How can we better support students with disabilities?

Lauren: If I could wave a magic wand, and every superintendent and school leader really believed in the potential of a child with a disability, and believed that they could achieve, and the decisions that they made trickle down from that belief, I think that would be the biggest game changer, is simply the belief.

Kevin: The COVID-19 pandemic affected student learning across the board. While almost all students declined academically, a report found that students with disabilities were especially impacted.

Students with disabilities often face wide and persistent achievement gaps. With the more than seven million young people with disabilities in the United States, it begs the question of what more we can do to support them. What challenges do students with disabilities face? How can we create more inclusive spaces and services for these students to thrive? And how can we help our schools be more equitable and supportive when it comes to special education?

This is “What I Want To Know,” and today, I am joined by Lauren Rhim to find out.

Lauren Rhim is the executive director and co-founder of the Center for Learner Equity. The Center is the first organization to solely focus on working with stakeholders to ensure students with disabilities have the quality educational options and choices they need to learn and thrive.

Prior to founding the Center, Lauren worked as a researcher, consultant, and advocate. She continues to strive to identify strategies that create and sustain high-quality public schools for all students. She joins us today to discuss special education and how we can create quality programs for students with different abilities.

Lauren Rhim, welcome so much to “What I Want To Know.” Lauren, I have heard about your work for many years. I think that the work you’re doing is tremendous. But I wanted to go back to what started this for you. I mean, you now are one of the leading experts in focusing in on the needs of children with different abilities. But where did it all come from? How did you get into this field? Because this is something that is wholly needed, but it’s not for everyone.

Lauren: Thanks. Well, Kevin, thanks for having me. Great to be here with you today and much appreciate the compliments.

It started when I was in grad school. I’m embarrassed to say I almost fell into an amazing research opportunity when I started my doc work at the University of Maryland with a professor who went on to be my mentor for many years. And she was deeply committed to students with disabilities.

I was there working on an ed policy degree and really interested in what at the time, in the early ’90s, was emerging as early contracting privatization. And I was fascinated by the economic theories involved.

And so, I came from a history of a mom who was on the school board and then heard frustrations in the public schools that I attended in rural Vermont, and was really interested in school reform. And so the two kind of came together, this notion of how do we improve public schools, and could markets and market forces help improve public schools?

And then this growing passion and commitment and interest in students with disabilities to then being, “Well, if we’re going to have school choice,” in what came to be in my position, “if they were truly a valid option, then they needed to educate all kids.” They needed to educate the same kids and do it well.

And that’s really those . . . it was a couple of federal research grants in the early days of the charter sector and looking at kids with disabilities that really was the impetus for all of my work.

Kevin: Now, you also served on a school board, didn’t you?

Lauren: Mm-hmm.

Kevin: I mean, talk about that experience. Because oftentimes people who get involved and they have that commitment that you just expressed you obviously had, and they get involved with a local school board or a charter school board, it could be more than a notion. And sometimes people run away from it after service as opposed to running to it. What led you to just explore even deeper?

Lauren: God, it goes back to being a kid. My mom wasn’t happy with my public school where my sister and I were going, and so she ran for school board and I watched her serve on school board. And she just said, “If you don’t like something, you need to get involved and change it.”

And so when my kids were in school . . . Actually, it really wasn’t dissatisfaction, but the local public school was looking for school board members, and as is typically the case in a lot of smaller communities, there weren’t enough school board members to go around.

And so my first appointment was just that, it was an appointment because there was a vacancy. And then I did go on to be elected.

So, I served on my traditional school district, but I also was on the board of a local charter school. There was a small kind of fledgling charter school in New Hampshire called the Ledger Charter School that was an alternative high school. I also joined that board, and really enjoyed board service.

For me, I was doing a lot of this kind of abstract research or policy-level work, and being on my local school board, I felt like, provided me an opportunity to take some of what I knew, but also just to learn a ton of really how decisions are made in practice and what parents and families care about.

Kevin: So how did that experience inform your work, particularly work you’re doing now, when you talk about the need to make sure we’re educating all children, but particularly children with different abilities? Talk about how that experience sort of . . . it must have illuminated things for you.

Lauren: It illuminated and reinforced. I mean, in both my experiences at the charter school and . . . In New Hampshire, charter schools are part of local districts, so we had to work a lot with the local district and really fight for resources. Because we had a high proportion of kids with disabilities, but we had trouble getting money from the local traditional district to pay for those services. So in that experience, it was just once again confronting the level of comfort that everyone had of not giving kids with disabilities what they needed.

And then in my traditional school district, it was a high-performing . . . I live in a college town. It was a high-performing school district, high-performing schools. But also realizing that the system was pretty comfortable not holding anyone accountable or really pushing for better outcomes for kids with disabilities.

So I was surprised at some of the things I saw at the federal level that trickled down, like you need to have a plan for how you going to educate kids with disabilities. And I kind of naively thought, “Oh, people sit down to make the plan,” and then I realized it was pretty much a rubber stamp. So that was enlightening of kind of the lack of annual intentionality about what was going to be happening.

Kevin: Let’s just talk about the whole notion of where we are with special education. I mean, we’ve come a long way. We still have a long way to go. How would you characterize the state of special education services in American schools?

Lauren: The first word that comes to mind is crisis. I mean, you’re right, we have come a long way. When you think back historically, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in ’75, if kids learned differently or had any kind of disability, then they might be put in an institution, which was a terrible place. And there’ve been lots of documentation in writing about what it looked like pre-IDEA. So I don’t want to overlook the progress we’ve made.

With that said, from low-performing districts to high-performing districts, I think there are very few parents who feel like their students with disabilities are getting what they need. Every parent has to fight.

When I meet parents and they say, “Oh, I think my child has XYZ disability, what advice?” I say, “You need to learn a lot about what your child needs. And you need to accept that you are going to be there first and most determined advocate, and that you’re going to have to fight for everything you get.” So, that feels like a crisis. That’s not the way it should be.

Kevin: But Lauren, I found this to be the case . . . And again, this isn’t a knock on our school system per se and school districts, but isn’t part of the challenge that we’re kind of used to a one-size-fits-all approach? So if you’re a little bit different, let’s say you’re an accelerated learner or you have different abilities, it’s kind of hard for most school districts to adjust to where the children are. Is that still the case, and have we gotten better with that?

Lauren: I think technology has opened lots of doors in terms of individualizing things. But I think there’s still a fair amount of, “If you’re X, you get Y,” as opposed to, “If you’re X, let’s sit down and learn about what kind of learner you are, and what is your profile, and what accommodations and modifications you need in order for you to be successful.”

Also, one of my board members, who is Marty Mittnacht, who I just so admire, she was state director of special ed in Massachusetts for more than 25 years. One of the things that Marty said to me early on was, “You do know that special ed is a workaround?” She said, “If general ed could better differentiate and meet all kids where they are, disability or not, we wouldn’t need special ed.”

We have special ed because general ed isn’t adapting enough and educating kids, in a way. And that shifted my mindset of what it was.

It’s actually changed the language. I don’t talk about fixing special ed anymore. I talk about, “How do we improve the education of kids with disabilities?” It’s not a program we’re trying to improve. We’re trying to improve outcomes for kids who have disabilities.

But I really think the biggest levers to push are around leadership and decision-making. If I could wave a magic wand, and every superintendent and school leader really believed in the potential of a child with a disability, and believed that they could achieve, and the decisions that they made trickled down from that belief, I think that would be the biggest game changer, is simply the belief.

But so often the belief isn’t there, and so all decisions that are made . . . And it’s incremental. It’s like death by a thousand cuts. It’s, “Well, that’s a classroom and it’s kids with disabilities. So we won’t give them the strongest teacher because we don’t think their outcomes are going to be good. So it won’t hurt them as much.” Those kinds of really ableist decisions that are deeply embedded in our structures and our systems in our schools, and society in general, are what contribute to it.

Kevin: I’m mindful, Lauren, of a trip I took over 20 years ago to Taiwan. I visited a special needs school on a Saturday. The principal invited me. And when I walked in, it was like attending a rock concert because these young people who had been in the program, they were going to graduate. And part of their graduation requirement was not only learning how to grow academically, but also they had designated jobs for them in the Subway sandwich shop, the McDonald’s, the KFCs. And they had to navigate getting on a bus, getting to work, working two, three, four hours a day, and coming back.

When every name was called, everyone was celebrating these kids. And when I talked to the principal, he shared the fact that, culturally, there’s no othering. How do we get there? Because it seems like that’s really at the crux of a lot of what we face.

Lauren: I completely agree. The othering is a big part of it. There more than seven million kids with disabilities, school-aged kids with disabilities. It’s not a small number, but we’re pretty comfortable with the othering, and the lower expectations, and openly discriminating.

I mean, I draw the analogy that clearly racism is pervasive, but people still know it’s wrong. No one wants to be a racist. But when it comes to individuals with disabilities, there’s not even an awareness that it’s wrong. I mean, on a pretty regular basis, I hear people use language and make reference, and the way they talk about kids with disabilities, it’s very othering. It reveals a lot of comfort with . . . It’s not even a problem. They’re not even uncomfortable with it, much less changing the behaviors.

I don’t think there’s any one answer, but I think representation and visibility are two important parts. And I was working on a commentary with a colleague about how to raise awareness and what to do. In the mainstream media and pop culture, increasingly, you see individuals with disabilities, and you hear conversations about disability and neurodiversity.

And then I think it’s also proximity. I think people need to work with colleagues who have disabilities and interact with peers that have disabilities in order to say, “Oh, this isn’t Other. This is my friend Jamie, or my friend Susie. And they’re neuro-diverse,” or they have a physical disability, whatever it is, but it’s exposure.

Kevin: Let me ask you this. I really want to probe more on the Center for Learner Equity, because recognizing this world or this universe as it relates to how we educate children in the special education sphere, what prompted the start of the organization? Talk a little bit about its mission and goals.

Lauren: When I was at Maryland, I was involved in some of the early studies looking at special ed right as the charter sector was starting. This was the early ’90s, and charter schools were a brand new concept and I was fascinated by them. You’ve got some guardrails in that they’re public schools, they’re open enrollment, but granted autonomy to do things differently. It seems like a great opportunity to improve outcomes for kids with disabilities.

But the charter sector early on in particular really struggled with it. And so I led a number of research studies and then I did consulting.

But there was a group of us who kept running into each other who were interested in special ed and the charter schools, and they were folks . . . I did some projects with the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers and the National Association of State Directors of Special Ed. There were just a handful of us that were interested in this topic. It was a niche of a niche.

And in 2012, the Government Accountability Office wrote a big report on the status of kids with disabilities and charters, and really highlighted that there was a pretty significant gap and that they were underrepresented in charters.

And this group of us who had crossed paths got together at a meeting, at a conference, and said, “Hey, we think we need to do something.” I don’t know if the world needs any more nonprofits, but we couldn’t find an existing nonprofit that could really take it on.

And so we talked to our network. I co-founded it with a gentleman named Paul O’Neill, who was a special ed attorney, who is an individual with a disability, a parent of a child with disability.

Paul and I had worked together a bunch, and just decided that we were in a position personally and professionally that we could launch this initiative and try to raise awareness and really push and work on creating policy changes that could enable charters to educate kids with disabilities and make sure they could enroll them and educate them.

So initially we were born . . . we were the National Center for Special Ed and Charter Schools. We changed our name two years ago to better line up with the work that we were doing. We weren’t working solely with charters, and we really, really wanted to center students and not just special ed as a program. We felt like that was not the direction we wanted to go.

Kevin: Now, do you work with a lot of policymakers at a federal and state level?

Lauren: Yes. We do some policy work at the federal level, work with a number of different coalitions. Really, the big policy changes for charters are at the state level, so federal and state policy work. We do research. One of the things we do is every two years we analyze the Civil Rights data collection, which is a huge survey of all the public schools in the nation, and we track the trend line of the experiences of kids with disabilities in the charter space relative to traditional public schools.

We lead a couple of coalitions. We have a group called the Equity Coalition, where we bring together special ed advocates and charter advocates. And we’re really proud of the work that Equity Coalition has done because those two groups typically didn’t spend a lot of time together talking to one another.

And then we do fieldwork. So we have multi-year deep partnerships in places like New Orleans and Camden and Newark, doing work in Connecticut. We’ve done work in Denver, D.C., where we’re really trying to look at what are the system structures and policies in those locations, and what changes could we make to try and ensure that parents of kids with disabilities can navigate the system and that charters can be viable options for kids with disabilities.

Kevin: Beyond the mindset and cultural challenges we talked about earlier, Lauren, what are some of the barriers that you have seen as the Center tries to develop and promote policies that would improve upon things?

Lauren: There are policies that I think of as offense and defense. A fair amount of the work in the special ed advocacy world is defense. It’s protecting the rights that have been gathered/articulated. That was particularly true during COVID, where there was some movement to, “Let’s waive IDEA.” And so a lot of that work was very defensive.

But there is more offensive work, like trying to get laws passed, like the RISE Act, where working with other national organizations to say that if a child with a disability has an IEP in high school, that they should be able to take the documentation evaluation . . . when they go to college, they should be able to use that and present it to a college, and a college can provide supports to them.

Because typically what happens is a child has an evaluation in high school. They get to college and they go to disability services and say, “I need some extra supports.” And the college says, “Well, we need proof that you need it. We need an evaluation.” It can become a real barrier to kids with disabilities persisting in college. And so those are kind of technical fixes that we work on.

Then there’s also financial. We’re always trying to get more dollars allocated for kids with disabilities. The dollars that are allocated to support special ed come from federal, state, and local sources. Always trying to get more money at the federal level to support, to give to states and districts.

And then there are important policies around discipline. Discipline is a huge issue for kids with disabilities. Especially black boys, disciplined two, three times as much as their peers without disabilities. And so a lot of our policy work focuses on tweaking policies related to restraint and seclusion, because kids with disabilities are disproportionately restrained and secluded.

So that’s some of the big push at the federal level, both offensive and defensive work. And then it trickles down to the state level. At the state level, a lot of the work tends to be really specific to charter schools.

So things like if we do a data analysis in a state and we realize that in the charter schools, kids with disabilities are way underrepresented, we might do an analysis to try to understand why are they underrepresented, to then go to the state and say, “There are some legislative or regulatory changes that could address this barrier.” Whether they’re unfinanced or . . .

We did some work in Colorado that led to the state changing a rule that said charters can’t ask about the status of a student’s IEP, whether they had individualized education program before they enrolled them in the charter. So really kind of highly technical fixes that we’re trying to pursue that our research has said, “Those are some of the barriers that lead to kids with disabilities not accessing charters.”

Kevin: We talked about this previously, but over the last few years, particularly post-pandemic, there’s been a renewed focus on the mental health challenges that our young people face on special needs, suicide prevention, a whole range of health and wellness issues. That focus has been long overdue. Have you picked up on that change as it relates to the way we educate and treat children with disabilities?

Lauren: Yes and no. So, mental health has been something that has always been a part . . . especially a couple of different categories of disability, emotional disturbance, there’s overlap with mental health. But the Venn diagram is not the same thing. Mental health and disability, there’s overlap, but they’re distinct.

It’s been something that we’ve always wanted to raise awareness of, and so there’s continuing that work.

And then there’s a new . . . I think even pre-COVID, there was greater awareness around trauma and how that could contribute to mental health in schools.

And then we have had this massive disabling event of the pandemic, both in terms of the actual illness, but then ripple effect of the illness on families and the stressors it introduced, that we’re seeing a lot more mental health issues.

So, it’s an ongoing concern. It’s very real. We are hearing from schools that they’re seeing a lot more mental health issues and needing to devote more resources to addressing mental health. And again, there’s overlap with disability, but not one-to-one.

Kevin: I mean, obviously, you still have to push and make sure that these policies are put in place that benefit these children.

One other granular question. You mentioned IEP, individualized education plan, for children with special needs. And that area has been rife with criticism over the years. I mean, there have been schools that just do a cookie-cutter approach where they just take an IEP for one child and apply almost word-for-word.

Some of that has been cleaned up, but how do you see sort of the beginnings of the diagnosis of a child with certain disabilities where they start to formulate the individualized education plan? Has that process gotten cleaner over the years? Because for a lot of parents, that’s when they start to realize something isn’t right, when the school says, “This is the challenge your child has,” but it may not be the exact challenge or may not be covered the way it should be.

Lauren: I think that if you’re running a school and you see the IEP as a tool to help collaboratively make decisions with parents and capture where the student is and what kind of learner they are and what services they need, then the IEP can be an amazing, robust tool that helps keep all the educators in the school informed and the parents, and it’s a collaborative document that everyone works from. That’s a great thing. That can be really positive.

However, the converse of that is if you see this as this compliance-based thing . . . I mean, this was one of the things that came up during COVID. When we would talk to parents, they were like, “We’re less concerned about procedures. We just want to know that as you shift to virtual learning, my child is going to continue to get some services so they can access the virtual content or the online content.”

And some districts became so compliance-oriented that it further limited, and parents were like, “We don’t need to follow all the rules, but let’s try to do what’s best for the kid in this current context.”

So all kinds of silly things happen in the name of compliance. If common sense would prevail, it could be good for kids and manageable for systems.

Kevin: Well, speaking of common sense . . . and Lauren, I really appreciate your perspective on this. I have one last question. This is what I really want to know, and this is one of those wave-a-magic-wand questions. So let’s say we waved a magic wand and you are able to have every school district in America conduct a school audit on their special education services. In other words, you’re asking them to look at how they’re delivering the services, how the children are doing, how they can improve on those services. What kinds of things would you ask the school’s superintendent or a principal of the school to focus on? And what would you be looking for in this audit to see that they’re moving in the right direction?

Lauren: Growth. It comes down to growth. It’s “Where is the student when they walk through the door and where’s the student after they’ve been there at the end of each quarter or the end of each year or semester?” Has the child shown growth? I think that’s the most important thing.

Regardless of where the child starts, has the child shown growth? Depending on the complexity of their needs, growth means different things. But for a child who’s got really significant medical issues, can they function independently? Are they making progress towards being able to go through their day with more independence for a child who has relatively mild disabilities? Are they able to read and can they access the content in the classroom? So I think it’s all about growth.

Kevin: Yeah. I actually love that answer. Lauren Rhim, I really appreciate what you’re doing and I really also appreciate you joining us on “What I Want To Know.”

Lauren: Thank you. My pleasure. Great to see you, Kevin.

Kevin: Thanks for listening to “What I Want To Know.” Be sure to follow and subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app so you can explore other episodes and dive into our discussions on the future of education.

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For more information on Stride and online education, visit stridelearning.com.

I’m your host, Kevin P. Chavous. Thank you for joining “What I Want To Know.”