Response: The Special Education Overhaul and NYC’s Special District

In a thorough piece on the special education reform that has begun in recent years in New York City Public Schools, ChalkbeatNewYork’s Patrick Wall focuses on several students, families and schools and how they have adapted as a result of new policies that steered students with disabilities to their neighborhood schools in Kindergarten, 6^th and 9^th grades, rather than schools with specific special education programs. 

What the article fails to mention is that these schools, with special education programs and related services already in place, are not just another community school option but are most likely part of New York City’s District 75. This district is an entirely separate district composed only of children with disabilities, most of whom are bused long distances to attend these programs. When people are discussing self-contained options for students with disabilities in New York City, it is important to understand that these are isolated self-contained classrooms in self-contained special education schools and that we are not just talking about another classroom down the hall. 

There are approximately 23,000 students with various disabilities in District 75 with schools throughout the five boroughs. Interestingly, the DOE’s new website no longer lists a specific number of students, only that there are “56 school organizations,” but you can find the number on their old website here. No other school district is organized in such a segregated fashion, as far as I can tell from much conversation and research. Across the country inclusion, in various forms, is the norm and it is rare to find more than a couple of self-contained classrooms in a district or even entire counties. Yet here in New York City, we not only have 23,000 students in self-contained classrooms, but in substantially separate schools. Although many District 75 schools are physically housed in buildings with other schools, anyone in NYC knows co-located schools spend more time fighting for precious space and resources than integrating.

A big part of the problem in New York City is that there is this funnel that flows right to District 75 for any child that a school deems too difficult to educate, like Joseph in today’s Chalkbeat article. It does not specify whether the other, more appropriate school that the administration found for Joseph was not a community school, but I would bet that it was a District 75 school. District 75 seems to be the missing piece of the special education reform story that no one mentions.

As a teacher of students with multiple disabilities, I understand the benefits of a highly specialized environment for some students with significant disabilities, especially in a complex urban school system where these students might otherwise be in the corner of a basement somewhere. The problem is that in NYC we fool ourselves into thinking that these students have been brought out of the basement by having these District 75 school organizations, when in essence they only perpetuate the isolation of students with disabilities from their communities.

A red flag of a student who doesn’t belong in District 75 for me is when a student, like Joseph, is reading at a 3^rd grade level, which means most likely he is not severely intellectually disabled. If he comprehends what he reads, he can most likely access middle school material presented visually or orally with some accommodations. Joseph also managed to get all the way through elementary school and only began to struggle in middle school. This is not the profile of a student with severe/ profound disabilities that District 75 was intended to serve.

Most students in District 75, because of their significant disabilities, are alternately assessed and do not take coursework that leads to a high school diploma. By high school, most schools focus on transition skills that will enable students to communicate in the community, have some independent living skills and possibly have some type of employment. When a student is sent to District 75 from a community school, their IEPs are changed to alternate assessment, which will forever limit their life options because they will obtain an IEP certificate, not a diploma.

Students with severe/ profound disabilities make up less than 1% of all students in NYC, most teachers and schools have never encountered such a student. A student with profound disabilities is non-verbal, meaning he does not use a single word and it is unclear what the child wants because they have not learned a formal communication system, who lacks all control of his muscles and is dependent on others for all their care needs, and who might also be visually impaired, deaf or both. Another student who may need the specialized environment of District 75 might have severe autism, meaning they engage in self-stimulating behaviors all day or be self-abusive and require strict behavioral programs to learn to not hurt themselves or meet their own care needs and gain independence.

No honest discussion about special education reform can take place without discussing the way that New York City isolates its most disabled students in District 75, taking the burden off of community schools who are fixated on test scores and data. I commend those who are trying to stop District 75 from becoming an easy dumping ground for challenging students and can only hope that this is the beginning of an essential change in our city. Until we think of all New York City students as “our kids,” not ours and theirs, no true special education reform will occur.

Take the “I” out of Special Education

It must be my old age. But many years into teaching, the things that stressed me most my first few years just seem so miniscule now. It pains me to watch younger teachers learning the lesson that not everything is in your control and you need to accept the things you cannot change right at that moment. Even in special education, it’s rarely the kids that send a teacher home crying, it’s unsupportive co-workers. Now that I can navigate the always shifting personalities of a school better, I still don’t understand why elders in our profession make it so difficult for new teachers.

A change is coming, I can see it, a special ed “oasis,” where me-focused individuals hid is crumbling.

But I fear they are sucking the life out of everyone around them before they go.

If you’re truly here for the kids, don’t you want to see this teacher succeed, along with all her students?

If you’re here for the kids,

why do you let old school policies and outdated thinking dictate how your school is run?

If you’re here for the kids,

why do you keep telling me how busy YOU are?

And it trickles down to all staff members who are suppose to be collaborating in classrooms.

If you’re here for the kids,

why are you talking about YOUR report?

If you’re here for the kids,

why ignore a teacher who asks you about how you’re working with a student?

If you’re here for the kids,

why are you talking about YOUR feelings and your supervisor?

If you’re here for the kids,

why are you talking about YOUR schedule?

During my undergraduate student teaching in general education, I had a funny moment where I was caught off guard by my clinical supervisor’s criticism. My supervising teacher continually gave me nothing but praise. After keeping a running record of my comments during an observation, the clinical supervisor pointed out that I used a lot of “I” statements. Like, “I need your homework handed in” or “I need you to do this task for me and then come back to me.” I had never realized this. It was something I was naturally doing. It sparked an interesting discussion about how you want students to do things, but not because they’re just doing it FOR the teacher. They should be doing things for themselves, not for YOU.

I think those who are working in special education need to take a close look at how many “I” statements they are using these days and really ask ourselves if we are truly “here for the kids.”

Charlotte Danielson is not evil?

(As long as teachers can still use their intuition)

“Learning to trust your instincts, using your intuitive sense of what's best for you, is paramount for any lasting success. I've trusted the still, small voice of intuition my entire life. And the only time I've made mistakes is when I didn't listen.” – Oprah Winfrey

The other day I just happened to catch an NPR Radiolab piece on “Choice” and being “Overcome by Emotion.” Essentially, the hosts were discussing if we were all completely rational beings, like Spock from Star Trek, would we have an easier time making choices throughout our day. In theory, you think of course, but in reality it’s our emotions and intuition that keep us out of a circle of rationality. When you finally remember your favorite cereal from childhood, you are saved from the endless oblivion of choices in the supermarket aisle.

After sharing a series of interesting stories related to emotion and choice, Jad Abumrad came to the conclusion that, “one way to look at a gut feeling is that its kind of a short-hand average of all of this past wisdom.” (Quote is at 12:30)

Teacher Knowledge

I had a light bulb moment. As teachers, so much of our day is piecing gut feelings together. What separates a good teacher from a bad teacher is strong implicit knowledge of what good teaching looks like and how to implement it. Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan L. Lytle refer to this as “teacher knowledge” in their work on teacher action research. Listening to the NPR piece on the reality of intuition, I was excited that there was neurological evidence to support the notion that what teachers know is particular to teachers and is important in educating children.

But then I thought, “oh, no!” This does not jive with all these “teacher effectiveness” buzzwords I have been hearing lately.

Or does it?

Teacher Effectiveness Confusion

My first experience with the Danielson framework was while working with a student teacher last spring. She came to me concerned about using “low-inference evidence” to support her work with our students who were emergent communicators with multiple disabilities. I immediately thought, “you want evidence of what my students say, only? Hmm, most of them are non-verbal… how’s this going to work?” The student teacher gave an example of grading student papers without knowing who they were, so that you would not be biased. I thought, “great, my students cannot write and definitely do not independently do worksheets.”

This was what I was thinking of as I combed through the New York City’s Department of Education (DOE)’s website for implementing the new teacher evaluation system based on the Danielson’s Framework for Teaching, also known as Advance. (Because everything needs to have its own name in NYC, can’t just be APPR like the rest of New York State.) I was looking for a better understanding and I cross-referenced the DOE’s info with the Danielson Group website and other web resources.

A Danielson Framework Surprise

I have to admit that I have come to the conclusion that Charlotte Danielson may not be as evil as we have been led to believe. It seems that its our state education departments and local school districts in their rush for accountability that may be corrupting the important work of documenting what good teachers know and do.

Shockingly, I have to say that this particular PowerPoint from the NYC DOE was actually quite helpful. I appreciated that their definition of low-inference included what students say AND do. I also got the impression that this was about improving administrators’ practices, as well as teachers. I went looking for evidence that teachers had to be robots teaching to a strict norm, but I only found it on district websites about “norming,” not in Danielson’s actually work, like here.

Teacher Knowledge and Danielson Working Together?

I started thinking: is Danielson’s work finally what we as teachers have been looking for in order to prove our implicit teacher knowledge? I have always felt good teachers should have nothing to fear about being observed; could this be a tool that could confirm that we are effective teachers?

What Low-Inference Really Means

It turns out low-inference does not just mean grading papers without knowing who the students are, but can be something like using a checklist during your lesson to document that students are meeting specific IEP objectives. Low-inference has come to have two meanings in education: low-inference observations of what our students are doing by teachers and administrators and low-inference observations of what teachers are doing by administrators.

Because I am a special education teacher, I initially thought that everything I do is high-inference, such as observing children’s movements and facial expressions and drawing conclusions, and I became defensive. Actually, everything I do in my teaching is a series of low-inference (ie. evidence-based) actions that over time have formed my intuition. This is exactly why experience counts in teaching. As teachers, we need to think about it as taking evidence-based action, which will provide low-inference evidence for administrators. We need to specifically identify the parts of our practice that causes us to form opinions and determine next steps.

To eliminate confusion though, I wished they would have just used a simple phrase like “objective evidence” instead of “low-inference evidence.” The definition of “inference” inherently means, “a conclusion or opinion that is formed because of known facts or evidence.” (Merrian-Webster Dictionary) Conclusion is in the word, and it is confusing as to whether there is supposed to be low conclusions or low evidence. A low “conclusion from evidence” evidence?

Support for Teacher Intuition

Initially, I associated the Danielson framework and teacher evaluations as an attempt to eliminate teacher intuition. Low-inference was another buzzword for rejecting teacher knowledge. But low-inference is about being specific, which I think we as educators really cannot fight. We can no longer simply say that our teacher knowledge is immeasurable, but we need to be sure that the tools that are being developed accurately reflect the murkiness of teaching young minds. We need to let our implicit teacher knowledge shine, by investing the time to understand the Danielson Framework of Teaching and use it to support our profession.

So I leave you with the two questions I have arrived at today:

1.)   Are the Danielson Frameworks of Teaching an accurate way to demonstrate implicit teacher knowledge?

2.)   How can we be sure that the Danielson Frameworks are used accurately given the complexities of teaching students with special needs?

I hope you can help me by sharing how you answer these questions and I will continue to blog as I shape my own answers.

It is time for all teachers to channel our innermost Captain James T. Kirks, because as rational as Spock was, he and the rest of the ship would have been lost without the gutsy Captain James T. Kirk in command.

Sometimes a feeling is all we humans have to go on. – Captain James T. Kirk