Culturally Proficient Inclusive Schools

All Means ALL!

Delores B. Lindsey, Jacqueline S. Thousand, Cynthia L. Jew, Lori R. Piowlski

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781506356280
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education

Create inclusive educational environments that benefit ALL learners!

As schools become more diverse with students of differing abilities and needs, this self-reflective and action-oriented guide helps you create and support more inclusive schools and classrooms that intentionally educate all students. Using the Five Essential Elements of Cultural Proficiency as a roadmap, this book presents:

• Students’ learning differences as just that – differences rather than deficits

• Strategies that show you how to break though the common barriers to culturally proficient and inclusive schooling

• Assessments that gauge your awareness and show you how to best serve every student’s needs

Part I Commitment to ALL!

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2016), the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind Act (2002), is the nation’s general education law and stands as the opportunity for all students, irrespective of their abilities, to receive support and resources to achieve at high levels. One of the primary goals and requirements of the mandate is to keep students with disabilities on track for success. All students must have access to the general education curriculum. Federal assurances are in place to keep students with disabilities from being denied access to graduation, college required courses, and other high-level curriculum requirements. ESSA identifies that students eligible for special education are general education students first and must receive access to and all of the benefits of participation in the general curriculum and the general education environment. Today, more than ever, general and special educators have opportunities to work in unison to better serve every students to achieve at levels higher than ever before. With the backing of federal and state mandates and state college and career readiness standards, educators can collaborate to provide equitable educational supports and services to all students. In this book we illustrate how ALL can mean ALL.

Chapter 1 provides the rationale for why we were compelled and needed to write this book. We describe the structure of the book and invite you to join us on the journey of reflection-on-action and reflection-for-action.

Chapter 2 introduces the four Tools of Cultural Proficiency and describes how they can be used as lenses to examine and implement inclusive educational practices. The tools are intended to inform you about the importance of knowing who you are and the values, beliefs, and assumptions you hold about who learns and how they learn. Inclusive Education is defined and through a vivid classroom snapshot, illustrates how general and special educators can create and sustain a rich and nurturing educational environment through collaborative partnerships, such as co-teaching.

Chapters 3 and 4 introduce the reader to the Barriers to Cultural Proficiency and the most instrumental tool—Overcoming the Barriers to Cultural Proficiency. Barriers to culturally proficient and Inclusive Schooling are identified and described in Chapter 3. Barrier busting principles, assumptions, and actions are offered in Chapter 4.

The tools that energize educators to move forward and transcend Barriers are the Guiding Principles and five Essential Elements defined in Chapter 2. The Guiding Principles are described in greater detail in Chapter 4. The Essential Elements are illustrated in Chapters 5 through 9 of the second part of this text. At the end of each of Chapters 5 through 9, a case story presents an Essential Element in action. The Lakeside Union School District is a composite district from our combined experiences and serves as the setting for educators who use the elements of cultural competency to create and sustain an inclusive educational environment. Chapter 10 guides you to develop a plan of action for Inclusive Schooling using the five Essential Elements.

We provide two resources following Chapter 10. Resource A, “Book Study Guide,” is offered for you to use with groups or individually to enhance and deepen knowledge, understanding, and commitment to the concepts and actions of culturally proficient Inclusive Schooling. Resource B, “Cultural Proficiency and Inclusive Schooling Books’ Essential Questions,” details a list of books about Cultural Proficiency and Inclusive Schooling. Essential questions help you focus on key concepts for each book.

Note to the Reader: You and We

We use the pronoun you to personalize our relationship to the readers of this book. The pronoun we refers to the co-authors of the book. The co-authors have combined our years of work as educators, school administrators, parents, and scholar practitioners to bring you our experiences, our research, and our best thinking about the importance of responding to the need for educating all learners, unlike anytime in this nation’s history.

The Format of This Book

This book is designed to be used as an individual guide for reflection and action. It is also designed to be used with interdisciplinary colleagues—in small groups or in large groups—as a book study for developing a school or district action plan. The stakeholders of the groups may be parents, administrators, general and special education teachers, higher education faculty, and paraprofessionals. Each chapter has lines for you to compose your responses to prompts about the text and suggestions for reflection and action at the end of each chapter. The reflections and the dialogues with your co-learners will deepen your learning. Your learning community will be enhanced by the diversity of your perspectives, experiences, and expertise. We wish you well and now join you on your life-long journey of creating and sustaining culturally proficient inclusive educational environments for all learners.

1 What Are Equity and Access Gaps? Why Do They Persist?

When school goals are developed from mission statements without shared values and clear vision, then goals and action plans will be nebulous and the mission will, again, not address the needs of all students in the school.

Frattura & Capper (2007, p. 41)

Getting Centered

As an introductory activity for reading this book, examine your school and district’s mission and vision statements. In what ways are the statements aligned with your values, beliefs, and assumptions? In what ways are the statements aligned with your day to day actions as a member of the school/district community? In what ways are the values, beliefs, assumptions, and actions of your colleagues aligned with these vision and mission statements? What might be some responses to the Frattura and Capper quote when you share it with your colleagues?

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When Mandates Meet Morality

This book focuses on what it takes for all educators to believe they can educate all learners in ways that embrace students’ cultures as assets and students’ learning differences as just that—differences rather than deficits. Believing we can educate all learners is a powerful belief statement that drives action in classrooms and schools. Not too many years ago, educators would proclaim, I believe all students can learn! The statement became part of nearly every vision and mission statement, slogans in classrooms, posted on banners throughout school buildings, and chanted as mantras across classrooms far and near. Of course, the proclamation was intended as a powerful belief statement to guide teachers’ actions in the classroom. One problem was the widely accepted statement developed silent exceptions that were attached to the end. All students can learn . . . except the students with special needs; All students can learn . . . except those kids who live in the trailer park . . . except those kids who don’t speak English . . . except those kids who have an aide with them all the time. The responsibility for learning seemed to be on the students rather the educators.

This book takes the statement, “We believe all educators can educate all learners!” and places the responsibility with all educators, school and district administrators, support personnel including paraprofessionals, custodians, front office staff members, and school board members. Truly, we are all in this business of educating learners together. And along with us are our partners: parents, community members, health and human services, and other support agencies. As partners, who hold a belief system that is inclusive of educating all learners and educators who possess a skill set that is grounded in culturally relevant and equitable instructional practices, we can create a culturally proficient inclusive educational environment.

We present the four Tools of Cultural Proficiency and the Inclusive Schooling practices and philosophies as a framework for action to facilitate you and other educators to be able to provide equitable educational opportunities to meet the needs of all learners, especially learners who may benefit from special education services. We provide case stories, tables, figures, and reflective and dialogic activities to engage you in applying the four Tools and Inclusive Schooling practices to your current context. This book is written to guide you on your cultural proficiency journey in support of inclusive classrooms and schools.

Certainly, we recognize that an abundance of laws already exist to support our work with children and youth with identified disabilities and other learning challenges. In 1975, Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children’s Act (Public Law 94-142), which guarantees that all students with disabilities receive a free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment. Since then, the law’s name has changed, most recently, in 2004, to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA). Regardless of name changes, the law has provided the foundation for Inclusive Education and codified advancements in policy and practices that forward Inclusive Education. Bolstering IDEIA is the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the 2015 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. ESSA maintains the act’s legacy as a civil rights law in at least three ways. First, it ensures that states and districts hold schools accountable for the progress of every student subgroup (e.g., students with disabilities). Second, it dedicates resources and supports so that students with disabilities, English learners, and vulnerable student subgroups (e.g., children of low-income, homeless, or migrant worker families) have equitable access to rigorous curriculum and quality educators. Third, it requires districts to use evidence-based, whole-school interventions in its lowest-performing schools and in schools where subgroups (e.g., students with IEPs, English learners) persistently underperform. In short, ESSA articulates an expectation that schools foster and be held accountable for high educational standards, equality of opportunity to learn, and excellence in student performance for every child.

Even with these mandates in place, students with special educational needs continue to lag behind their counterparts in achievement, according to performance data in today’s data-rich environments. As a matter of fact, we emphasize these education gaps persist today, despite an abundance of federal laws and compliance checks. Many of today’s schools now describe these achievement gaps as issues of disproportionality (Linn & Hemmer, 2011). Disproportionality may be defined as the ”over- or under-representation of a given population group, often defined by racial and ethnic backgrounds, but also defined by socioeconomic status, national origin, English proficiency, gender, and sexual orientation, in a specific population category” (Elementary and Middle School Technical Assistance Center, n.d., para.1). Disproportionality in special education involves the inappropriate over-identification, misidentification, and/or misclassification of certain groups of students as special education eligibility. Sullivan (2011) describes the over-representative identification, and placement of culturally and linguistically diverse students and students of color in special education as a long-standing phenomenon, which “strongly indicates systemic problems in inequity, prejudice, and marginalization within the education system” (p. 318).

General educators and members of the special education community have an ongoing need to learn about and have tools to recognize institutional Barriers, individual beliefs, and deeply held societal or personal assumptions that foster and perpetuate these gaps. We address the need to narrow and close these gaps through the content of this book. Our goal through intentional actions is to support and teach students who require and need differentiated learning and behavior supports to easily access and progress in the general education curriculum to fully participate in their educational lives. We focus the content of this book on what to do when mandates meet morality.

Reflection

To what extent are you aware of the laws that pertain to students with special educational needs? In what ways do these opening comments resonate with you and your context? What are the moral issues facing educators in preK–12 schools and classrooms today regarding equity and access? What gaps and disproportionality exist in your school/district? What’s being done to address these issues?

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Why We Wrote This Book

We drew from ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Commitment to ALL!
• 1 What Are Equity and Access Gaps? Why Do They Persist?
• 2 Using the Tools of Cultural Proficiency and the Vision and Practices of Inclusive Education as a Conceptual Framework
• 3 Barriers to Culturally Proficient Inclusive Education
• 4 Overcoming Barriers and Creating Opportunities for Learning
• Part II How to Become Inclusive Using the Five Essential Elements of Cultural Proficiency
• 5 Assessing Cultural Knowledge Through Authentic and Differentiated Strategies
• 6 Valuing Diversity Through Inclusiveness
• 7 Managing the Dynamics of Diversity Through Collaboration, Creative Problem Solving, and Conflict Management
• 8 Adapting to Diversity Through Advocacy and Universal Design for Learning
• 9 Institutionalizing Cultural Change
• 10 Engaging in Action: When All Means ALL!
• Resource A: Book Study Guide Culturally Proficient Inclusive School: All Means ALL!
• Resource B: Cultural Proficiency and Inclusive Schooling Books’ Essential Questions
• References
• Index
• Publisher Note