Dynamic Working Conditions: A Frontline Examination of Special Education Policy Implementation

• In Event: 18.034 - Beyond Interpretation: A Sociocultural Approach to Educational Policy Studies

Abstract

Objectives
Prior studies demonstrate the influence of resources and policy on special educators’ decisions regarding student access to the general education curricula (Bettini, et al, 2016; Billingsley, 2004; Ruppar, et al., 2017). While previous work conceptualizes special educators as working within relatively static conditions, this paper examines the daily variations that impact special education service provision. Usually categorized as disruptions, I argue that incidents including staff absences and scheduling conflicts are more aptly described “dynamic working conditions” due to their paradoxical frequency and unpredictability. The objective of this paper is to examine the relationships between dynamic working conditions, policy contexts, and policy implementation through the experiences of five special educators in an inclusive elementary school.

Theoretical Frameworks
In addition to dynamic working conditions, this research is framed by the concept of street level bureaucracy (Weatherly and Lipsky, 1977), which asserts that professionals tasked with implementing policy within resource constrained environments do so by “routinizing procedures, modifying goals, rationing services, asserting priorities, and limiting or controlling clientele” (p.172). This approach closely aligns with a sociocultural approach to policy analysis, which centers the roles of local actors in negotiating and reshaping educational policies (Levison & Sutton, 2001). Through these frameworks, I examine the factors that comprise the school context as well as the manner by which special educators navigate and manage these factors.

Methods
I employed qualitative methods and analytic tools, namely interviews, observations, and memoing (Charmaz, 2014; LeCompte & Schensul, 2010), to gather and analyze data pertaining to the lived experiences of a group of special education teachers at an inclusive Title I elementary school. Data include interviews with five special educators and field notes from approximately 56 hours of shadowing special educators throughout their school days.

Findings
Analysis indicates that staff absences, scheduling conflicts, and student behaviors functioned as dynamic working conditions with which special educators grappled daily. For example, special educators often taught students in small groups, as staffing constraints and general education schedules rendered individual instruction for each student impossible; as a result, the quality of instruction provided by special educators in a single group depended in part on the behavior of multiple students. In response to these conditions, special educators employed discretion to conduct a form of “educational triage” (Gillborn & Youdell, 2000) in which students whose needs were deemed most urgent received services over those students whose needs were deemed comparatively non-urgent. The resource-austere contexts in which special educators worked thus inhibited fidelity to special education policy, as service provision to students was interrupted and obstructed by dynamic working conditions.

Significance
This examination of working conditions within a specific policy context paints a nuanced portrait of the work of special educators. The manner by which such professionals filter and remake policy illuminates oft-obscured contradictions of special education policy and the consequent barriers to educational access for students with special needs. Further, dynamic working conditions are an alternate framework through which scholars may interrogate policy implementation in the realm of special education and beyond.

Author

• Helen Rose Miesner, University of Wisconsin - Madison