2022 was a darn good year for inclusive education. Here is why.

Read 'em (the research) and weep (tears of joy).

Dec 16, 2022

Selfie of Tim on the last day of the TASH Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, about to sit for the closing general session.

2022 was a darn good year for inclusive education. Here is why.

Listen now (12 min) | For this edition of The Weeklyish, I share the highlights from this year’s TASH conference and why I think 2022 was a darn good year for inclusive education. Transcript + Show Notes: https://weeklyish.substack.com/p/2022-darn-good-year-inclusive-education…

Listen now

2 years ago · Tim Villegas

Hi Friends!

My name is Tim Villegas, and you are reading or listening to my newsletter, The Weeklyish, where every couple of weeks, I break down what is happening in the world of inclusive education or what’s been on my mind regarding inclusion. I like to say The Weeklyish is for inclusionists because if you are a subscriber, then it probably means you know our educational system is broken, and you want to replace it with one that serves and supports each and every learner.

Sorry for such a long absence.

I was preparing for the TASH conference, and it took all of my creative energy. You see, I was producing the pilot episode of Inclusion Stories, our new podcast series about families and school districts who are committed to full and authentic inclusive education.

Do you mean there are fully inclusive public school districts out there in the world? Yep. And I’m so excited to share about the ones we’ve highlighted, but it is going to take some time cause I just want to do it right, ya know?

So yeah. The TASH conference. If you listened to the most recent Think Inclusive episode, where I interviewed members of the Inclusive Education Community of Practice from TASH, you would have heard that TASH is a disability rights organization that has been around since 1975. It is comprised of a diverse group of educators, disabled advocates and activists, family members of people with disabilities, and everyone in between.

I first learned about TASH in my teacher education program at Cal State Fullerton. This was around 2003 or 2004. That’s when I first heard Lou Brown speak, the now-late co-founder of TASH and his story about the boy in the slab class.

In 2019, I had the privilege of interviewing him for the Think Inclusive Podcast about what support for students with significant disabilities looked like before 1975 and the progress we have made since then. My complete interview with Lou was over an hour long. If you are interested, I’ve unlocked it on Patreon and made it available for everyone.

Back to the TASH Conference. My presentation was well received, I think. In the pilot, I tell the story of a Georgia school district that denies a family’s request for their daughter, Natalia, with Down syndrome, to attend her neighborhood public school because they claim they don’t have the right staffing. The family revokes special education services to ensure their child is placed in their neighborhood school. Meanwhile, in Cecil County, Maryland, district officials explain why every learner belongs in general education and how they structure their school system from pre-school through 12 grade to give access to learners with disabilities. At the end of the episode, the family is back discussing special education services with the district, hopeful that their daughter will not have to move schools and stay in her general education classroom.

The episode was about 30 minutes, and I took questions afterward. And got some excellent feedback. In fact, one of the audience members was upset with me at the end because she wanted to know what happened with the family from Georgia! I guess that’s all you can ask for, right? Anyways. We got some more people interested in sponsoring our podcast series. If that sounds interesting to you, let me know, and you can join Communication First, the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, and iSecurePrivacy as sponsors.

But my presentation wasn’t the only thing happening at the TASH conference.

Here are some of the highlights for me.

The Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education (MCIE) held a meetup at the conference, including former colleagues, friends, current partners and potential ones.

MCIE's CEO Carol Quirk speaking with Madeleine Will

Our CEO, Carol Quirk, chatting up Madeleine Will during our meetup.

In case you didn’t know, Madeleine Will, the former assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, called for general and special educators to share responsibility for students with disabilities through something called the “Regular Education Initiative” in the early 1980s. She received TASH's Lifetime Achievement Award.

I also went to some fantastic sessions.

One was an open forum, which was formatted differently than usual sessions and reminded me why I love the TASH conference. It was called Exploring a Neurodiversity Affirming Position and was facilitated by Michael McSheehan. It centered around the values we hold as TASH members. And how we can ensure they are aligned with affirming alternatives to (among other things) ABA and PBIS that autistics, self-advocates, and professionals have expressed. It certainly was a start of a conversation and one I’m very happy to have been a part of.

A quote that Michael shared with us stuck out to me:

“…there is no such thing as a value-free way of working with others. The challenge is to keep ourselves honest and to consider what values we actually use in our work and not just the values we say we use.” - Herb Lovett (1949-1998)

Another standout presentation was by Kristin Burnette of UNC Greensboro, who shared her research investigating a school district’s multi-year experience with facilitating the development of inclusive education practices for students with Significant Cognitive Disabilities. Yet another example of how change can be sustainable through a systems change approach. Take note, school leaders.

There was a presentation that I was sorry I missed, which was an overview of several research studies by the University of Kansas. One of the studies, Ecobehavioral Analysis of Classroom Types for Students with Complex Support Needs by Elissa Lockman Turner Et al., was the most interesting one to me. But listen, all you need to do is read the abstract. Here is a taste:

“We observed 116 students with complex support needs across the United States, and results indicated that contextual features of resource, self-contained, and separate school classrooms do not offer superior levels of instruction or supports for students with complex support needs as compared with general education classrooms. We were more likely to observe no one interacting with the focus student, no instruction, and the presence of distractions in self-contained and separate school classrooms compared with general education classrooms.”

I’m just going to interject here that 2022 was a darn good year for inclusive education. Allow me to explain. Not only did you have the fantastic research that I just mentioned, but you also had a study that, according to Edutopia, “puts the matter beyond dispute.” When researchers tracked nearly 24,000 adolescents who received special education services, they found that spending at least 80 percent of their day in general education classes improved reading scores by 24 points and math scores by 18 points, compared with scores of their peers in segregated settings. Twenty-four thousand learners!

On top of all that, the stellar work going on in the state of Washington with their Inclusionary Practices Project, the Journey to Inclusion that Nebraska is on, the Council of Chief State School Officers and others focus on inclusive principal leadership, and the sheer number of referrals we are getting to work with MCIE is enough to make my inclusion heart very very happy.

One of the things that I hope you take away from listening to or reading this newsletter is that there is hope. Hope that things are actually getting better. And we are getting ever closer to the critical mass that will propel us into a more inclusive educational system for every learner.

Before I let you go, I wanted to share a clip from an impromptu interview with Madeleine Will. I caught up with her after Carol Quirk's presentation about MCIE’s systems change work, and I asked Madeleine if she had any highlights she wanted to share from the TASH conference.

Madeleine Will: Yeah, you need to keep doing podcasts because the pandemic has made things very difficult. But parents are not optimistic right now. And we have to show them that there are solutions. This is a marvelous, marvelous project that you have underway. That already has data. My gosh.
Tim Villegas: Yeah. Well, Carol has been doing this—
Madeleine Will: I know. A lifetime. A lifetime.
Carol Quirk: A long time.
Tim Villegas: A long time.
Madeleine Will: Yes. But to do this in so many schools is so exciting.
Tim Villegas: Would you do me a favor? Could you say your name for the tape:
Madeleine Will: I’m Madeleine Will.
Tim Villegas: Has there been a highlight of TASH so far for you?
Madeleine Will: Yes, for me, it's that I'm going to breakout sessions. And I am hearing very fascinating innovation. The little green shoots, yours is much more developed. It's not a green shoot. It's an initiative that's really substantive. But it's exciting to feel that way about education. We have a lot of work to do to convince Congress, but we need to. IDEA has to be reauthorized. It's out of date.
Carol Quirk: Yes.
Madeleine Will: And the kind of problems that you talked about. They're there throughout the regulations because they've been in place for so long.
Carol Quirk: Is there talk about IDEA reauthorization?
Madeleine Will: We talk about it periodically, but you know, it's on the back burner. Congress has so many—there's so many other priorities right now, but they have to at some point, can't put it off indefinitely, and the Higher Education Act too, and that's where our post-secondary education program is. Yeah. Anyway, it's very exciting to be here. TASH has always made a huge difference.