Future directions for practice and research

Our findings suggest several future directions for special education practice. Overall, school leaders and teachers must recognize the ways in which their organizational structures and

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routines influence teacher practice and the support students receive. First, practitioners should take care to examine their inclusive practices to ensure that they offer equitable access to learning opportunities as well as equitable benefit from those learning opportunities. We suggest that Willow and Elm’s routines for inclusion may have bolstered the appearance of equity by helping students with disabilities to earn passing grades. However, particularly in the case of Willow, this was done without providing equitable access to learning opportunities. Students with disabilities require specialized instruction to help them access grade level content, but these routines allowed students to earn passing grades even if they did not have specialized instruction. Equitable outcomes for students with disabilities are only meaningful if they are achieved by way of equitable access to learning opportunities. These implications for equity may not necessarily apply to students with low incidence disabilities, who are included at a lower rate (Kurth et al., 2014). While students with low incidence disabilities may not have the same access to general education content, they may still be receiving specialized instruction that was largely absent in Willow and Elm’s inclusion programs.

Second, school structures and routines should align to established best practices that allow special educators to help improve instruction inside general education classrooms as well as to collaborate around instruction with general educators (Mcleskey et al., 2014a; McLeskey et al., 2014b). Specifically, formal school structures should afford special educators the opportunity to help improve instruction inside general classrooms, whether indirectly through consultation or more directly through their co-teaching. This requires that teachers have both designated time for collaboration as well as a manageable caseload of students and teachers to support. While other researchers have underscored these requirements for successful inclusion, especially in high

schools (e.g. Dieker, 2001; Scruggs et al., 2007; Wasburn-Moses, 2005), we urge special education professionals to also look at the importance of collaborative routines.

Organizational routines can support stability but can also introduce change (Feldman & Pentland, 2003). Intentionally designed routines have been found to successfully introduce and sustain change in teacher practice (Sherer & Spillane, 2011; Spillane et al., 2011). School and district leaders should leverage general and special educators as designers of new organizational routines for inclusion, as they are most aware of the unique constraints they face. Collaboration between special and general educators around issues of teaching and learning should be at the forefront of these routines and new routines must be supported by school structures, which allocate critical resources. Without careful design of such structures and routines, our case study cautions that educators can fall into the trap of achieving symbolic inclusion success by emphasizing passing grades without focusing on equitable learning.

While we sought to generate a mid-level theory of inclusion, our study offers implications for future research more broadly. Our conceptual framework for bridging institutional influences, organizational structures, and practice may be a productive lens for examining policy implementation. Research has attended to institutional influences (Burch, 2007; Coburn, 2004; Ogawa, 1994) or the link between organizational structures and teacher practice (Coburn & Russell, 2008; Spillane et al., 2011; Diamond & Spillane, 2004), but our mid-level theory provides a means for linking these lines of research. Additionally, this study offers a unique approach for identifying emergent organizational routines using multiple data sources including interviews, observations, and network data. This approach could benefit future research seeking to understand how collaborative practice unfolds within organizations.

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In an era of strong institutional pressure for inclusion, it is important we consider how schools are organizing to support students with disabilities. While often overlooked, school organizational structures and the informal routines that govern teacher practice have critical implications for equity and inclusion.

Notes:

1. While special education advocates may interpret what constitutes a student’s LRE differently, federal law requires that schools report and are monitored on the percentage of time that students with disabilities are educated in general education settings.

2. This is true for students with more commonly occurring disabilities (i.e. “high incidence disabilities” such as learning disabilities and speech and language disorders), while the inclusion of students with less commonly occurring disabilities (i.e. “low incidence disabilities” such as deaf-blindness) lags behind (Kurth, Morningstar, & Kozleski, 2014). 3. This demographic data is from the 2009 – 2010 school year, which was the first year of

data collection for this investigation.

4. Four special educators from Willow were not included in this sample as their roles were administrative and not instructional (e.g. Transition Coordinator) or did not involve supporting the inclusion of students with disabilities (e.g. self-contained or “Life Skills” teachers). All special educators from Elm were included as their roles involved instructional duties and supporting the inclusion of students with disabilities.

5. We chose to use incoming, daily ties to define each special educator’s ego network of close colleagues. Using incoming ties (i.e. survey responses generated when educators noted interacting with the special educators) highlights the perspective of other educators, many of whom were not directly interviewed or observed, and so adds validity to our claim. We chose to focus on those who reported interacting with the special education teacher(s) daily in order to strengthen our claim that these routines structure the day-to- day interaction of teachers.