Superintendents: A Problematic Call to Action

Superintendents: A Problematic Call to Action

  August 25, 2015    Verenice Gutierrez, PhD

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Ronald Heifetz writes and lectures about technical vs. adaptive leadership. His work is captured in his book, Leadership on the Line (published in 2002).  I won't attempt to be expansive about his work but I am referencing here because of a call to action that I found in the School Superintendents Association to support a bill that would change how school districts have to fund special education.  You can read the call to action here: http://www.aasa.org/aasablog.aspx?id=37987&blogid=286

While I understand the rationale behind the call to action, I disagree with this approach to addressing mounting costs for special education.  I agree that a lot of money and resources are allocated to maintain current special education programs and delivery models.  However, the proposed solutions in the bill are purely technical.  What is necessary to address how and why special education programming isn't working is adaptive leadership.

The first step I propose towards adaptive leadership is a significant, comprehensive data dig.  Start with current Individual Education Plans (IEP) to have a full understanding of what services districts are currently providing.  What are the number of service hours that, per the IEP, special education personnel are legally obligated to provide in one academic year?  Once known, districts can determine if they have the appropriate personnel to deliver the hours that they have legally obligated themselves to provide.  This first step can be quite eye opening.  When we collected this data in my school my special education teacher came to this conclusion:

...the students I serve have high needs and the number of service minutes I am to provide exceeds the time constraints of the work week...I have 12 minutes between the end of my lunch duty and the time I have to be with students again.  This is my 'lunch break'.  There is no room in the schedule to account for a transition between groups; they are booked back to back.

I was fully aware of this issue.  This teacher was the second amazingly talented Special Education teacher I had hired for our building.  I prayed she would not leave us too while I worked furiously to get more support for her and for the students.  However, I had to work with a program administrator and a special education director who were stuck in technical, compliance driven leadership.  The adaptive task was to find ways that we could serve students in the general education classroom, where appropriate.  Another adaptive task was to be honest with ourselves and parents about what was written into the IEP.  Was it not only realistic but also necessary for student X to have 250 minutes of math support in one week.  This number amounted to 15% of the school week above and beyond the required 75 minutes of core math instruction for one child.  These conversations are not easy to have with the team, the parents or the special education department because the reaction is to find a technical solution where adaptive leadership is necessary.

A technical task that may happen after a true analysis of service hours has been completed may very well be a re-writing of IEPs.  And, if the team uses multiple data points to write realistic IEPs they may also find that some students no longer need services.  This was the case with our first amazing Special Education teacher.  Once she truly assessed students abilities and triangulated her data she found that some students no longer needed services.  Students were able to be exited from Special Education because we had hard data to demonstrate that they could be successful in general education.  There weren't that many students and I am not advocating to take services from students, simply be data driven.

A deeper part of the data analysis is to have hard numbers as to which students are referred to Special Education and for which reasons.  We found that most of the students referred for Special Education services happened to be second language learners.  That led to professional development for the staff about the process of second language acquisition, assimilation/acculturation and many sessions on the Special Education referral process.  Often second language learners will exhibit behaviors that are similar to those of a student with a learning disability.  However, the behaviors are appropriate for their linguistic level as well as what stage they may be in their assimilation/acculturation process.  The behavior does not necessarily indicate that there is a cognitive "problem" as much as the child is learning a new language and a new way of being.  The intersectionality of Special Education with Bilingual/ESL Education is a field that I believe needs to be of focus by educational leaders, especially those making policy and funding decisions.

The second piece of this work is "for which reasons".  If the data demonstrates an increase in "other health impaired" there may be cause to explore that further.  Aside from a high referral of second language learners we found a high referral of boys of color for "behavior".  Again, professional development was necessary to address how boys of color are often problematized for behaviors that educators do not find problematic in White children.  At some point I will do a whole post on this topic but here I will leave it only as an example. Remember that IDEA was originally meant to serve students with "true" disabilities such as blindness, deaf/hard of hearing or traumatic brain injury.  Yet, we have added other categories that students can be slotted into.  How are students being slotted?  Is it appropriate for them to be so?  These questions may have some technical solutions but I can assure you that there will be some adaptive work that will be required to create change if it is needed.

IDEA is now 40 years old.  Since its enactment in 1975 it has been reauthorized about every five years to ensure that students with disabilities are being appropriately educated.  As educators we should be involved in ensuring that policy appropriately reflects the reality of our school sites.  However, we should not be quick to list out technical solutions where adaptive leaderships is needed.