An Oct. 15 webinar hosted by Education Week brought together a panel of experts to answer the question, how can school districts better support English learners with disabilities?
A recent survey by the EdWeek Research Center found that 75 percent of educators say the number of appropriately trained staff in their school systems are insufficient for English learners in special education (22 percent responded that their district didn’t have anyone who fit this category).
Panelists agreed that one significant challenge was getting stakeholders, including policymakers, on the same page about how to classify this student group in the first place.
“I wish more people would have in mind in their work is just how heterogeneous this population of students is. We tend to talk about them as a group, and the challenges they face as a group, but … I think that we’re just starting to come to terms with how diverse this group is, and how we need to parse out their more specific needs as relating to their disability, but also relating to their language background,” said Sara E.N. Kangas, an associate professor in the College of Education at Lehigh University.
One of the difficulties is getting teachers and local educational agency staff to see multilingual students with disabilities as one, rather than two separate students, explained Lizdelia Piñón, an education associate at the Intercultural Development Research Association.
“Their language, their culture, their identity, their disability, all of these are interconnected, but yet, our schools are often separate in how these needs are taken care of in different departments,” she said, noting that even among individualized education program (IEP) teams, the siloed nature of departments makes deeper collaboration difficult.
Silvia DeRuvo, director of Multilingual Learners with Disabilities Services at the WestEd Center for Education Systems, said that while administrators and teachers often express support for planning instruction together, scheduling presents a significant barrier.
“Ideally, you could plan to co-teach, where you might even daily have a common planning time, because the instruction, when it’s siloed, is fragmented,” DeRuvo said. “And that’s why I’m so passionate about planning this instruction together so that no matter where the student might sit today receiving an instruction, it’s aligned to each other where that same specially designed instruction IEP goal is being worked on along with the language goal at the same time as we’re allowing them access to the general education curriculum.”
Kangas agreed that scheduling is one of the biggest barriers, both for students in terms of the services they receive and for teachers in terms of their time together. A lack of data that can help drive decision-making also plays a role in lower rates of cross-department collaboration.
“It is becoming increasingly hard to have that collaborative time together, given all the things that are on teachers’ plates. I [also] think that we need our teachers to have access to the data that they need,” Kangas said. “So many teachers that I work with, they don’t have access to the data that maybe their colleague has access to. So, they’re supposed to be guiding instruction for a [multilingual learner] with a disability, but they don’t have proficiency information about their skills in English, or if it’s an [English as a Second Language] teacher, they may not have a lot of information about their disability. So, I think even the way districts have their data management systems set up and how that is shared across departments is really key for our teachers being able to have access to the same information so that they can have asynchronous and synchronous collaborations.”
Stronger collaboration among staff who have all the information they need to make decisions that will meaningfully support student outcomes will lead to better crafted IEPs that capture the spectrum of challenges a student faces, she continued.
“There’s still a lot of debates about IEPs and to what extent they should account for language,” Kangas said. “A lot of scholars who do work in this area would argue they should account for language learning, and they should be more robust and not just a checkbox that this is a multilingual child. So, I think if reading the document, you would have no sense that it’s a bilingual child, then we kind of need to make some adjustments in those documents.”
