As someone who works in special education as an IEP chair (someone who oversees the special education process at my school), I have facilitated more than a hundred IEP meetings over the past year. It’s my second year in the position, but I have earned a reputation as someone who is good at adhering to the deadlines inherent in special education law and regulations.
I have seen the process really work out for some kids and parents and have gotten in substantial paperwork to help make it happen. Our teams have gathered enough data to support kids getting into the right placements (like public separate-day schools), students with severe disabilities getting 1-on-1s, students getting transportation services, and more. I’ve been a part of IEP teams and re-evaluations where students make so much progress that they test out of special education and the student no longer has an IEP. It’s a ton of work, as you can imagine, but it means a lot to students and parents.
If you are not familiar with the school system and special education, you would know it can be a very legalistic process where there is a lot of paperwork and a lot of mandates. All of this is so the child gets the best and most appropriate education possible to meet the educational impact of their disability and their needs.
Still, as someone who was new to the process last year, sometimes I got some criticism from my colleagues for being too eager to please the parent and being too soft and sensitive whenever a parent was upset. Sometimes I would be at the voice who would do anything to try to assuage and cave to the parent’s demands instead of listening to the rest of the team and the data to drive decisions.
One thing we always have to push is inclusion. According to Understood, a prominent special education website, inclusion is the need to have students with disabilities in the general education environment as much as possible, or at least have students with disabilities engage with their non-disabled peers as much as possible.
There is a whole section of the IEP, known as the least restrictive environment (LRE), which pushes this inclusion, and as children get older and make progress on their IEP goals, there is a greater push for students to be in more inclusive environments. According to Section 300.114 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), says:
As the rationale goes, there are no IEPs after high school and in the real world, so once a student is a senior and graduating with a high school diploma, they should be included as much as possible.
Inclusion might mean getting moved out of a classroom environment known as self-contained, where students are in a classroom with only a special educator (and maybe paraeducators) with other students with moderate to severe disabilities. Self-contained classes are known to be classes where students ideally receive more support intensive support from a special educator and are also known to be smaller classes.
Inclusion might mean getting moved into a classroom with their non-disabled peers, which are usually much bigger classes, or it might mean receiving fewer psychological, social work, or speech/language services when the provider deems there to be less educational benefit.
It’s my role to push inclusion as much as possible. And it is the law after all — when the predecessor to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was signed into law as the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHEA) in 1975, the mandate was for a student to receive a free and appropriate public education (FAPE) in the least restrictive environment possible.
However, I disagree in some instances with whether a push to put a kid out of a self-contained class to a co-taught class (a class with a general and special education teacher) is appropriate or advocate for a student needing a more restrictive setting when they are not making progress in their current environment, especially if they are reading or performing in math calculation significantly below grade level. I often advocate for a student to receive more pullout services if they are not making sufficient progress in the areas of need, mostly in math, reading, and writing.
. . .
No one IEP team member can unilaterally make a decision. There needs to be agreement from at least a consensus of IEP team members, and mandatory team members include the general education teacher, special education teacher, administrator, parent, and student (if they’re 14 or above). If the student sees a psychologist, social worker, or speech/language pathologist or other kind of related service provider, that member must also be invited. The point of explaining this is that each team member has a voice, but it has to be a consensus of all team members instead of one person making all the decisions.
There are a lot of ways that I see certain pushes for inclusion as harming, rather than helping the student. Of course, I explained to a friend, who was also a teacher, the angst of being a part of an IEP team that moves a kid out of self-contained only to see them fail or struggle.
“Well, you could just move the kid back to self-contained,” my friend said.
That is true — the push for inclusion always includes the risk of failure. Even when the data shows the student can function and thrive in the general education setting, data is not the child’s lived experience.
We put a kid out of self-contained, and sometimes, it backfires greatly. At the moment, of course we feel like it’s the right thing to do as an IEP team and we feel like the kid is ready. However, it’s undeniable there are pressures in the process that force IEP teams all across the country to push inclusion. I have seen whole schools where the self-contained model is gutted in favor of a co-taught model. In this case, there are IEP meetings to change the least restrictive environment for students to fit the instructional model of a school.
In one instance, we put a student with severe autism into a co-taught English class in hopes that he could succeed in the general education setting with the support of a general education teacher since he was making so much progress in his self-contained English class. It seemed like the right decision at the time, and, of course, in the back of our minds, we were incentivized to push it. He did not make any progress in the general education English class. There was a significant cost to his ability to get the best instruction possible and an added stressor on the teacher who tried every strategy they knew to try to get the student to keep up with his non-disabled peers.
I won’t take one anecdote as well as the many decisions I review and deal with on a daily basis (and ones I’m sure others criticize my team’s decision-making too) as an overall indictment on inclusion as a concept, but I do want to make the point that sometimes the push can come without a comprehensive review of whether the student is really ready.
. . .
As schools are incentivized to put more and more kids into the least restrictive environment, particularly when they get older, there are often compliance numbers a school may have to meet for their students with IEPs. At traditional schools, least restrictive environments are broken up into LRE A (inside the general education setting >80% of the time), LRE B (inside the general education setting between 40–79% of the time), and LRE C (inside the general education setting <40% of the time).
There might be specialized programs in the school that are more restrictive. More specialized schools, like public or private separate day schools, are considered more restrictive than anything a traditional school can provide.
The philosophy is that you want a student with disabilities to be included and not segregated from their non-disabled peers and access the general education curriculum as much as possible while still meeting their educational needs with accommodations and modifications.
According to Allison Gilmour, a professor of special education at Temple University, at Education Next, the intention of the school districts’ and IEP team members’ pushing maximal exposure in the general education setting is that exposure might not necessarily mean progress. And recent Supreme Court case Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District raised the standard for the “educational benefit” to “progress appropriate in light of the child’s circumstances.” School systems and IEP teams, like my own, are under significant pressure under federal law and legislation to push kids into the LRE
Gilmour also critiques many studies that find benefits of inclusion for long-term academic, social, and long-term outcomes. One study from the Special Education Elementary Longitudinal Study from 2000 to 2006 showed significantly higher scores on reading and math standardized exams for students with disabilities inside the general education setting more than 75% of the time than students who spent less than 25% of their day in these settings. Multiple more contemporary studies find similar results.
However, Gilmour points out the selection bias in this data. Students who have significantly fewer academic and behavioral challenges, and perform closer to grade level in academic tasks, are more likely to be placed in a general education setting as much as possible, whereas students with more intensive needs due to their disabilities need more restrictive environments — so of course studies comparing the two groups will find better performance for students in more inclusive settings.
“The consistent finding that SWDs have better outcomes when educated in general-education settings likely reflects this bias,” Gilmour says.
Gilmour goes onto talk about how pushing students with moderate to severe disabilities into more inclusive classrooms can often lead to more teacher burnout and less retention, as well as the effect on other peer learning. Of course, IEP teams don’t take this into consideration because the sole purpose at the table is the one student at hand.
There are plenty of times I’ve been part of an IEP team putting a kid in a more inclusive and less restrictive environment. But I always urge caution. If a student is in all self-contained classes (LRE C, usually), I urge the IEP team with my voice to only include them in one or two classes to see how they adjust and make progress (usually putting the student in the LRE B placement) prior to putting the student in all inclusive classes.
We have one student where multiple data sources show he is reading on grade level and able to make progress with accommodations like preferential seating, where he can be seated very close to the teacher to focus. He was in all self-contained classes. At his re-evaluation meeting where we had more data to show his strength in reading, I pushed to include him in at least one general education class, and ELA seemed like the most appropriate choice.
At first, the student struggled being in a class with about 30 kids versus a class of about 10–15 kids where he got more support or attention. But now, the student is making progress and making substantial improvements in his reading and writing ability, according to his teacher. It’s not like he was getting all A’s out of the gate, but it took some time for him to adjust and even the one class was a pretty substantial adjustment from what he was used to.
It was a very cautious, gradual push into the general education setting where only one area of support was released instead of all at once.
And I think pushes for inclusion should always be cautious and gradual. IEP teams have to come together for each student with a disability every year for the student’s annual review meeting to review their year’s worth of progress and review and revise the IEP meeting accordingly.
. . .
To people outside of special education, all this special-ed babble about LRE, inclusion, co-teaching, and self-contained seems like too many acronyms. But if your kid had autism, ADHD, an intellectual disability, or any other disability that affected their educational performance to the point where they need special education,
There are times I genuinely push the case for a student needing a more restrictive environment. In these cases, other team members might strongly disagree with me, and I usually get pushback all around due to how much work it is to put a student in a more restrictive environment.
Because of the incentive structure around least restrictive environment and the pressures all schools are under to have as many kids in the least restrictive environment as possible, you would not believe how many weeks of data need to be gathered, how much paperwork is involved to make the case, and how many procedural processes need to happen prior to putting a student from LRE B to LRE C, for example. It’s meant to be as difficult as possible because it’s not a great look for a school’s compliance numbers and adherence to IDEA.
It’s so easy to move a student into a less restrictive environment, but so difficult to move a student into a more restrictive environment.
That’s why I think sometimes our push for inclusion is wrong. Sometimes I think states and school districts can put less pressure on individual schools to have as many kids in LRE A.
There is always a kid who has a lot of family members who care a lot about them. If pushing a kid into a more inclusive setting doesn’t work out, it’s not like the kid’s whole education is butchered: you can just move the kid back into the setting they were in before.
But it is so easy to move a kid out of a more restrictive setting, and so difficult to move them back, so the decision is a lot more consequential than the remedy of “we can just put the kid back in self-contained.”
We often make these decisions as if each school is an ideal world with ideally trained teachers to handle the needs of every student with a disability. We are not supposed to consider external factors outside the particular student’s individual needs and progress. We are not supposed to consider factors like class sizes and who the teacher is, but those considerations matter, especially in light of trying to meet the Endrew F. standard of “progress appropriate in light of the child’s circumstances.”
I might receive some pushback for writing publicly about the cognitive dissonance and angst these decisions cause me in doing what I believe is right for my students, especially when IEP team decisions I myself have pushed for have backfired. Even when I am part of a team making a decision I do not feel like is in the best interest of the child, I am still part of that team and have to stand by the implementation of that decision. As an insider in the system, I am as much part of the problem as I am part of the solution.
But the goal is not to critique individual decisions IEP teams make as much as the systemic pressures and incentives IEP teams are under, which might not always be (in my perspective and those of many educators) to the benefit of the child.
My plea and solution is that all of us, as educators, be more thoughtful and more cautious on decisions to release supports to put a student in a more inclusive setting. There are some schools where peers have told me the school has completely dissolved the self-contained model, all in the name of equity. Special education students being isolated from their non-disabled peers is not considered the most just thing to do.
But there is a lot of nuance, and in all my experience in special education, pushing a kid into general education before they’re ready and because it looks good for the school is similarly unjust.
Inclusion never easy or simple. It should be the goal for every student with an IEP in this country. But it is incredibly consequential for a student’s education and their future. Inclusion must be done with diligence and care, because at the end of the day, if we were the parent, that’s what we would want for our own kids.
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This post was previously published on Age of Awareness.
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