Focus on Learning, excerpt (text)
ED 392 187 AUTHOR Fruchter, Norm; And Others TITLE Focus on Learning: A Report on Reorganizing General and Special Education in New York City. INSTITUTION New York Univ., NY. Inst. for Education and Social Policy. SPONS AGENCY Grant (W.T.) Foundation, New York; N.Y. PUB DATE Oct 95 NOTE 143p PUB TYPE Reports - Evaluative/Feasibility (142) – Viewpoints (Opinion/Position Papers, Essays, etc.) (120) EDRS PRICE MF01/PC06 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Accountability; *Change Strategies;*Disabilities; Educational Change; Educational Diagnosis; Educational Finance; Educational Policy; Elementary Secondary Education; High Risk Students; High Schools; *Inclusive Schools; Legal Responsibility: Models; Preschool Education; Regular and Special Education Relationship; *School Based Management; School Districts; *School Restructuring; *Special Education; State Aid; State School District Relationship; Student Evaluation; Student Placement; Teamwork; Urban Education IDENTIFIERS *New York City Board of Education
ABSTRACT
This report is the result of a year-long evaluation of special education in New York City (New York) and presents major recommendations for reorganizing general and special education. It proposes a school-based model with an integrated general/special education system, and use of an enrichment allocation from merged special and general education funds to meet the needs of students with disabilities and students at risk of academic failure. It recommends creation of Instructional Support Teams within schools, formal evaluations of students by a district-level multidisciplinary Committee on Special Education, significant investment in school-based professiona1 development, creation of an independent Accountability and Quality Assurance Office, changes in state funding mechanisms to encourage the placement of students in neighborhood schools, and restoration of funding to general education. The report begins with an executive summary and an introduction. The following six chapters address: (l) why the current system doesn’t work; (2) guiding assumptions of the study; (3) major features of the school-based model; (4) implications for high schools; (5)implications for District 75/citywide programs; and (6) implications for preschools. A concluding chapter presents the study’s 14 specific recommendations and suggestions for phased-in implementation. Appendices provide: public reaction to the first draft of this report; a legal analysis of the proposed changes by Perry A. Zirkel; and a review of financing dimensions of the proposed changes by Thomas B. Parrish. Contains 15 references. (DB)
Education and Social Policy
Focus on Learning
A Report on Reorganizing General and Special Education in New York City
October, 1995
NORM FRUCHTER Co-Director, NYU Institute for Education and Social Policy Education Advisor, Aaron Diamond Foundation
ROBERT BERNE Co-Director, NYU Institute for Education and Social Policy Dean, NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service
ANN MARCUS Dean, NYU School of Education
MARK ALTER Chair, Department of Teaching and Learning, NYU School of Education
JAY GOTTLIEB Prcfessor of Special Education, NYU School of Education
Support for this report was provided by the W. T. Grant Foundation
Table of Contents | |Executive Summary|i| |I.|Introduction|1| |II.|Why the Current System Doesn’t Work|11| |III.|Guiding Assumptions|18| |IV.|The School-Based Model|20| |V.|Implications for High Schools|34| |VI.|Implications for District 75/Citywide Programs|37| |VII.|Implications for Pre-Schools|40| |VIII.|Conclusion|44|
Notes |Accountability|51| |Federal and State Requirements and Other Legal Issues|53| |Funding and Cost Savings|56| |Transition|62|
Appendices |Appendix A: Public Reaction to Focus on Learning|Appendix-1| |Appendix B: A Legal Analysis of Focus on Learning Perry A. Zirkel, University Professor of Law and Education, Lehigh University|Appendix-24 |Appendix C: Review of Financing Dimensions from Focus on Learning Thomas B. Parrish, Co-Director of the Center for Special Education Finance, The American Institutes for Research, Palo Allo, California |Appendix-35
Focus on Learning: A Report on Reorganizing General and Special Education in New York City © 1995 by the Institute for Education and Social Policy of New York University, 285 Mercer Street, New York, New York 10003 (212) 998-5880
Executive Summary Focus on Learning: A Report on Reorganizing General & Special Education in New York City
As recently as twenty years ago, many students with disabilities were excluded from public education and, when included, were often taught in separate, inadequate, and sometimes inhumane settings. Federal action through laws such as PL 94-142; court intervention through cases such as Jose P.; and the development of state and local programs have improved the education of students with special needs. For many, the days of exclusion and mistreatment are over. Almost 13 percent of students in New York City public schools are now classified as disabled and almost 25 percent of the City’s public school budget is spent on their education.
But despite this radical change in educational policy and practice, stakeholders, providers and constituents are convinced that the City’s special education programs are not serving the majority of their students effectively, efficiently, and equitably. Special education produces limited outcomes because:
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Accountability is very limited. There are no useful instructional smndards and very little useful data on educational and behavioral outcomes.
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Far too many students are placed in separate settings rather than in more appropriate, less restrictive instructional settings defined by state and federal law.
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Students of color are over-represented in special education, and particularly overrepresented in separate special classes.
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Many students are placed in special education not because of a disability but because general education is not meeting their learning needs.
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The cost of evaluating, transporting, tracking, re-evaluating, mainstrea1ning, and decertifying students who may not be disabled is siphoning off resources from a resource-starved public education system.
We believe that many students assigned to special education do not have the disabilities that special education was created to address, but are placed in special education because general education teachers and their schools don’t have the resources, capacity or training to respond effectively to their learning needs. But special education was not designed to address the needs that general education fails to meet. Special
[page i]
education is, ultimately, alternative or enriched instruction and support for students with disabilities.
Our report recommends major structural changes to respond more effectively to students experiencing academic or behavioral problems, both those in general education and those in special education, and particularly those classified as mildly or moderately disabled whose instruction is the responsibility of the 32 community school districts and the Division of High Schools. We also recommend some smaller changes in the citywide programs (District 75) serving students with severe disabilities. Improving general education’s capacity to meet the needs ofa much broader range of students requires a major shift in how our entire school system operates. We need structural changes to create new school practices that help school staffs respond very differently to the rich diversity of children’s learning styles and learning needs. Such new practices have been developed in a small number of New York City’s schools; our recommendations encourage the development of new practices in all the City’s public schools.
We propose a school-based model that restructures schools and classrooms, deploys personnel in new ways, reconceptualizes instruction and assessment, and changes how funds are allocated. The overall goal is to improve teaching and learning. The critical unit is the school, and the personnel critical to making our model work are school staff. Implementing our model would transform our dual system, with instruction separated from evaluation and special education students separated fron1 general education students, into a far more integrated system that better serves the learning needs of all students. The school-based model invites each school to assess the needs of its more precarious students and to create, with an enrichment allocation consisting of merged special and general education funds, the classroom structure and school organization that best meets all its students’ needs. The primary purpose of the enrichment allocation is to ensure that classroom teachers have adequate instructional and non-academic supports to meet the needs of students with disabilities or students at risk of academic failure. The special education funds to be merged are only those allocated to community school districts and high schools for programs for studentswith mild and moderate disabilities. The general education funds to be merged include compensatory education resources and other supports. We believe that if teaching and learning in general education were significantly restructured, using the enrichrnent allocation, most students’ learning needs could be met without referral to special education and placement in separate settings.
[page ii]
3. Require community school districts and high school superintendencies to merge special education resources for mildly and moderately Disabled students with supplementary general education resources to create a single enrichment allocation for each school. This allocation would include all federal and state compensatory and preventive funding, as well as the resources generated by special education programs for students with mild and moderate disabilities. Such funding should be used, within the context of broad guidelines, to serve the needs of all students with mild and moderate disabilities, as well as the needs of all students at risk of school failure.
[page vi]
10. Empower District 75 to help community school districts develop effective programs for students with severe disabilities, thereby creating choices of District 75 or local district programs for parents. Give the Division of High Schools administrative responsibility for all SIE IV, V, VI, VII and VIII programs for high school-age students. Create a new superintendency wuhin the Division of High Schools to oversee these programs and to help insure that all students with disabilities entering high school choose, or are placed in, the most appropriate programs and receive appropriate post-school transition services.
[page vii]
APPENDIX A
Public Reaction to Focus on Learning
Focus on Learning was issued as a Draft Report on May 19, 1995. The New York University team developed the report as a framework for reorganiziing both general and special education in New York City public schools, but recognized that many of its recommendations were controversial and needed further exploration. Therefore, the Draft Report ended with an invitation “to all the city’s constituencies to begin a dialogue that will result in clear directions for system-wide improvement.”
Formats for public response were organized by the Board of Education, which held two sets of hearings on the report in each of the boroughs in June, 1995; more than 300 individuals gave oral or written testimony. In addition to these public hearings, the Chancellor, the Board of Education, and members of the NYU team received more than 50 written responses from individuals and advocacy groups during the 1995 summer months.
[Appendix 1]
A number of witnesses, including parents and educators, also were fearful that a unified system would not serve disabled children well, particularly in a period when regular schools suffer from severe funding cuts. A resource room teacher explained how she worked with five students at a time, but, because of budget cuts, was being threatened with ten students every 42 minutes. A psychologist predicted that with budget cuts, class size would increase, and since “research shows crowding leads to aggression… we will pay a high price in maladjustment and crime.” Another psychologist noted that in his school, many of the regular students weren’t doing well. What good would it serve to infuse special ed students into already overwhelmeed regular ed classrooms?" A witness summed up this line of concern: given the chronic underfunding of education for New York City’s school children, “it isn’t difficult to figure out that
[Appendix 4]
principals and community school districts will try to use the special education monies turned over to them to make up funding shortfalls for general education.”
A student who had been transferred from the Hungerford School, which serves children with severe physical disabilities, to a general education school, made the point about the two divided worlds more sharply: “When I got there they always talked about me in front of me as if I were dead. But I am not.”
[Appendix-5]
A parent was uneasy about how well the top-down lecturing format generally offered by the Board of Education’s professional development units would serve this extensive retraining. Another worried, “I don’t know where you get the training for these teachers, these thousands and thousands of teachers out there who don’t have the qualifications or the experience… to deal with your children. I don’t know how my daughter’s educational and transition plan would be implemented with people who don’t have the experience, who don’t know her, who are… walkingin cold.”
And a Hungerford School student with cerebral palsy, who communicates through a pointer on his head that activates a computer lapboard, feared the impression he would make: “We are defenseless because our bodies are not able to defend us, but our brains work. So many times able-bodied people think when our bodies do not work our brain does not work.”
[Appendix-9]
6. RESTRUCTURING DISTRICT 75 TO ENHANCE ITS ROLE AS A RESOURCE TO THE DISTRICTS AND HIGHS CHOOLS.
The Draft Report recommended supporting District 75 to help community school districts develop effective programs for students with severe disabilities, thereby creating choices for parents of student placement in District 75 or local schools.
Of all the Draft Report’s recommendations, this one generated the most angry and frightened responses, because many witnesses were committed to preserving District 75 and assumed that the real agenda of Focus on Learning was not choice, as the recommendation stated, but rather elimination of District 75 schools and programs. A great deal of anguished testimony advocated maintaining the security and protection that children with disabilities were perceived as receiving in District 75 schools and programs. Acknowledging the legal mandate to place all children with disabilities in the “least restrictive environment,” these witnesses argued that District 75 programs provided such environments and that students with severe disabilities should not have to attend regular schools.
[Appendix-15]
Parents, educators and students from other District 75 schools described their settings as filled with staff who work tirelessly, far beyond the regular school day. Many argued that children do get “a good education,” or at least the education they need, in District 75 schools. A common plea among professionals staff in District 75 was that the NYU team visit schools and see how well they were functioning. Many special education parents expressed satisfaction with the instructional services at both District 75 schools and in the community school districts. As one witness put it, “The low scores in District 75 are not the fault of the schools, but a reflection of the severely troubled students that these schools serve.”
Perceiving the Draft Report, along with impending budget cuts, as threatening all District 75 schools, several witnesses suggested comparisons with the closing of psychiatric hospitals, which turned mentally ill people into New York’s homeless, because the promised community supports were rarely provided. Advocacy groups, social workers, teachers and psychologists also testified that, just as the regular schools have
[Appendix-16]
Witnesses used words like isolation, misunderstanding, ridicule, humiliation, and prejudice to describe the world that awaited special education students in large and over-crowded general education schools, where many far stronger students are disengaged and alienated. As the Parents’ Coalition to Save District 75 put it, “Our innocent children, thrust into the noxious world of the regular education high school, will lose pieces of their dignity, self-respect and safety, as well as part of their funding and services.”
A few criticisms by professional staff and advocacy groups targeted the quality of education provided in District 75 schools and programs. Some educators saw District 75 as a place of rundown schools and discouraged teachers. A District 75 high school counselor reported:
“Many of my high school students complain that their school is not a ‘real high school’ and that they will never have the chance of obtaining a ‘real’ high school diploma. They say that with a special ed diploma they will never find a decent and good job and will always be treated differently… I myself have observed the decaying state in which District 75 high schools work; it is pitiful indeed. The programs offered to these kids are limited, the staff don’t give a damn many times, so the children lose interest in school… I support you 100% on your plan of integrating District 75 programs.”
[Appendix-17]
Queens School for Career Development begged the NYU Team: “Do not return these students to the high schools where they have met failure in the past!”
[Appendix-20]
Several parents, as well as the Parents’Coalition to Save District 75, argued that District 75 parents would lose the power of their voice in the community school districts, where they would be a small minority, and their wishes may conflict with those of most parents. Similarly, a mother of a student in a district program argued:
“Parents must be allowed to be a whole unit. Local PTA’s will not welcome or embrace us into their organization. In my experience, local PTAs, workshops, presentations, and meetings never include the special education entity within the school. We are as invisible to them as are our MIS children.”
Finally, several parents argued that, if the NYU team really wanted to give parents more of a voice, they should have begun by consulting them about this Draft Report.
[Appendix-21]