Special education: frameworks, practices, and student outcomes

¶ … special education from the standpoint of the students' parents. The writer explores the opinions on the accessibility and quality of special education afforded their children in Massachusetts. The writer examines the opinions through the use of research project that is proposed here. There were eight sources used to complete this paper.

For the last four decades the nation has been steadily working to improve the special education system within its public schools. A Supreme Court decision in the 1960's mandated that special education children be given many more services than they had in the past and that they receive that education within the least restrictive learning environment possible. Over the last four decades as these changes have taken place there have been many articles published on the changes, and the success or failure of those changes. Massachussets has enjoyed the cutting edge of special education reform with prototype programs as well as many evaluations to determine what direction to take next. While many studies have been conducted as to the success or failure of the special education services in the state of Massachusetts, they have primarily focused on the reactions of the students or the perception of the educators. One population that has been largely overlooked, but has a unique perspective of the situation is the parents of the children. Parents of special education children have a unique perspective about how well the delivered services are working for their child. The students themselves are a great source of information for the purpose of special education research but because they are children, and disabled in one way or another they may not be able to accurately access the situation. In addition the educators can assess the classroom and test performance but are not able to determine the success of the services outside of the school setting. A child with severe dyslexia needs to read street signs, medicine instructions and other things. The teachers will know if the child can do that in a school setting but will not know how affective the services have been overall. Parents are one of the best research tools in the special education field, yet very little has been done to utilize their input. The state of Massachusetts has been heavily involved in the changes that the special education system has seen in the last four decades. This paper proposes a research study that will determine how satisfied parents of special education students are with the services that their children are receiving. This research will serve as a guideline for future decisions in the field of Massachusetts's special education by providing insight to the success of the current program using the parents as the barometer. The parents will provide many viewpoints of the field and allow the experts to use this research study to build future special education services for the students of the Massachusetts system. The research may also serve as a guide to promote more in-depth studies and could be broadened to assist other states in their decision making process for special education. The research question will focus on what parents of special education students think about the accessibility and quality of the special education services.

PURPOSE OF STUDY

The purpose of the study will be two-fold. The first purpose of the study will be to determine if parents of special education children in the state of Massachusetts are satisfied with the accessibility of services for their children. Fifty years ago students who had special needs were sent to a classroom down the hall and basically did easy work all day long. They put in their time and went home each day. There was no effort to teach them within the regular classroom. In addition to the room at the end of the hall many students were sent to a centralized location on a special bus each day and they were kept there for the entire day. There were no laws governing and mandating parent-school contact or teamwork, therefore the parents and students were at the mercy of the school that taught their child. The need for meetings could be ignored, and one year a student could receive excellent services while the next year receive substandard if any services. The accessibility to special education was up to the individual school and it was not mandated in quality in any way. This study will serve to determine the satisfaction of the parents regarding the accessibility that their child is currently afforded for their special education needs and services.

The second purpose of this study is to determine the satisfaction of the parents of special education children regarding the quality of those services. Before the laws were passed there was no constant when it came to the delivery and quality of special education services. The purpose of this leg of the study is to provide guidelines to future education systems about the quality needs of the system. The parents will provide insight through this research study as to where the special education system is succeeding and where it is lacking in quality. The use of parents in the study is going to provide a perspective of quality that may enlighten providers as to where the holes are in services being provided. In addition the study will conclude where the services are being deemed satisfactory by the parents of the children receiving the services.

METHODOLGY

The method that will be used for this study is going to be a survey. The survey will be designed to provide the two fold parts that the study is meant to address. The question of accessibility as well as quality of care can be further defined through the use of a survey. While deciding what method to use for this research study there were several methods discussed, including in person interviews, telephone interviews, and online interviews. The survey method was chosen because of its flexibility and its ability to allow the participants to expand on any answer that they feel the need to do so with. The use of a survey questionnaire will allow for the expansion of the questions as well. A survey can address a wide variety of issues that all go back to the main issue, which in this case is the satisfaction of quality and accessibility of special education services from the viewpoint of the parents.

The overall plan is going to be to have a selected population fill out the survey and send it back in. There will be measures that will eliminate any survey that will not have pure results. This will include any survey that asked for one answer but received more than one, as well as any survey that had questions get skipped for any reason even if the reason is unknown. This is so that the researchers can be sure that the surveys used in the final assessment will be only those that are completely filled out and with the number of answers the survey requested. There will be fifty questions on the survey and some of them will be designed to be tossed out. The purpose of the "throw away" questions is to create a true method of random discussion among the participants through the use of survey questions by mixing the research questions in with questions that will not be used or needed for the research. This will help eliminate the participants responding in ways that they feel is expected of them whether or not it is a purposeful act.

SAMPLE

The intended sample of this research study will be the parents of special education children between the grades of Kindergarten and twelfth grade. The survey will not be partial to single parent or two parent homes, nor will it discriminate between families with multiple children in the special education system and single children in the single parent home. In addition the research survey will include parents of multiple children even when some are in need of special education services while others are not. It is important to get such a cross sampling of parents to fill out the survey so that the research is not narrowed by a limited and possibly biased sample. The using of a singular group of parents, such as parents of one child, or parents of only special education children and no regular education children could unwittingly provide a non-honest result by use of a specific sample population who may react a certain way by very virtue of the fact that they are members of a narrow population group.

There will be five thousand questionnaires sent out. The sample population will be gathered through the roles of students in Massachusetts. The samples will be sent to five thousand households that will be equally divided in the various school districts that are within the state of Massachusetts. The sample population will not be divided racially because there is no way to determine the race of the students and their parents accurately enough to determine how to equally determine the racial groups. It is the hopes of the research team that sending out this many surveys in a variety of areas will be able to reach many racial groups. In addition there will be a section on the survey asking about racial background. This will allow the study to further conclude by race how satisfied the parents are with the accessibility and quality of the special education services their children receive. In addition this may provide some questions as to the type of services that different races receive which may pave the way for further research in the future regarding special education for minorities.

The way the research question will be answered through this survey question is through the use of multiple choice questions. The survey will address several quality issues as well as accessibility issues through the use of many questions that allow for some flexibility in answers. This will allow the parent answering the questionnaire to provide more in depth answers when they feel it is necessary to further qualify those answers for the purpose of research.

The attrition and non-response factor will also be considered in this research. It is

Method Section: What is your overall plan? How will you answer your research question? Adress the following issues:

Sample: what/who is your intended sample? How many will be sampled? what will be the sampling procedure? What about non-response or attrition? Justify why you intended to utilize this strategy.

Design: What is your research design? Include: Conceptual definition of your variables.(Please note that my research is qualitative and there are no variables. However, I need definition of quality and accesibility of special education)

(right a revised draft of part one)

Part 2

-Validity and reability: comments on the validity and reability of instruments

-Ethical considerations: Includea paraghraph on ethicaland political issues that you may encounter and how you plan to handle them. How will you protect your participants? Are there any risk to participation in your research?

-Proposed data analysis: How will you analyze your data?

Findings / research recommendations: How will your findings help/improve your agency/organizations/society etc...

-Your assesment: What are the strengths and weaknesses of your research design?

This is an important part of the proposal-student should carefully reflect on the strength and weaknesses of the entire research desing (e.g, sampling, method, threats to internal and external validity etc...)

Include a referance page for all references cited. (Please for each part1 and part2 separete)

SPECIAL ED ON LI / States, and a U.S. Law, Aim for Better Ways to Aid Disabled Kids

By Jerry Markon. STAFF WRITER

In Massachusetts, children don't have to be disabled to be in special education.

The state has the highest proportion of children in special education in the country - one in seven students - some of whom are identified as having unspecified "special needs."

But in the wake of a new national law governing the education of children with disabilities, officials in Massachusetts and other states across the country are finding themselves forced to grapple with rising special education rolls and diluted academics for disabled students.

It's a debate that centers on the goals and philosophy of special education, and it's been occurring in classrooms, statehouses and the pages of national magazines. But the latest impetus has become the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act amended by Congress this past summer, which calls for changes that - if strictly enforced could fundamentally change the way the special education process works.

The revisions focus on academic achievement, calling for states to hold disabled students to higher standards and expose them, to every extent possible, to the general curriculum - to make sure that special education services are a supplement to regular educational opportunities, not a substitute.

To help accomplish that goal, states will have to write measurable education objectives in each student's Individualized Education Program, the plan that governs each special education student's studies.

By next year, states will be required for the first time to include special education students in the standardized tests they use to measure progress in regular education. They must explain why any student cannot take these tests, and by the year 2000 must provide an alternative testing system for those they exempt.

The new law also tries to address concerns that too many children are being classified: It directs states to document that they have considered other factors before labeling a student wth a disability.

That's intended to keep children from being classified by school districts that don't offer sufficient remedial reading or math instruction.

In addition to requiring more integration of disabled students in mainstream classes - an area where New York lags the other 49 states the new law attempts to bring the two systems closer together by placing regular classroom teachers on every school district's Committee on Special Education. That committee not only decides placements of students, but draws up the individual learning plans, and the intent is to have teachers strengthen the academic component of those plans.

And states will be required to keep data on the percentage of minorities in special education classes, in order to examine whether they are overrepresented.

Some states have already been making changes in efforts to raise standards for disabled children. In California, the state board of education on Friday adopted new language arts standards that will require most special education students, as well as all regular education students, to take new statewide tests. That followed last month's change in California's special education funding formula, basing it on numbers of overall children in school districts instead of numbers of students identified as disabled.

Just as in New York, the previous formula in California "encouraged classification. You identified kids, they'd be plunked into your special ed program, and you'd get more funding for it," said J. Vincent Madden, manager of special education assessment, evaluation and support for the California Department of Education.

He said special education enrollments have been growing about percent a year since 1990, four times the growth of general enrollment.

Part of that can be attributed to overidentifying children. Part is parents pushing to get their kids into special ed," Madden said.

States that don't change their funding formulas can expect to get an inspection visit from federal officials to direct them to comply with the law. In a recent trip to Michigan, federal educators warned the state that its funding formula, by encouraging placement of students in more restrictive settings, may be a violation.

We have developed an agreement with them on how we can come into compliance," said David Brock, acting supervisor of special education for the Michigan Department of Education.

New York officials, who expect federal inspectors to visit next month, think the new law may force changes. "Clearly there is no doubt that the federal law now creates a greater sense of urgency for the state of New York to do something," said assistant education commissioner Brian McLane.

In Vermont, considered a model for the nation, officials reduced the number of students in special education by changing the aid formula in the late 1980s. The revisions allowed districts to spend special education money on the regular education side of the ledger for programs to help keep children in regular classrooms - an idea adopted in the new federal law as well.

The result: Vermont keeps about 85% of its disabled children in regular classes for at least 40% of the day, far above the national average of about 70%. "You start from the regular classroom, and only when that fails do you consider alternatives," said

Dennis Kane, director of a state team that oversees special education.

Former Vermont Education Commissioner Richard Mills, who now runs

New York's Education Department, is trying to move New York in the same direction.

Change has taken longer in Massachusetts, but is coming: A plan to restrict eligibility to children with disabilities has won wide support from political leaders.

We think some of these children could get their needs met in regular education," said Lida Harkins, a Massachusetts state legislator.

Diagnosing learning problems can be difficult for parents and teachers

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Carola Suarez-Orozco suspected a problem with her son's ability to learn when he was 4 years old, but it took her a year to convince the schools that Lucas needed diagnostic tests to confirm a learning disability.

Lucas "consistently didn't recognize a lot of the letters" of the alphabet, Suarez-Orozco explains. "We would spend a whole week working on the difference between the letters M. And N. And the letters B. And D. He wasn't getting it."

Suarez-Orozco notes both she and her husband have doctorates. Each night since Lucas was 1-year-old, they've read 15 to 30 minutes to him before bed. And, "there are books falling out of every corner of the house."

When Suarez-Orozco approached her son's kindergarten teacher and a team of educators at the school, the response was, "You know, he's young and it's probably developmental." She accepted the recommendation to wait since Lucas started school at age 4, and Massachusetts law requires two years in kindergarten for early starters. During Lucas' second round in kindergarten, the same teacher agreed, "You might be right. Let's go ahead and have him evaluated."

His story underscores the problems of identifying children with learning disabilities. It's a difficult process because the problem involves subtle neurological disorders that affect the brain's ability to understand, remember or communicate information, says Victoria Purcell-Gates of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Nationally, there are 5.8 million students identified as needing special services, about 10% of all school-age children. Only 30% of the disabilities are medically based.

From state to state, there are wide discrepancies in standards for learning disabled, says Tom Hehir, director of the U.S. Education Department's Office of Special Education Programs. For example, in the 1994-95 school year, he says, 15% of all school-age children in Massachusetts were referred to special education, while 7% were referred in Hawaii, 8% in Idaho and 9% in Colorado. Even within states, discrepancies are evident, such as 23% in Boston and 27% in Cambridge.

Part of the problem, says Jay Heubert, an assistant professor at Harvard's School of Education, is "the need to be more precise in what we' re trying to address. There's a lack of precision of diagnosis."

For many school systems, the trigger for assessing students for learning disabilities is when they drop two grade levels in reading, Purcell- Gates says. Some states also use IQ tests to determine learning disabilities, comparing the IQ with achievement test scores. There must be a wide gap between the two scores.

Lawrence Larsen of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, says the main difficulty with identification is that "these kids don't look disabled. Their disability is invisible. They don't look retarded or have visible signs. They can communicate verbally. We know that they are intellectually intact. Their central nervous system might function differently. They don't stand out in a crowd. They try to fit in as best they can."