteers at our school occasionally. The kids love her; she loves the kids. One day last week she asked me if I’d answer some questions for her for a class. And question number four (I think) out of six was this question.

Out of the mouth of babes…, I thought.

The question is a controversial one. There are plenty of patronizing people around who think that most children with disabilities are better off, socially and educationally, in a separate room. Someplace where they can get more attention. Someplace where they can be with other kids “like themselves.” Someplace where the risk of failure and frustration isn’t so great.

There are also people out there who advocate for the rights of those who aren’t disabled in some way. They say that special education children can be a distraction to the class. Their needs, their immaturity (or developmental delays) can be disruptive, they say. Some go so far as to say that exposing “normal” children to kids with disabilities can be traumatic for the normal children. Normal kids should learn about Down Syndrome in their early 20’s from a doctor who’s caring for them or their spouse during a pregnancy, not by having a Down Syndrome child in their kindergarten or first grade class.

So there I sat, shuffling through my brain in the back of a classroom where a student with a profound disability is well accepted by peers and achieving academically better than some of the “normal” kids in the room, trying to come up with a good answer for a 20ish year old college student with a servant’s heart and a few freckles.

I started my career as a special education teacher sincerely believing that kids who where mentally impaired or had learning disabilities were better off outside the general education setting. They were mine. I understood their needs. But now I have a few years’ experience…

Kids in America have a right to a free, appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment possible. – whether they have a disability or not. “Normal” kids don’t have a right to be sheltered from real life.

My answer: It’s justified to remove a child with a disability from the general education classroom (from “inclusion”) when the general education environment itself becomes an impediment to meeting the child’s needs. Students with disabilities have a legal right to be in the general education classroom.

And if someone asked me. “What about the rights of the ‘normal’ kids?” Well, they have a right to be there, too…

I’ve heard it a few times from people in educational leadership: we’re building a plane while we’re flying it. Usually, I get the urge to get off when I hear that. It doesn’t strike me as inspirational – unless the goal is to inspire fear…

Brian Eno recently talked about the nature of the coming change:

We’re either at the start of a renaissance, or at the end of civilisation. Increasingly, from facts and figures and arithmetic, we’re building the intellectual tools to decide which it will be. While some shrill conservatives cling to the past, the rest of us are moving forward to something still in the process of being defined. That’s why, compared to them, we look a bit untogether. They know precisely what they don’t want, but we can’t yet clearly articulate what we do want. That’s the nature of the future—it’s a collective act of informed imagination. And the quality of information is improving. (Emphasis added.)

My friend John Connell commented on Eno’s idea of how data impacts our decision making. Here’s Eno’s quote:

In the absence of data, you theorise. In an abundance, you just need to do the maths. And, because of all those super-efficient search engines, we share more and more data. Data dissolves ideology.

Connell disagrees; and so do I. Connell points out that not only do we still have to make assumptions, but the energy in the current debate about the future comes about because we’re not able to agree on those assumptions – assumptions that Eno thinks are so obvious (in light of all the data available), they’re inescapable (just a matter of doing the math).

I like the metaphor of a coming Renaissance when we talk about change and about new direction. Airplanes are, well, mechanical; and if they don’t work, we crash and burn. The Renaissance was a more productive form of chaos.

Eno has muddied an important distinction. There’s a difference between facts and truth. Truth is more real, but less tangible. And while it might seem like an abundance of facts would lead to obvious conclusions, the truth is that facts are manipulable. Individual facts may not be malleable, but a collection of fact usually is manipulable. And people manipulate them to draw conclusions they’d already suspected (or hoped) to be true…

The National Journal published a short piece recently and asked that question: How should teacher effectiveness be measured? They start by referring to a recent study on teacher effectiveness measures (or the lack of them):

In a report titled “The Widget Effect,” the nonprofit New Teacher Project found that in public schools nationwide, teacher effectiveness is not measured, recorded or used to inform decision-making in any meaningful way. The result, according to the study, is a system where teachers are treated as interchangeable parts.

My first thought is that the answer can’t be a binary one. We can’t confine ourselves to the narrow box of saying that a teacher is either effective or not effective. It’s more complicated than that.

Neither can the answer be related solely to student achievement measured in a single year.

The National Journal’s blog post had 25 comments on it when last I looked at it…

I’m not really an advocate of school choice for the simple reason that in my sparsely populated, physically rugged part of Appalachia it is a somewhat impractical approach to providing students with improved education environments. If little my school (about 110 students this year in 7 grades with 10.4 teachers) doesn’t adequately serve the kids in Jenkinjones and Anawalt, it’s a hour or so on the bus to the next closest school (which probably doesn’t have room for them).

Simply closing “bad” schools might be a marvelous idea in Chicago (we’ll come back to that idea), but in rural America it takes a few years of planning and usually requires that districts find outside resources. It’s also a gamble in the sense that you can close an old school if it’s “bad,” but if you decide in six or eight years that the new school is just as bad, academically, you’re pretty much done with the school closure option. No district in my part of rural Appalachia is going to close a 10 year old building for any reason short of a natural disaster. Closing an old school and reopening it with new staff is also problematic because we are chronically short of teachers in key areas.

The Chicago Tribune looked recently at a study of school closures in Chicago. The study concluded that the effort to close poorly performing schools in Chicago between 2001 and 2006 resulted in only 6% of the students from closed schools ending up “at top schools, as measured by standardized test scores.” The study also concluded that students at closed schools regressed during the period of time between the announcement that their school would be closed and the time it was actually shut down. Then they showed no change in educational performance at their new school.

The Special Education Law Blog draws a fascinating conclusion in a post on the topic: Closing really bad schools doesn’t accomplish much of anything if you don’t have room for those kids at good schools (of if you don’t have good schools at all). School choice puts the cart before the horse. Step one is not closing bad schools, it’s building good schools. When a district succeeds at that, then it can argue about whether to close the “bad” schools or apply what they’ve learned from building the good schools to the bad schools in the hope that they’ll improve.