The Best of Think Inclusive Volume 2 ~ 910

Tim Villegas:
Happy holidays, everyone. I hope you are taking some time to reflect on this year—the good and the not so good—and are making plans, goals, or dreams for a brighter 2022. My name is Tim Villegas, and you are listening to the Think Inclusive podcast presented by MCIE. This podcast exists to build bridges between families, educators, and disability rights advocates to create a shared understanding of inclusive education and what inclusion looks like in the real world. To find out more about who we are and what we do, check us out at thinkinclusive.us or on the socials: Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

Today on this Best of Podcast, we are featuring four interviews—one that you haven’t heard yet, Lou Brown, and three that you might have caught in our feed if you’ve been listening for a while: Katie Novak, Alfie Kohn, and Cheryl Jorgensen. The first is a previously unpublished clip from my 2019 interview with the co-founder of TASH, the late Lou Brown. I always meant to revisit this interview, and I’m so glad I did for this episode. Lou did not want to waste any time. Before the interview, he sent me a detailed outline of what he wanted to talk about, and in a signature Lou Brown move, the outline was in all caps.

Tim Villegas:
How’s the weather in Florida? [laughs]

Lou Brown:
Oh, it’s beautiful. Let’s get going.

Tim Villegas:
We start off by talking about how it can be impossible for educators who believe in inclusive education to find a job that matches our values and our credentials. And we finish with the discussion about whether Lou thought special and general education would ever become one system. Thanks for listening. And like Lou says, let’s get going.

Lou Brown:
When I started, there was no place to go.

Tim Villegas:
Right? Exactly.

Lou Brown:
You got a place here in school—you got it. The people who succeeded got them in school with tax support systems, legal protections, safe environments, and all of that. So now you gotta take it to the next step. Other people have done it, by the way. There are thousands and thousands of kids with significant disabilities in integrated settings. But you gotta do it. You gotta figure out a way to do it.

The other problem that hit me early on when we started training teachers is this: you get a practice teacher with a good cooperating teacher. She gets trained as best you can do in the time you have, and then she gets hired and gets a job teaching. Then you work with her there, and she does these wonderful things for these kids. Then they go up to the next class or the next level—nothing. All the communication devices you developed, the new teacher won’t use. The way you handle behavior problems effectively, she does the opposite.

So this goes to that issue of ultimate functioning. You want people to have quality service every year. You want people in the best possible environments and to get the best possible instruction every year. One person is always important, but you gotta have a team. You gotta have a longitudinal team. You’ve built good horizontal teams—collaborative teams—that’s great, that’s wonderful, that’s necessary. Now you gotta build vertical teams.

Where am I sending them to? We had kids that were fully included in elementary school, but the middle school was segregated. So we came up with what we call elementary-to-middle-school transition plans. We activated the parents to say, no, don’t put a kid in a special class. Don’t settle for it. You’re integrated in the fifth grade; you go to sixth grade, you’re integrated there too. We’ll figure out the curriculum. I understand where you are if you’re there, and unfortunately you’re in the majority. That’s the state of special ed in the country for these kids.

Tim Villegas:
Let’s say you have a student with an intellectual disability who is being included in a second- or third-grade class. Some of the arguments are, well, this student would be learning so much more if they were in a homogeneous setting with students like them, and they could work and learn at their pace.

Lou Brown:
That’s baloney. We know that is untrue. Julie Causton and her group in Syracuse wrote a great paper, “The Promise of the Special Class.” You get all this individualization—learn at your own pace, be with your own kind, and so on. Then you go and see what happens in those classes when we do a due process case. We go see where the school recommends, and what do you see? Dead time, horrible models, isolation.

I think our kids need functional skills we can teach in general ed and other ways. Our kids need social relationships with people without disabilities. You can’t teach that in a segregated class. I want to build relationships at school that can be expressed during non-school days and times. You can’t do that if you’re isolated. I don’t buy the special class argument at all.

And then you still have the same problem: what are you gonna do about generalization? What is it that’s important that you can learn in a special class that you can’t learn in an integrated setting? Tell us specifically. We go see what they’re doing in a special class—we can do that in a general ed class. But we’re not giving up feeding relationships, travel relationships, tutorials, the best models available, and the best teachers in the American public school system in those general education classrooms. We’re not giving up on them.

Tim Villegas:
Yeah.

Lou Brown:
I defy you. That’s what we used to do. We’d go to a class—often they wouldn’t let us videotape—because we’d videotape dead time. Kids doing nothing for minutes and minutes. Limited engagement. You’ve got a teacher and a paraprofessional and six kids. How many get individualized instruction? What are the other kids doing while you’re doing that? What are the role models they’re exposed to? How much dead time—time when nothing good is going on?

I don’t buy that argument. I think the best preparation— and you’re the inclusion guy— is learning how to function in integrated society, how to function well without interfering with the achievement of other people, and outside the presence of people who are paid to be with you. That’s what they need. That’s preparation. The outcome is functioning in integrated society—live, work, and play in integrated society with the least amount of support. The more support you need, the more you’re gonna be kept home.

Tim Villegas:
You said something interesting about learning without interfering with the achievement of others.

Lou Brown:
You want to do your work without interfering with the achievement of others. If you’re a person with a disability and you interfere with the productivity of other workers, you are gone. It’s not a sheltered workshop where you can hit your head and scream and yell all you want. It’s hard—learning to function in integrated society. It’s much more challenging.

Tim Villegas:
So I just want to explore this a little bit more. That is another big reason—or argument—that I hear when we’re promoting inclusive practices: “This student is so disruptive or has self-injury or severe behavior challenges that nobody else can learn. Why are they in this setting?” I know there are supports that need to be in place, but let’s say hypothetically this student is getting all the support we can give them. We have a behavior intervention plan, a functional behavior assessment has been done, and for whatever reason, this student is still not doing well and is interfering with the learning of others. Where do we go from there?

Lou Brown:
At what age are you talking about? It’s extremely rare that if the kid is in elementary school, we can’t solve the problem with the resources we have. Little kids, little problems. Now, you get older, you run into some heavy stuff.

We had a kid who wouldn’t take a shower—wouldn’t get clean. Big, strong, tough guy who smelled terrible. So we got him a job at a dog kennel. Fit right in.

We had a guy who was a flasher in high school. He’d flash. We had all this therapy and psychoanalysis, talking about this and that. We got him a job in a butcher shop. You don’t flash in a butcher shop—it’s cold.

We had a kid who used to punch others walking down the hall. We got him in a truck maintenance garage with big, strong people. They don’t punch him. Not a problem.

You can solve more significant behavior problems with good environment matching than with all the behavior modification in the world. There are too many case histories where kids with significant behavior problems—dangerous problems for themselves and others—were helped by increasing the environments and opportunities for them to function in.

Tim Villegas:
Do you see a trend moving toward general and special ed becoming one system?

Lou Brown:
Yes. Go see Wayne Sailor.

Tim Villegas:
Exactly—SWIFT.

Lou Brown:
Let Wayne do a podcast. There is no special ed—do away with it. Put the kids in, and teachers have to be trained. Training a teacher for special classes is very different from training a teacher to be an inclusion support person. Dramatically different. You have to know an unbelievable number of important things.

So yes, I see clearly more and more people saying, “Let’s do away with special ed as a profession and make education a profession—and expand it.”

Tim Villegas:
How likely do you think it is that it will become one system?

Lou Brown:
I’m 80 years old. When we started this, everybody said, “There will always be institutions.” Wrong. “You can’t serve all of these kids.” Wrong. “They can’t do real work in the real world.” Wrong.

So will special ed and general ed merge? I think pooling resources is happening. People are doing it effectively. I don’t know—maybe, maybe not. We did a lot of things we used to have that we don’t have now—they’ve gone away. But it takes people, resources, effort.

I don’t think I’ll see it at my age, but I never thought I’d see the end of institutions—although I prayed, hoped for them, and worked toward them. I never thought I’d see all kids going to school. I never thought I’d see kids going to general education classrooms. But I saw it. It happened. I’m proud and happy to be a part of it. But it took a hell of a lot of people.

Tim Villegas:
So, Lou, what do you think is the biggest barrier to inclusive practices?

Lou Brown:
Millions of people without disabilities don’t know anything about us. They have no direct experience with us. They weren’t on a bus with us, they didn’t have lunch with us, they didn’t have exposure.

That’s one of the blessings of inclusion—you never know who’s learning something, who’s being changed, and who’s being educated because they’re around us. If we go into integrated settings in natural proportions with good support services, millions of future citizens will know about us. They won’t say, “I don’t want my daughter to go to school with somebody with autism,” or “Don’t invite them over—they have Down syndrome.”

When they become lawyers, physicians, and teachers, they’ll know about us. It’ll be okay.

Tim Villegas:
Next up is my interview with universal design for learning expert, Katie Novak. In this clip, we talk about how ineffective traditional assessments are because they are not universally designed, even though the most recent education law says they should be. Take a listen.

Tim Villegas:
One of the biggest barriers we’re looking at in the United States is standardized assessments and standardized testing, and accountability measures that really tie the hands of educators. Is that something you saw, especially when you were assistant superintendent—educators saying, “I’d really like to do this, it sounds great, but I’m accountable because it’s reflected in my evaluation or my school scores or the scores that are sent to the state. I’m not sure if I can teach this way.” Is that a barrier you’ve come across?

Katie Novak:
I’ve come across it, but I think it’s a barrier that is ripe for being challenged. What we’re doing right now is incredibly ineffective. We have less than 40% of students in this country meeting grade-level standards when you look at national assessments of educational progress. So the traditional way is incredibly ineffective at increasing traditional outcomes—that’s a fact.

The second part is that these assessments should be universally designed. The Every Student Succeeds Act is very clear that state standardized assessments should be universally designed. They’re not there yet, but I’m hopeful we’ll make more changes in the future so what we’re measuring aligns much more to the same resources and supports students would have in college and careers.

And the last piece is, as an educator, the tests in many ways are inaccessible. I won’t argue with that. They’re incredibly inaccessible for some learners. They’re also very focused on literature that aligns to dominant culture. So not only are they inaccessible, they’re culturally not responsive in many ways.

That being said, I have a choice as an educator, as a school, as an administrator: I can choose to continue to teach in a really inaccessible way to prepare students for an inaccessible test, or I can choose to make sure I’m teaching in an incredibly accessible, trauma-informed, engaging, linguistically appropriate, and culturally sustaining way. I can make sure students have all the knowledge and skills they need, and then they’ll take an inaccessible test.

Certainly, I would advocate for much more flexible means of measuring that information. We’re way too far into this universe and technology to not provide opportunities to listen to text, to not provide opportunities for voice-to-text—because everyone will always have that available. So it feels a little bit like a game of “gotcha” and not necessarily what students need to be college and career ready.

So long story short: I do not think we are doing so well on these tests that it gives us any reason to say, “I can’t do something different.”

Tim Villegas:
There’s something I heard you say—I forget if it was in one of your videos—you said, “When we value impact over intentions, all of us have equal opportunity to succeed.” Could you expound on that a little bit?

Katie Novak:
Yeah. In many ways, in education we’re focused more on our input as opposed to our output. Learning is alterable. All students can be successful given the right environment, the right instruction, conditions of nurture. We have to recognize that certainly there are things we cannot alter, but there’s a heck of a lot more that we can.

When we see that outcomes are not great, it’s easy to say, “The kid’s not doing their part,” and say, “Well, I did this, I covered it, I offered extra help sessions.” But if the student is still not learning, then we have to work together to design something differently.

John Dewey wrote an essay called On Teaching in 1910. He said, “To say that you have taught something when no one has learned it is like saying you sold something no one bought.” It’s transactional. You didn’t teach it if students didn’t learn it.

That hurts my heart and soul because people go into this work because it’s emotional work—they love teaching and they love kids. It’s heartbreaking to be doing the best you can with what you have and realize you don’t have the impact you want. But that requires collaboration, unlearning, learning, and being evidence-informed enough to say, “When I do this, does it make a difference?” It’s much more iterative than traditional education was.

Tim Villegas:
Right, and it’s not enough to just say, “Well, you did the best you can.”

Katie Novak:
Moving on to chapter seven.

Tim Villegas:
Right. But believe me, I know you’ve heard those conversations as well. That’s what happens: “Oh well, we’ll get them next time or next year.” [laughs]

Katie Novak:
Yeah. And again, I honestly believe the intention is good. People are breaking their backs trying to do this, but we’re not using strategies that are truly responsive to students because we’re doing things in one way.

Any strategy you use will likely work for some students, and that provides a false narrative that what you’re doing is really effective. If you don’t truly embrace variability and say, “Okay, I’m going to provide direct instruction and then give a quiz,” and some kids do well, you think, “See, they’re paying attention.” But they’re not the same. We have very different cognitive skills, strengths and weaknesses, funds of knowledge, and background knowledge.

It also starts getting into things like mood significantly impacting your ability to learn. Even with the right background knowledge and ability to process auditory information, if I’m in high school and just went through a really bad breakup, my mind is not on your lecture.

That’s why we have to think about barriers as not only academic but also about creating opportunities for students to self-regulate, find balance, and work through emotions. Students will experience trauma. Many will struggle with being really angry or really sad—and for really good reason.

Tim Villegas:
My interview with Alfie Kohn, author of the book Punished by Rewards, was our most listened-to episode of 2021. The clip you’re about to hear is probably one of the reasons why. Alfie lays out his argument for why educators should steer clear from using any extrinsic reward system in their classroom. Here’s the clip.

Tim Villegas:
I feel like I’ve read in a number of parts of your work where you talk about setting up the environment for learning. Isn’t that just antecedent strategies in another way of describing it?

Alfie Kohn:
No, I understand the confusion. Of course, the teacher has a role to play in working with kids—not doing things for or to kids—to create a culture, a climate, a curriculum that will be most effective. But most effective at what? At tapping and nourishing the intrinsic interest within the children. That is the starting point for everybody who’s outgrown behaviorism and that old model that frankly wasn’t even all that accurate in reflecting human experience 80 years ago.

Cognitive science—the science of human motivation—has come way past that antecedent notion. We now understand that there are different kinds of motivation. There is intrinsic motivation, where you get a kick out of something and find it worthwhile, meaningful, joyful in its own right. And there is extrinsic motivation, where something outside the task is guiding you or inducing you to do it—namely, getting a reward or avoiding a punishment.

The research finds not only that those two things are very different—helping another kid because I think that’s a good thing to do is completely different from doing it because somebody’s going to give me a sticker—but also that intrinsic motivation is adversely affected by any extrinsic inducement.

So it’s not just that those two are different. It’s that the whole model that collapses the two and just talks about “motivating kids” overlooks the fact that rewards—including verbal doggy biscuits for jumping through our hoops—actively undermine the intrinsic interest we’re hoping kids will have and take away. We want them to continue doing good stuff even when there’s nobody around to give them a doggy biscuit for it.

This means that, exactly like punishments—even if we call them “consequences”—rewards are not just ineffective for the long term and for the stuff that matters. They’re counterproductive.

Tim Villegas:
So would you say then for educators—and we know a lot of educators who want to build strong relationships with their students, who survey their students about interests and passions, and who desperately want to build up that intrinsic motivation—what I’m hearing you say is that for all the great practices teachers are doing, if they overlay on top of that a behaviorist view, even if it’s just a little bit, even if it’s just a portion of how they approach teaching, it could counteract or have a negative effect on what they’re already doing that is good.

Alfie Kohn:
Yes. I’m afraid that’s exactly right. They don’t do it to be nasty. They don’t do it because they’re stupid. They do it because they’ve been marinated in behaviorism in our educational system, which manifests itself in various ways—not only with garbage like PBIS and ClassDojo and red-yellow-green tags and other ways of treating kids like pets, but also with standardized testing, with scope-and-sequence top-down curriculum that breaks everything down into little bits and then offers reinforcement at each stage.

Most versions of classroom management and all of this lead you to assume that it’s either necessary or helpful. So teachers with the best of intentions are pulled into becoming behaviorists. But the reality is every time you do anything like PBIS, any point system, stickers, gold stars, grades, rubrics, extra privileges, money, any kind of treat offered as an extrinsic inducement makes your job harder in the long run because that much more of kids’ intrinsic motivation has evaporated.

Alfie Kohn:
And because this is distressing to hear if you’ve been socialized as an educator to do this stuff—to say “good job” a lot, to give praise—it’s something we do in a knee-jerk fashion. A little bit of harm is done every time we give that patronizing pat on the head because it’s an extrinsic inducement.

We tell ourselves, “I don’t want to do it forever, so we’ll just give the kid a jump start. We’ll offer an extrinsic inducement at the beginning and then fade it out as the intrinsic interest kicks in.” Unfortunately, the research overwhelmingly demonstrates that this is a fool’s errand. By offering the sticker, the star, the praise, the grade, you’ve set your goal back. Now there’s more damage to overcome.

It becomes harder to restore, revive, resuscitate the intrinsic interest in helping, in reading, in doing whatever. And all of this is even tougher for teachers in the field of special education, where—as the late Herb Lovett once put it—the only two problems with special education in America are that it’s not special and it sure as hell isn’t education.

We find ourselves in a position where we think, “With neurotypical kids, we wouldn’t treat them this way. But with those kids, you’ve gotta treat them like pets.” And of course, the research shows you’re doing more damage. Kids with special needs start out with the same curiosity about the world, the same connection to other people, but now it’s much harder for them because of the sticker, the point systems, the praise—all of that systematically undermines the desire to do the very things we want them to do.

Tim Villegas:
What often gets tied together when we talk about advocacy for people with disabilities is the parallels between the civil rights movement and the disability rights movement. A lot of people in the disability rights movement use that language. We use terms like “segregation,” which is a civil rights term.

Do you see them as the same thing, or do you see them differently? The reason I’m asking is, I’ve always seen it in principle as the same thing—because you have people with disabilities and people of different races being discriminated against simply because of those characteristics.

But, for example, a Mexican American—which I am—or a person with brown skin being discriminated against, and a person with an intellectual disability being discriminated against, are inherently different situations. That person with brown skin, if they’re typically developing, is no different than anyone else in the classroom. But a person with an intellectual disability is inherently different—not less, of course, but different. So what do you think about that comparison between disability rights and civil rights?

Cheryl Jorgensen:
Yes, I think they’re the same. The differences you pointed out—that discrimination against a person with brown skin is a slightly different situation than discrimination against a person with an intellectual disability—is a matter of degree.

I hate to say this, Tim, but if we surveyed everybody in the United States and said, “Among the racial groups, how would you rank them in terms of intelligence?”

Tim Villegas:
Yeah.

Cheryl Jorgensen:
I don’t need to finish that.

Tim Villegas:
No, you don’t.

Cheryl Jorgensen:
It’s become more unpopular to admit that, but you still hear people in urban school districts say about kids of color, “They just can’t learn as much as those white kids.” So I think some of the same prejudices about competence and ability are going on.

There are similarities in terms of prejudice against groups that historically haven’t had much power. White people have controlled people of color, and people without intellectual disabilities have controlled the lives of people with disabilities—including children—and have said, “My professional opinion is that this is what your life should look like.”

So I see them as very similar. We’re still struggling with race in this country after 150 years, and only 60 years since Brown v. Board of Education. So when I say I wish we were further along with inclusive education, I remind myself that the same entrenched societal institutions that perpetuate racism also perpetuate discrimination against children and adults with disabilities.

Tim Villegas:
Yes, I can see that. It’s a false assumption—that given a characteristic, one person is more intelligent than another. I remember in my teacher training learning about IQ scores and how Black people scored lower than white people on IQ tests. That was used for years as “proof” that they weren’t as intelligent. Until we realized those tests were biased.

Cheryl Jorgensen:
I agree. Have you ever read the book The Mismeasure of Man?

Tim Villegas:
I can’t say that I have. Who is it by?

Cheryl Jorgensen:
That’s your assignment. It’s by Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard professor. He goes back to the early development of IQ testing in the late 1800s and early 1900s and shows how those tests, which were supposed to be scientifically based and not culturally biased, were based on assumptions about how different racial groups would perform. People fudged the data to support conclusions they’d already drawn. IQ testing is worthless.

Tim Villegas:
So I have a question for you. I don’t think you know this, but I am a self-contained teacher.

Cheryl Jorgensen:
Oh, I didn’t know that. OK. Nice talking to you, Tim.

Tim Villegas:
[laughs] Yes. I’ve been a self-contained teacher for 10 years. When I started working in schools, my training was so different from what I experienced. The job I got was a self-contained teacher for students with autism. Now I’m in Georgia in the same situation.

But now I’ve kind of come out of the closet, and I can’t shut up about inclusion. People are probably tired of hearing me talk about it—especially at my school. I often have this cognitive dissonance every time I go to work.

So should I quit my job as a self-contained teacher and move to another school or district because of my beliefs in inclusion? Or should I stay and try to influence the system from within? There’s only so much I can control. I can’t control who my principal is or my superintendent, but I can control what goes on in my classroom. What would your advice be? Because I’m not the only one. There are plenty of people who feel the same way.

Cheryl Jorgensen:
I’d need to know more about you and what you feel you need to have done at the end of the day or year to feel like you’ve made the difference you want to make. Some people say, “If I change five little moments in my students’ lives to give them five little slices of joy during their day, then I’ve made enough of a difference.”

Another question: have you tried to develop a core group of allies in your school community so you’re not alone? You’ll never do it alone. Even convincing one person—like the principal—means that person has to convince others. So what kind of effort and resources have you brought to try to systematically get a group of allies? How long can you work on that without throwing in the towel?

Tim Villegas:
I don’t really have an answer for people in my position except: keep going, keep believing, keep talking. That’s part of why I started this website—because I couldn’t find anything out there to support me. I couldn’t find resources or teachers trying to do the same thing. So I hope Think Inclusive and these podcasts help teachers and parents say, “I’m not the only one. I can do this. I can create a professional learning network on Twitter or Facebook. I can have that support. Even if I don’t get where I want to, I have a roadmap.”

Cheryl Jorgensen:
I just want to scream when I hear that you couldn’t find those resources when you were teaching—because they’ve been around since 1985. But those of us putting them out there haven’t done a great job. If you, being assertive and creative, couldn’t find them, what a terrible job we’ve done. That’s a problem.

We haven’t learned how to take these little islands of inclusive excellence and spread them. That’s what the SWIFT project is trying to do. It’s not that we don’t know how to do it—it’s that we don’t know how to spread it on a large scale and sustain it.

Tim Villegas:
That will do it for this episode of the Think Inclusive Podcast. Subscribe to the Think Inclusive Podcast via Apple Podcasts, the Anchor app, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Thanks for your time and attention. Until next time, remember: Inclusion always works.