Saturday's post about the new report from the Public Advocate’s office on the DOE’s special
education inclusion initiative, whose author refrained from interviewing any parents,
teachers or other school-based staff, provoked comment on our NYC Education List. I think I can speak for most parents who
believe that given the right training provided to classroom teachers,
sufficient expertise, including enough specialists to push in, AND small
classes, inclusion could be a wonderful thing.
But
as usual with the NYC Department of Education, because of poor planning, mismanagement,
top heavy spending on “network” and “cluster” leaders, and a concurrent disinvestment
in actual classroom teachers, as well as an apparent total disinterest in how
people on the ground are experiencing their policies, they seem likely to
completely botch it all – at tremendous cost to the kids involved.
Below
are comments from first a Brooklyn teacher, and then Lisa Donlan, a parent
leader and head of the Community Education Council in District 1:
Teacher: I was furious
when I read the NY Times article. How clueless can this reporter AND the
"Public Advocate" be? For the past three years, I have
taught in an ICT [inclusion] class as the regular general education teacher.
I have NEVER received any of this so-called training for the upcoming
"special education reform". From conversations with teachers in
many schools, most have NO idea what these "reforms" even mean, much
less the "training" to work with IEP students with less or
no services. ..
Lisa Donlan: The
main issue lies in the role of the Children First Networks (CFNs), the invisible
virtual "support" networks that have replaced the old district
offices.
These CFNs serve 25-30 schools
looped together by accidents of history, at this point, often
spread across 4-5 boroughs, and include all kinds of schools-
ES/MS/HS's, varying demographics and pedagogical approaches. I may be
wrong but there seems to be no rational rhyme or reason for the groupings of
schools in CFNs that then fall under 5 "clusters'. That being said, each
layer means lots of staffers at the Network and Cluster level. These staff members include roughly
four people who are "accountable" for the special ed reform policy
training, support, communication and operations- generally two special ed specialists and two instructional
specialists.
My guess is that those
staffers have themselves been recently "trained" as late as
this spring/summer and that they have "arranged" for
"trainers" to work with some of the schools staffs under their
purview throughout the spring, summer and even fall (or later). By all reports the trainers
used so far have been outside consultants who basically know the
Tweed- based PowerPoint/rhetoric, but do not "know" the issues
and operations the schools face.
In typical "kick-the-
anthill" style the DoE has rolled out these reforms to
1750 schools teaching more than a million
kids with some 75-80K teachers without any
data, training or supports in place. In the late spring my District
Leadership Team held a training on the reforms and we had great difficulty
finding any CFN-based staffers to participate in the training. Out of the
8 different CFNs operating in our small district, only two employees (out
of 16-32 theoretically qualified and accountable CFN employees) agreed to
support our efforts.
All they were able to do was recite
the Powerpoint talking points- they had not worked with schools in Phase I to
understand the problems the reform will create or to
provide solutions to the issues schools are facing now,
such as:
·
Schools
are working from budget projections based on estimations of enrollment and the
new Fair Student Funding paradigm that provides less funding for ICT [inclusion
with two teachers] and self-contained classrooms and more for SETTS related
services ( pushing "inclusion" via important dollars as carrots), so
they do not know exactly what resources they have to schedule and
manage to address their students’ needs;
·
This
problem of matching resources to needs is exacerbated by
the shortage of service providers in the DoE system: many students do
not get their services because there is no one to provide the
service- especially speech therapy, apparently, due to
DoE bureaucratic knots, it seems;
·
Enrollment
is still a moving target ( which is why budgets are projection based) so
schools do not know which students they will serve and what services and
configurations their IEPs [Individualized Learning Plans] will require, w/ no CSE
[Committee on Special Education] to work directly with the schools there is no
heads up to help administrators plan for these;
·
As
class sizes rise to the contractual maximums ( and above) across the city
, how can a school/ an individual teacher adequately provide a
RTI [Response to Intervention] and differentiated instruction? These reforms
posit greater flexibility which necessitates more room,
fewer pupils per teacher, more support services and therapies, all of which are
made impossible by the administration's centrally-driven practices of
imposed budget cuts, overcrowding and reduction in support personnel in
schools;
·
Students,
no matter their needs, cannot be directed to a different school where the
students IEP requirements can be met. Each school must meet the needs
of the students that arrive on their rosters, regardless of
the capacity of the school to provide those services. If a student
requires a 12:1:1 in K but the school has only a 12:1:1 from 3-5 th
grade, the school must provide services to the student, which will
mean rewriting the IEP to fit the capacity of the school, even if
down the street there is a school w/ a seat open in a K level 12:1:1 (which
will go unfunded, as a result).
These reforms will lead to a number
of dangerous and potentially harmful unintended consequences to
our students and schools but there seems to be no safeguards or
even monitoring ability built into the system. This is true of all of the top-down
centrally-mandated "reform' policies that get kicked down to the schools
to implement as they can and as they see fit, each according to its own
capacity and interpretation (and CFN, supposedly). This seems odd to me,
since the whole idea behind Mayoral control was supposed to be even-handed
centrally-monitored rationally-designed standardized budgets and services
to combat the unfair and inequitable district system of the
past.
With the destruction of districts
(then Regions, then Boroughs) what we have lost is the ability to monitor and
watchdog the process in a community, and of course a place for parents
and others to go to call attention to and ask
for remedies for the problems these policy changes create.
When the policies enacted fail
to meet their stated goals and there is no loop back system for improvement; you
cannot help but wonder if the policy was designed to accomplish something other
than its stated goal. The stated goals (accountability, equity, the voice
for the voiceless, the civil rights issue of our times, fair student funding,
centralized control, decentralized empowerment of schools and principals,
integrated charter schools, increased inclusion) seem to be
mere slogans that serve to buy off the advocates who would push back
and impact, delay or stop these reforms, since they are the ones who know
better.
But if the policy makers know how to
scratch us just where it itches, we end up going along with the policy, so
great is our desire for the stated outcome.
We then spend our time doing the monitoring and
adjustments any good policy requires, while the deformers rush off to the
next reform. While we fight to try
to peek in and tweak and complain, the next destructive tsunami has already
been unleashed before we can raise our heads
and collectively name the issues and devise solutions (which should be
the job of our centralized accountable education department, but
oddly is not since there is no capacity for this).
The
"unintended" consequences of the often-contradictory
policies stack up in our schools and communities and there are fewer and fewer
people to untangle the complex causes that lead to the problems and
concerns we can see.
The next Mayor had better
have some good ideas of how to put Humpty back together again,
starting with transparent data (and not the cooked books we get from this DoE)
and methods devoid of a political agenda to diagnose the core
issues at hand. I am not sure how any of these cats can get walked back into
the house at this point, but am dying to hear form the hopefuls how they plan
to do it. Declaring "mission accomplished" before the actual battle
ain't gonna do it!
