Exploring Inclusive Education at CHIME Charter School ~ 702

Tim Villegas: It was an unusually rainy day in Woodland Hills, California, when I stepped onto the campus of CHIME, a kindergarten through eighth grade full inclusion charter school. Dr. Erin Studer, the principal of CHIME, and Amy Hanreddy, a professor at California State University, Northridge, gave me a tour. Our first stop was a third-grade classroom where a diverse group of students were in the middle of literacy centers, or something called Daily Five.

The first thing Dr. Studer highlighted was their focus on universal design for learning.

Erin Studer: That’s where we start. All lessons need to be universally designed. I always tell people that it doesn’t matter how many adults you put in a room—if it’s a bad lesson, then it’s just a bunch of adults teaching a bad lesson, right? So it has to be a good, universally designed lesson with multiple means of engagement, representation, and expression.

Tim Villegas: He then went on to explain how they plan for flexible grouping with the wide variety of instructional levels in the classroom. For those of you who don’t know, Daily Five is not a curriculum but a way to structure language arts in the classroom into five rotations: read to self, work on writing, read to someone, word work, and listen to reading. This is where differentiation comes into play. How can the teachers plan for the success of all students? This is really the backbone of what ensures that inclusive education will work. And Dr. Studer explains:

Erin Studer: We’re not going to read this out and have everybody do the exact same thing. We’ve actually structured it through the co-planning process where everybody’s getting what they need within any one of those stations or centers. Co-teaching and co-planning go together. If you don’t co-plan with your co-teacher, you’re not actually co-teaching. You’re just teaching nearby. You don’t have a plan.

Tim Villegas: Let me repeat that in case you missed it: co-teaching and co-planning go together. If you are not co-planning with your co-teacher, you are just teaching nearby. You don’t have a plan.

I want to emphasize that when people say that inclusion doesn’t work, it has more to do with the symptoms of a broken special education system and how it supports students, rather than the practice of universal design for learning, differentiation, and co-teaching. If you are not implementing these practices, then it is difficult for me to even call it inclusion.

Also, while I’m at it, I want you to think about how preposterous it is that many school districts say they are inclusive because they have inclusion classrooms. Think about it: over there is the inclusion classroom, over there are the special education classrooms, and the other ones are for the general education kids. Special education is a service, not a place.

Ask around in education circles, and you will find that inclusion classrooms often have more than half of their students with individualized education programs. If we were following what Lou Brown talked about in the last episode—natural proportions…

Erin Studer: We’re suspicious of desks in rows. We’re pretty sure that five rows of desks pointed at one smart person don’t actually bring about learning. So we design our rooms that way. And then the design of our room actually pushes the design of our instruction, because we inherently know that they are in a configuration by which they should be working.

Tim Villegas: After a couple more stops on the middle school side of the campus—which was fascinating—we decided to go to a kindergarten classroom where they were having indoor recess. We walked into the class and they were dancing to a Go Noodle video.

One thing I noticed about all the classrooms at CHIME was that not one of them was quiet when I walked in. Not one of them had all of their students doing the same exact thing at the same time. Not one of them had their students sitting in rows, listening to a lecture. This is probably the thing that stood out to me the most. It wasn’t even that in each classroom you could see typically developing students learning side by side with students with autism, Down syndrome, intellectual disabilities, and physical disabilities. If I had a student engagement meter with me as I walked around the campus, it would be measuring off the charts.

Today on the podcast, our guest is Dr. Erin Studer, principal of CHIME Charter School. We discuss how CHIME has made inclusion work since the 1990s and how they can serve as a model for what is possible for schools in the United States and beyond.

Erin Studer: At CHIME, we’re a TK through 8th grade program. So we have four-year-olds to 14-year-olds. That’s who I get to hang out with every day, which is a lot of fun. We have 790 total students on our campus. We have one campus here in the San Fernando Valley. About 160 of those are students with IEPs. Of those 160, around 60 are students with low-incidence disabilities—moderate to severe disabilities that you generally find in about 3% of the population. That number puts us at about double; we have about 7–8% of our kids with low-incidence disabilities.

We’ve had students over the years—and really at any given time—from all 13 disability categories. We have students with autism, orthopedic impairments, emotional and behavioral disabilities, kids who’ve suffered from traumatic brain injury, visual impairment, and so on.

In California, special education responsibility ultimately lies with what we call Special Education Local Planning Areas, or SELPAs. I sit on our SELPA board, so I get to see all the numbers. I had to chuckle to myself last year—we were running numbers on different campuses, and the number of our students with orthopedic impairment is the same as the number of students with orthopedic impairment at our next three closest high schools. These are 3,000 to 4,000 student high schools. You had to add up the kids with orthopedic impairment at the next three large comprehensive high schools to equal the number we have here at our one campus.

We have a density of kids with moderate to severe disabilities. And everybody’s in the model. There’s no RSP class. There’s no pull-out. There’s no special day. Everybody is educated 100% of the time in the general education classroom. And we do it through a collaborative co-teaching model.

Erin Studer: We have a lot of schools who come to us to visit. We do a fair amount of training—or have over the last five or six years—of teachers and school teams that come. I think I’ve evolved to the idea around inclusion that when we want to do inclusion on a large-scale level, whether it’s a school site or maybe a network of schools or a district, it cannot be the mission of special education.

I’ve started to tell this story—you’ve probably heard it a couple of times now, Amy—and it’s my metaphor. I say, when the special education department leads the charge for inclusion, it’s like the ending scene of Braveheart. When Mel Gibson is up on the grassy knoll and he’s giving his speech to his Scottish band of warriors, he implores them to go fight, and they yell and charge down the grassy knoll—and they are slaughtered. Because it did not actually matter how noble their cause was. They don’t have as many people. They’re going to lose this fight.

I think that happens in schools all the time. The special education department is like, “We need inclusion! Freedom!” And there’s just not—there are way more general education teachers than there are special education teachers. So in the building, this needs to be a vision about how we run our school for all kids. We’re not going to do this really sophisticated, intricate, integrated approach to teaching all children for just this 15 percent of kids. We need to do that for 100 percent of the kids in the building.

So it needs to be all our mission. Otherwise, it’s just going to look like a really bad battle scene at the end. We’re not going to get the traction we want. We’re going to get wiped out. And it’ll be that thing that we tried that one year. And then we’ll move on and, I don’t know, adopt a new ELA curriculum instead and use our institutional resources to do that.

Part of the conversation about inclusion needs to expand beyond kids with special needs and look at how this is an excellent model for our English learners. This is an excellent model for our kids from disadvantaged socioeconomic situations. This is an excellent model for kids who are gifted. You can just go down the list of the kids and show how that works.

Having co-teaching approaches, universal design approaches, positive behavior support approaches—that’s great for everybody in the building. I think when we can move the conversation there, the work becomes a lot easier. It doesn’t feel like we’re doing that uphill battle. It doesn’t feel like we’re the little band of entrusted souls to move this inclusion mission forward, but that it’s a vision of the school.

I think moving that conversation is the job of leadership. That special education teacher in the moderate to severe special day class can advocate and can push and can be a part of it. But ultimately, we need wise, compassionate, and future-looking leaders who are willing to pull the big lever and say, “Actually, we run schools this way.”

In the world of inclusion and different kinds of systems that support inclusion, we do a lot of training on co-teaching. So we’re going to this co-teaching training or that co-teaching training. I always make a point of saying co-teaching and co-planning, and I say them together as fast as I can—like they’re one. We’ve hardly even hit the spacebar, right? Because if you’re not co-planning, you’re not actually co-teaching. You’re just teaching nearby. You just happen to be proximal to someone doing other kinds of teaching.

Real, authentic co-teaching that brings about inclusive environments has a plan. You’ve spent time with that co-teaching team or with the staff in the room saying, “Okay, we’re going to work together. Here’s the lesson. Here’s the standard and objective we’re teaching. This is the big idea of what we’re going to do. While I’m doing this, you’re doing that. And then we’re going to make sure this student and this student and this student’s needs are met by making this accommodation or this adaptation.” Then we’re working together as a team, and we plan that out in advance.

Because the thing is, when you go to schools and you look at co-teaching systems—and I have the privilege of going to visit different schools on occasion—and they say, “Hey, we’re doing co-teaching,” if I walk into their classrooms and 100 percent or 90 percent of the classrooms are doing either one-teach-one-support or alternative group—two of our co-teaching models—but they’re only doing those two, I’m pretty sure they’re not co-planning.

The reason is, those are the two co-teaching models where, if I’m the special education teacher and I walk into a room and we haven’t actually planned together, I can walk over to you, the general education teacher, and say, “What are we doing? How can I help?” And the general education teacher says, “Well, just walk around and see if anybody needs anything,” or “Take Jose and Maya and Susie and pull them to the table. They need to work on their multiplication.” And then that passes as co-teaching in dozens and dozens of schools across America—scores of districts.

We call it co-teaching. And even sometimes the special education teacher will get into the fallacy of being like, “And I co-taught today. I went in. I helped kids. Check. I did my co-teaching time. Good for me.” But it’s not. That’s not real. That’s not authentic. That’s not making the best use of the two wise, educated teachers in the room.

Amy Hanreddy: I was just going to add in co-assessment.

Erin Studer: Yeah, yeah. So that kind of finishes the loop. That together, we are looking at student performance and making use of work samples and data and then using that in our planning. But we’re both part of that whole cycle of assessment, planning, instruction.

Amy Hanreddy: Absolutely true.

Erin Studer: I just can’t say all three of them fast enough to make it seem like one thing. Co-teaching, co-planning, co-assessing.

Amy Hanreddy: I say co-instruct.

Erin Studer: Co-instruct. Well, there we go. All in one.

Tim Villegas: We have these two systems, right? We have special ed and we have general education. What do you see as the future of special education and how it fits into education in general? Do you have a vision of where it’s going?

Erin Studer: Wow. Do I have a vision of where it’s going? I have a vision of where I’d love to see it go. I don’t know if that’s where it’s going. It’s a big, big thing. When you talk about special education and even the variety of structures and service delivery that I see—from Los Angeles to Denver to New York to Atlanta—they’re not all the same. Even though we are supposedly playing by the same rules of the same federal law, the ways in which we have all decided, state by state and in some cases city by city, to work this out are not all the same. So it’s hard to get this unified vision.

But I think there are trends and currents and things that are pushing us all in certain ways—hopefully. I think that we need to, on the adult learner level, dramatically close the gap in preparation between general education and special education. For the good of all, all teachers will be better if we have more in common. I’m not saying that there isn’t specialty to be found in subject matter specialists, or in how to approach early literacy, or remediate a reading disability, or support a student with a significant disability. Yes, all true. But we need a lot more in common.

In many preparation programs today, you can go 90—and in some cases 100—percent of your program without taking a course from another department. You can go through elementary ed and not take a special ed class. You can go through your single-subject math program and never know a thing about early literacy, as if that has nothing to do with the challenges that come to your classroom. And that’s just not true.

The math teacher in 10th grade who’s really frustrated that their students struggle to comprehend word problems is intricately linked to the challenges of effective or ineffective early literacy instruction. So I think bringing the preparation a little closer together so we share more will allow us to engage more authentically and deeply in these things like universal design, co-teaching, co-planning, PBIS, etc. That will be helpful. And I think that will move us closer to a vision of special education that is a continuum of service as opposed to a continuum of placements.

In a lot of schools and districts, that is still the model: “Well, they can be in this room or this room or this room,” and we continue to talk about what program they can be in based on their disability. We should really be thinking about what additional services and support we shall bring to them so that they can effectively learn with their typically developing peers.

One of the other things—and this is kind of like, I don’t know if it’s 30,000 feet or it’s soapbox-y—but I think we also need to start to appreciate even more than we already do the ways in which special education reinforces social justice problems in our society, at least the way we do it now.

There are all kinds of overrepresentation of different minority groups in special education that is problematic. It doubles down on notions of segregation, except now we’ve formalized it in a system called special ed. I think that there is inherently an injustice. It’s a major problem if you tell me that a child with an intellectual disability in California will spend 80 percent of their K–12 experience only with other children with disabilities. That’s a problem. That’s an issue that deserves our attention because we are, just on a basic level, not setting that individual up for success in life at all.

The world doesn’t work that way—and shouldn’t work that way. Their right to access their peers, typically developing and otherwise, is being violated by a system that we’ve invented. And I think sometimes that’s the frustration I have. We will say things like, “Well, that’s how it’s set up. That’s how schools work.” And I want to say, “But we run schools. We’re the ones in charge.”

We’ll sit around a group of administrators and go, “Yeah, man, that’s tough. Schools are set up this way.” And I’m like, “But we’re the ones paid to run schools! Maybe we should change that. Maybe we should think about how else we might design this so that these injustices don’t continue to repeat.”

Tim Villegas: If you would like to hear the entire unedited recording of my interview and school tour with Dr. Erin Studer, as well as Amy Hanreddy, consider becoming a Patreon subscriber at patreon.com/inclusivepodcast. Follow the Think Inclusive Podcast on the web at thinkinclusive.us and tell us what you thought of the podcast via Twitter at @inclusive_pod, on Facebook, or Instagram.

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Next time on the Think Inclusive Podcast:

We’ve been told, we’ve been taught, we believe that children with disabilities deserve to do better when, you know, need to be in separate spaces. And that’s a convenient thing to think because those students then are somebody else’s problem.

Thanks for your time and attention. See you next time.

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