At my current school, not at all. On-level classes tend to have about 1/3 of kids on IEPs/504s, but a lot of those are minor accommodations. The kids who need the most help are either grouped into a class with a co-teacher who does all curriculum modification, or else divided evenly across classes so only 1-2 will be in an individual class. That's workable and gives us the ability to differentiate.
The district next door has basically eliminated co-teachers to save $$$ and there are way too many SPED kids with high needs in one classroom. It's terrible for them because one person cannot possibly manage all the different accommodations and modifications and give them a solid education.
Inclusion is great, but it should never be done as a way to reduce costs. It only works when there are trained SPED personnel supporting kids within the gen ed classroom. Inclusion is getting a bad name because of terrible execution.
I was educated in the NYC public system at a time when kids of similar abilities were segregated into separate classes. We were basically at the same level and all moved ahead. Students were neither bored or left behind.
I still think this type of system makes sense.
My only complaint is I wish they would have had remedial gym. Maybe I could have learned to climb a rope and throw decently.
On its surface, I agree with this approach to education. Grouping by academic readiness rather than age would make it easier and cheaper to meet everyone's academic needs.
In reality, this creates racially segregated classes thanks to generations of systematic social, financial, and medical oppression.
The real problem is that public schools have always shouldered the brunt of racial and socio-economic equity issues, which makes the progress S L O W and very localized.
The fact that many conservatives are trying to destroy diversity and equity programs at public schools, while simultaneously undermining the entire public education system, is such obvious racism and classism that I don't even know how to fight it.
I was often used as a peer tutor as a kid and I learned to hate school. My difficulties were never recognized because I was “smart”, I was reprimanded when my peers did not do their work (like I could make them 🙄) and worst of all, I was bullied by the very kids I was tasked with babysitting. As such, I do not use this method in my classroom at all. It’s not fair to rob gifted and talented children of opportunities simply to help those who struggle.
Oi, hi there! In school I "helped the autistic kid(s)" because I was always ahead and we had 1 boy that was ASD nonverbal and 2 others that struggled with reading, writing and other grade level things (I never knew if they had autism or if it was something different, didn't matter to me) but they were always in our GenEd class other than pull outs for speech/ot/pt/etc.
**Guess who found out as an adult that she's also autistic?! **
*AuDHD actually, and so are both of my kids. Totally missed it in my first one until his mid teens (because everything about him just seemed normal to me, he exhibits almost the exact same way I do) but my youngest has been the "happy-flappy"/ you can tell just by looking at him / level 3 kinda kiddo that almost always gets diagnosed early, and that began my proper learning path & a lot of realizations...*
Anyway, yeah...if they hadn't been so focused on having me help others, maybe someone would have noticed that I was struggling too, in my own way.
Spent the first 30 years of my life trying to tell myself that "everything is this difficult for everyone, they just hide it & you have to hide it too." What a waste of effort. The mask is off now & IDC who sees it!
That sort of arrangement should only be an opportunity, not an obligation. If students help their classmates/friends, that's great, but it's ultimately the job of the teacher to differentiate.
I was at a school where they were big into “differentiation” - we had 6th graders who were “at risk”, who had iEPs, who were ELL, and who were performing way below all three of the other groups but somehow had no label, kids who were chronically absent, kids experiencing the trauma of living in homeless shelters or foster care (almost 10%), kids who were verbally gifted but were not allowed to be placed in gifted humanities classes because they were not also gifted in math (gawd that drove me crazy) — Kids performing from K through 8 grade levels — all mixed together in our 6th grade classes. Then in my last 2 years admin folded the gifted program and “gifted” the gifted kids to us gen ed teachers. So that brought in some kids who were reading and writing at high school levels. “Oh they’ll be such great peer mentors” “oh they’ll inspire their peers to embrace academic rigor” but we all know that IQ does not equal EQ. Guess what? A lot of those gifted kids did not have a lot of patience with their other peers. A lot of those gifted kids had challenging behaviors too. The icing on the cake was that year admin also pulled all SpEd staff from our classes and announced that our SpEd students would receive all of their specially designed academic instruction for their IEP goals in a daily study skills class. (I truly believe some admin assumed the gifted kids would serve as unpaid teaching assistants) This meant that the SpEd kids got one less elective choice than everyone else. Guess what? They were pissed. Guess what? SDI in small groups out of the regular classrooms did not result in them being able to keep up in gen ed language arts and math classes without any in class SpEd staff support despite numerous accommodations and modifications made by the swamped GEN ED teachers. Guess what? the gen Ed teachers were pissed. Guess what? After two years of this insanity, 10 out of 12 of us LA/SS block teachers jumped ship.
Yeah…I don’t know what source(s) is
/are touting it as some big boon but peer tutoring sucks and I personally would never see it as an “opportunity.” It’s a fast way to breed resentment among your brightest students. Students who are bright don’t typically want to be mini teachers helping others along (unless that’s inherently part of their personality or personal goals), they want to learn higher level, more interesting stuff so they’re working to their capacity. If students want to gain exposure tutoring peers they should be able to do so after school as they desire, not as part of the classroom model. I’d be very curious if student morale was part of the data collected in that research. Maybe those students achieved more long term, but at what cost?
I do see benefits in terms of the general attitude of inclusion and acceptance/appreciation of others who have different skill sets than yourselves but ugh. Peer tutoring in class makes my skin crawl.
I think the overall teaching model matters a lot. I taught Montessori for 15 years, and peer instruction is an important part of the model. BUT, that's because it is baked into the idea of living in community. Everyone is an expert at something, and everyone needs help with something. It's also a mixed age class, so the older children help the younger children, just as they were helped two years earlier. It builds confidence and respect. But that is very different from what I had to do as an undiagnosed 2E kid in a typical classroom. That model is doomed because the gifted children are not challenged and allowed to do their own thing, nor is it a situation of mutual aid and community.
No. Being a teachers helper is not FAPE.
This is not great for the kids at the low end of gifted, but for the kids at the high end if gifted, it is insanity. Fluid intelligence peaks around age 20. Post puberty, the brains of will-be scientists need and want to jam in as much as they can. They are not going to learn "soft skills" by teaching basic fractions to classmates who are near the ID end of the intelligence spectrum.
Oh god, what I would do to have a co-teacher! This past school year my sixth period had 27 kids. 7 with IEPs, 2 with 504s, 4 who didn't speak English. I didn't have a co teacher or anything like that. My license is not for SPED- I feel like we're doing the kids a massive disservice. I got a terrible observation when they came into that class because we weren't performing "at the standard of the benchmark" and was told my job was in danger if I didn't improve.
I teach 4th but my district doesn’t do honors in a separate class anymore. Everyone is together heterogenously and you can do the work of the “honors” classes for GPA credit but it’s not a separate class.
Gen Ed is not SPED. I think you’re broadening the definition of SPED just to mean kids who are academically low achieving. To qualify for SPED a child would have to be assessed and qualify under very specific criteria. Its not just kids who are low. So no, a Gen Ed room is not a SPED room just because you pull out the honors kids.
I don’t know who has rooms of 35 SPED students but that would be bonkers.
It’s against our contract in BC, Canada but we have something called “remedy” which means they can regularly load our classes over composition limit but funds are allocated to “make up” for it. We are supposed to be able to use the $$ for TOC release time or regularly scheduled staffing, but because of teacher shortages it’s never available and we end up just getting a small payout at the end of the year that we can use for resources the following year. So doesn’t actually help the class that’s “in remedy.”
In my district, we have it so no more than 1/3 of a class can have an IEP... so they make the classes bigger so they can put more IEP kids in to keep it within ration.
A Gen Ed classroom with a significant number of IEPs is a de facto SPED classroom. I’m teaching modified curriculum and dealing with the behavioral issues—it might as well be SPED.
The IEP kids would be better served in a true SPED classroom but it’s cheaper and easier for the district to do “inclusion”, which means that no one gets what they need.
It’s an interesting legal challenge. Kids with IEPs/504s are legally entitled to the least restrictive environment— which has been understood to be the gened classroom. How does that understanding change as more kids have IEPS/504s?
LRE might have had good intentions but it causes it's own slew of issues. My kid would learn so much more with LESS gen ed time, but the school cries LRE and throws them in gen ed where they learn next to nothing bc it's too much, too fast, etc.
Yeah totally— it’s interesting, a Sped environment might actually be less restrictive in practice. Like the Montessori system, for example, was built for students with differences and is famously less restrictive.
i have a daughter who is deaf along with many other medical conditions. i can’t even remember how many ARD meetings i sat in and argued this exact point to no avail. i’m so glad to hear others say this, it’s absolutely true for many students. i don’t understand how LRE became synonymous with GenEd but it’s absolutely a disservice to all of the students.
this past year my son had a classmate with autism who was incredibly disruptive on a regular basis. the teachers had no support in managing this, and her daily outbursts and other disruptive behaviors restricted the learning environment for the rest of the class. it’s not fair to a class of 20-25 other kids to have the teacher spend so much time managing the special needs of one, this only restricts the learning environment for all.
Just curious , but as a lurker who only sees the mostly horror stories online, are there any protections for the normal kids. It just seems like for the sake of the (increasing) minority there are some pretty significant negatives for the majority of the kids as a result of trying to be inclusive.
Liked nothing against special ed kids, they really do deserve an education.
But it just seems straight up neglectful how much strain is put on the rest of the student population (once again, please lmk if my impressions are incorrect, I readily admit my ignorance on this topic)
Eh, there’s not really a good way to answer your question fully, but it’s worth nothing that stories online are always oversimplified and usually the worst of the worst. Online, it seems like students with 504s/IEPs == disruptive, and that’s just not true. There are lots (and lots) of kids who are disruptive who don’t have plans and many kids with IEPS/504s who are engaged and delightful.
I do think that many of the pushes to help students with IEPs/504s are actually beneficial for all students. Like for example, it’s a common accommodation to provide instructions verbally and visually through written instructions. While this is absolutely necessary for some students with auditory processing issues or executive functioning issues, it’s beneficial for everyone. Graphic organizers and offering extensions on assignments are other examples. A classroom that accommodates different needs can be better for students who are just having a rough time or are undiagnosed or haven’t yet been identified as needing accommodations. (“Universal design for learning” is a good search term here.)
Where it becomes difficult is when the accommodations clash — like, only so many students can be assigned to sit at the front of the class. If too many students have plans that say they must sit in the front of the class, I quite literally can’t do that in the space that I have. Or, some plans ask for regular 1:1 check ins. It’s best practice to check in 1:1 with students who need it, and all students regularly, but if I have 5 students who need 1:1 check ins every 15 minutes, that’s just impossible to maintain and also take care of the rest of the class.
Thanks!
And yeah i definitely didn’t mean to imply that all iep/504 kids were inherently trouble students at all.
Just that it seems (from the nice online bubble) a lot of the strategies do lead to an unbalanced prioritization
Thank you for explaining my biggest frustration so well. A lot of accommodations make so much sense in a vacuum. Let's use the example you gave of checking in with a student 1:1 to ensure they understand directions and stay on task... if that's the only kid with an accommodation, that's no big deal. Let's say it takes a minute to do that and you end up doing it at the beginning of class and once halfway through to ensure they're still on task and understanding what they're working on. Two minutes out of a 45 minute lesson, not a huge deal.
I had one class period with 7 kids who had that accommodation in one class. The same class had several students who didn't speak English and would often have questions that we would use google translate for- it worked fine, but took time. So combining the kids with that accommodation and my ELLs, that's ten kids. If I check in with them each for a minute twice a period, that's 20 minutes- a little less than half the class. And then there were 17 other kids in the class.
That's the reality some teachers are working with. To answer the person you responded to- yes, I absolutely think this has a negative impact on the gened students. Once in a coaching, my coach told me I was spending too much time with students one on one answering questions...
They're abandoning kids with IEPs into gened and calling it inclusion instead of admitting they're doing it to save money. It hurts literally everyone.
Inclusion is best practice socially and emotionally for kids who are special education. Just because a child has an IEP doesn't mean they need to be put in a box.
I also think it can be harmful for students who have IEPs- the classes are too big and they're more likely to have clashing manifestations of disabilities- I've seen an ADHD (without an IEP) kid stimming send an autistic kid into a panic attack. I've had gen ed kids ask if they can work in the guidance office because it was too noisy with kids having behavioral issues. Not all students with IEPs have behavior issues, but many do.
I think it's less an issue of needing to separate IEP and GenEd kids and more an issue of classes being too large. An inclusion class with 17 students, 2 with an IEP is a very different situation than an inclusion class with 27 students, 7 with an IEP. Numbers used because they described two of my class periods last year.
There isn't a good answer at this point, but doing things that are harmful to special education students is not the solution. And not all IEPs have behavioral issues. That's a huge generalization.
Maybe just my experience. Not all, but many. I fully understand and support students with disabilities. The number with behavior issues has increased dramatically.
Just because the IEP does not have behavioral goals, doesn't mean the child doesn't have behavioral issues.
Lots of kids misbehave, very few have IEP's.
Not 35 but generally a third of one class is special ed with an iep or 504.
Edit to add: there is a tipping point when it’s no longer considered LRE and that’s why you can’t have 100% special ed in a classroom.
I’m right there with you. And more students would undoubtedly qualify if their parents were competent enough to get them evaluated and show up for a meeting. I have plenty of GenEd kids who I give modified assignments and accommodations to because they need them even if they’re not actually on an IEP.
Students with 504 plans do have special needs that must be accommodated in the classroom. I have had a number of students who had both. Having a 504 causes them to often be lumped in with special education needs and accommodations. They don't all have IEPs or case managers, though. In a lot of cases, I've found as a SPED teacher myself, that is to the student's detriment. Having an IEP and a case manager is to the benefit of the student. It protects them from discrimination, allows them a contact person in the school to go to for help and assistance, and guides them through the academic process with modifications that allow them to thrive and succeed.
Yes, and students with 504 plans are not special education students. They are general education students. A student with a 504 plan has nothing to do with sped. It’s gen ed, so that’s why they don’t have sped case managers or IEPs.
There’s no reason a student with a 504 plan should be in special education unless they qualify, in which case they would have an IEP and not a 504 plan.
Are both for students with disabilities? They still need accommodations provided for by a teacher.
What would not including them in the general ed classroom look like?
Like anywhere, it's a mixed bag. I'm currently 5th grade and typically 75% of my students are below grade level, with about 40% being far below grade level. That 40% does sometimes include the inclusion students, but it's not the entire group. A lot of student are unfortunately flying under the radar and not being tested until it's too late.
My by-the-books inclusion students who have their IEPs and accommodations do bring more challenges, but I can't say it makes me think of my class as special Ed. It's more of remembering to print this test for Student A, or read this test aloud to Student B. Also Students C and D get preferential seating but Student C has ODD and hates Student D who is on the spectrum so they can't be near each other but for some reason they were put in the same class. Don't forget small group testing for Students A, B, and D. There are at least 3 more untested students who would benefit from small group testing but who can't get it because Student A is easily distracted and the more students in the small group there are the more Student A is distracted. And you can't put them by themselves because small group testing has to be with the teacher.
I don't know. Now that I'm thinking about it, I guess it depends on a lot of things and the type of kid that is added to the classroom. I do think a lot of general education students are falling further behind and not having their needs met. Another accommodation our district loves to use is peer buddy. How is it fair to the general ed student tasked to help their classmate? Most of them can barely keep up with their own work, and the ones who can should be challenged academically, not constantly keeping the IEP student on task. It's not fair, but such is public education these days.
My inclusion classes are very, very low ability. Some of the students there have less comprehension than my actual SAI class I was teaching the year before. It really is truly dysfunctional and a detriment to everyone's learning.
Special education does not mean low performing and low performing doesn't mean special education.
I teach one AP course, and the rest of my classes are freshmen. I have had AP students who had IEPs, 504s, and nothing at all, even though they could have qualified for it. I always have SPED students who are extremely hard workers, and sometimes don't use the accommodations they have for my class. And there are students who don't care, both in SPED and out of it.
I love my freshmen classes. I love my behavior problems and my well behaved students. I love my high performing students and the students with IQs so low that they should really be in modified classes, but we don't have them for my subject.
Are there classes that are out of control? Yes. And sometimes I have those classes. It sucks being what feels like a jail warden to keep the class in line, but it is typically not the SPED students who cause those problems.
As a teacher, I must meet my students where they are. If they're an above average class, I will challenge them more, but also take time to acknowledge that they might be ahead and they can have a relaxing day while others catch up. If I have a low level class, then I cut some of the work load and spend more time on the basics to make sure they have a good foundation. If I have a wild, but kind class, I will have them up and moving more to channel their energy. If I have a quiet, tired class, I will keep the volume down and let them work more individually at their own speed. And if I have a class I can't trust, who have a lot of behavior issues, then I will separate them as best I can and run a tight ship so their classmates can get something out of the year.
If you teach 5 of the same course throughout the day, you are going to have differently behaved classes, even though they're learning the same stuff.
If we take an essentialism approach, it means more work for the teacher.
Because of accommodations and modifications.
It has to mean that or it means nothing.
Which is the argument for segregation. "Segregate so we can work less"
No. Students who need OCS or BLS instruction are on a whole other level from just an average academic class that happens to also have students with IEPs.
Below grade level is not the same as special education. Academic level classes are full of people who are performing below grade level. Students who have no disability perform below grade level all the time.
I do, however, wish that more Gen Ed teachers had better training on helping students with acquiring academic language, because that is one of the biggest barriers for students who are performing below grade level. To those students, often the academic language of any subject might as well be in a foreign language.
“Academic language learning” is a really interesting concept. I see how it would be related to the hidden curriculum, but I’ve never heard that specific term. Do you have any resources you can recommend, by any chance? It’s an idea I’d like to incorporate into freshman comp classes at university as well. Thank you!
I recommend first looking into the concept of "tiered" vocabulary.
A basic overview is that there are at least 3 tiers of words: Tier 1 is like "everyday" words like "write." Then Tier 2 integrates more complex vocabulary that may be applicable to many subjects, like "compose." Then Tier 3 is the technical jargon for each specific subject, like "igneous rock" or "dramatic irony" or "integral."
If students are living their life in Tier 1 all the time, then Tier 3 is like a whole different language.
A great way to bridge the gap between them is though the use of prefixes, suffixes, and roots. They can use definitions in Tier 1 to connect the Tier 2 and 3 words to build a foundation for expanding the academic understanding.
We need to do a better job of presenting these Tier 3 words the same way we support Tier 2. We also need to support vocabulary acquisition in *all* content, not just Language Arts.
Yes! And so many Level kids’ parents are pushing them into Pre-AP just so they can escape the behavior issues of level “inclusion” classes, but it just means about half of my Pre-AP classes aren’t truly able to keep up with the honors workload, and the behaviors there have gotten worse too!
Exactly my experience. If I had students on IEPs or with any type of modifications, they were usually mostly in the same class period with less than one-third of the students on or above grade level.
I had a cap of 27 kids per class in 7 blocks the last two years.
On average I had 16/27 with various accommodations and no reliable para or translator in the classes- I would get one helper pop by maybe once per month for 4/7 classes.
Because of how full my classes are and how I have no reliable helper- I have to hard bake ALL the accommodations directly into the class proper- even for the kids who don’t meet accommodations and could be held accountable for things like… writing their own notes… when I have 3, 7, 11, 2 who all need different versions of the teachers notes- just give them all the notes and not stress about:
“did person #3 in block #6 get the filled in or the filling the blank or the fill in the whole versions- or did they not pay attention and take the Spanish language version- well I will know when I get to block 9/10 and am missing a Spanish copy and #3’s parents bitch at my principal (instead of me) about ‘refusing to follow accommodations!’”
Incase you can’t tell, 22-23 was my first year on my own and nearly killed me!
No, I don’t. We have non-SPED kids who are just as low or lower than our SPED kids, but I’ve never felt like it turned into a SPED class. Co-teaching is absolutely the best model though for having SPED kids in a core class. I cotaught for years with an IS in my English classes that had SPED kids. It worked out really well.
I feel like that sometimes with 11th graders at my school because there are so many other advanced options for them by that year so the kids in general are usually pretty academically low. Not really SpEd but for sure remedial.
There are students with disabilities in honors and AP classes. IEPs are legal documents and every teacher is obligated by federal law to follow a student's IEP, even if they are in higher level classes.
Every class is special education.
That does not happen in the state I live and work. There are laws preventing too many kiddos with special needs being put into gen-ed classrooms without a co-teacher or aide.
We get funding for SPED based on the number of qualifying students, and we're legally obligated to serve them according to their IEPs. This affects the number of SPED teachers we have year to year, often resulting in adding or subtracting a position. Realistically, that usually means someone goes part-time or does half SPED and half whatever else they're certified in. But the thing is that we wouldn't really save a bunch of money if we just crammed them all in huge classes because we'd lose the funding aimed at teaching them.
We do mainstream our high school students eventually. The school gets rated better if its kids aren't in Direct Instruction (small group) classes, and it does your average SPED student a disservice to keep them separated from the general population all day. Eventually, they're going to be leaving school for the real world, and they need to have some experience interacting with the average Joe. Most of my classes are co-taught, 20-30 students, with up to 14 on the SPED roster. But they are fairly close to the gen ed students in there as a rule. Most of my gen ed kids are lower achievers (bottom half of their class) who've long since abandoned any goal of attending a prestigious college.
I am a special education teacher and hate this attitude. These kids are supposed to be in general education in the least restrictive environment. If your class is mostly IEPs, you should have a coteacher, but it's not a resource class. They deserve to be in the classroom with everyone else, not socially isolated.
In most cases, it does. Sorry, the law is the law. The vast majority of SpEd classifications are for specific learning disabilities, which are literally meant to be in general education with resource supports.
Except those kids end up failing because they can't meet grade level standards. Gen ed teachers are so overwhelmed with class sizes that sped students don't get the attention they require. IDEA is such a sham to validate lack of funding.
It depends on the school district and school itself in k my y experience. I am a teacher and mother of a 16 year old who in elementary was told of her class but never passed the district’s gifted program test, which was eliminated after Covid, but when she hit middle school she was placed on the honors class track to graduation. Her friend is in regular classes and they are viewed as any other class but it’s a charter school so they view things differently when it comes to their curriculum.
My school is a public K8 and the only ones that care about the difference between remedial, Gen Ed, honors are the students themselves not the staff.
I was given the side eye by younger teachers when I described the tracking classes I had in high school. I've taught for many years and hate seeing one teacher struggle with individualized and and differentiated lessons and instruction, special education or not. Each class needs to be a little hive of activity, with several professionals in each room sharing management of kids' access to the curriculum.
I taught seniors in AP most of my career, they didn’t get co-teachers. A solid 1/4 of my kids had 504s and each year there was at least 1 IEP (usually some degree of Autism) including a blind student in AP Economics, a selective mute in AP Government and a brain injured student in both.
I know what you mean! Where I am we have two levels of inclusion. The tier 1 level with 1/3 with special education needs but no behavior plans is successful in my experience. The tier 2 level where we have 1/3 sped with behavior plans and 2/3 on-level is chaotic and ineffective. The time I spend on behavior each day adds up to a lot of missed instruction over time. However we are 100% inclusion, so even if we have students making threats, putting hands on people, making harassing comments, the only consequences are “counseling” (telling them not to) and calling home. However, in my experience, which doesn’t represent everyone by any means, calling home is not typically effective for the Tier 2 group. There are many times I have wished I could put a camera in the classroom of the tier 2 inclusion and send it home to all the parents so they know what’s going on, because the education the kids are getting in that class are not on-par with what other kids are getting, and it’s not fair and equal.
Depending on where you live, your tier 2 inclusion sounds sketchy. ED students need their own area. They need explicit social skills instruction. They need a safe place to go before having problems. I hope for everyone that you’re just shorthanding. That sounds life nightmare. I would go home from that and just shake.
That's not how it works and I'm honestly fucking tiered of everyone attacking inclusion. Inclusion works. Proven. Done. Now, it works when implemented correctly, which it's not typically done, mostly due to a lack of funding. So your issues are not with inclusion, and we shouldn't legislate out actually effective special education models. Your problem is with your districts unwillingness/inability to apply inclusion practices appropriately.
I've suffered any number of classes in which a full half or more of the students should be in a self-contained special education classroom. Instead, my district just shoved them all into "regular" classrooms to save a buck and hide their numbers from the state.
We had so many kids who clearly needed services, but there was no way in hell the district would ever suggest testing. They did not want to spend that money. The district hated their teachers, and they did not give a damn about a bunch of poor kids on the wrong side of town.
As a regular classroom teacher with zero special education training, I had no idea how to serve those kids. Truth be told, where those kids were also a behavior problem, I wrote them off. If not, I tried to support and encourage to the best of my ability, which never was all that much. I often felt as though I was teaching special education without the slightest clue as to what I was doing, and this was after many, many years in the classroom.
Special education demands a very special type of person—they're angels, as far as I'm concerned. I am not that kind of person.
No.
I teach at a “high performing “ school where we have 60% AP Honors sections to 40% general. I have students in my AP ands Honors classes who struggle but feel like they have to “keep up” socially.
Conversely I have students in my general classes that could easily succeed in AP/ Honors but have made the wise choice to limit the number of those classes and focus on the subjects that matter to them (I have lots of 10th graders taking AP Calculus).
My school is doing a ridiculous “push in” model. The idea is that the sped teachers float around and attend classes with their students and deliver their minutes of specially designed instruction in class. There’s no schedule of when they should attend classes. There’s no common planning.
In practice, I never once saw a sped teacher in my class. Not once all year. I have no idea when/if students are receiving actual instruction to close their skill gaps.
Even if they did come to my class, they would be pulling kids away from work that they are already needing extra supports and time to do and trying to deliver different instruction while class is happening. How could you get a kid to focus when they’re in a room full of peers and friends doing something different?
Also, my room is full. There’s no space for a small group table. It’s wall to wall desks with barely enough room to move around. My desks are the worst with attached seats and a bar that kids have to climb over if I do anything other than straight rows. This actually came up in an evaluation. I’m off on a tangent now, but I’ve been asking for new desks since I started at this school three years ago. I was pissed when it came up in an evaluation that my rows show teacher-centered thinking. I showed him my drawer of hardware that I keep from bits that fall off my desks and rearranged into pods to show how it blocked kids in and made them have to climb. He took it off the evaluation and promised to look into different desks. Still have the same crappy desks.
I've talked about this with some teachers at my school- we've been feeling this. I'm not sure if it's a FERPA rule or my district, but they're not allowed to have more than 1/3 of the students in a class be IEP/504 but SO MANY of the kids at my school have one that it's becoming hard to do that. The other issue is that about 30% of the kids at my school are ELLs. So effectively, the gen ed classes end up being 1/3 kids with accommodations, 1/3 kids who aren't fluent in English, and 1/3 kids who are performing on baseline. Weirdly, it's that last third that gives me trouble as a teacher- they're bored because the class is moving too slow.
We don't have coteachers, so it's all on you to differentiate. The advanced classes are much easier to teach- not because they're advanced, but because the kids are all performing on roughly the same level.
Students who have mild to moderate special needs who can handle a gen-ed classroom with little accommodations and/or modifications. Classes with 30% or more students with IEPs typically get a SPED co-teacher or at least a paraprofessional aide to help them carry the workload and provide the needed accommodations in the classroom.
Oh, I know. It was a rhetorical question. Inclusion is not a type of person; it is a value, practice, or characteristic of a space. I think that dangerous ideological work happens when people take values like inclusion and turn them into adjectives that have a pejorative flavor… like referring to some students as “inclusion kids” and implying that they worsen the quality of education for “non-inclusion (exclusion?) kids”.
Yeah I'm not a teacher but my wife is and it's honestly gross how thinly veiled the term "inclusion" is. An alarming number of teachers would rather her students were all locked into the SPED room because it would make their lives easier. Ohh you have to make a modified worksheet for a couple students boo hoo my wife has to make 4 or 5 different levels for every class.
Inclusion is a legal invention. Without federal or government intervention, schools would segregate this demographic. Think of it as if tomorrow, the government banned schools for the blind and required every teacher to learn Braille pedagogy. Every kindergarten teacher must be able to teach it.
Without that government intervention, we would segregate it. With it, we call them inclusion kids.
"Inclusion is not a type of person" inclusion is the type of person who would be segregated if not for some government law.
Your comment is a good example of the dangerous ideological work that happens when we turn a value (inclusion) into a pejorative label for a type of person (inclusion kids). Your comment frames neurotypical, able bodied students whose socioeconomic contexts empower them to focus on education as normal; everyone else—the “inclusion kids”—is The Other. This kind of thinking raises red flags for me.
I think our society doesn’t value inclusion.
If it did, we wouldn’t require the law to have it.
We’d just have it voluntarily.
We have the inclusion law precisely because we don’t value inclusion.
If you want to know what happened, read the text of brown vs board of education. An argument against racial segregation was that it’s a slippery slope for desegregation of students with disabilities.
It’s exactly what happened.
I wonder how your red flags will react once this very right wing Supreme Court overturns brown vs board of education. We’re more segregated than ever racially after all
I agree that many people—most of whom are white, neurotypical, able-bodied, and have high socioeconomic status—do not value inclusion. However, I think many others not only understand the importance of inclusion, but are willing to put their lives on the line for it. Black people, disabled people, and people in the intersections of those groups fought for racial desegregation and for the ADA at great personal risk.
I get the feeling that you and I share the same values about integration and inclusion, even if those values are not reflected in powerful governmental bodies (like Congress or SCOTUS).
What I take issue with is that the phrase “inclusion kids” turns “inclusion” into a pejorative adjective that means “not able bodied, not neurotypical, and/or not performing at grade level.” I also take issue with the idea that inclusion means “adding The Other to the normal classroom” rather than “bringing multiple groups together to form a new learning space.”
Like, purple is not blue including red; blue is not “the normal color,” and “red is not “the inclusion color.” Purple is red and blue coming together to form something new and different. If we think of racially desegregated classrooms as white spaces to which kids of color have been added, or of inclusive classrooms as neurotypical spaces to which neurodivergent students have been added, we are privileging some identities as normal (white, neurotypical) while framing others as, well, The Other.
That’s the ideological harm I’m referring to.
At my current school, not at all. On-level classes tend to have about 1/3 of kids on IEPs/504s, but a lot of those are minor accommodations. The kids who need the most help are either grouped into a class with a co-teacher who does all curriculum modification, or else divided evenly across classes so only 1-2 will be in an individual class. That's workable and gives us the ability to differentiate. The district next door has basically eliminated co-teachers to save $$$ and there are way too many SPED kids with high needs in one classroom. It's terrible for them because one person cannot possibly manage all the different accommodations and modifications and give them a solid education. Inclusion is great, but it should never be done as a way to reduce costs. It only works when there are trained SPED personnel supporting kids within the gen ed classroom. Inclusion is getting a bad name because of terrible execution.
I was educated in the NYC public system at a time when kids of similar abilities were segregated into separate classes. We were basically at the same level and all moved ahead. Students were neither bored or left behind. I still think this type of system makes sense. My only complaint is I wish they would have had remedial gym. Maybe I could have learned to climb a rope and throw decently.
On its surface, I agree with this approach to education. Grouping by academic readiness rather than age would make it easier and cheaper to meet everyone's academic needs. In reality, this creates racially segregated classes thanks to generations of systematic social, financial, and medical oppression. The real problem is that public schools have always shouldered the brunt of racial and socio-economic equity issues, which makes the progress S L O W and very localized. The fact that many conservatives are trying to destroy diversity and equity programs at public schools, while simultaneously undermining the entire public education system, is such obvious racism and classism that I don't even know how to fight it.
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I was often used as a peer tutor as a kid and I learned to hate school. My difficulties were never recognized because I was “smart”, I was reprimanded when my peers did not do their work (like I could make them 🙄) and worst of all, I was bullied by the very kids I was tasked with babysitting. As such, I do not use this method in my classroom at all. It’s not fair to rob gifted and talented children of opportunities simply to help those who struggle.
Oi, hi there! In school I "helped the autistic kid(s)" because I was always ahead and we had 1 boy that was ASD nonverbal and 2 others that struggled with reading, writing and other grade level things (I never knew if they had autism or if it was something different, didn't matter to me) but they were always in our GenEd class other than pull outs for speech/ot/pt/etc. **Guess who found out as an adult that she's also autistic?! ** *AuDHD actually, and so are both of my kids. Totally missed it in my first one until his mid teens (because everything about him just seemed normal to me, he exhibits almost the exact same way I do) but my youngest has been the "happy-flappy"/ you can tell just by looking at him / level 3 kinda kiddo that almost always gets diagnosed early, and that began my proper learning path & a lot of realizations...* Anyway, yeah...if they hadn't been so focused on having me help others, maybe someone would have noticed that I was struggling too, in my own way. Spent the first 30 years of my life trying to tell myself that "everything is this difficult for everyone, they just hide it & you have to hide it too." What a waste of effort. The mask is off now & IDC who sees it!
I hated this as well.
That sort of arrangement should only be an opportunity, not an obligation. If students help their classmates/friends, that's great, but it's ultimately the job of the teacher to differentiate.
I was at a school where they were big into “differentiation” - we had 6th graders who were “at risk”, who had iEPs, who were ELL, and who were performing way below all three of the other groups but somehow had no label, kids who were chronically absent, kids experiencing the trauma of living in homeless shelters or foster care (almost 10%), kids who were verbally gifted but were not allowed to be placed in gifted humanities classes because they were not also gifted in math (gawd that drove me crazy) — Kids performing from K through 8 grade levels — all mixed together in our 6th grade classes. Then in my last 2 years admin folded the gifted program and “gifted” the gifted kids to us gen ed teachers. So that brought in some kids who were reading and writing at high school levels. “Oh they’ll be such great peer mentors” “oh they’ll inspire their peers to embrace academic rigor” but we all know that IQ does not equal EQ. Guess what? A lot of those gifted kids did not have a lot of patience with their other peers. A lot of those gifted kids had challenging behaviors too. The icing on the cake was that year admin also pulled all SpEd staff from our classes and announced that our SpEd students would receive all of their specially designed academic instruction for their IEP goals in a daily study skills class. (I truly believe some admin assumed the gifted kids would serve as unpaid teaching assistants) This meant that the SpEd kids got one less elective choice than everyone else. Guess what? They were pissed. Guess what? SDI in small groups out of the regular classrooms did not result in them being able to keep up in gen ed language arts and math classes without any in class SpEd staff support despite numerous accommodations and modifications made by the swamped GEN ED teachers. Guess what? the gen Ed teachers were pissed. Guess what? After two years of this insanity, 10 out of 12 of us LA/SS block teachers jumped ship.
They did this to my oldest and it was horrible for him...It messed witb his education
Yeah…I don’t know what source(s) is /are touting it as some big boon but peer tutoring sucks and I personally would never see it as an “opportunity.” It’s a fast way to breed resentment among your brightest students. Students who are bright don’t typically want to be mini teachers helping others along (unless that’s inherently part of their personality or personal goals), they want to learn higher level, more interesting stuff so they’re working to their capacity. If students want to gain exposure tutoring peers they should be able to do so after school as they desire, not as part of the classroom model. I’d be very curious if student morale was part of the data collected in that research. Maybe those students achieved more long term, but at what cost? I do see benefits in terms of the general attitude of inclusion and acceptance/appreciation of others who have different skill sets than yourselves but ugh. Peer tutoring in class makes my skin crawl.
I think the overall teaching model matters a lot. I taught Montessori for 15 years, and peer instruction is an important part of the model. BUT, that's because it is baked into the idea of living in community. Everyone is an expert at something, and everyone needs help with something. It's also a mixed age class, so the older children help the younger children, just as they were helped two years earlier. It builds confidence and respect. But that is very different from what I had to do as an undiagnosed 2E kid in a typical classroom. That model is doomed because the gifted children are not challenged and allowed to do their own thing, nor is it a situation of mutual aid and community.
Totally agree on that.
No. Being a teachers helper is not FAPE. This is not great for the kids at the low end of gifted, but for the kids at the high end if gifted, it is insanity. Fluid intelligence peaks around age 20. Post puberty, the brains of will-be scientists need and want to jam in as much as they can. They are not going to learn "soft skills" by teaching basic fractions to classmates who are near the ID end of the intelligence spectrum.
Education research is highly suspect, especially when the results just happen to be the thing that bean counters wanted to do for cost reasons.
Peer tutoring is great once. It sours after years of it. Tracking is a better system at the expense of the lowest grouping.
Oh god, what I would do to have a co-teacher! This past school year my sixth period had 27 kids. 7 with IEPs, 2 with 504s, 4 who didn't speak English. I didn't have a co teacher or anything like that. My license is not for SPED- I feel like we're doing the kids a massive disservice. I got a terrible observation when they came into that class because we weren't performing "at the standard of the benchmark" and was told my job was in danger if I didn't improve.
"trained" personnel
It’s looking more and more that way.
I teach 4th but my district doesn’t do honors in a separate class anymore. Everyone is together heterogenously and you can do the work of the “honors” classes for GPA credit but it’s not a separate class. Gen Ed is not SPED. I think you’re broadening the definition of SPED just to mean kids who are academically low achieving. To qualify for SPED a child would have to be assessed and qualify under very specific criteria. Its not just kids who are low. So no, a Gen Ed room is not a SPED room just because you pull out the honors kids. I don’t know who has rooms of 35 SPED students but that would be bonkers.
Not quite 35, but I had a class of 30 and 70% of them had an IEP. No exaggeration - I counted. It was rough.
That should be illegal. It IS illegal in my state.
It’s against our contract in BC, Canada but we have something called “remedy” which means they can regularly load our classes over composition limit but funds are allocated to “make up” for it. We are supposed to be able to use the $$ for TOC release time or regularly scheduled staffing, but because of teacher shortages it’s never available and we end up just getting a small payout at the end of the year that we can use for resources the following year. So doesn’t actually help the class that’s “in remedy.”
What is the case load?
No more than 30% iirc
In my district, we have it so no more than 1/3 of a class can have an IEP... so they make the classes bigger so they can put more IEP kids in to keep it within ration.
Studies have shown little growth is made for the lowest if they are all grouped in the same class
I regularly have 19 IEPs in front of me, out of ~30. I teach art so they all get shoved together with the low gen ed or EL population. It's bonkers.
Honors being translated into *do more work* is not a good lesson for children.
I didn’t design it 🤷 I don’t know how they differentiate honors works versus “regular” - my buddy teaches it but I’ve never asked.
A Gen Ed classroom with a significant number of IEPs is a de facto SPED classroom. I’m teaching modified curriculum and dealing with the behavioral issues—it might as well be SPED. The IEP kids would be better served in a true SPED classroom but it’s cheaper and easier for the district to do “inclusion”, which means that no one gets what they need.
It’s an interesting legal challenge. Kids with IEPs/504s are legally entitled to the least restrictive environment— which has been understood to be the gened classroom. How does that understanding change as more kids have IEPS/504s?
LRE might have had good intentions but it causes it's own slew of issues. My kid would learn so much more with LESS gen ed time, but the school cries LRE and throws them in gen ed where they learn next to nothing bc it's too much, too fast, etc.
Yeah totally— it’s interesting, a Sped environment might actually be less restrictive in practice. Like the Montessori system, for example, was built for students with differences and is famously less restrictive.
i have a daughter who is deaf along with many other medical conditions. i can’t even remember how many ARD meetings i sat in and argued this exact point to no avail. i’m so glad to hear others say this, it’s absolutely true for many students. i don’t understand how LRE became synonymous with GenEd but it’s absolutely a disservice to all of the students. this past year my son had a classmate with autism who was incredibly disruptive on a regular basis. the teachers had no support in managing this, and her daily outbursts and other disruptive behaviors restricted the learning environment for the rest of the class. it’s not fair to a class of 20-25 other kids to have the teacher spend so much time managing the special needs of one, this only restricts the learning environment for all.
Just curious , but as a lurker who only sees the mostly horror stories online, are there any protections for the normal kids. It just seems like for the sake of the (increasing) minority there are some pretty significant negatives for the majority of the kids as a result of trying to be inclusive. Liked nothing against special ed kids, they really do deserve an education. But it just seems straight up neglectful how much strain is put on the rest of the student population (once again, please lmk if my impressions are incorrect, I readily admit my ignorance on this topic)
Eh, there’s not really a good way to answer your question fully, but it’s worth nothing that stories online are always oversimplified and usually the worst of the worst. Online, it seems like students with 504s/IEPs == disruptive, and that’s just not true. There are lots (and lots) of kids who are disruptive who don’t have plans and many kids with IEPS/504s who are engaged and delightful. I do think that many of the pushes to help students with IEPs/504s are actually beneficial for all students. Like for example, it’s a common accommodation to provide instructions verbally and visually through written instructions. While this is absolutely necessary for some students with auditory processing issues or executive functioning issues, it’s beneficial for everyone. Graphic organizers and offering extensions on assignments are other examples. A classroom that accommodates different needs can be better for students who are just having a rough time or are undiagnosed or haven’t yet been identified as needing accommodations. (“Universal design for learning” is a good search term here.) Where it becomes difficult is when the accommodations clash — like, only so many students can be assigned to sit at the front of the class. If too many students have plans that say they must sit in the front of the class, I quite literally can’t do that in the space that I have. Or, some plans ask for regular 1:1 check ins. It’s best practice to check in 1:1 with students who need it, and all students regularly, but if I have 5 students who need 1:1 check ins every 15 minutes, that’s just impossible to maintain and also take care of the rest of the class.
Thanks! And yeah i definitely didn’t mean to imply that all iep/504 kids were inherently trouble students at all. Just that it seems (from the nice online bubble) a lot of the strategies do lead to an unbalanced prioritization
Thank you for explaining my biggest frustration so well. A lot of accommodations make so much sense in a vacuum. Let's use the example you gave of checking in with a student 1:1 to ensure they understand directions and stay on task... if that's the only kid with an accommodation, that's no big deal. Let's say it takes a minute to do that and you end up doing it at the beginning of class and once halfway through to ensure they're still on task and understanding what they're working on. Two minutes out of a 45 minute lesson, not a huge deal. I had one class period with 7 kids who had that accommodation in one class. The same class had several students who didn't speak English and would often have questions that we would use google translate for- it worked fine, but took time. So combining the kids with that accommodation and my ELLs, that's ten kids. If I check in with them each for a minute twice a period, that's 20 minutes- a little less than half the class. And then there were 17 other kids in the class. That's the reality some teachers are working with. To answer the person you responded to- yes, I absolutely think this has a negative impact on the gened students. Once in a coaching, my coach told me I was spending too much time with students one on one answering questions...
They're abandoning kids with IEPs into gened and calling it inclusion instead of admitting they're doing it to save money. It hurts literally everyone.
Inclusion is best practice socially and emotionally for kids who are special education. Just because a child has an IEP doesn't mean they need to be put in a box.
I mean, what about the other kids whose classes are full of behaviors that make it difficult to learn and just as impossible to teach, though?
This. Inclusion is helpful for the special needs kids; however pretending it doesn’t have an effect on the other kids is disingenuous.
I also think it can be harmful for students who have IEPs- the classes are too big and they're more likely to have clashing manifestations of disabilities- I've seen an ADHD (without an IEP) kid stimming send an autistic kid into a panic attack. I've had gen ed kids ask if they can work in the guidance office because it was too noisy with kids having behavioral issues. Not all students with IEPs have behavior issues, but many do. I think it's less an issue of needing to separate IEP and GenEd kids and more an issue of classes being too large. An inclusion class with 17 students, 2 with an IEP is a very different situation than an inclusion class with 27 students, 7 with an IEP. Numbers used because they described two of my class periods last year.
There isn't a good answer at this point, but doing things that are harmful to special education students is not the solution. And not all IEPs have behavioral issues. That's a huge generalization.
Maybe just my experience. Not all, but many. I fully understand and support students with disabilities. The number with behavior issues has increased dramatically.
Just because the IEP does not have behavioral goals, doesn't mean the child doesn't have behavioral issues. Lots of kids misbehave, very few have IEP's.
Not 35 but generally a third of one class is special ed with an iep or 504. Edit to add: there is a tipping point when it’s no longer considered LRE and that’s why you can’t have 100% special ed in a classroom.
I’m right there with you. And more students would undoubtedly qualify if their parents were competent enough to get them evaluated and show up for a meeting. I have plenty of GenEd kids who I give modified assignments and accommodations to because they need them even if they’re not actually on an IEP.
504 is not sped. Students with 504 plans are gen ed students.
Yes, I understand that.
The way you phrased “special ed with an IEP or 504” suggests you didn’t understand that.
Students with 504 plans do have special needs that must be accommodated in the classroom. I have had a number of students who had both. Having a 504 causes them to often be lumped in with special education needs and accommodations. They don't all have IEPs or case managers, though. In a lot of cases, I've found as a SPED teacher myself, that is to the student's detriment. Having an IEP and a case manager is to the benefit of the student. It protects them from discrimination, allows them a contact person in the school to go to for help and assistance, and guides them through the academic process with modifications that allow them to thrive and succeed.
Yes, and students with 504 plans are not special education students. They are general education students. A student with a 504 plan has nothing to do with sped. It’s gen ed, so that’s why they don’t have sped case managers or IEPs. There’s no reason a student with a 504 plan should be in special education unless they qualify, in which case they would have an IEP and not a 504 plan.
This is what I was getting at and I expressed it poorly.
Yes sorry I read it again and see what you mean.
Are both for students with disabilities? They still need accommodations provided for by a teacher. What would not including them in the general ed classroom look like?
Like having the kids in wheelchairs and with diabetes or CF in special classrooms
Like anywhere, it's a mixed bag. I'm currently 5th grade and typically 75% of my students are below grade level, with about 40% being far below grade level. That 40% does sometimes include the inclusion students, but it's not the entire group. A lot of student are unfortunately flying under the radar and not being tested until it's too late. My by-the-books inclusion students who have their IEPs and accommodations do bring more challenges, but I can't say it makes me think of my class as special Ed. It's more of remembering to print this test for Student A, or read this test aloud to Student B. Also Students C and D get preferential seating but Student C has ODD and hates Student D who is on the spectrum so they can't be near each other but for some reason they were put in the same class. Don't forget small group testing for Students A, B, and D. There are at least 3 more untested students who would benefit from small group testing but who can't get it because Student A is easily distracted and the more students in the small group there are the more Student A is distracted. And you can't put them by themselves because small group testing has to be with the teacher. I don't know. Now that I'm thinking about it, I guess it depends on a lot of things and the type of kid that is added to the classroom. I do think a lot of general education students are falling further behind and not having their needs met. Another accommodation our district loves to use is peer buddy. How is it fair to the general ed student tasked to help their classmate? Most of them can barely keep up with their own work, and the ones who can should be challenged academically, not constantly keeping the IEP student on task. It's not fair, but such is public education these days.
My inclusion classes are very, very low ability. Some of the students there have less comprehension than my actual SAI class I was teaching the year before. It really is truly dysfunctional and a detriment to everyone's learning.
Special education does not mean low performing and low performing doesn't mean special education. I teach one AP course, and the rest of my classes are freshmen. I have had AP students who had IEPs, 504s, and nothing at all, even though they could have qualified for it. I always have SPED students who are extremely hard workers, and sometimes don't use the accommodations they have for my class. And there are students who don't care, both in SPED and out of it. I love my freshmen classes. I love my behavior problems and my well behaved students. I love my high performing students and the students with IQs so low that they should really be in modified classes, but we don't have them for my subject. Are there classes that are out of control? Yes. And sometimes I have those classes. It sucks being what feels like a jail warden to keep the class in line, but it is typically not the SPED students who cause those problems. As a teacher, I must meet my students where they are. If they're an above average class, I will challenge them more, but also take time to acknowledge that they might be ahead and they can have a relaxing day while others catch up. If I have a low level class, then I cut some of the work load and spend more time on the basics to make sure they have a good foundation. If I have a wild, but kind class, I will have them up and moving more to channel their energy. If I have a quiet, tired class, I will keep the volume down and let them work more individually at their own speed. And if I have a class I can't trust, who have a lot of behavior issues, then I will separate them as best I can and run a tight ship so their classmates can get something out of the year. If you teach 5 of the same course throughout the day, you are going to have differently behaved classes, even though they're learning the same stuff.
You sound like an amazing teacher
If we take an essentialism approach, it means more work for the teacher. Because of accommodations and modifications. It has to mean that or it means nothing. Which is the argument for segregation. "Segregate so we can work less"
No. Students who need OCS or BLS instruction are on a whole other level from just an average academic class that happens to also have students with IEPs. Below grade level is not the same as special education. Academic level classes are full of people who are performing below grade level. Students who have no disability perform below grade level all the time. I do, however, wish that more Gen Ed teachers had better training on helping students with acquiring academic language, because that is one of the biggest barriers for students who are performing below grade level. To those students, often the academic language of any subject might as well be in a foreign language.
“Academic language learning” is a really interesting concept. I see how it would be related to the hidden curriculum, but I’ve never heard that specific term. Do you have any resources you can recommend, by any chance? It’s an idea I’d like to incorporate into freshman comp classes at university as well. Thank you!
I recommend first looking into the concept of "tiered" vocabulary. A basic overview is that there are at least 3 tiers of words: Tier 1 is like "everyday" words like "write." Then Tier 2 integrates more complex vocabulary that may be applicable to many subjects, like "compose." Then Tier 3 is the technical jargon for each specific subject, like "igneous rock" or "dramatic irony" or "integral." If students are living their life in Tier 1 all the time, then Tier 3 is like a whole different language. A great way to bridge the gap between them is though the use of prefixes, suffixes, and roots. They can use definitions in Tier 1 to connect the Tier 2 and 3 words to build a foundation for expanding the academic understanding. We need to do a better job of presenting these Tier 3 words the same way we support Tier 2. We also need to support vocabulary acquisition in *all* content, not just Language Arts.
That is super helpful, thank you! (And greetings from the TarHeel state!)
Yes! And so many Level kids’ parents are pushing them into Pre-AP just so they can escape the behavior issues of level “inclusion” classes, but it just means about half of my Pre-AP classes aren’t truly able to keep up with the honors workload, and the behaviors there have gotten worse too!
Exactly my experience. If I had students on IEPs or with any type of modifications, they were usually mostly in the same class period with less than one-third of the students on or above grade level.
I had a cap of 27 kids per class in 7 blocks the last two years. On average I had 16/27 with various accommodations and no reliable para or translator in the classes- I would get one helper pop by maybe once per month for 4/7 classes. Because of how full my classes are and how I have no reliable helper- I have to hard bake ALL the accommodations directly into the class proper- even for the kids who don’t meet accommodations and could be held accountable for things like… writing their own notes… when I have 3, 7, 11, 2 who all need different versions of the teachers notes- just give them all the notes and not stress about: “did person #3 in block #6 get the filled in or the filling the blank or the fill in the whole versions- or did they not pay attention and take the Spanish language version- well I will know when I get to block 9/10 and am missing a Spanish copy and #3’s parents bitch at my principal (instead of me) about ‘refusing to follow accommodations!’” Incase you can’t tell, 22-23 was my first year on my own and nearly killed me!
Pretttttty much. Even the honors classrooms are a bit of a junk show these days.
Same.
No, I don’t. We have non-SPED kids who are just as low or lower than our SPED kids, but I’ve never felt like it turned into a SPED class. Co-teaching is absolutely the best model though for having SPED kids in a core class. I cotaught for years with an IS in my English classes that had SPED kids. It worked out really well.
I feel like that sometimes with 11th graders at my school because there are so many other advanced options for them by that year so the kids in general are usually pretty academically low. Not really SpEd but for sure remedial.
Absolutely
There are students with disabilities in honors and AP classes. IEPs are legal documents and every teacher is obligated by federal law to follow a student's IEP, even if they are in higher level classes. Every class is special education.
That does not happen in the state I live and work. There are laws preventing too many kiddos with special needs being put into gen-ed classrooms without a co-teacher or aide.
We get funding for SPED based on the number of qualifying students, and we're legally obligated to serve them according to their IEPs. This affects the number of SPED teachers we have year to year, often resulting in adding or subtracting a position. Realistically, that usually means someone goes part-time or does half SPED and half whatever else they're certified in. But the thing is that we wouldn't really save a bunch of money if we just crammed them all in huge classes because we'd lose the funding aimed at teaching them. We do mainstream our high school students eventually. The school gets rated better if its kids aren't in Direct Instruction (small group) classes, and it does your average SPED student a disservice to keep them separated from the general population all day. Eventually, they're going to be leaving school for the real world, and they need to have some experience interacting with the average Joe. Most of my classes are co-taught, 20-30 students, with up to 14 on the SPED roster. But they are fairly close to the gen ed students in there as a rule. Most of my gen ed kids are lower achievers (bottom half of their class) who've long since abandoned any goal of attending a prestigious college.
I am a special education teacher and hate this attitude. These kids are supposed to be in general education in the least restrictive environment. If your class is mostly IEPs, you should have a coteacher, but it's not a resource class. They deserve to be in the classroom with everyone else, not socially isolated.
Yes. If you’re getting into teaching with the expectation that you’ll only work with one kind of student-don’t.
Right? I can't believe I'm getting downvoted for saying kids should be in the classroom and not treated like it's 1960 and put in the padded room.
It’s not one or the other.
LRE does not automatically equal gen ed.
True
In most cases, it does. Sorry, the law is the law. The vast majority of SpEd classifications are for specific learning disabilities, which are literally meant to be in general education with resource supports.
Except those kids end up failing because they can't meet grade level standards. Gen ed teachers are so overwhelmed with class sizes that sped students don't get the attention they require. IDEA is such a sham to validate lack of funding.
It depends on the school district and school itself in k my y experience. I am a teacher and mother of a 16 year old who in elementary was told of her class but never passed the district’s gifted program test, which was eliminated after Covid, but when she hit middle school she was placed on the honors class track to graduation. Her friend is in regular classes and they are viewed as any other class but it’s a charter school so they view things differently when it comes to their curriculum. My school is a public K8 and the only ones that care about the difference between remedial, Gen Ed, honors are the students themselves not the staff.
Yes
I was given the side eye by younger teachers when I described the tracking classes I had in high school. I've taught for many years and hate seeing one teacher struggle with individualized and and differentiated lessons and instruction, special education or not. Each class needs to be a little hive of activity, with several professionals in each room sharing management of kids' access to the curriculum.
I taught seniors in AP most of my career, they didn’t get co-teachers. A solid 1/4 of my kids had 504s and each year there was at least 1 IEP (usually some degree of Autism) including a blind student in AP Economics, a selective mute in AP Government and a brain injured student in both.
No
I know what you mean! Where I am we have two levels of inclusion. The tier 1 level with 1/3 with special education needs but no behavior plans is successful in my experience. The tier 2 level where we have 1/3 sped with behavior plans and 2/3 on-level is chaotic and ineffective. The time I spend on behavior each day adds up to a lot of missed instruction over time. However we are 100% inclusion, so even if we have students making threats, putting hands on people, making harassing comments, the only consequences are “counseling” (telling them not to) and calling home. However, in my experience, which doesn’t represent everyone by any means, calling home is not typically effective for the Tier 2 group. There are many times I have wished I could put a camera in the classroom of the tier 2 inclusion and send it home to all the parents so they know what’s going on, because the education the kids are getting in that class are not on-par with what other kids are getting, and it’s not fair and equal.
Depending on where you live, your tier 2 inclusion sounds sketchy. ED students need their own area. They need explicit social skills instruction. They need a safe place to go before having problems. I hope for everyone that you’re just shorthanding. That sounds life nightmare. I would go home from that and just shake.
If a class has 35 students, every student gets 1/35. If a student takes more than that, another student is getting nothing.
What do you mean by inclusion kids?
Dual Enrollment and AP classes no longer hold the prestige they once had.
That's not how it works and I'm honestly fucking tiered of everyone attacking inclusion. Inclusion works. Proven. Done. Now, it works when implemented correctly, which it's not typically done, mostly due to a lack of funding. So your issues are not with inclusion, and we shouldn't legislate out actually effective special education models. Your problem is with your districts unwillingness/inability to apply inclusion practices appropriately.
And Honors kids have ieps...
I've suffered any number of classes in which a full half or more of the students should be in a self-contained special education classroom. Instead, my district just shoved them all into "regular" classrooms to save a buck and hide their numbers from the state. We had so many kids who clearly needed services, but there was no way in hell the district would ever suggest testing. They did not want to spend that money. The district hated their teachers, and they did not give a damn about a bunch of poor kids on the wrong side of town. As a regular classroom teacher with zero special education training, I had no idea how to serve those kids. Truth be told, where those kids were also a behavior problem, I wrote them off. If not, I tried to support and encourage to the best of my ability, which never was all that much. I often felt as though I was teaching special education without the slightest clue as to what I was doing, and this was after many, many years in the classroom. Special education demands a very special type of person—they're angels, as far as I'm concerned. I am not that kind of person.
No. I teach at a “high performing “ school where we have 60% AP Honors sections to 40% general. I have students in my AP ands Honors classes who struggle but feel like they have to “keep up” socially. Conversely I have students in my general classes that could easily succeed in AP/ Honors but have made the wise choice to limit the number of those classes and focus on the subjects that matter to them (I have lots of 10th graders taking AP Calculus).
What an elitist ass you are. "Oh, poor me, a kid has IEP! Think of the poor children that have to be in a room with them!"
The commas here are giving me a stroke
My school is doing a ridiculous “push in” model. The idea is that the sped teachers float around and attend classes with their students and deliver their minutes of specially designed instruction in class. There’s no schedule of when they should attend classes. There’s no common planning. In practice, I never once saw a sped teacher in my class. Not once all year. I have no idea when/if students are receiving actual instruction to close their skill gaps. Even if they did come to my class, they would be pulling kids away from work that they are already needing extra supports and time to do and trying to deliver different instruction while class is happening. How could you get a kid to focus when they’re in a room full of peers and friends doing something different? Also, my room is full. There’s no space for a small group table. It’s wall to wall desks with barely enough room to move around. My desks are the worst with attached seats and a bar that kids have to climb over if I do anything other than straight rows. This actually came up in an evaluation. I’m off on a tangent now, but I’ve been asking for new desks since I started at this school three years ago. I was pissed when it came up in an evaluation that my rows show teacher-centered thinking. I showed him my drawer of hardware that I keep from bits that fall off my desks and rearranged into pods to show how it blocked kids in and made them have to climb. He took it off the evaluation and promised to look into different desks. Still have the same crappy desks.
I've talked about this with some teachers at my school- we've been feeling this. I'm not sure if it's a FERPA rule or my district, but they're not allowed to have more than 1/3 of the students in a class be IEP/504 but SO MANY of the kids at my school have one that it's becoming hard to do that. The other issue is that about 30% of the kids at my school are ELLs. So effectively, the gen ed classes end up being 1/3 kids with accommodations, 1/3 kids who aren't fluent in English, and 1/3 kids who are performing on baseline. Weirdly, it's that last third that gives me trouble as a teacher- they're bored because the class is moving too slow. We don't have coteachers, so it's all on you to differentiate. The advanced classes are much easier to teach- not because they're advanced, but because the kids are all performing on roughly the same level.
> inclusion kids What does this mean?
Students who have mild to moderate special needs who can handle a gen-ed classroom with little accommodations and/or modifications. Classes with 30% or more students with IEPs typically get a SPED co-teacher or at least a paraprofessional aide to help them carry the workload and provide the needed accommodations in the classroom.
Oh, I know. It was a rhetorical question. Inclusion is not a type of person; it is a value, practice, or characteristic of a space. I think that dangerous ideological work happens when people take values like inclusion and turn them into adjectives that have a pejorative flavor… like referring to some students as “inclusion kids” and implying that they worsen the quality of education for “non-inclusion (exclusion?) kids”.
Yeah I'm not a teacher but my wife is and it's honestly gross how thinly veiled the term "inclusion" is. An alarming number of teachers would rather her students were all locked into the SPED room because it would make their lives easier. Ohh you have to make a modified worksheet for a couple students boo hoo my wife has to make 4 or 5 different levels for every class.
Inclusion is a legal invention. Without federal or government intervention, schools would segregate this demographic. Think of it as if tomorrow, the government banned schools for the blind and required every teacher to learn Braille pedagogy. Every kindergarten teacher must be able to teach it. Without that government intervention, we would segregate it. With it, we call them inclusion kids. "Inclusion is not a type of person" inclusion is the type of person who would be segregated if not for some government law.
Your comment is a good example of the dangerous ideological work that happens when we turn a value (inclusion) into a pejorative label for a type of person (inclusion kids). Your comment frames neurotypical, able bodied students whose socioeconomic contexts empower them to focus on education as normal; everyone else—the “inclusion kids”—is The Other. This kind of thinking raises red flags for me.
I think our society doesn’t value inclusion. If it did, we wouldn’t require the law to have it. We’d just have it voluntarily. We have the inclusion law precisely because we don’t value inclusion. If you want to know what happened, read the text of brown vs board of education. An argument against racial segregation was that it’s a slippery slope for desegregation of students with disabilities. It’s exactly what happened. I wonder how your red flags will react once this very right wing Supreme Court overturns brown vs board of education. We’re more segregated than ever racially after all
I agree that many people—most of whom are white, neurotypical, able-bodied, and have high socioeconomic status—do not value inclusion. However, I think many others not only understand the importance of inclusion, but are willing to put their lives on the line for it. Black people, disabled people, and people in the intersections of those groups fought for racial desegregation and for the ADA at great personal risk. I get the feeling that you and I share the same values about integration and inclusion, even if those values are not reflected in powerful governmental bodies (like Congress or SCOTUS). What I take issue with is that the phrase “inclusion kids” turns “inclusion” into a pejorative adjective that means “not able bodied, not neurotypical, and/or not performing at grade level.” I also take issue with the idea that inclusion means “adding The Other to the normal classroom” rather than “bringing multiple groups together to form a new learning space.” Like, purple is not blue including red; blue is not “the normal color,” and “red is not “the inclusion color.” Purple is red and blue coming together to form something new and different. If we think of racially desegregated classrooms as white spaces to which kids of color have been added, or of inclusive classrooms as neurotypical spaces to which neurodivergent students have been added, we are privileging some identities as normal (white, neurotypical) while framing others as, well, The Other. That’s the ideological harm I’m referring to.
Meh, most of the inclusion kids behave like animals bc they know there are 0 real consequences with the Get Out of Jail IEP.