Levels of Inclusions – Let’s actually get inclusive

What is (disability) inclusion really? And how do we get there? And let’s be even more specific and talk about disability inclusion in schools through high school – the classic realm of special education and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

While we talk about inclusion, we have hardwired segregation/discrimination into our education system for disabled learners. We have:

• Separate High School Diplomas (or non-diplomas)
• Separate assessments (Alternate Assessments for up to 1% of students)
• Separate Curriculum for students with extensive disabilities, and
• Separate certifications for teachers (actually doubly segregated)
• Resulting inevitably in segregated, separate classrooms and second-class education for too many disabled students.

And let’s acknowledge, unsurprisingly, as we have learned elsewhere for other people/groups of people

Separate is not Equal

Insideous Exclusion

My school district has this really impressive literacy program (impressive, not perfect) called “Every Student Reads Initiative” (ESRI… organizations do love their acronyms.

I think it doesn’t matter how it’s performing. Actually that it exists is a great start.

It’s a systematic district-wide initiative… But, it is based on a tool called iReady which is apparently not-accessible and doesn’t include many students with extensive support needs in its process or data collection.

No malice intended.

But, “Every Student” isn’t really everyone… and, at least so far, these students are totally invisible… and this actually warps the perception of how the program is doing for special education students as around 10% of the special education student population isn’t even tracked.

And I don’t think anyone noticed.

But, this gets to the heart of the inclusion problem – if our basic tools aren’t accessible to everyone and used by everyone, a separate and unequal system is inevitable.

These basic levels of accessibility / “hard” inclusion can be measured and tracked fairly objectively:

1. Accessibility of curriculum, assessments, tools, products and services used by students and teachers.
2. Accessibility for all Policies, Procedures, and Practices
3. Certification of ALL teachers to teach ALL students

Next, we have the “softer” levels of inclusion:

4. Awareness, education, and culture

5. Welcoming

And then we need to wrap this all up with Management, Standards, Metrics, and Timelines… and we have a real program for inclusion.

What I get concerned about is that well-intentioned teams of parents and teachers dive into the soft cultural side of inclusion without addressing the hard foundational issues.

Accessible Materials

Accessible materials need to be built using a evolving series of standards just as we’ve done websites to certify curriculum as accessible, and then we need to work with the states, particularly and ambitious school districts to require that all products services and such that they buy each accessibility standards.

I looked into the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) standards (UDL 2 specifically, UDL 3 seems to have some other issues).. and they are not well-suited to becoming part of formal curriculum standards (either very surprising or very unsurprising given how long UDL has been around… a topic for another article).

It may make more sense to work from the Web Accessibility Standards and Plain Language (both an ISO Standard for you tech nerds out there and a US law with guidelines).

Universal Teacher Certification for Educating Disabled Learners

We need teachers that can teach all students.

If the teacher can’t teach everyone there is no way that the classroom can be inclusive by definition.

Unfortunately, in the US we have a deeply segregated, stratified teacher certification system. There seem to be three levels of certification:

• Default Certification – no particular level of training for meeting disabled students educational needs.
• “Mild-Mod” Certification – able to support students with “mild-to-moderate” disabilities. and
• “Mod-Severe” Certification – for students with substantial disabilities.

There is a huge staffing problem for special education in the US. Getting rid of these multiple levels of certification will reduce segregation and make staffing more flexible. The two-tier system is particularly arbitrary:

As far as I can tell, there is only a single course different between the Mild-Mod / Mod-Severe certifications, so these two should be able to be efficiently combined promptly. Simplifying teacher education programs and helping staffing – Win / Win!

Next, we need to work to restructure teacher certifications to get rid of the separate classification for “special education teachers”. This is going to take a long time including working with colleges and changing state standards… and providing a graceful process to migrate teachers towards a single standard.

This is probably going to take at least 20 years – we better get started.

Policies, Procedures and Systems

In parallel with all of us, we need to go through all of our school systems’ policies, procedures, and systems – from top to bottom, left to right, and everything in between. Acquisition, staffing, safety, public meetings, … all of it.

.. to make sure everything is accessible, end discrimination not and and eliminate segregation.

Then we need to start moving to actually make sure these policies are real and are not just paper on a shelf to make folks like you and me me happy but our actual practice in the classrooms administration and playgrounds

Oversight and Management

Measurement – we need metrics at all levels of our educational systems to track progress. Classrooms in schools. Schools in School Districts, School Districts in States.

Easy metrics will be things like percentage of school materials that are accessible and teachers that are certified to teach all students. Other metrics will be more challenging (hiring percentages for disabled workers and employment outcomes for disabled students after graduation).

Awareness and Culture

The biggest challenge, and it’s not just a responsibility of the schools, is to change our basic awareness and culture around disability.

This is a massive project but if we want cultural change, we need to invest – it’s not just going to happen.

It’s not going to happen because of a court case or a teacher or someone certifying something as inclusive. It’s beyond the classroom. It’s changing our essential relationship as a society with disability.

Buckle up it’s going to be a bumpy ride.