Caught in the Middle: The Challenges and Opportunities of Inclusive Education in Middle School Contexts

• In Event: What Does a District’s Commitment to “Inclusive Practices” Mean and How Does It Affect School Practices?

Abstract

A comparative case study approach (Stake, 1995; Tellis, 1997; Yin, 2009) was used to examine how a policy designed to include students with disabilities in general education classrooms is being implemented in one middle school that has made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) goals for students with disabilities for the past three years and in a second school that has not met AYP goals for two consecutive years. The two schools were selected based on recommendations from the district’s Director of Special Education, and four types of data were collected, following IRB approved protocols, including: (a) publicly available documents related to each school’s context; (b) data derived from semi-structured interviews with administrators, teachers, and students; (c) data derived from field notes taken by the research team in classroom observations; and (d) demographic and state assessment data provided by the district, as described in an earlier paper. After receiving permission from the district’s Director of Special Education, the school principals at both sites were contacted, and a series of semi-structured individual and focus group interviews were conducted. Interview transcripts were analyzed using Atlas.ti 5.0 software. Initially, free codes were developed, and an axial coding structure was developed to establish similar and contrasting themes that emerged from the data. Using the method of constant-comparison (Corbin & Strauss, 2008), larger themes emerged from later analyses, which became the basis for future theoretical sampling and selection of specific classrooms at each individual school site for the in-class observations.
Several themes emerged during the analyses. In school one, researchers noted that leadership was committed to inclusive practices, and while disability-first language was also prevalent at this school, there were more instances of person-first language than in school two. According to the teachers interviewed, there were many opportunities for intentional professional development about co-teaching “best practices” that they felt were both informative and useful. In school two, leadership argues class size and teacher disposition are determinates of student learning for those with disabilities. Participating teachers cited a lack of intentional professional development targeted toward new staff as a potential barrier to schoolwide commitment to inclusion. In both schools, teacher dispositions and chemistry between co-teachers were factors in teacher perceptions of the effectiveness of their combined practice.
A comparison of the mean state assessment data for school one (n = 293) and the mean of school two (n = 302) evidences differences in achievement. Achievement was determined by a composite of reading and math state tests. To determine whether these differences were statistically significant, the research team conducted an analysis of the data using a two-level hierarchical linear model. Specifically, the research team compared the achievement of students with high frequency disabilities, low frequency disabilities, no disabilities, and gifted students in both schools, controlling for gender, language proficiency, and socioeconomic status. Results indicate that there were differences in gain scores across groups (all ps < .05). Implications regarding leaders’ communication of priorities and personnel development needs are discussed.

Authors

• Joshua Hazen Barton, University of South Florida

• Jeannie Kleinhammer-Tramill, University of South Florida