Teach Effectively!

Julia Steiny, who writes a weekly column for ProJo—the Providence (RI, US) Journal—reported on the high achievement level of a school that has 54% of its student body in special education. According to the column, Boston’s George Conley School made annual yearly progress despite having at least a half dozen special services classes plus many students for whom English is a second or other language.

The bulk of the column implies that the reason for this remarkable achievement is the organziation of the school. There isn’t much about the instruction that’s going on there.

In 1998, Boston Public Schools embarked on an unusual initiative they call Unified Student Services, which melds special education with other student-support systems like counseling, health and after-school. The philosophy is: All students have special needs; some students have disabilities. The strategy was to build up each school’s capacity to support all special needs, including disabilities, at the school itself. So Boston Public Schools considers all students to be on a continuum of needs, some of which will be temporary and of low intensity, some on-going, frequent and highly-specialized.
But no longer is special education a silo unto itself, with its own budget spent only on those kids who meet its criteria. No longer do parents have to fight like tigers to get their child into special education just to get him some help or counseling. The special education teacher along with other support staff — social workers, psychologists — provide services to whichever child needs it, regardless of whether she has been anointed with the special-ed label.

The column contains some remarkable statistics about how the special education population has declined in Boston. It is said to have gone from 22% to 17%. This makes it odd that the school Steiny features has 54% in special services. Sounds as though the criteria for being counted as needing special education has changed, no?