Effective Inclusive Schools

Designing Successful Schoolwide Programs

Thomas Hehir, Lauren I. Katzman

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780470880142
• eBook ISBN: 9781118133651
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

How to raise the achievement of all kids, from gifted to those with severe disabilities

This book presents lessons learned from in-depth case studies of some of our most effective inclusive public schools. The authors conclusively demonstrate that schools can educate students with mild and severe disabilities in general education classrooms by providing special education services that link to and bolster general education instruction. This goes beyond complying with Special Education law; having a truly inclusive environment raises the achievement level for all students and results in more committed and satisfied teachers.

Insights shared from teachers, school leaders, parents, and the students themselves provide a path forward for anyone striving to Improve special education services. The authors reveal what these exemplary schools do that makes them so successful, and provide advice for readers who want to incorporate these practices themselves.

• Hehir, former U.S. Office of Special Education (OSEP) Director, is a leading name in Special Education
• Highlights the important relationships between administrators, teachers, and parents to foster maximum collaboration between general and special education
• Includes information on committing to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Positive Behavior Supports

This vital resource zeroes in on what excellent public schools do differently to ensure all students succeed.

PART ONE
The Schools and Their Leaders

CHAPTER ONE
The Schools

This book began out of our desire to document successful inclusive education in urban schools. We therefore sought to look deeply at practices within highly successful inclusive schools. We chose three Boston schools that fit our criteria: the Patrick O'Hearn Elementary School (O'Hearn; later renamed the William T. Henderson Elementary Inclusion School), the Samuel Mason Elementary School, and the Boston Arts Academy (BAA), a high school. After we began this study and began presenting our findings to various groups, we were informed by many suburban and rural educators that the lessons learned from these urban schools have applicability to their schools, so we augmented our studies with two suburban schools that appeared very similar in practice to the urban schools. In this chapter we give the reader a detailed picture of the three urban schools studied. We also encourage readers to enhance their understanding of these schools by viewing the YouTube video links provided.

PATRICK O'HEARN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

A “magical mix of teachers, parents, the students, and Bill Henderson” was how one parent described the William T. Henderson Elementary Inclusion School. The O'Hearn was a school known for educating students so effectively that parents who were eligible to enroll their children in the city's elite exam schools chose rather to stay at the O'Hearn. It was a school known for its inclusive practices. Its principal, Dr. William Henderson, was so well respected that when he retired in 2009, the mayor of Boston proclaimed June 23 William Henderson Day and renamed the school the William T. Henderson Elementary Inclusion School.

We introduce this school by describing its 2007 annual African American history student performance, Dare to Dream: Sharing African American History Through Storytelling. The performers and the audience were a racially diverse mix of Black (likely some African American, Caribbean, and South American), Asian, and White. Among students, there was also diversity in disability; some students used wheelchairs, some had visible intellectual disabilities, some had Down syndrome, and there were many students with disabilities that were not visible. Disability at the O'Hearn was as typical an aspect of diversity as racial diversity. A parent of a student without a disability explained, “The children there really end up learning about and caring for others, just the diversity of the world.”

The show included students reciting a twenty-minute Langston Hughes poem, students in a traditional African drumming circle, some dancing to the drums, tap dancers, and a performance of a play based on the African folk tale Why Anansi Has Eight Thin Legs, complete with the spider, the rabbit, and the monkey. Perhaps the loudest applause came when a student with a significant intellectual disability and limited verbal skills walked across stage, and in a low guttural voice sounding like the real Cab Calloway, belted out the words “Well, hello Dolly!” that Calloway was famous for. Those in the audience knew what an accomplishment this was for the child, and the already enthusiastic applause intensified for him.

The celebration culminated with all students on stage singing two gospel songs, and the audience clapping along with them. In the group, there was a White student with autism, eyes half-closed, shaking her hands in the air as if she were at a traditional Black church service, surrounded by her peers, many of whom are Black. She was belting out the songs, utterly out of tune. Also on stage was another girl with autism who had her fingers in her ears, and although she was not singing, she was standing next to her peers and swaying to the music with her classmates. These children did not stand out in this environment, because students with visible disabilities participate in all school performances. This is a community that appears to know one another and is clearly comfortable across racial, class, and disability lines.

At the end of the show Dr. Henderson spoke to parents about how wonderful their children were and how proud he was of each of them, as well as his talented teachers and staff, calling them out by name. Mary, a teacher at the school, said that “one of the best things about Bill is that he knows the kids that need to be known.. . .On the first day of school, when he was naming specific kids in the school that everybody on the staff has to know and has to be able to help out and be aware of, for me, as a special ed teacher who has worked in a school where the principal doesn't ever come to my classroom because I'm the special ed classroom, to have our principal talk about the kids that I will be teaching and caring about them that much, that's one of my favorite things about him and about being at this school.”

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To learn more about the Henderson, view the videos on YouTube, www.youtube.com, by entering William Henderson Inclusion School.

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Looking Back with Pride

Dr. Henderson has reason to be proud of his students and teachers. Since 1989, when he became the school's principal, the O'Hearn had grown from an underperforming school with student vacancies to a school with a higher percentage of students with and without disabilities passing the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) in the fourth grade than the overall percentage of the Boston public schools.¹ Instead of vacancies, the school now has a waiting list of parents who want their children, those with and those without disabilities, to attend. Since 1989, the school has evolved from providing special education services in segregated settings, such as special education classes and resources rooms, to providing the overwhelming majority of their special education services in the general education classroom.

Mary, a parent of one child with a disability and one without a disability who both attended the O'Hearn, explained her appreciation for the school: “The children there really end up learning about [and] caring for others, just the diversity of the world. Not everybody's on the same page and same level. And there's been times when. . .my so-called typical [daughter] has gone places and. . .people are really surprised [about] how she doesn't stare when she meets somebody. She can talk to any child, is not afraid. And they go, ‘Wow.’ And I'm like, ‘She goes to the O'Hearn.’”

The O'Hearn is located in Dorchester, a section of Boston with a mix of African American, Irish, and Vietnamese residents. Most students were enrolled at the O'Hearn through a lottery process. Boston has a rather elaborate student assignment process in which parents were given a number of schools they could choose from, and each school is then subject to a lottery. The choice system gave preference to children with siblings who attended the school and whether the school was designated as the child's “walk” school preference.

During the 2004–2005 school year, the O'Hearn enrolled 221 students. Approximately 47 percent were African American, 28 percent White, 8 percent Asian, 6 percent multi-race, and 5 percent were Hispanic or Native American. (See Table B.5 in Appendix B.) Of this population of students, 34 percent received special education services, a percentage high above the national average of approximately 12 percent. The range of student disabilities was vast. The majority of students had milder and high-incidence disabilities, such as learning disabilities. There was also a population of students with more significant and low-incidence disabilities, such as intellectual disabilities, autism, Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, and students who were medically fragile.

Each classroom at the O'Hearn had two teachers, one certified in elementary education and the other in special education. With such a high percentage of students with disabilities in the school, Henderson was able to garner enough resources to make possible this staffing. Though there was also a paraprofessional assigned to each classroom, only one paraprofessional was assigned to work with one student, a boy who had brittle bone syndrome and required individual adult supervision to ensure his physical safety.

The only special education classroom at the O'Hearn was called the Baking Café, a room used collaboratively by the speech and language therapist and occupational therapist to work with students with significant intellectual disabilities to organize and run the school store, to deliver school supplies to classrooms, and to work on functional skills such as cooking. Aside from these activities, speech and language and occupational therapies occurred in the general education classroom.

The classrooms at the O'Hearn were brimming with activity. Teachers were in and out of each other's classes, bringing suggestions, working with students, problem-solving students’ needs together. Similarly, students worked collaboratively with their teachers and their peers in the classroom. In one first grade class, students were preparing for a publishing party to which they invited family members and others in the school to show and read from the books they had created. Students were asked to choose one of their stories from the stack that they had written, go through the story to see if they could add more sentences, make sure that each sentence had a period, and make sure that their illustrations matched their words. Conversations between students about their books were serious. These first graders were asking each other detailed questions about their illustrations and how what they drew was in their story. They listened to each other read and asked specific questions about their stories. These six-year-olds took great pride in their work.

In another first grade class, students were read part of a story and were asked to turn to their partners to talk about how one of the characters was feeling. The teacher called this activity “accountable talk” because students were working to explain or to be accountable for their ideas. Once the story was completed, students broke into small groups to work on their reader's workshop activities. “Letter Blocks” was an activity in which students were asked to use four letters on blocks to “mix it, fix it, check it.” Another activity was to work on a computer program that supplemented phonetic instruction. The third activity was to work in their guided reading groups run by each of the two teachers. In one of these groups, students were asked to write their names on a piece of paper. For the student in the group who could not write his name, there was a name stamp ready for his use. Accommodations like this were typical at the O'Hearn, and the school was a pilot school for the use of Kurzweil technology, a text-to-speech hardware, as an accommodation eligible for use with the MCAS.

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A Parent Influences Federal Policy

In 1994 I (Tom Hehir) visited the O'Hearn with then-Secretary of Education Richard Riley and Assistant Secretary Judy Heumann. Secretary Riley wanted to see an inclusive school because inclusion was such a controversial issue. I told him about the O'Hearn and to my astonishment he said, “Let's go visit it.”

After visiting classrooms we met with several parents of children with disabilities, who spoke about how their children had thrived in inclusive classrooms, developing communication skills, making friends, and achieving academically. One mother whose three non-disabled children attended the O'Hearn told us her oldest daughter had “tested for advanced classes” (referring to Boston's gifted program). When she and her husband visited the program that was housed in another school, they found that the students in the gifted program were doing lower-level work than her daughter was doing in her inclusive class. They decided to keep her at the O'Hearn, where “every child has an individualized program.” She went on to say that even more important to her and husband was their kindergartner's experience: the li...

Table of contents

• COVER
• CONTENTS
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• DEDICATION
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS
• PREFACE: ON ABLEISM
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE: The Schools and Their Leaders
• PART TWO: What They do Differently
• PART THREE: How to Create More Inclusive Schools
• PART FOUR: The Big Picture of Special Education
• Afterword Transitioning to a Full Adult Life
• Appendix A: Questions for Discussion
• Appendix B: Information on the Research Study
• NOTES
• INDEX
• END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT