Improvement and Leadership

Eliminating Ableism in Education
- Definition- Laura Rauscher and Mary McClintock (1996) define ableism as “a pervasive system of discrimination and exclusion that oppresses people who have mental, emotional, and physical disabilities.
- The Education of Students with Learning Disabilities- Students with learning disabilities drop out of school at relatively high rates — about twice that of non-disabled students (Wagner et al., 1993). These students also participate in higher education in relatively small numbers. NLTS also documents that relatively large numbers of these students are not taking challenging academic subjects.
- Toward Ending Ableism in Education- Include disability as part of schools’ overall diversity efforts. Encourage disabled students to develop and use skills and modes of expression that are most effective and efficient for them. Special education should be specialized. Move away from the current obsession with placement toward an obsession with results. Promote high standards, not high stakes. Employ concepts of universal design to schooling.

Inclusive school reform: Distributed leadership across the change process
- Two Frameworks for Understanding Inclusive Reform- Distributed framework (a) providing and selling a vision (b) providing encouragement and recognition (c)obtaining resources, (d) adapting standards € monitoring the improvement effort (f) handling disturbances
- Three phases of the change process- (a) initiation and adoption (b) implementation or initial experiences of trying to put reform into practice (c) institutionalization.
- Decision and Implications- Across the majority of studies, the initiation of inclusion usually came from outside of the school, emphasizing the importance of state and district leadership in developing incentives and supports for inclusive reform.

What is high-quality instruction and support in high need and culturally diverse schools?
- Historical Perspectives on Research and Practice- Institutional practices that create the institutional layers in which people live, think, learn, and act. Schools are full of cultural assumptions that add up to institutional rules, expectations, assumptions about competence, learning, curricula, assessment, instruction, and so forth. Examples of attention to this cultural dimension include research on curriculum tracking, the canonical classroom discourse, and low-income and female students' performance in assessment tasks that trigger stereotype threats.
- Teachers and How They Teach- (1) scaffolding opportunities to master content; (2) teacher kindness; and (3) teacher accessibility.
- Safety, Security, and Belonging- It Matters The social context of schooling must offer three core social spaces. The first is psychological safety, wherein identity exploration, markers of cultural histories and experiences, sexual and gender affiliation, ability, and linguistic and religious differences are accepted, and aspirational goals are valued. Second, schools must offer personal and material security so that students are able to foreground learning rather than having incessant and persistent concerns about violence, theft, and harassment. Third, schools need social spaces that offer the opportunity to belong within the school community.

Ableism can be observed in general and special education settings. Those who have contact with students can promote ableism when the student needs to meet higher expectations. Applied to school and child development, ableist preferences become particularly apparent. From an ableist perspective, the devaluation of disability results in societal attitudes that uncritically assert that it is better for a child to walk than roll, speak than sign, read print than read Braille, spell independently than use a spell-check, and hang out with nondisabled kids as opposed to other disabled kids, etc. In short, in the eyes of many educators and society, it is preferable for disabled students to do things in the same manner as non-disabled kids. When helping eliminate ableism inclusive practices can help obtain higher expectations with eliminating ableism. There are many different reasons in which teachers and school personnel are resistant to inclusion and it is the responsibility of the administrator to help educate staff and to promote inclusion in the classroom. Culture can be a barrier that hinders inclusion. High dropout rates, school-to-prison pipelines, serious substance abuse, violence, and high rates of teenage pregnancy are some of the by-products of inadequate investments in basic social, economic, health, and political systems. In spite of these social and political barriers, some students and families are able to flourish, realize their educational aspirations, and create caring communities for their children.

Hehir, T. (2002). Eliminating ableism in education (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.. Harvard Educational Review, 72(1), 1-32.
Billingsley, B. (2012). Inclusive school reform: Distributed leadership across the change process. In J. B. Crockett, B. S. Billingsley, & M. L. Boscardin (Eds.), Handbook of leadership and administration for special education. New York, NY: Routledge.
Kozleski, E. B., Artiles, A. J., & Skrtic, T. M. (2014). What are high quality instruction and support in high need and culturally diverse schools? In J. McLeskey, N. L. Waldron, F. Spooner, & B. Algozzine (Eds.), Handbook of effective inclusive schools. New York, NY: Routledge.