Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Sam.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Hello and welcome to JCELL Jabber. For this episode we are recording live from the annual meeting for UCEA in Seattle and we're excited to be here and make this part of the conference experience.
My name is Ian Mehta. I am an Associate professor of Educational Leadership and a School Director at the University of Maine, and I am a board member of the Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership.
JCEL publishes peer reviewed cases for educational leaders who are in preparation programs as well as for practitioners who want to connect theory to practice as part of professional development efforts.
The journal is available online and the goal of JCEL is to help educational leaders create more equitable learning experiences for communities across the globe. Each case has a narrative, teaching notes, discussion questions, and learning activities for educational leaders to consider.
[00:01:32] Speaker C: Hello, my name is Terry Watson. I'm an Associate professor of Educational Leadership at the City University of New York. I'm also a board member for JCEL and JCEL Jabber is a way to help educators consider how one of the cases from JCELL could be used to support Learning for Leadership. DayCell Jabber is a quarterly podcast that helps highlight special collections of articles that are temporarily made available for free to increase access around issues of inequities that exist in school systems across the globe.
It provides listeners with a brief 30 minute podcast to engage more deeply in the case and hear nuanced analysis of the issue. It also connects the listener with the author who provides additional details about the case and a discussion with a scholarly practitioner from the field who can discuss how to apply this in practice.
[00:02:26] Speaker A: My name is Curtis Brewer and I'm an Associate professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. I'm also a co editor of the Journal.
In this episode, we review Denying Special Education to Students in Need A Case of Accountability, Compliance, and Fear in a Texas Elementary School by Dr. David DeMathews and Dr. David Knight. It was published in 2019 in volume 22, issue number one. The case explores special education law top down accountability, the intersectional identities of vulnerable students and families, and ethical decisions confronted by principals seeking to ensure all students are successful.
In particular, this case illustrates the way state level accountability policy can lead schools and districts to delay or deny special education to eligible students.
[00:03:18] Speaker B: So to set the stage for this case and for the listener to hear from the authors, we wanted to unpack the history of federal interventions on the public education system in the U.S.
while most educators believe federal government started to influence educational outcomes starting around 2001 with no child Left behind, there are much deeper historic roots to these efforts.
So in 1958, the US Congress passed the National Defense and Education act that was a direct response to space race with the USSR and the launching of Sputnik due to fear of falling behind the Soviets. The US bolstered education efforts to boost achievement in science, math, and foreign language, and it was a prime example of the expansion of the federal government and how it was willing to enact its efforts and interventions on the US Education system.
So this federal effort to shape education focused on military outcomes and directly impacted what students learned in public education classrooms. In an effort to maintain dominance in the US throughout the 1960s, government interventions tended to focus on social outcomes and for a while, many efforts at the federal level focused on issues of criticality, specifically around issues of equity and the emphasis of black and indigenous experiences, as well as classism that was experienced by many impoverished US citizens.
However, during the 1970s, achievement in the US began to decline and with the recession of the 70s came an increased call for politicians to focus on economic outputs through education to compete on a global scale, namely with countries like Japan and Germany that the US had economically dismantled during World War II. It is here, starting with the Nation at risk in 1983, that the birth of the accountability movement can be found specifically tying education to economic outputs, in other words, the belief that the purpose of education is not to focus on ensuring equitable outcomes for all citizens, but to focus as a business engine and ensure profit as part of a capitalist society from A Nation at Risk and moving forward, we see the rapid development and evolution of accountability in education, including goals 2000 that established the goal of raising standardized achievement under the Clinton administration, no Child Left behind under the George W. Bush administration, and Race to the Top under the Obama administration.
Through these efforts, the federal government has been able to enact neoliberal reform efforts that have weakened the public education system to serve students at the community level through the development of charter systems aligned to educational policies and practices that are tightly aligned to standardized achievement as opposed to focusing on asset based pedagogies and despite stated intentions, have largely failed to address the educational debts sometimes described as achievement gaps based on race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.
[00:06:02] Speaker C: What makes this podcast particularly special is that I get to be in conversation with David DeMathews and in our 2020 EAQ article, leading Inclusive Principal Perceptions, Practices and Challenges to Meaningful Change, we discussed the important role principals play in creating inclusive schools and and the ways in which race, disability, family background, language, and immigration status affect principals in their efforts to promote inclusion.
Now, what's nice about this particular case study is that it takes off kind of where we began in exploring the lived experiences of principals in a state in the U.S. let's say that with that said.
[00:06:47] Speaker A: Yeah. In this case, denying special education to students in need, we find a discussion of a centralized accountability policy and its interaction with local practices of identification of special education students.
First, the reader learns about the policy context of Texas, a southern US State. Due to the concern of over identification of students for special education services, the state education agency sets a a target of a maximum of 8% of the school population identified and qualifying for special education services.
The state then begins to require that school districts report these numbers to the state agency. This leads to a major drop in the number of identified students and an investigation by the federal government in 2018.
The investigation found that districts failed to serve many students that qualified for special education services.
In an attempt to hit the target number in this scenario, we meet Ms. Martinez, a new administrator who is conscientious and committed to serving all students.
As she learns about her new campus, she is impressed by the faculty and engaged community members. However, Ms. Diaz, a community activist, introduces Principal Martinez to families whose students have been denied special education services.
After Principal Martinez begins to look into the issue, she meets with the central office administrator who leans on her, pressures her to maintain the target identification numbers. The principal is faced with a choice to keep the status quo or to find a way to serve students and the community.
So in this case, we found it to be a compelling discussion, a compelling way of thinking about that intersection of principals who are trying to be inclusive in a policy context that was maybe working against them. So we wanted to give an opportunity for the authors to discuss this case.
So to do that, we'd like to welcome Dr. David Demathus, an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. We'd also like to welcome Dr. David Knight. Dr. David Knight is an assistant professor of education finance and policy at the University of Washington College of Education.
David. David, welcome to the show.
[00:09:13] Speaker D: Thank you for having us.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: If you'd like to briefly introduce yourself and then we'll get started with some questions.
[00:09:20] Speaker D: Sure.
So I'm really passionate about special education.
I was a former practitioner, former teacher, and for both of those roles, I wasn't really prepared, particularly in the area of special education. I didn't understand all aspects of the law.
And I found that as my knowledge of special education grew and it was something I had to invest in personally, and it was something I Just was also lucky to be kind of networked to certain people who had knowledge.
I realize how the top down accountability system, some of the logics that operate within that top down accountability system can really further marginalize students with disabilities.
And what's really frustrating to me is even still a federal policy that is civil rights legislation that provided for the first time free appropriate access to public education, which was denied in many states in this country before 1975.
So a law with really, really good civil rights human rights intentions has in ways being co opted with accountability logics and in ways have not been adequately teachers, principals in our universities, even people who do policy research, they have not focused enough on understanding the law, making sure practitioners are knowledgeable about the law and the underpinnings of the law that should be able to value to guide administrators even when they don't know the little individual nuances of the law. And so it's an important law to know it's evolved over time. It's not evolved necessarily in the most perfect way, but it's still, it's civil rights legislation, but the systems in which it's being implemented at times is creating these inequities. And I know Dave and I are really concerned about this.
[00:11:24] Speaker E: Yeah. And I would just add to that. So David and I collaborate on a lot of different things and I come to this work from a background in finance and policy and less work on special education. And so I think when you come at it from a policy perspective, you're thinking about much more about what the system's doing and the policy context. And so a lot of the discussions we saw on this particular issue was focusing on individuals.
So individual principals and people were feeling like they were being denied services. And one thing I think that this case in particular tries to out point pull out is that it's not necessarily individuals doing bad things, it's that they're operating in a system and a policy context that makes it really hard for them to do what they really want to do for their students.
[00:12:15] Speaker C: So why you clearly focused on special education policy, why special ed in particular? I know David, you are a former special ed teacher, but you come from a policy perspective, so why does it matter? In terms of finance, I would think that we would want more students in special education just for a finance reason.
[00:12:34] Speaker E: Yeah, I would say that it's a lot about resources. So when you get an iep, when you have an individual education program, that's a document that guarantees to you certain services and resources. And I think there's a Tension when you identify a student into special education, that's going to require resources. And so a school needs to know where that's going to come from. So there's just a lot of really important policy questions around special education and finance and relatedly.
[00:13:05] Speaker D: And I think that has something to do in this case as well. In the grander context, if we're really being honest, the federal mandate is not adequately funded by the United States Congress.
President Biden has, in a few speeches at a few different times, acknowledge that special education or IDEA needs to be fully funded. You didn't typically hear that from prior presidents, but I think there's a reckoning with the fact that there's so many problems with the implementation of this and IDEA is getting old. So it's been quite a long time since the law has been updated. So potentially there's a policy window there. This has been somewhat of a bipartisan project from its beginning, so maybe there will be opportunities. And finance is key. And my gut tells me that the reason why Texas actually created these indicators was less about their interest in stopping racial disproportionality in special ed. So I think if they were interested in that, there wouldn't be racial inequities in the school finance system.
What I think was happening was they're trying to save money because special ed is not fully funded.
And by lowering the number of students who are identified, that can take some burden off of the state financially. So I think that underpins some of this. It's not necessarily the most relevant to principals working with teachers, working with families, but I think that's a part of this too. And Dave and I have written about this in some other articles looking at publicly available information.
And also some other folks like Bruce Baker. Baker have written about issues with school finance, but then particularly special ed school finance.
[00:14:45] Speaker C: But here's something. Historically, as we all know, black and Hispanic students, particularly boys, have been over identified in special education by educators who failed to take the time to really get to know their students in some ways couldn't. By not funding sped, we forced teachers to become more socially just in their practices and to see the whole child.
[00:15:09] Speaker D: I don't think so. So I think the first part of what you said is true. I think special education has at times, even before there was a law, has been a way to push out black children and other children of color into segregated self contained programs. I think that's absolutely true.
But where I don't agree is there is some children do have unique cognitive, emotional, psychological difference that requires certain types of supports and services for people with highly specialized knowledge.
So both are true. I think there's going to be students that have very special unique needs. They don't have time to waste as they're moving through the human development process.
But the problem is, in a society that is racist and has wrestled with racism, when you enact a policy that provides filters and can move students around, black children in particular are disproportionately moved outside of the system. And that was something a lot of politicians, a lot of families in this country wanted after, you know, Brown happened. They wanted to see schools maintain racial segregation. And so special education was an avenue on top of that, deficit perspectives of black children in general.
So not the kind of grand policy scheme, but just teachers, their own inherent biases that they bring in with them from school because they're people that live in neighborhoods and, you know, watch tv, will see some black children and will feel that those children are not capable or not able to reach the same potential as white children. And that accumulated deficit frame, I think also contributes to funneling those kids out. And that's still a problem today, even though I think there's a lot of improvement in recognizing deficit mindset. It's still, you still look at the data in the US Department of Education, it's the same old, same old.
[00:17:18] Speaker E: Yeah, sorry, I lost my train of thought, but a couple things. So I agree with what you're saying, Terry, but I would also say that special education is underfunded and we already are limiting the amount of resources we're putting forward.
And so.
Well, okay, so, and so what Dave was saying earlier about the federal government does not fully fund idea.
It's a little bit ironic. Every few decades they fund this big national study called the state, and it looks at the expenditures on special education students and students in regular education.
And one of the key findings from that study is that students who have an IEP who are in special education have 1.9 times higher spending on them than a student who's in regular education. And so we know that when you are able to get an iep, you're likely to have more resources allocated towards you. And then at the same time, we have this long standing finding that there is over identification into special education that's racialized. And so, and yet this case is about under counting students in special education. So there's just, there's a lot of nuance here. And it's about both restricting resources from certain types of students, but also pulling, excluding them from the classroom. So this just can happen through undercount or over identification.
So I think the case does a good job of trying to highlight that nuance.
[00:18:45] Speaker D: And one thing we were trying to highlight too in the case was because the state has tried to frame what I think is a glaring, problematic, intentional policy to kind of defund special education further.
I think there's intentionality behind it, but I don't know, I wasn't in the room.
But some of those, they use some of the same logics saying like, oh, we just set this cap. Nobody really had to follow it because we care about racial equity.
There's disproportionate identif. There's an over identification of students of color. We're concerned about that. So that's why we set this cap. Even though they just pulled that number out of thin air, there's no research, there was no investigation into it. When they had to explain why they did this to the US Department, Department of Education, they had no adequate answer. And so it's kind of funny, that narrative and then that narrative was pushed down. So I think in the case the special edit, the administrators at the district level in some respects are being reluctant to kind of provide that principal with that support because they're operating from that like flawed logic where this problematic policy was kind of transformed and framed as a policy to address racial disproportionality.
[00:20:04] Speaker C: Right. So when we read this case, why is it important to think about the asset based pedagogies and moving away from the deficit mindsets that we know exist in the classroom regarding students and their achievements, along with the inequities that achieve that achievement focused policies have on the treatment of students. Meaning what can we do different? Like what's the takeaway? We know that the teaching force is overwhelmingly filled with nice white women, Right. And many of them have little to no experience in communities of color with students of color. Yet they come in and evaluate them and find them missing certain skills or talents or just not being aware of their culture. So they identify them as learning disabled or somehow they make them a problem as opposed to knowing who they are and learning more about their families and communities. What can be the takeaway from the this? Because there is a problem with race in the schoolhouse and we know that historically SPED has been used to further marginalize black and brown children in particular.
What can we do better?
[00:21:05] Speaker D: Well, I'm biased. I think it starts with highly trained school leaders and a diverse workforce.
So given that we work in the principal preparation area, I think you need to have, first of all, all more leaders of color in school leadership positions, first of all, so that they can hopefully bring in a mindset that recognizes the assets of the community in which they work.
That should hopefully be more inherent to them than a lot of the workforce that does tend to be majority white women. I think that's important. But underneath that, I think racial identity is not going to get you all the way there. So there needs to be really, really high quality, intentional training for principals to understand the law, to understand the research that supports this fact. Right. That for decades, low expectations, deficit frames, a lack of access to teachers of color throughout a student's trajectory through the public school system all have these powerful effects on students and students of color. And a principal's job is to disrupt, that is to think differently about the way that they organize their schools.
The values, the vision, the mission, the way that they engage with teachers, the way that they engage with families, and the type of environment they expect to see in every single classroom. So I think it starts with the principal because I don't think superintendents can force something onto a school.
And I think you'll always get a great teacher here or there that kind of gets it.
But we want school wide, system wide change. And so I think it starts with leadership preparation and development and it starts with that school leader on the campus.
[00:22:53] Speaker E: Yeah. One thing I would add something we tried to do with this case was it's really coming out of a larger project that had multiple publications. And so this is a case study that we think would be really good as a teaching tool. And we also have a paper that we published in a journal on educator preparation. And so one of the arguments we make there is if we could help school leaders better, even just better understand data, and you could look at things like identify these problems before they come up. What we show in that paper is it was actually really obvious. It was very clear that kids were being undercounted and denied services. It was right there in the data that people could use. And so we could be pushing that a little bit more in educator preparation.
We also had a paper in epaa, the Education Policy Analysis Archives, and that one's more focused on sort of the policy context and how we can avoid these types of things coming up at the state level. I mean, it's really a state accountability cap that they put in place that started all this particular problem.
[00:23:57] Speaker C: So is the cap the problem or is it deficit, mindsets, racist practices?
[00:24:03] Speaker D: I think it's not an either or. I think we have a Top down problem and kind of a bottom up problem. Right.
The top down the system is not adequately funded. The monitoring mechanisms there should be, we should have oversight, the government should have oversight over public schools.
There should be data to have a sense of what's happening or what's not happening.
But the top down system of accountability and how it's framed, the finance system. And even to your point about teachers, what you need to be certified to be a teacher or a principal, do you need to have an asset based orientation? I don't think you do. I think you just need to kind of jump through these certain types of hoops to get into a certification pathway. In Texas, 60% of our teachers are alt certified.
So they're not even necessarily studying to be a teacher for a long time. So now you're taking somebody who lives in a society where there is racism in the first place and now you're giving them a little bit of training and then you're putting them in a classroom, in a community they might not even be from.
So I think that's an issue. And I also think we paid teachers more and made it a more attractive profession. We get people who could long term develop, stay in this role.
Low income students of color are most likely to have the least experienced teachers and principals. And that I think also contributes to what we're seeing. And in this case it's a new principal in a challenging school trying to figure out how to be a principal and all the self esteem issues and legitimacy, the workload, familiarizing yourself with systems and meeting people and then is injected into a system where you would expect your supervisor to be like, oh, we have to fix this. And that's not the case. And so I think it's both. It's a top down problem, but I also think like we need teachers to be better prepared. We need teachers to have these values. When I was a teacher, my principal, my first principal told me this is civil rights and human rights work.
But that's a little, that's just when NCLB is starting. A lot has also changed from then to now. And I had a woman of color that made sure that was clear to me on my first day at work. And so I think we agree it's.
[00:26:21] Speaker B: Just a both to that point, maybe from more of the student or parent or community perspective. You know, when schools attempt to avoid providing services to students when the students need them and the school is legally required to offer them, what does that then do to children and parents when the kids don't receive those services?
[00:26:45] Speaker E: Well, I mean, even taking a step back and looking at what the way Texas operates its school, in addition to its special education system, its school finance system, I would describe Texas is a lot like many other states that operates a regressive school finance system where if you compare different types of school districts serving either high or low poverty student populations are districts that serve higher percentages of students of color. Those districts are getting the same or less money than districts serving wealthier student populations. And so the system itself is set up to fail in that sense. And so then you layer on top of that this accountability system that's trying to tell districts not to identify to keep your special education rates at a lower rate.
That's just kind of a recipe for disaster.
[00:27:38] Speaker D: Let me add to this. So in the kind of warm up for this, Curtis, you mentioned that, you know, Texas is a southern state.
There is a long history in Texas of denying access to public education to in particular black and Mexican children. There's a long history of that inequitable facilities and segregation. And even when there was integration, differing policies and practices, retaining Mexican and Mexican American students, just a variety of flawed policies, not respecting or valuing Spanish and the culture that really is a key part of Texas communities or certain parts of Texas communities.
So that's a long history there that Texas parents and Texas grandparents and great grandparents all know about. And so going to like, how does this affect communities? Well, some communities because of that history, don't trust their public schools.
And that trust is critical.
A good administrator might take over that school, A good superintendent might take over that school. But just because those individuals hearts are in the right place, that doesn't make up for 50 or 70 or 80 years.
So on a policy like this fractures that relationship at a time when we should be trying to mend those relationships because those broken relationships don't serve the schools and its desire for accountability. And it definitely doesn't serve families.
Kids do best when teachers and families have trusting relationships that are two way.
They do poorly when there's distrust. And so another unintended or another toxic side effect of this policy was fracturing. We're further fracturing the relationship between public schools and families.
[00:29:44] Speaker E: One of the things that happened since this paper was published is that we had the COVID 19 pandemic. So that created obviously a whole bunch of challenges for schools, but and especially around special education. But I think another challenge that folks often forget about is the impact of teacher turnover on the working conditions for those who stay. And so you talk about institutional knowledge and People who know students and relationships. And when you have a major disruption like Covid that leads to more turnover that we're seeing, you lose a lot of those relationships. And that's going to affect all kinds of different things, including special education.
[00:30:25] Speaker C: But here's something. So looking at the most recent NAEP data, right, it showed that in California, when they were proactive with COVID 19, how scores not only maintained, meaning students learned, but they even exceeded expectations when the rest of the nation fell behind with school closures and remote schooling. So in many ways, it's almost like it's a setup. What did Tupac say? We ain't meant to survive. It's a setup. But if we look at these policies, and I would say the intended outcomes, because I think they do know what putting a cap as fat is. I think they do know that the teaching forces, largely white women, if there is bias because. Because schools as, you know, mirror society, and Texas tells us that. So if we know Texas, right, and if Texas does what we know it's going to do, should we really be surprised by these policies and practices?
[00:31:15] Speaker D: I think with Texas, we shouldn't be surprised. I mean, there's a long history of it. There's been ebbs and flows, there's been some positive reforms, but no, all in all, the state has not been moved in the direction we'd hope it to move.
[00:31:31] Speaker C: So what can we tell aspiring school leaders, like, you know, what did Dr. King say? The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice because we really want to create, embody, embolden socially, just leadership, right?
Based on what we know with this case, and we know it's hypothetical, but it's based on data, and it does matter.
Our children matter.
What can we do better?
[00:31:57] Speaker D: Well, sometimes when we look at the system, right, we think about our history, we think about our society, it feels like change is so far away.
The beauty of being a principal or being a teacher is changes right down the hallway, changes right in a classroom.
And each individual decision makes a difference. It makes a difference for somebody. It makes a difference for a child, a family.
And so for practitioners, it is really important to know that they have agency.
They have a great deal of agency. They can stop in the middle of this IEP meeting and say, wait a minute, I don't agree with that.
They can talk with their principals. A principal can rally up a group of parents and go to the school board, maybe covert rallying them, but, like, there's things that they can do on the ground that can Disrupt that. And so in the article that we did research on, we identified it wasn't easy to find really effective principals who could speak to all the variety of community contexts, student identities in a campus, and then we're effective at disrupting the status quo in their schools. It was not easy for us to find them. But they're there, and they're doing this work, and they're making a difference for those teachers, for those children, for those families. And so my call is to the folks who are listening, who might be practitioners, like, you can do this at your school.
The broader change is a lot harder. Right. I mean, work with your professional associations, I think, are really important. So every state has an administrator association, work with whatever organizations are out there. And there's also a lot of parent advocacy groups that are out there.
So I think there's great opportunity for change at the local level.
At the national level, it does feel a bit more daunting and predictable. But I would still like to think, you know, if you looked at the data in 1975 and you looked at where we are today, we are in a better place in terms of serving with disabilities. But if you looked at America today, you looked at it yesterday, the racism has changed and evolved, too. But it's still with us.
[00:34:32] Speaker B: Right.
[00:34:33] Speaker D: And so it's still with us with special education and with our public schools. But I do think we're seeing progress. It's just we cannot be content with this status quo, and we need to be organized and raising our voices and advocating to disallow these types of toxic policies.
[00:34:54] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:34:54] Speaker E: Yeah. It's also important to remember how this whole story kind of came to fruition, which was a whistleblower on the ground who reached out to the Houston Chronicle. And then the Houston Chronicle did this major investigation, shined a huge light on it. Then the US Department of Ed comes in and does a major investigation at multiple school districts around the state. And so since that, all of that stuff has happened, there are changes that are taking place on the ground. It started with the school leader, and obviously the work now is ongoing and it's not done yet. And we have to keep. Keep working on it.
[00:35:27] Speaker A: But.
[00:35:27] Speaker D: And we have a role as education leadership and policy scholars. So when this happened, when I read this in the Houston Chronicle, we worked together in the same building at the same time. And I was so angry about the general issue, but then I was like, yo, how did we not do this?
And with publicly available data, we could have done this two or three years out. So from 2004 to 2007, you are already seeing this play out. Why was nobody tracking this?
So honestly, I put some of it on our field, on our education research community, that a Houston Chronicle reporter is the one that gets this story after 14 years, but not us. And so I think like, there's some. We need to do some social media soul searching too. Why we marginalize special education in policy spaces, why we tend to focus on only certain groups of I'm an urban ed scholar. But then you don't focus on special education or rural scholar. Whatever your thing is, it's often not intersectional. And so special ed policy has been almost completely marginalized from spaces and it was just sitting right there. So how many families were fighting and complaining? How many kids were not getting what they need without while this data was just mounting?
[00:36:52] Speaker B: I was going to say, I believe this to be true. That many parents with IEP 504 children.
This is probably a typical lived experience.
[00:37:03] Speaker D: Yeah. Right.
[00:37:05] Speaker B: And so thank you for shining a light on that.
[00:37:07] Speaker C: Thank you for your work, both of you.
[00:37:10] Speaker A: If you'd like to access this article, please visit our special collections page linked to this podcast. Every 90 days we will post five to six articles that will be available to everyone.
If you'd like to see our whole body of work, please visit your local university library or talk with Sage about a subscription. If you have questions, you can email me directly at Curtis Brewertsa.
[00:37:33] Speaker C: Edu and I'm Terry Watson. Thank you for listening. If you'd like to reach me, I can be reached at T.
[00:37:45] Speaker B: And I'm Ian Mehta. You can email me at Ian Mettein Edu and if it's still around, you can follow me on Twitter.
We look forward to joining you next time on JCEL Jabber.
[00:37:59] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:38:17] Speaker D: Yeah.
