Education Week - February 27, 2019 - 8

SURVEY

Ground-Level
Perspectives
On Spec. Ed.
By Christina A. Samuels
Special education teachers feel
mostly competent in their own ability
to work with students who have disabilities. But they have less confidence
that their general education peers and
supervisors have the same skills-a
deep concern when inclusion in general education classes is a priority for
most children with special needs.
That finding is one of several from
a survey of special education teachers conducted by the Council for
Exceptional Children and released
at its recent national conference in
Indianapolis.
Only 14 percent of the special education teachers who responded to
the survey said they felt they were
given sufficient time to plan with
partners. And despite the interest in
recent years in co-teaching, just over
half of respondents, 54 percent, said
they felt highly confident in their coteaching skills.
Mary Ruth Coleman, a former
president of CEC, who spearheaded
the survey along with William K.
Bogdan and Susan Fowler, also former presidents of the organization,
said even the sobering findings have
an upside: They show that special
education teachers expect a lot from
themselves and others.
"They feel competent, they understand the role of the [individualized
education program], they understand collaboration and they value
it. They want to do it more, and better," said Coleman, a senior scientist
emerita at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute
in Chapel Hill, N.C.

Percentage of special education teachers ...
... rating themselves or their colleagues highly
prepared to work with students with disabilities:
69%

Themselves
Related service providers
(therapists, speech and language pathologists, etc.)
Special education colleagues

68
56

Special education novice colleagues

38

Paraeducators 12

Language
diversity

22

Ethnic or racial
diversity

37

Socioeconomic
diversity

43%

General education novice colleagues 12
General education colleagues 8

... reporting restrictive disciplinary strategies
that they or their schools use:

... reporting high levels
of district support for
family engagement and
IEP involvement:

71%

In-school suspension

69

Out-of-school suspension

31

Restraint
Seclusion

28

Expulsion

28

42%
27
Family
engagement

None of these 11
Other (time-outs, loss of privileges, etc.)

33

... reporting a lot or a great deal
of support for these types of collaboration:

System Change Needed
Nearly 1,500 teachers responded
to the survey; general education,
self-contained, or resource-room
settings each accounted for roughly
30 percent of respondents' teaching
environments, with the remainder
saying they taught in other places.
Fowler said she was gratified to
see how many teachers saw the
student's IEP as an essential document-not just paperwork.
"We were delighted and maybe even
a little bit surprised that the IEP is
a living, useful, frequently referred-to
document," Fowler said. More than
half of respondents said they referred
to the IEP daily to weekly; more than
70 percent said they individualized
their curriculum using the IEP as
guidance most or all of the time.
Bogdan, a retired special education administrator with the Hamilton
County Educational Services Center
in Cincinnati, which provides support to local school districts, said the
findings underscore that there must
be a systemwide change in education
so that teachers can have the collaboration time, planning time, and other
resources they say they need.
"It's not just one resolution that's
going to take care of problems," Bogdan said. "It's how we think about
the entire system of education."

... reporting high levels
of competency in engaging
diverse families:

Family
involvement
in IEP

... assessing how often
their students felt
"a sense of community
or belonging" in school:

62
48

Always

48

Never

29%
Co-teaching

Multitiered
systems of
support

Positive
behavoiral
interventions
and supports

Inclusion
in general
education

... reporting high competence
in these instructional strategies:
Meeting IEP goals

81%

Observational data

79

Progress monitoring

75

Formal assessments

74
65

Sampling portfolios
Strengths-based assessments

8 | EDUCATION WEEK | February 27, 2019 | www.edweek.org

High-stakes tests

54
47

Sometimes

2 7
20

Most of
the time

44%

About half
of the time

27

Top 3 things needed by

special education teachers to
be successful, in ranked order:

1. Adequate resources to meet IEP
requirements for my students

2. Smaller class sizes/caseloads
3. Administrators who support
the IEP process

SOURCE: Council for Exceptional Children State of Our Profession Survey, 2019
http://www.edweek.org
Education Week - February 27, 2019

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