Accountability: The New Inequality
By SHONNA CARTER


Lucy, a special education teacher in a Lower East Side high school, understands firsthand the advantages and disadvantages of small schools when it comes to providing everything a special education student needs.

On the one hand, she points to Christian, a noticeably self-conscious and articulate 10 th grader, who is so motivated he often stays after class to seek out extra help. “I know sometimes I just need a little extra attention with my work,” said Christian, a special education sophomore at Lower Manhattan Art Academy. The school is one of the six public schools replacing the behemoth Seward Park High.

Lucy teaches him in a collaborative classroom setting, where kids with special needs are mixed in with general education students, and teachers trained for both populations share the curriculum. “Christian is one of those extremely bright and motivated kids who thrive in collaborative educational environments,” she said. “This type of setting works well because he is able to work alongside his peers, and get the type of instruction that keeps him from falling behind.”

Educators believe collaborative classrooms like this work well for special education students because they allow children to mix socially without stigmas attached. And team teaching ensures kids receive the learning support necessary to succeed.

On the other hand, Lucy is also responsible for teaching a teenager with severe emotional problems. The collaborative classroom is too much for him. He bursts out in class, disrupting lessons for the other students as well as for him. His diagnosis entitles him to a self-contained classroom with only other special education classmates and a smaller teacher per student ratio. It’s the kind of educational setting this small high school does not provide.

When he was in middle school, he attended such a class. But his mother noticed that the high schools with self-contained classes only seemed to be in the worst schools. She didn’t want him to be transferred away from Lower Manhattan Academy, so she refused to sign his Individual Education Progress form; the document that entitled him to a self-contained classroom environment.

Lucy understands why. It’s often the case that schools that provide the most comprehensive services are not considered the best schools she said. Adding that is because the big high-schools tend to provide the most services because they have more people and more resources. However, that also means that more of those students end up there and that has consequences for the school’s performance.

Lucy is in her first year of teaching and is one of two special education teachers at the Lower Manhattan School. She is still trying to figure out how to provide her students with the best services in a system that is increasingly fueled by student test scores. Plus, the rush to take apart large failing high schools and create smaller schools in their stead has ignored the complicated needs of students in special education. Small schools are exempt from accepting special-needs kids in their first two years of opening, and special education teachers bear the brunt of the consequences that result from measuring classroom success with test scores.

Collaborative classrooms are one progressive and relatively inexpensive solution for small schools. But they only work well for students like Christian, who are able to adapt in general education classrooms. Some kids with emotional disturbances need more. They need smaller class sizes and intervention from more adults. They need what small schools are not equipped to provide.

It is clear that special education kids are not much more than an asterisk on the planning board of New York City school officials, so far. Their needs should be placed front and center as the massive school reforms continue. Educational success should not be measured by the performance of the best students, but by the growth of the students having the most trouble.