CEC: SPECIAL ED TEACHING TODAY IS PAPERWORK FIRST, STUDENTS A DISTANT SECOND
By Mary Hillebrand
October 31, 2000
More than one-third of special ed teachers in the United States and Canada have 20 or more students with disabilities in the classes they teach, according to the Council for Exceptional Children. More than 60 percent of special ed teachers say they only have one to two hours per week to work one-on-one with their students. Special ed teachers have to collaborate with an average of 17 other teachers and service providers to manage their current caseloads.
In "Conditions for Special Education Teaching," a new study released this month, the CEC documents teachers' struggles to find the time and support needed to work with each student. With this evidence, the CEC says, it is hardly surprising the nation faces an extreme shortage of qualified special ed teachers. Noting the special ed field has made great strides in the past decade toward mainstreaming and graduating more students with special needs each year, CEC Executive Director Nancy Safer says the teaching conditions report is alarming. "It was very ironic that, at the time we have made such progress, that we feel that this progress is being threatened and will continue to be threatened because of the number of special education teachers that are leaving the field because they are burned out or who are not coming into the field in the first place because of the teaching conditions that they perceive that are there," she said.
Those two important trends will likely continue unless school districts and states, as well as Congress, change their attitudes about providing teachers the support they need to be effective, the CEC says in its report, which included surveys distributed to 1,600 teachers and administrators and yielded 538 usable responses. "The roles for teachers who work with students with exceptionalities are changing, and little is being done systemically to address these changes," the CEC argues.
The meetings and paperwork that come with teachers' large classes and caseloads appear to be their biggest challenge, because they are the most time-consuming tasks. Most teachers and administrators spend four to eight hours per week on paperwork to keep up with students' individualized education plans, which are required by federal law for all public school students receiving special ed services. However, 30 percent of special ed teachers say they spend at least 12 hours per week on IEP paperwork. This may be due to the complexity of the IEPs, which typically are less than 11 pages but can grow as large as 41 to 50 pages by the time students reach high school, the report says.
Meetings related to IEPs take up another four to eight hours per week for both educators and administrators. Finally, collaborative meetings with other educators for curriculum planning and other tasks take another four to eight hours of work time each week.
Higher caseloads are also taking away individualized teaching time. Eleven percent of special ed teachers say they have more than 31 students in a class, and 39 percent say they have at least 20 students. About 30 percent of elementary and secondary general ed teachers have 20 or more students with special needs in their classes, but only six percent of elementary teachers have more than 30 such students, and no high school teachers have that many. Special ed teachers are getting little help from paraprofessionals, who are also in short supply. Twenty-four percent said they have no paraprofessionals to assist them.
As teachers are forced to allocate time for administrative tasks and divide their time among more students, the quality of instruction suffers, the CEC says. Fifteen percent of special ed teachers -- ostensibly those most qualified to address specific challenges with their students -- say they have no time for one-to-one teaching, while 31 percent have less than an hour per week for such work. More than 30 percent of elementary and secondary classroom teachers spend no time on one-to-one instruction of students with special needs.
General education teachers at both the elementary and secondary levels rated their preservice preparation for teaching students with disabilities the lowest. Teachers at all grade levels in both general ed and special ed said they need better inservice training opportunities to learn about special ed issues. Despite those complaints, all teachers and administrators ranked the need for more pre-service training and more state licensing programs far behind the need to reduce caseloads and paperwork and increase planning and collaboration time, the CEC says. "Yet, if the conditions for teaching students with exceptional learning needs are to improve, these [training] issues must be addressed," the group argues.
One of the most significant conclusions the CEC drew from the survey as a whole is there is a notable gap between teachers' perceptions of various teaching conditions and the perceptions of administrators. Where teachers are rating factors such as paperwork, caseloads and access to materials in the "needs improvement" range, administrators are calling those issues "satisfactory" to "very satisfactory." Perhaps the most poignant example of the two groups' differences is in the area of communication among the staff, which in theory should be bridging the teacher-administrator gap. Even in this area, teachers are far less satisfied than administrators.
The administrators are not ignoring the problem or willfully painting a happy face on a bad situation, CEC Assistant Executive Director for Professional Standards and Practice Richard Mainzer said. "They just don't know" what providing quality special education entails, he said. Just like many people teaching special ed classes today with less training than they need, administrators often lack the skills to create good programs and evaluate current programs.
"More and more we're expecting these people to be the leaders, the evaluators, the supervisors and the cheerleaders of these programs, and they simply don't know what it's about," Mainzer said. "They'd like to, by and large, but they don't know."
CEC's recommendations
Many of the problems special ed and general ed teachers face in meeting the needs of students with disabilities are a matter of organization and attitude at the school district level, the CEC says. In addition to training administrators to run quality special ed programs and support teachers, the CEC wants school districts to establish clear definitions of the special ed teacher's responsibility. The CEC is calling on both school districts and states to make reducing class sizes a greater priority, which must start with administrators understanding better how many students a teacher can work with effectively.
Recognizing the special ed teacher's important role in the educational process can also help relieve the paperwork burden, the CEC says. School districts should assign clerical support staff to handle some paperwork tasks and provide teachers with updated computers and case management software, plus training to use them.
Meanwhile, states must make a systematic and broad-reaching effort to reduce the paperwork required for each student with disabilities and streamline the special ed decision-making process. "As long as we're doing different things district by district by district, teachers are going to be confronted with idiosyncratic forms and idiosyncratic requirements," Mainzer said. For its part, the CEC plans to lobby Congress to further reduce federally mandated paperwork when the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act comes up for reauthorization, Mainzer added.
In addition to overhauling attitudes and processes, the wide variety of changes the CEC urges states and school districts to make will require more money, Mainzer acknowledged. Smaller case loads for special ed teachers and smaller classes, for example, require hiring more teachers. Hiring and holding onto better qualified teachers, by offering better salaries, other financial incentives, more training opportunities and more incentives to get that training, also costs money.
The CEC will continue to push for more federal money for special ed programs, but the states will also have to step up their allocations, he argues. "If we simply substitute local dollars for federal dollars, it's a zero sum game for special ed," he said. "States and districts need to continue and to increase the financial support for special education at their levels also."
Mainzer argues some of the money needed to improve special ed teaching conditions could simply come from revising current spending priorities at the district level. A special ed administrator who has seen the education budgets for more than a few school districts in his time as a CEC leader, Mainzer noted expenses for non-academic programs, such as athletics, are still taking priority over efforts to improve special ed programs. The issue is not about taking money away from other general ed programs, as political opponents of increased special ed money argue, he says.
"Until we're at a point where we're considering turning the lights off in our football stadiums, I'm not worried about taking educational services away from other general ed students to better serve special ed students," Mainzer said. "It's a question of will at the state and district level. The bottom line is we can afford more."8
|
D
