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From what I have learned about disability and special education this last semester, I have come to see that there is a big issue with how teachers work with students with disabilities.
Many teachers do not understand disabilities, they get set in their ways, get easily frustrated with students with disabilities, and have a hard time working with them in the classroom. Future teachers are not well educated in the world of disability and that leaves these kids with disabilities at an extreme disadvantage.
My service learning was at a daycare for children with special needs, one big take away that I got from that is that is not easy to work with students with disabilities. It takes patience and understanding. It takes being educated about disability and special needs.

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Strong progress has been made to integrate students with disabilities into general-education classrooms. Educator instruction hasn't kept up.

Jackie Mader / Hechinger Report

BLOOMFIELD, N.J.-When Mary Fair became a teacher in 2012, her classes often contained a mix of special-education students and general-education students. Placing children with and without disabilities in the same classroom, instead of segregating them, was a growing national trend, spurred by lawsuits by special-education advocates.

But in those early days, Fair had no idea how to handle her students with disabilities, whose educational challenges ranged from learning deficits to behavioral disturbance disorders. Calling out a child with a behavioral disability in front of the class usually backfired and made the situation worse. They saw it as "an attack and a disrespect issue," Fair said.

Over time, Fair figured out how to navigate these situations and talk students "down from the ledge." She also learned how to keep students with disabilities on task and break down lessons into smaller, easier bits of information for those who were struggling.

No one taught her these strategies. Although she earned a bachelor's degree and teaching certificate in math instruction for both elementary and middle school, she never had to take a class about students with disabilities. She was left to figure it out on the job.

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The need for teachers who have both the knowledge and the ability to teach special-education students is more critical today than ever before. A national push to take students with disabilities out of isolation means most now spend the majority of their days in general-education classrooms, rather than in separate special-education classes. That means general-education teachers are teaching more students with disabilities. But training programs are doing little to prepare teachers; Fair's experience is typical.

Many teacher-education programs offer just one class about students with disabilities to their general-education teachers, "Special Ed 101," as it's called at one New Jersey college. It's not enough to equip teachers for a roomful of children who can range from the gifted to students who read far below grade level due to a learning disability. A study in 2007 found that general-education teachers in a teacher-preparation program reported taking an average of 1.5 courses focusing on inclusion or special education, compared to about 11 courses for special-education teachers. Educators say little has changed since then.

A 2009 study concluded that no one explicitly shows teachers how to teach to "different needs." Because of time constraints, the many academic standards that must be taught, and a lack of support, "teachers are not only hesitant to implement individualized instruction, but they do not even know how to do so," the report stated.

Fair says teacher-preparation programs should be doing more. At the very least, "You should have a special-education class and an English language learner class," she said. "You're going to have those students."

Between 1989 and 2013, the percentage of students with disabilities who were in a general education class for 80 percent or more of the school day increased from about 32 percent to nearly 62 percent. Special-education advocates have been pushing for the change-especially for students who have mild to moderate disabilities like a speech impairment-in some cases by suing school districts.

Some research shows as many as 85 percent of students with disabilities can master general-education content if they receive educational supports. Supports can include access to a special-education teacher, having test questions read aloud, or being allowed to sit in a certain part of the classroom.

Students with disabilities who are placed in general-education classrooms get more instructional time, have fewer absences, and have better post-secondary outcomes. Studies also show there is no negative impact on the academic achievement of non-disabled students in an inclusion classroom; those students benefit socially by forming positive relationships and learning how to be more at ease with a variety of people.

Alla Vayda-Manzo, the principal of Bloomfield Middle School about 30 miles outside of New York City, said she's seen the benefit of inclusion for students. The school serves about 930 students, nearly 20 percent of whom have a disability, according to state data. When students with disabilities are included in classrooms with their peers, Vayda-Manzo said the high expectations and instructional strategies "lend themselves to those students being more successful than they would be had they been in a separate, self-contained environment."

But as more districts move to make classrooms inclusive, they've been caught flat footed when it comes to finding teachers prepared to make the shift. Academic outcomes for students with disabilities have remained stagnant for years, even as more students with special needs are integrated into general-education classrooms. Students with disabilities are less likely to graduate and more likely to earn an alternate diploma that is not equivalent to a general diploma in the eyes of many colleges and employers. And year after year, they score far lower than their peers on standardized exams.

Experts say the problem is that it takes much more than just placing students with disabilities next to their general-education peers: Teachers must have the time, support, and training to provide a high-quality education based on a student's needs.

Mike Flom, a parent and co-founder of the advocacy group New Jersey Parents and Teachers for Appropriate Education, said many factors impact inclusion's effectiveness. His twin sons, now in seventh grade, were placed in an inclusion classroom beginning in fifth grade. Initially, Flom said his sons had "mixed reviews" on whether inclusion was beneficial.*

"I think the teachers were really motivated to be helpful," Flom said. "I don't know the extent to which they were permitted to do the things, or had enough training to do the things, that were required to be more effective."

"It's not just getting a child included ... that is only a small portion of the battle," he added.
* * *
These days, Mary Fair navigates her classrooms with ease. She has learned through experience how to teach students with a variety of disabilities and works with a veteran special-education teacher to modify lesson plans and tests.

On a recent morning in a seventh-grade math-inclusion classroom at Bloomfield Middle School, Fair and her co-teacher, the special-education teacher Christina Rodriguez, started a lesson on the order of operations.

Fair stepped up to the front of the classroom as Rodriguez circulated to make sure students were on task.

"We're starting order of operations," Fair said. "It's something you did in sixth grade, but today we are doing it differently."

"Ms. Fair, I want to see if they remember," Rodriguez said to Fair, who smiled and nodded.

"Put your hand up if you remember what the order of operations is," Rodriguez said.

More than half of the students raised their hands

"Who remembers 'PEMDAS'?" Rodriguez asked, referring to the mnemonic device used to remember order of operations (Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication and Division, Addition and Subtraction). More students eagerly shot their hands in the air.

Fair cut in and explained that although they learned PEMDAS in sixth grade, they were going to learn a new rule about the order of operations today. "Take your yellow paper and fold it horizontally," Fair said, referring to a yellow sheet of paper that sat on each student's desk.

"Like this," Rodriguez said, holding up a piece of paper and demonstrating how to fold it horizontally.

"Like a hamburger," Fair added.

To an outsider, it's impossible to tell who is the general-education teacher and who is the special-education teacher. Both Fair and Rodriguez have desks at the front of the room. They switch off during lessons, effortlessly picking up where the other has left off. They both give directions and explain content. They are careful not to fall into what educators say is a common trap: seeing general-education students as the responsibility of one teacher, and special-education students as the responsibility of the other.

That's how a good inclusion class should be, Rodriguez said, but it takes practice and time. Like Fair, Rodriguez didn't receive any training in special education before she entered the classroom. She became a teacher through an alternate program. When she got a job teaching special education six years ago, she relied on strategies she learned while working as an aide in a class for students with autism. In 2014, she received her master's degree in teaching students with disabilities from New Jersey City University; she now teaches a class for Montclair State University's dual-certification teacher-preparation program.

Although most traditional teacher-preparation programs nationwide do include some training on students with disabilities, usually in the form of one course over the entirety of the program, educators say this course is often generic and perfunctory. Aspiring teachers also may be given assignments in other classes that require them to adapt a lesson for a hypothetical special-education student.

Fair said she had some assignments like those, but "we didn't really know what we were talking about, because we weren't taught it." Her colleague, the science teacher Jessica Herrera, said she was only offered one class in special education-called "Special Education 101"-when she went through a traditional teacher-preparation program in New Jersey.

"A lot of my training was for that 'middle of the road' kind of kid," Herrera said. "I was prepared for the regular ed student." In her 13 years as a teacher, Herrera has taught some inclusion classes; she said she picked up strategies from working with "good special-education teachers." When she earned her master's degree from Montclair State, she was finally taught how to teach a "range of learners," she said.

Fair and her co-teacher Rodriguez say there are certain things they wish were included in all teacher-education programs, like an explanation of the different kinds of disabilities and ways to address the various struggles students may encounter. They also say teacher preparation should include more classroom management and "subtle ways" to keep students focused and on task.

Rodriguez says it's also important for teacher candidates to be exposed to different classrooms, including inclusion classrooms, to ensure teacher preparation is not "so out of context."

Mimi Corcoran, the president of the National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD), said teacher preparation should better address topics in special education. "We do a disservice to the teachers we're sending [to schools] in the way we're training, and we're doing a disservice to kids," Corcoran said. "We've got to step up to the plate and think differently and act differently, and that's hard because everybody gets comfortable and systems are hard to change."
* * *
Some teacher-preparation programs are trying to better prepare graduates to teach students with disabilities, especially in inclusion classrooms. At Syracuse University, George Theoharis, a professor and the chair of Teaching and Leadership, said the school's elementary special-education program has been one of the leaders nationwide in training educators for inclusive education.

Every teacher who graduates from Syracuse's Early Childhood or Elementary Education program is dual-certified in special education and spends time in inclusion classrooms. Theoharis says it's an approach that more preparation programs should take. "All of our programs need to be inclusive," Theoharis said, referring to teacher preparation. "Regardless of what job teachers get, people need to be prepared to work with all children and see all children as their responsibility."

At Montclair State, students can receive a dual certification in special education and a subject-level or grade-level range. The school also offers a unique concentration in "inclusive iSTeM," which specifically prepares science, technology, engineering, and math teachers for inclusion classrooms. Students in the program receive a Master of Arts in Teaching, a certification in math or science, and are endorsed by the state as a teacher of students with disabilities.

Jennifer Goeke, a Montclair State professor and the program coordinator, said the dual-certification program prepares teachers to be hired as either a general- education or special-education teacher. "They know how to perform both roles easily and effectively," Goeke said.

On a recent afternoon, Goeke was holding class in the Bloomfield Middle School media center. She asked her 17 students to first discuss issues they were having in their "fieldwork classrooms," where they are currently observing and working with general- and special-education teachers. She listened to a few descriptions of struggles and then reminded her students that part of their job is to be an example for other teachers.

"I'm not trying to minimize or trivialize what you might be learning in your content area," Goeke said. "It's very important that you have a strong grounding in the methodology and the philosophy of your discipline ... and know how to teach your content." But, Goeke added, "You have to remember that most people do not have any diverse learners in mind. Their training did not teach them to take those students into account."

Goeke's students nodded and a few scribbled down notes.

In Montclair's program, students work with two mentor teachers for a year in an inclusion classroom and in small-group settings. They receive extensive training in how to work with students with disabilities as well as how to effectively teach content, like math and science, or grade levels, like early education or elementary education.

Bloomfield chose to partner with the iSTeM program in 2012, and has hired two graduates of the program, and offered teaching positions to several more, who eventually chose jobs in other districts. The Bloomfield Principal, Vayda-Manzo, says the graduates of the program are "like unicorns in the field," as it's rare to find teachers who are dual-certified in general and special education.

Current teachers at Bloomfield have also benefited from iSTeM, Vayda-Manzo said. The program provides professional development for inclusion teachers at the school who agree to be mentor teachers for iSTeM students, and those teachers also observe each other and work with professors from Montclair State. Vayda-Manzo said the school makes sure co-teachers have the same planning periods so they have time to plan lessons together each day.

Herrera, who mentors iSTeM teachers, said the professional development provided through the program has improved her ability to teach students with disabilities. "I feel like I got a lot of additional strategies through that," Herrera said.

On-the-job training is essential to ensure teachers have the skills needed to teach all students in their classroom, especially those teachers who may have attended teacher preparation years ago or missed out on training about disabilities, according to Mimi Corcoran of NCLD. "We have to be fair for the educator," Corcoran said. For "many that are already in field, the concepts of special education and how to include kids has shifted, and [teachers] need the supports."

Vayda-Manzo said it has been an easy choice to continue the program.

"I saw the impact that it made in our inclusion classes," Vayda-Manzo said. "We saw tremendous gains."
This post appears courtesy of The Hechinger Report.
* This article originally misstated the gender of Mike Flom's children. We regret the error.

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Teacher Training Is Failing Students With Disabilities

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Strong progress has been made to integrate students with disabilities into general-education classrooms. Educator instruction hasn't kept up. BLOOMFIELD, N.J.-When Mary Fair became a teacher in 2012, her classes often contained a mix of special-education students and general-education students.

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There are countless stories of students like Caleb that the school system failed. Students who have disabilities that teachers are not well equipped to educate and work with. It is essential for teachers to be educated on disabilities and how to work them to their students' benefits.

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ATLANTA - Brent Agnew remembers feeling a sense of relief when he left the meeting called to discuss his 6-year-old son Caleb's anxiety attacks.

As he and his wife, Jennifer, walked into the parking lot outside the E E Butler Center in Gainesville, Georgia, that day in 2006, the two could picture a different future for Caleb.

At the meeting, a special education teacher had recommended taking the boy out of Martin Elementary School, in a town 10 miles southwest, and placing him in Georgia's Network for Educational and Therapeutic Support, or GNETS, a statewide system for children with "emotional and behavioral disorders."

Agnew, who had worked as an elementary and middle school teacher in the same county for six years, trusted that this would be the best way of managing his son's angry outbursts, which included knocking over chairs and desks, and of getting him back on track in his class work. Both parents figured Caleb would return to his neighborhood elementary school before too long.

"We saw it as a scaffolding until things got better - a short-term, possible solution," Agnew recalled.

Ten years later, the couple sat across a wooden table from Caleb, now 16, a high school dropout and, as of September, survivor of a suicide attempt.

Not only did Caleb never return to his local school, but he learned little throughout his elementary, middle and high school years - which included hundreds of hours struggling through computer lessons in math, science and social studies.

His paltry education was much like that of dozens of other children in the GNETS system whose experiences this reporter researched. Aspects of Caleb's time in GNETS were echoed by the families interviewed - a sense that they could do nothing to get their children back into local schools once they were in the system and a hopelessness in the face of violence and chaos in the classrooms. Most, but not all, reported an absence of the sort of therapeutic benefit implied by the program's name.

There are children like Caleb and his GNETS classmates all over the country - with diagnoses including ADHD, bipolar disorder and, increasingly, autism. They are often placed in separate classrooms within public schools and spend large numbers of hours on computers using technology that is not aligned with their specific needs. Georgia has had an entirely separate and separately funded program for children with emotional and behavioral disorders for five decades.

The Georgia program caught the attention of the Department of Justice, which launched an investigation that lasted several years, and resulted in a 21-page letter of findings in July, 2015, and a lawsuit in August, 2016.

According to that lawsuit, the GNETS system violates the federal Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, both by segregating children with disabilities and by denying them access to an equal education.

The state of Georgia filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit in October. Students like Caleb continue to languish in GNET schools while the lawsuit continues its course. The most recent move came on December 9, when the Department of Justice filed a brief opposing the state's motion to dismiss. Whether the Trump administration will approach the case differently is unclear.

Whatever the Justice Department decides to do, disability advocates are prepared to pursue the GNETS case as a class action lawsuit if necessary, said Alison Barkoff, advocacy director at the Center for Public Representation, a public-interest disability law firm.

"Although this litigation is brought under the ADA, with the DOJ driving it, when we are talking broadly about educating children with disabilities, the disability-rights community is incredibly concerned about Secretary [Betsy] DeVos and her views and policy directions," Barkoff said. She added that voucher programs for private schools, which DeVos supports, have often failed students with disabilities - private schools either aren't willing to serve them, or require them to waive their rights under federal laws such as the ADA and the IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act).

"We're continuing to fight for students with disabilities to be educated alongside their peers, as required by federal law," Barkoff said.
*****
The GNETS program is spread across Georgia in 24 locations. Since opening in Athens, in 1970, the program has admitted tens of thousands of children, with a range of disabilities, under the umbrella of "emotional and behavioral disorders."

The Justice department's case is the first time that the agency has charged a statewide educational system with violating the ADA, Title II, which guarantees people with disabilities full access to the same public services as the general population. "I'm confident that what's being created [by this lawsuit] is that the ADA applies to all segregation - including education," said Alison Barkoff, advocacy director at the Center for Public Representation, a Massachusetts-based public-interest disability law firm.

"The truth of it is, we know how to educate these kids. There's nothing GNETS is offering that can't be offered in the community setting."

The case has implications for school systems and children with emotional and behavioral disorders across the nation, experts say, pointing to the notion that children with disabilities, given the right kind of in-classroom supports, are capable of learning in a general education environment and will benefit emotionally and psychologically from being in class with children without disabilities. What's more, research has shown that integrating children with disabilities into classrooms, when accompanied by adequate teacher and staff training, yields positive academic and social results.

The federal lawsuit's first argument - that the system is segregated - is fairly straightforward and easy to demonstrate: GNETS students spend their days in stand-alone, separate buildings or in separate classrooms within public schools, and have little to no contact with the general student population.

But the second argument- that GNETS offers an unequal education - is more complex, as it requires discovering what students and teachers are doing in those separate buildings and classrooms. It appears that little grade-level content is being taught, with much teaching relegated to online courses. What's more, many school days are derailed by violent outbursts from students whose behaviors are not managed according to useful therapies, often resulting in visits by police and even arrests.

"Because of their disabilities ... these kids need potent, individualized instruction, but instead they're receiving one-size-fits-all, or what I call 'one-size-fits-none,' computerized instruction and coercive behavior controls, or warehousing," said Leslie Lipson, counsel to the Georgia Advocacy Office, a nonprofit organization and part of a coalition that has sought to integrate GNETS students into the public school system.

In its July, 2015, letter of findings, the DOJ offered its own peek into GNETS classrooms:

Students in the GNETS Program generally do not receive grade-level instruction that meets Georgia's State Standards like their peers in general education classrooms. Rather, particularly at the high school level, students in the GNETS Program often receive only computer-based instruction. By contrast, their peers in general education classrooms generally receive instruction from a teacher certified in the subject matter they are teaching, and in the case of students with disabilities, also from a teacher certified in special education.

The letter also noted:

Based upon our interviews with GNETS Program staff, academic instruction, particularly at the middle and high school level and in rural areas of the State, is often computer-based.

About two-thirds of the students in the system's population are in middle or high school, according to the state education department, so if the DOJ is correct, most GNETS students are being taught largely by computers.

During a six-month period, this reporter gathered information on the experiences of about 100 families with children in the GNETS system, via interviews with the families and by talking to advocates, attorneys and educators. The experiences of these families generally matched the DOJ findings. Ironically, many families also said that the very technologies designed to help students with disabilities - known as assistive technology - are seldom part of a GNETS education.

Notably, the few parents who spoke positively of the system did so out of a sense that it was the least disagreeable option for their children. One parent at a public meeting said that a police officer had told her that her son "would get better services in jail" than at her local school.

Matt Cardoza, spokesman for the Georgia Department of Education, repeatedly answered queries about the GNETS system by saying that legal counsel had prohibited any substantive conversation, on the record or off. Specific queries were repeatedly answered with claims that the information was unavailable or would take dozens of hours to obtain. And Wyn Hornbuckle, the deputy director of the DOJ's office of public affairs, did not reply to multiple emails seeking a conversation about the GNETS system.

Experts have concluded that, in Georgia and elsewhere, little or no integration with the general student population, teachers with no specific content-area certification, ineffective treatment of behaviors caused by disabilities, and poor uses of digital technology all add up to negative - and unequal - educational outcomes for these children.

******

Brent, Jennifer and Caleb lived with these issues for nearly a decade. What makes their experience noteworthy is that both parents were public school teachers while Caleb was growing up - Jennifer even had a certification in special education. And still they could do nothing to improve their son's education as he got shuttled from one GNETS center to another.

Along the way, with Caleb under doctors' care, the Agnews tried a variety of medications to help him with his psychological problems, together with family and individual therapy. Some of this helped.

On a recent winter's evening, the three of them sat in the dining room of Jennifer's parents house, down the street from where they used to live in Gainesville, looking out the picture window at Lake Lanier, a placid contrast to Caleb's chaotic childhood. It took them several hours to unravel how things had gone wrong for their son in school.

The first GNETS center Caleb attended was in the building where E.E. Butler High School, a segregated school in the early 1960s, once stood. Now known as the Alpine Program, it was where 13-year-old Jonathan King, a child diagnosed with ADHD and depression, hanged himself in 2004 after being placed in a windowless "seclusion room." That tragedy led the state, six years later, to adopt rules prohibiting such practices and limiting the use of physical restraints to control a child's behavior.

But as Caleb went through elementary school, he recalled, "it became more and more normal to see kids blow up, and being restrained - including me." His mother stood up from the table and demonstrated how teachers would restrain her son. She stood behind her husband, crossed his arms in front of his chest and pushed his head down on the table.

"I remember wailing and squirming around until I got out of energy," Caleb said.

The boy now stands nearly six feet tall, with the frame of a high school cornerback. But back then, he said, "I was a chubby little kid."

At the time, Brent recalled with pride, Caleb was a "phenomenal reader - way above grade level." But he struggled with math, and, less so, with science and English. By the third grade, he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. At the start of the school year, the family went to the program's annual Individualized Education Program meeting (or IEP, the cornerstone of special education planning, designed for families and schools to set goals together). They were determined to get Caleb back in the local public school, with a paraprofessional to help manage his behavior.

But the county and GNETS officials said Caleb wasn't ready and needed to stay at Alpine - a refrain the family would hear over and over in the coming years. "There was only so hard we could fight," recalled Jennifer. "We didn't want to jeopardize our jobs."

"I remember wailing and squirming around until I got out of energy."

By sixth grade, Caleb was at another GNETS center, in the same building where Jennifer attended middle school, but now devoid of displays of student achievement in the hallways, or names of teachers on the doors, or visual reminders of teaching and learning. Classrooms were off a hallway with locked doors at both ends.

There, Caleb started using the e2020 computer program most of the day. Developed by a company now called Edgenuity, the platform is available for all K-12 subjects. "It looked amazing on paper," Brent recalled. "You work at your own pace, get your credits - but there was no one there to help."

Caleb's classroom, like most in the GNETS program, had fewer than 10 students; it had a teacher trained in special education, and one or two paraprofessionals, but no teachers licensed in any academic content areas. Although Caleb took care to point out that he felt most of his teachers "cared" about him, he said none had really helped him academically. "Most of the time, they were putting out fires," he said - responding to behavior outbursts.

"Half the time he would just sit down and listen to music all day, watch movies on Netflix and sleep," Brent said. They had a new principal nearly every year. One principal blocked Netflix, but, Caleb said, "a kid figured out a way to get around that, using proxy servers."

Throughout middle school, he was "still great in reading," said Jennifer, but behind in all other subjects. Jennifer had started a three-ring binder notebook when Caleb was in elementary school to keep track of his IEP meetings. Then, she said, when she saw that the GNETS program would not even follow such simple procedures listed in Caleb's IEP as allowing him to use a calculator during a math test to reduce his anxiety, she started to give up. "We just stopped keeping up with it," she said.

Caleb's high school was a two-hour bus ride away, to the Futures Program, another GNETS center located in a building where black students once studied during de jure segregation. ( Some studies have suggested that Georgia and other states' disproportionate numbers of black male students in their special education and emotional and behavioral disorder programs have resulted in a new form of racial segregation; according to a GNETS official, in 2014-15, when 37 percent of Georgia's K-12 population was black, 51 percent of GNETS students were black and 80 percent were male.)
Related: Column: Stop punishing black children just because they're black
Like many GNETS centers in rural areas, Futures drew students from a handful of surrounding counties. Caleb spent two more years mostly in front of computers, although students would often lose the Wi-Fi connection throughout the day. Occasionally, a paraprofessional substituted for the teacher; on those days, the students wouldn't even go online. "Everybody in class, we did the least possible," Caleb said. "We used Pandora to message each other. We watched movies."

And Caleb got arrested several times - for kicking a door, punching in a window. Jennifer would get calls at work and have to go pick him up. She continued to believe that the program was not following her son's IEP and not helping him to succeed behaviorally or academically.

The Agnews pulled Caleb out of GNETS last May. He sat around the house most days, until one day in September when he swallowed 17 Abilify pills.

*******

Most of the Agnews' experiences resemble those of the dozens of families with children in GNETS that this reporter was able to interview or research. Parents frequently pointed to GNETS's lack of useful behavioral therapy of any kind; underlined unclear or seemingly impossible-to-reach criteria for exiting the system; and described a lack of in-class or take-home work. One parent said she saw no schoolwork from her son for seven months.

Many parents - especially those with middle school- and high school-age children - noted the lack of teachers trained in specific content areas, the reliance on computers to teach those subjects and the absence of assistive technology.

"Online instruction should be used as a tool, but in GNETS it's used to say, 'We have that content,' " said Jonathan Zimring, an attorney who has worked in disability law for four decades.
Learning technology once reserved for special needs students is now in everyone's hands. Can teachers figure out how best to use it?
"With the use of computers and technology in the (GNETS) classroom, you have to ask, 'Is it just babysitting the child, or is it providing them with stimulation that will help them learn?' " said Talley Wells, director of the Disability Integration Project at Atlanta Legal Aid Society.

A 2010 state audit of the program reached many of the same conclusions. What's more, wrote the auditors, the system "cannot demonstrate that the services provided to a student in the GNETS program have resulted in improvements to behavior or academic performance." The system, the audit noted, did not break out data for students, or centers, or the program as a whole, and instead grouped data for all GNETS students together with data from the local public schools they originally attended.

At that time, the state pledged to maintain "program-level files" moving forward, in order to more carefully track student academic progress. The current GNETS director, Nakeba Rahming, told this reporter that the system plans to adopt i-Ready, an online platform that allows for "diagnostic assessments in reading and math for early identification and immediate instructional placement to remedy performance gaps" and increases "accountability and monitoring at the state, program, classroom, and student levels." But the state Education Department wouldn't clarify how i-Ready differs from the "program-level" files, or if those files had been used to any benefit.

The GNETS program, experts say, has never been able to show its results. "We've asked - 'Where are your data to show that what you're doing is meaningful and effective?' " said Zimring. "They've never had efficacy data - on the academic program, or on kids going back to their community schools.

"The truth of it is," Zimring continued, "we know how to educate these kids. There's nothing GNETS is offering that can't be offered in the community [school] setting."

******

Georgia isn't the only state where local school districts place children with emotional and behavioral disorders in programs that achieve little academic progress and rely heavily on computers. Marcie Lipsitt, a Michigan-based special education advocate whose federal complaints about the use of online instruction have prompted nearly two hundred investigations, said that e2020 and similar platforms "are very common in so-called emotionally impaired programs."

Sean J. Smith, a researcher at the Center on Online Learning and Students with Disabilities, released a report in January 2016 after evaluating more than a thousand lessons from a range of K-12 online learning platforms used for children with disabilities. The report sought to gauge how the online lessons reached "struggling learners." Its conclusion: the platforms were "poorly aligned" with "the specific learning needs of students with disabilities."

The problem, Smith wrote, is that they provide "limited options [for students] to navigate lessons and express what they know. The primary means for navigation were sequential throughout a structured lesson, requiring the student to click from page to page - similar to traditional work with texts." In other words, the computer was basically used as a digital textbook.

"Because of their disabilities ... these kids need potent, individualized instruction, but instead they're receiving one-size-fits-all, or what I call 'one-size-fits-none,' computerized instruction and coercive behavior controls, or warehousing."

Also, much of the material Smith reviewed did little to engage students whose disabilities may make it hard to focus, or remember instructions, or handle multiple tasks. The platforms offered "limited options to heighten attention and engagement," according to the report, and offered no support to students with learning impediments.

"Digital technology has been used inefficiently with children with disabilities," Smith said in an interview from his University of Kansas office, where he is an associate professor in special education. "If you're deficient in a skill - say, math - instead of providing you instruction, [many online lessons] give you a series of drills and practice exercises." Couple this with the lack of instruction from teachers certified in content areas, he said, and learning suffers.
Related: Opinion: 'I spend half my day in accelerated classes and the other half in special ed'
This state of affairs doesn't just affect students whose disabilities cause them to struggle. It also affects those who are academically advanced, since the teaching and online platforms are not tailored to their needs, either.

Take Kellan Powell, a 12-year-old who loves science and was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum several years ago. He's now at Mainstay Academy, his second GNETS program, in Fayetteville, a town about 25 miles south of Atlanta.

Over French fries at a McDonald's near Mainstay, an engaging Kellan told this reporter one afternoon about the theoretical physics behind Portal, a video game that involves moving through three-dimensional space, and about how to build a compressed-air rocket (which he did once: "It hit Matthew [a friend] with a great force!"). But he described science at school as "boring." At school, he uses an online program called MobyMax. The program takes him from one lesson to the next, with questions and vocabulary at the end of each lesson, much like a textbook, he said.

"I listen to music without lyrics on my headphones; it helps me concentrate, and the work just keeps coming," he said. Kellan spends "pretty much the whole day on the computer," he said, including playing video games during breaks from schoolwork. In the absence of teachers certified to teach science, he does no labs, nor any sort of hands-on work, which he said would "definitely be more fun." Still, his best grades are in science and English.

His mother, Kerstin, wants Kellan to go to college. She said Kellan's current teacher cares about him, and is helping him work through earlier trauma that occurred in kindergarten and first grade, in Ohio, where the Powells used to live. A teacher hit him and put him in a closet, Kerstin said.

But now, despite the caring teacher, Kellan's mom feels he's being shortchanged academically. "He's missing out on how to document, experiment, prove your theory - that's important stuff if you want to go into sciences," she said.

As for assistive technology, parents with children whose disabilities affect their verbal or written communication, for example, have found that certain computer programs or devices that could help with those issues often go unmentioned at IEP meetings and unused in the GNETS program. Again, the result is stunted learning.

"With the use of computers and technology in the (GNETS) classroom, you have to ask, 'Is it just babysitting the child, or is it providing them with stimulation that will help them learn?' "

Mindy Exline's adopted son - whose name she prefers not to disclose - was placed in Fayette County's Mainstay GNETS program in second grade, nearly three years ago. He had been diagnosed at age six with ADHD and had outbursts that included kicking and throwing things. Later, his diagnosis was changed to the catch-all "emotional and behavioral disorder."
Related: Technology offers help in special ed
He also had tremendous difficulty with handwriting. Despite this, at Exline's first several IEP meetings in the GNETS program, she said, speech recognition, or speech-to-text, a relatively simple but fast-developing category of assistive technology tools, was never mentioned.

"I found out about it in a support group," Exline said.

She had wondered why her son got bad grades on English tests, especially since he was a good reader, and had read Harry Potter books from a young age. His teacher would complain about his handwriting, and he would come home frustrated.

"I wish we had discovered the assistive technology earlier," Exline said. "It was an option, and handwriting has been an issue for years." She hopes to get her son, now 11, back into a general education environment in January, at least part of the time.

Exline's experience was echoed by others interviewed for this story, several of whom had children on the autism spectrum with little to no verbal communication abilities, who could have been helped by other assistive technology devices.

Similar scenarios occur across the nation, according to Shannon Des Roches Rosa, an editor at a website called " Thinking Person's Guide to Autism."

"The thing about IEPs," she said, "is that even though technically everybody's supposed to be fighting for the student's needs, parents, if they're new to this, don't even know what to fight for, or ... ask for. And there's never enough [financial] resources ... [so] the system is only going to do what families push for."

******

On September 19, Jennifer drove Caleb 60 miles southwest to Hillside, a residential facility in Atlanta for children and adolescents with emotional and behavioral issues. The plan was for Caleb to stay a month, to help lift him out of the depression that led him to attempt suicide.

"I hated it at first, being so far from home," Caleb said. "But over time, I knew it was the best thing for me."
This article was produced as a project for the National Health Journalism Fellowship, a program of the Center for Health Journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about Blended Learning.
At Hillside, Caleb took classes appropriate for his grade level, with a key difference from the GNETS program. "I had so much help, one-on-one, instead of just telling me to go online and do it," he said. The teacher encouraged him to ask questions and go at his own pace. Then - "I had never touched geometry before, and I got a 90 on an analytic geometry test," he said, beaming. "After that, I was getting stuff done [in class]. My self-esteem went, whoom!"

Since his return home, Caleb and his family have had to face the reality that the local school district will only admit him to GNETS. He doesn't want to go back to GNETS, but he does want to obtain a high school diploma. The only choice, they say, is to seek a GED. They talk about college, which Caleb still finds "scary."

After listening to Caleb describe his experience at Hillside, Brent leans into the table. "This makes me think, 'What if?' Where would he be if he had the support he needed in public school? We will never know."

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The separate, unequal education of students with special needs

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ATLANTA - Brent Agnew remembers feeling a sense of relief when he left the meeting called to discuss his 6-year-old son Caleb's anxiety attacks. As he and his wife, Jennifer, walked into the parking lot outside the E E Butler Center in Gainesville, Georgia, that day in 2006, the two could picture a different future for Caleb.

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This video, 1) broke my heart and 2) helped me understand disability a little more clearly and how important it is for a teacher to understand their students specific learning needs.
Teachers need to be able to accommodate to their students and to everything they can to help them succeed, even if that means letting them rock in their chair, or providing simpler directions, or tap their pencil, etc.

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Dear Teacher: Heartfelt Advice for Teachers from Students

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So many teachers have what is called "Ableism", and it most likely not intentional.
In the classroom, it can manifest itself in sending a student outside for "misbehaving" when maybe they are just having a hard time coping with their surroundings, or not allowing a child to rock in their chair when they need to move in order to focus, or simply not adjusting your classroom and expectations to students with special needs.
Teachers need to be flexible and learn about their students and their learning needs.

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Ableism 101 - What is Ableism? What Does it Look Like?

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As buzzwords like social justice, equity, and inclusion permeate our conversations, it’s essential for advocates of progress to remember another ‘ism.’

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This article discusses how many teachers are not very receptive to inclusion of students with disabilities into their classroom, however teachers also express the need for improved "training on accommodating and adapting instruction/assignments, assessment techniques, variety of instructional strategies
to meet the needs of children with disabilities" (Fuchs, 30-31). Given that, maybe teachers who are better equipped and educated about disability would be more open to the inclusion of students with disabilities into their classroom. This is a really interesting article that further discusses the barriers to teaching students with special needs in a mainstream classroom from the point of view of teachers.

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I think that what is most needed to address this is to educate all future educators about special needs and disabilities, not just those specializing in Special Education.
All teachers need to be well equipped to work with students with special needs, understand their learning needs, and accommodate their classroom to best help these students succeed.
Even as general educators, we will have students with special needs, whether they are diagnosed or not, and we will have to know how to work with them and understand their experiences.

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There is a newer version of this teaching guide. Visit Creating Accessible Learning Environments for the most recent guide on the topic. by Danielle Picard, Graduate Teaching Fellow 2014-2015 Print version   Students of all abilities and backgrounds want classrooms that are inclusive and convey respect. For those students with disabilities, the classroom setting may present…

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All of our students are extremely unique and therefore have extremely unique learning needs, whether they have a disability or not. Not only do we need to learn how to accommodate for the specific needs of students with disabilities, but we need to learn how to accommodate for the unique learning needs of all students. Learning extensively about disability and special education will not only make us better teachers to the students with disabilities, but it will make us better teachers for all of our students. Rather than looking at students with special needs as different, look at all students as having diverse learning needs and styles. Not only would this teach us more about diversity in disability but also help us to be more open minded and flexible in relation to diversity in all fronts.

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Educating and training all teachers to work with students with special needs opens up so many possibilities. When all teachers are confident in their abilities to work with students with special needs, it allows for a much more inclusive setting for all students. It allows for those students with disabilities to be included in mainstream classrooms, extracurricular activities, and playing with the other students on the playground.

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"Alone, isolated, left out: This is the way most students with special needs feel in school," says Jayne Clare, a veteran special education teacher. A study published in 2001 suggested that it's not just a feeling: Students with disabilities are often deliberately excluded by their peers in academic and extracurricular settings.

Ellen Stumbo, who is the mother of a child with Down syndrome, wrote in 2019 that at her daughter's school, students with disabilities were not included in the yearbook. Being excluded or separated from their peers at school events like field trips, award ceremonies, and dances was all too common, Stumbo noted.

Going Beyond Access: Reaching Inclusion

That's not the case at all schools, of course: Some, like McKinley Elementary School in Santa Monica, California, prioritize social inclusion throughout the school day, in part by focusing on how students interact in unstructured time like recess.

To meet the needs of students with disabilities-in particular their need to feel like they belong in the school community-McKinley has partnered with Inclusion Matters by Shane's Inspiration, a nonprofit that aims to eliminate bias toward children with disabilities through play.

The team at Inclusion Matters started out thinking that their mission was simply to remove the physical barriers to play for children with disabilities. But they quickly realized that they would have to address a variety of social barriers as well in order to help those children feel included.

"For children with disabilities to feel truly included, it requires looking at what the invisible barriers are-the misconceptions, the perception that they are somehow less capable, seen as less valuable than their peers without disabilities," says Marnie Norris, director of programs at Inclusion Matters.

To facilitate social interaction between students with and without disabilities, Inclusion Matters orchestrates field trips between general and special education classes to inclusive playgrounds, which are designed so that children with and without disabilities can play together throughout the whole site. It's a free program for public schools that has served over 45,000 students in more than 250 schools around the world.

Play is something that all kids-regardless of ability-can enjoy together, but simply throwing them together on the playground won't ensure that they play together. Inclusion Matters created an ability-awareness workshop to help general education students acknowledge and challenge their biases toward people with disabilities, as a way to remove one barrier to social inclusion.

Grouping two general education students with one special education student as buddies bypasses another roadblock by ensuring that students interact with each other. And by letting the general education students know their buddies' interests, abilities, and limitations beforehand, the workshop guides the students to enjoy each other and have fun.

After the field trip, general education students participate in a 45-minute reflection workshop in which they consider how their beliefs changed and how they'll interact with their peers with disabilities in the future.

"We've seen this program transform school campuses," says Norris. "We've seen schools go from having children with more severe disabilities who've never interacted with their peers to organically interacting with each other. It's transformative, and not as complicated as people might think it is."

Play is not the only way schools foster social inclusion, though. In February 2020, the 15th annual Super Kids Bowl in California's Hemet Unified School District featured cheerleaders and the marching band celebrating elementary special education students as they ran down the field and scored a touchdown with the football team.

Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia brings middle and high school students with and without disabilities together to engage in service projects, giving them all a chance to develop relationships with their peers and do something useful for their community. Inclusion efforts can be simpler than that, too: Special and general education students at Salem Junior High and Salem High School in Ohio meet once a month in the library to have lunch and do activities together.

Working toward social inclusion can be as simple as talking with general education students about students with disabilities. "It's important that we be models for our students, and if we're afraid to talk about something, they'll think that means that something is wrong," says Ashley Benjamin, the principal of McKinley Elementary School.

Improving School Climate

Inclusion Matters' program has had a wide-reaching impact at McKinley Elementary. Parents of general education students have asked McKinley special education teacher Keylee Cubillas how they can include her students and their families at events and holiday parties. And the parents of Cubillas's students have told her that they're happy with the inclusion efforts. They want their children to be happy and to develop their social and adaptive skills, says Cubillas, and being included in the school community helps achieve both goals.

The buddy relationships deepen with time: "If any of Keylee's students pass us on campus, you would think they were a rock star with how excited my students are to see their buddies and interact with them," fourth-grade teacher Katy Buckner says.

Buckner also points out that the buddy relationships are not a form of charity, telling her students, "This isn't about you helping someone. That can be part of it, but it's also about what gifts do both buddies on both ends have to bring to each other."

Buckner has noticed her students learning sign language to communicate with their buddies and using person-first language instead of ability-centered language when talking about students or fictional characters with disabilities-they have developed greater empathy through their interactions with their buddies.

That's a process that takes time. Even when schools partner with organizations like Inclusion Matters, working toward inclusion is "not just one quick trip. It's something that has a lasting impact. It shapes how students act, think, and feel about differences. It's shaping who children are and how they're going to interact with others in the world and society," says Benjamin.

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How to Improve Students With Disabilities' Sense of Belonging

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"Alone, isolated, left out: This is the way most students with special needs feel in school," says Jayne Clare, a veteran special education teacher. A study published in 2001 suggested that it's not just a feeling: Students with disabilities are often deliberately excluded by their peers in academic and extracurricular settings.