Q & A: ‘The System Wasn’t Working’
A New Effort To Mainstream Special Education Students
In July 2009, Chancellor Joel Klein appointed Laura Rodriguez to the first cabinet-level special education position. Deputy Chancellor Rodriguez came up through the ranks in NYC’s public schools, beginning as a high school teacher, and has worked for four chancellors at DOE headquarters. Today, Ms. Rodriguez leads the campaign to build system- wide capacity to accelerate the achievement of all students with disabilities, a plan she and then-Chancellor Joel Klein announced a year ago. The mission: to ensure that all children with disabilities attend their community schools alongside their peers without disabilities when possible. Ten networks – 265 schools – were selected to participate in the reform’s Phase One. To give you an idea of Phase One progress and challenges, CSA Communications Director Chiara Coletti met with Ms. Rodriguez at Tweed Courthouse.
How did this special education initiative begin?
We saw that many students with disabilities were not benefitting from their education. The school system was graduating only 24 percent of students with disabilities in four years. We were out of compliance in several ways. We could see there were so many challenges in this situation that we could do nothing short of mounting a system-wide campaign.
Based on 39 recommendations in a July 2009 report by Garth Harries, a senior member of Chancellor Klein’s team, we developed five guiding principles (see box below) as the framework for system-wide reform, starting with the principle that the vast majority of children with disabilities should attend the schools they would attend if they did not have a disability.
Don’t many zoned schools serve children with disabilities?
Yes, but many families were turned away because the school didn’t have the specific program or class for their child. Families wanted to access their local schools and we, in our admissions and placement practices, weren’t allowing that to happen very often. Children with a change in their IEP found that the change sometimes triggered requiring
them to leave their school.
We also examined why so few students were graduating in four years. A lot of these students had too little access to the general education curriculum and to general education peers, and this put them at a disadvantage in terms of outcomes. At the same time, increased interaction with disabled peers helps non-disabled students in all the social and emotional contexts that are important to their development.
Why Phase One?
Our approach was to start working with networks on a small scale and we identified networks with interest in doing this kind of work. We weren’t going to prescribe a particular approach, but we were going to strengthen and uphold the IEP and use it as an instructional tool.
Does your work on the IEP relate to the new state IEP mandate?
In July 2011, the state will require all schools to implement a new IEP. This new IEP supports our reform initiative because it places greater emphasis on instruction. We are already pretty much in step.
What the state said to Principals and to us is that the only way you can be out of compliance is by not doing what’s on the IEP or doing something in special education that is not recommended. It’s also important to involve parents and include them in the IEP process. We’ve learned that the more schools personalize instruction and include parents in decisions, the more parents are flexible with innovative approaches.
What is SESIS and is it working?
We’ve introduced SESIS, Special Education Student Information System, a web-based case management system for services and processes around students with disabilities. Its purposes are to support the development of sound IEPs; to provide a vehicle for the new NYS IEP; to enable schools to track the progress of individual cases; to centrally manage individual student files so that important paperwork can be retrieved and referred to whenever educators need it; and to replace the old CAP system.
We hear SESIS has some glitches.
Well, technology is usually complicated. Remember, in the beginning, Phase Two was supposed to start in the school year beginning September 2011. One of the reasons we changed that to September 2012 was because of SESIS. Anything that is technologybased has challenges and we wanted to be sure that we had time to work out
the kinks and provide further training.
Our Principals see the value of SESIS, but they rightly believe it requires technical integrity and substantial training. Many Phase One Principals have chosen to send someone, or a whole team, to the training so they will be able to communicate back to the rest of the school. And SESIS requires a better understanding of the IEP process than in former days. You can’t just go through the motions. SESIS stops you and asks you to answer questions related to the child and the IEP.
What are some other Phase One challenges?
We met with all the Principals from all the networks and we’re aware of their concerns about funding the initiative. These are tough financial times, and they’re going to get tougher. Principals are looking at all their resources so children with disabilities
will benefit from the reform initiative.
Principals in Phase One have indicated that keeping all of their students with disabilities is a good thing. They understand that making a change on an IEP will not trigger removal of the child from the school; at the same time, the goal is that students with disabilities from other communities will not be placed in Phase One schools. Generally, Principals are saying this is good.
How will you prepare teachers?
The Principals’ biggest responsibility, in addition to improving student outcomes, is investing in teachers. Investment in teacher
capacity-building is so important. Not just in building capacity among general education teachers who may not have worked much with students with disabilities, but with special education teachers.
Tell us more about plans for professional development.
In addition to ongoing schooland network-based professional development, Phase One schools can send teams to the Teachers College Inclusive Classrooms Project (TCICP) for help in a specific instructional area. TCICP will continue to be our partner next school year when we implement a three-year state-funded institute. This June, TCICP will hold a conference for teachers by teachers where best practices will be shared. We need to continue partnering with organizations like CSA’s Educational Leadership Institute with the kind of sessions we did last summer.
As we learn from Phase One schools and the research, we understand the importance of coplanning between general and special education teachers. This needs to be reinforced.
How about capacity building for Principals and APs?
Phase One clusters and networks have created forums for Principals and APs to come together. Their enthusiasm is helping to sustain the momentum.
We have a Principals Advisory Group, which is very powerful, that tells us the good, bad and ugly about what we’re doing and
they tell us how to shape things. There have been bumps in Phase One. It hasn’t been perfect. But there’s momentum.
If you could say just one thing to Principals and APs, what would it be?
Let everybody in your school community know what this reform is about. When parents don’t know and teachers don’t know, when they aren’t engaged in the conversation, they think it’s something other than what it is. It really is preparing all students, including students with disabilities, for success in high school and beyond. I’d say remember that schools that do well by children with disabilities do well by all children.
