The Children's School: lessons for inclusion, leadership, and school success.

• Author: Lief, Beth
• Position: Disabled students

In recent years education has evolved into the country's number one public concern. (1) Presidential, gubernatorial, mayoral, and legislative candidates all claim to care about educating our children. Each candidate offers an agenda for ensuring that all children achieve at high levels. On the national level, President Bush's "accountability" package (2) addresses what kinds of tests and achievement reports schools must administer. No elected politicians have challenged the continued and increased testing of public school children to increase school accountability for student achievement.(3) This increased pressure on schools to perform is occurring amidst a critical shortage of qualified teachers and principals. This shortage strains the ability of school districts to meet the challenges imposed by testing. The problem is particularly acute in cities like New York that serve large numbers of disadvantaged students and students with disabilities.

Successful schools should be used by educators and policy-makers as models. In order to reproduce the success of these schools, the reasons for their success must be identified. A school's achievement data gives important indications of why it succeeds. There are also innumerable studies and reports listing factors enabling school success. (4)

Unfortunately, no single factor ensures student success, nor do factors contributing to school success thrive independently of one another. To create policies that invite replication on a large scale, one has to look at both the factors that enable school success, and at the factors that promote or frustrate the replication of successful schools.

The Children's School in Brooklyn, New York is a school worthy of study. The leadership is superb; teachers know their students and fellow educators well; parents genuinely feel part of their children's education. The teachers form a robust professional learning community that thrives throughout the year. At the Children's School, children achieve at high levels and learn to appreciate and respect differences among themselves. (5) The school is also a model for understanding how to successfully educate children with disabilities. These lessons are important for understanding how to provide a standards-based education to the ten to twelve percent of students in special education nationally. (6)

1. THE NATIONAL CONTEXT

   For at least two decades schools have been concerned with increasing student achievement. Beginning with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics ("NCTM") in the late 1980s, professional educator organizations began to promulgate standards for what students should know and be able to do. (7) Today, thirteen professional disciplines have developed content standards and every state but Iowa has passed content standards for students in specific subjects. (8)

   While testing students has long been a hallmark of public education (much more than in private schools), the standards movement has led to an increase in the number and significance of standardized tests. New federal legislation requires that all students in grades three through eight be given annual tests in reading and math. (9) The intensified pressure to pass the tests and the heightened consequences for students who fail to do so and their schools, have, in the view of many, changed the nature of K-12 schooling, (10) Increased testing has made it much harder for schools to ignore large numbers of failing students or the fact that these failing children are predominantly poor, minority, or disabled. (11) Increased accountability demands that schools help as many students as possible--including students with disabilities and limited English proficiency--acquire the skills needed to perform well on standardized tests.

   At the same time, even test makers agree that student and school success should not be judged by any one measure. (12) The business of nurturing young people is too complicated for such simplistic evaluation. The success of school-sponsored interventions to combat guns, gangs, and prejudice is not measured by standardized tests. Nor can a standardized test gauge a student's aptitude for singing, drawing, or community service. A great school enables its students to achieve on standardized tests while also providing them with a rich arts experience, teaching them how to get along with others, and encouraging them to contribute to their communities.

   Although accountability and testing have received much attention, no campaign to raise student achievement will succeed without paying attention to the quality of principals and teachers. It is hard to find a good school that doesn't have a good principal. Recruiting and retaining good teachers is just as important. The increased complexity of a curriculum that meets rigorous standards and the expectation that all children master that curriculum, presumes that teachers know the material, possess teaching strategies to reach the full range of students, and can assess their students' grasp of the material. We should not assume, however, that such educators are readily available. Nationally, the nation's schools will need over two million teachers within the decade. (13) The crisis in retaining qualified principals is of similar proportion.

   More attention is being paid to the recruitment, development, and retention of qualified principals and teachers. Since its inception in 1987, the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards has gained extraordinary support. Thirty-two states now offer salary supplements to teachers who attain National Board certification, and thirty states offer fee support for the certification process. (14) Major national organizations, such as the Education Commission of the States, along with professional organizations of principals and superintendents, are focusing increasing energy on preparing and retaining qualified school leaders. (15)

   Issues of accountability and student success have special meaning for students with disabilities. Since the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, (16) federal law has guaranteed an appropriate public education for students with disabilities. This right has been given further meaning with the passage of The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act Amendments of 1997 ("IDEA Amendments"). (17) Consistent with earlier law, the IDEA Amendments requires that

   [t]o the maximum extent appropriate, children with disabilities ... [be] educated with children who are not disabled; and ... children with disabilities [be removed] from the regular educational environment ... only when the nature or severity of the disability of a child is such that education in regular classes with the use of supplementary aids and services cannot be achieved satisfactorily. (18) In addition, the IDEA Amendments marked a major shift in the education of children with disabilities, moving from an emphasis on "access to education" to "improving results." (19) Schools, districts, and states now have to report the academic performance of students in special education and are being held much more accountable for the educational outcomes of disabled students. (20)

   Those responsible for educating disabled students, however, have much work to do to comply with the Amendments. According to a policy briefing by the United States Department of Education in 2001, only nine states reported academic achievement separately for students in special education. (21) More than ever, school districts and individual schools need to understand how to best provide a standards-based education to disabled students and improve their school performance.

   The Children's School is a success story in how to provide disabled students with a standards-based education. This essay uses The Children's School as a case study and suggests that its policies be carried out on a larger scale.

2. OVERVIEW OF THE CHILDREN'S SCHOOL

   Situated on a tree-lined street in Brooklyn, in the leased brick annex of Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church, The Children's School teaches approximately 450 students in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade. (22) General education students and special education students learn side-by-side in the same classrooms on a fulltime basis. (23)

   Quantitative and qualitative measures of the school's success abound. (24) The Children's School has a high attendance rate for both general education and special education students. Only one student was suspended during the 2000-2001 year. Students in both general education and special education outperform their peers on standardized tests. (25) When eleven experts in early childhood, special, and bilingual education looked at a sample of student progress from 1994 to 1995, they found that all the students they studied, including an equal proportion of general education and special education students, showed "extraordinary or good progress given [their] strengths and challenges." (26) These experts looked at progress not only in math and language arts, but also in early childhood socializing, which is never measured on standardized tests?

   From its inception, The Children's School has worked toward a coherent curriculum across classes and grades. The school's Comprehensive Educational Plan for 2001-2002 centers on a standards-based curriculum with specific outcome goals related to the applicable standards. The Plan is a living document, not just a token response to central headquarters' mandates. The instructional products of a rigorous standards-based education permeates the school's hallways, classrooms, and student portfolios. On the second floor, for example, one wall posts a first grade assignment requiring students to read the book Read For Me, Mama and answer two questions. One question asks, Why was reading so important to Joseph? The other question, Why is reading important to you? One forward-thinking child wrote, "To have a good future." Another student, more...