More Than a Least Restrictive Environment: Living Up to the Civil Covenant in Building Inclusive Schools

This article describes and analyzes data from the first annual Inclusion Institute (AAII) held during the 2006-2007 academic year at Arcadia University, and raises questions about the essential processes needed to create inclusive schools. In particular, our analysis focuses on the need to redirect our attention from the individual needs of particular students and toward the social and civil rights of all students, including those with disabilities. The innovative, team-based professional development model used in this project asks school-based teams of teachers, administrators and parents to create action plans, meet regularly, implement changes, and reflect on their practices to create inclusionary learning environments for all children. The authors have found that a limited definition of who gets included in the meaning of “all” students as well as an exclusive emphasis on legal mandates and the learning needs of particular students have obscured the need to think holistically and systematically about the ways that schools may need to fundamentally change in order to live up to the civil covenant of the United States. It has been a challenge, but I’ve been pretty successful at demonstrating to teachers that these children are quite capable if given a different format to display their talents. I believe this is because of experiences with my own son who found the physical act of writing extremely difficult. Writing a biographical report on William Penn seemed like a task he would never conquer. After consulting with his very understanding teacher, he had a rubric for essential elements that needed to be related. He also had the “green light” to present his biography in any format with which he was comfortable. He has always been a fan of Elvis Presley songs, so on “Biography Day”, he dressed like Penn and took an electric guitar to school. His report was sung to the tune of “Blue Suede Shoes” and was entitled “Don’t Step on my Religious Views. ” He earned an “A” for that report which was a big hit with the teacher and the students. Since then, his teacher has changed the format of the project and the students can demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways. Some have written and performed plays; others have done videos and Power Points or have built dioramas. One even made a comic book about the life of a former president. That teacher admits that some of the most creative projects have come from children with suspected or diagnosed learning differences. These projects have exceeded her expectations for her students (teacher journal, March). In this vignette, a teacher gives a compelling example of the possibilities for inclusion when students within the same classroom context are able to highlight their talents utilizing multimodal pathways toward common goals. Although the vignette begins by focusing on an individual child, the most compelling part of this story for our purposes has to do with how it altered the assignment possibilities for many other students – those with and without disabilities. In this article, we would like to draw the reader’s attention away from a primary focus on particular children and their individual experiences of inclusive practices. We would instead like to emphasize the ways that an attention to alternative learning modalities creates an enhanced learning environment for all students. It is clear from this account that it is not just a story of individual student success, it is also a story of an improved assignment, new opportunities for individual and collaborative learning, and enhanced meaningful participation by a greater number of classroom participants. In this article, we emphasize the ways that these benefits to the community of learners are not just side benefits of meeting the needs of an individual student with disabilities, but a critical and often missed opportunity for living up to the spirit and not just the letter of the law. Although this article focuses on students with disabilities and not immigrant newcomers, the questions it raises about how we create classroom environments that work for diverse students has implications for immigrant students as well. In fact, much of the literature on social rights utilized in this article focuses on immigrant newcomers and how to meet their social rights in educational contexts. As we have written previously (Skilton-Sylvester & Slesaransky-Poe, 2002), the legal mandates that govern special education services have significantly more “teeth” than those that have shaped educational programs for English Language Learners. Even so, for both special education as well as immigrant education in the United States, the legal system is often what drives changes in policy and practice from the top-down. In this way, in an issue that focuses on immigrant education, it is relevant to investigate how and if local schools and districts respond to legal mandates as PERSPECTIVES ON URBAN EDUCATION SPRING 2009 | PAGE 33 catalysts for meaningful change (Skilton-Sylvester, 2003). LIVING UP TO THE CIVIL COVENANT: SOCIAL RIGHTS AND A RELATIONAL VIEW OF DIFFERENCE In the spring of 2006, we heard John Hockenberry speak at an Inclusion Conference at Syracuse University (Hockenberry, 2006). In his keynote address, he told hilariously painful stories of trying to use public transportation in New York City in a wheelchair. He also used the notion of a civil covenant to talk about the work that still needs to be done to fully embrace members of our society who have disabilities. This notion of a “civil covenant” moves beyond the notion of an individual person’s civil rights (what Castles and Davidson (2000) describe as “freedom from discrimination”) in that it implies a mutually enhancing relationship among members of society. This civil covenant requires not only attention to civil rights but also to social rights that guarantee citizens the capacity to participate fully in society. What Hockenberry is advocating is strongly linked to Abu El-Haj’s (2006) description of a relational perspective on difference. As she says, Thinking about difference from a relational standpoint not only demands that teachers unmask assumptive frameworks that exclude some individuals or groups; it also requires that the community make substantive inclusion of all its members a primary value, whatever that takes in terms of reconfiguring practice. (pp. 190-191) This “reconfiguring of practice” is what we are most interested in understanding, particularly in relation to the legal concept of the “Least Restrictive Environment. ” Legal mandates, however, focus on the rights of the few without addressing normative assumptions in schools and classroom in a way that might alter the structure for all students rather than those “covered” by the lawsuit. The resulting outcomes are often the minimum amount that needs to be done without regard for the historical and current contexts in which education is taking place. The emphasis on students being placed in the Least Restrictive Environment, by definition, makes the student’s placement seem like the most important aspect of inclusion when it is, in fact, the minimum. In spite of these limitations, legal intervention in school policies and practices can also open the door for the possibility of reconfiguring practice. At this point, it is unclear whether or not new legal mandates concerning the Least Restrictive Environment will create lasting opportunities for reconfiguring practice or merely new room assignments and similarly segregating practices. Like Artiles, Harris-Murri and Rostenberg (2006), we have also been struck by the tensions in special education between addressing individual educational needs and rights and creating a collective school vision for how all students can fully participate. We also agree with Varenne and McDermott (1998) that a focus solely on individuals will not lead to better policies and practices in schools. As they say: Individuals must be the units of concern and justice, but they are misleading units of analysis and reform. The greater our concern with individuals, the greater must be our efforts to document carefully the social conditions in which they must always express themselves. We must look away from individuals to preserve them. (p. 145) In the analysis that follows, we have attempted to frame the experiences of individual teachers, parents and students within very specific micro and macro social conditions in ways that allow us to look beyond the individual. PARTICIPANTS, CONTEXT, METHODS In the summer of 2006, 20 teams of principals, general education and special education teachers, school counselors, and parents came to our campus to learn about inclusion, develop a vision for what inclusion should look like in their schools, and create year-long action plans to implement that vision. The state’s funding of our year-long Inclusion Institute and the enthusiastic response from school teams to participate are framed by the guidelines of IDEA and the recent court-mandated Gaskin Settlement Agreement (2005). In this settlement between multiple families of children with disabilities and the Pennsylvania Department of Education, the state agreed to prioritize placing all students identified with disabilities in the “least restrictive environment,” reinforcing the understanding that special education ought to be a service not a place. The current reality in the state of Pennsylvania is that schools are being monitored based on the percentage of time students with disabilities are spending with their general education peers. If schools report that students with IEPs spend significant time outside of the general education classroom, they are mandated to take corrective action with the support and supervision of the state. There are many involved in the process who see this as a pivotal and potentially transformative moment in the history of educational inclusion in K-12 education in the s