The Slow Progress of Inclusive Education in the US with Cheryl Jorgensen ~ 303

Tim Villegas
I’m recording from my living room in beautiful Marietta, Georgia. You’re listening to the Think Inclusive podcast, Episode 10, brought to you by Brooks Publishing Company. I’m your host, Tim Villegas. Today, I’ll be speaking with Dr. Cheryl Jorgensen, one of the premier experts on inclusive education with over 30 years in the field.

I had the pleasure of visiting with her one evening in January. Cheryl and I discuss why it has taken so long for inclusive education to catch on in the United States and what needs to happen to break the barrier for it to become part of best practices in education. She even gives me advice on whether I need to quit my job or not—you won’t want to miss her surprising answer.

So without further ado, let’s get to the Think Inclusive podcast. Thanks for listening.

I would like to welcome to the Think Inclusive podcast Dr. Cheryl M. Jorgensen. She was a faculty researcher at the University of New Hampshire’s Institute on Disability, focusing on inclusive education for students with autism, intellectual, and other developmental disabilities from 1985 until the spring of 2011. She is now in semi-retirement and able to focus on the work she is most passionate about: student-specific consultation, team professional development, school-wide systems change, policy advocacy, and writing. She particularly enjoys working with students with Down syndrome and their educational teams. She is the author of many books and articles—almost too many to count. Looking at your CV, I am very honored and pleased to have Dr. Jorgensen here with us. Thank you for joining us today.

Cheryl Jorgensen
Oh, you’re very welcome. I’m happy to do it.

Tim Villegas
Let’s go ahead and get right in. You’ve been doing this work for many years—almost 30 years, actually. There’s been a lot of progress made in public schools regarding inclusive education. But as you’ve noted before in other interviews and writings, it’s kind of piecemeal across the country. There isn’t really a systematic change happening in the United States. Do you think we should be further along, 30 years out, in providing inclusive schools for all children? Or is this kind of what we’ve always expected?

Cheryl Jorgensen
Absolutely, yes. I think we should be further along. But I can understand why we’re not. I’ve been thinking about this question, Tim, to really hone in on why I think the progress has been as slow as it is. I can share some of those ideas with you, and I think when you hear them, they’ll also provide an answer to what we could do to make progress more quickly and effectively.

The primary reason we’re not further along with inclusive education—since it started in the U.S. in the early 1980s—is because we still have two separate systems of education: general education for general ed students, and a whole separate system of special education. Along with those two systems have evolved different curricula, teacher skills and certification standards, assessments, and instructional methods. All of these differences perpetuate the notion that students with disabilities—particularly those with more intensive support needs—need something different and can’t benefit from the general education curriculum.

Part of the special education system that’s evolved over the past 40 years is the principle of the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE). Some people think LRE means inclusion, but it really doesn’t. The federal special education law says students with disabilities should be in the least restrictive environment in which they can meet the goals of their IEP. But the decision of what that environment is for each child is left up to the IEP team. There are vast differences from state to state, even within a state, from school to school, and sometimes even within the same district.

The LRE principle, although based on the idea of individualized education, continues to justify segregated education for some students. For example, in Hawaii, about 3.9% of students with intellectual disabilities spend 80% or more of their day in a regular class, compared to Iowa, where 60% do. Are those kids in Hawaii that different from the kids in Iowa? No. That discrepancy calls into question whether LRE is a real, scientifically consistent principle.

Tim Villegas
That’s an interesting point. I’ve spoken with others about LRE and whether we need something different in federal law to realize full, authentic inclusion. From what I’m hearing, LRE is actually holding us back as a country because there isn’t a strict standard on how we define it. Even in my own district, there’s a wide interpretation of what LRE is. If we had something more specific, that would help.

Cheryl Jorgensen
Exactly. And there’s no incentive for states to improve their placement of kids in general education, nor is there a disincentive from the federal government. Each state sets its own statistical goal. Hawaii could say, “Next year, our goal is 4%,” and as long as they meet that, the federal government doesn’t intervene. There’s no national policy that translates into everyday educational policy to move states along. If you look at historical data, it could take 100 years for most students to spend most of their time in general ed.

I understand parents who feel like their influence over placement is one of the only sources of power they have. If their child is getting a substandard education, they may feel the only thing they can do is say, “I want my child out of district.” It’s a dilemma. I wish I had a great alternative for LRE, but I just know it’s a real barrier.

Tim Villegas
Now, I wonder—do you think that school districts are actually not benefiting from this concept of LRE? Because when you go to the meeting, what the school district is concerned about, in my opinion, is not getting sued—not going to due process. This happens in districts all over the country. I hear it all the time, anecdotally of course. But it’s the parents who really advocate for their child to be included in general ed or for a specific related service—those parents are the squeaky wheels. They’re the ones who are getting what they feel like they need for their children. Whereas the parents who either don’t know how to advocate for their child or are indifferent, or for whatever reason, don’t. And so there seems to be a lot of hypocrisy or double standards within every district. Why is one student getting this service or being included, and another is not? That, I believe, creates tons of mistrust. No wonder why parents are so defensive when they come to meetings.

Cheryl Jorgensen
Yeah, there’s a lot we can unpack from what you just said. I go into meetings where I’m consulting with schools—whether the schools asked me or the parents did—and I go in trying to presume everyone’s positive intentions. That’s just my role. I’m not a lawyer. I’m not the person there to hold their feet to the fire on regulations. I’m advocating for the child and for best practices.

But I absolutely agree that there’s such inequity in the quality of education that kids are getting, even within one school building. When it comes down to it, it’s often the parents’ knowledge, advocacy, or the resources they bring to the table that make the difference. I was in a meeting the other day. A family wanted their third grader who has autism to be in general education. I had done a consultation and given them 30 pages of suggestions for how to do it. I went to the meeting with the mom, and there were 14 professionals around the table—and the mom. She was highly educated and does advocacy work herself, and yet she couldn’t—or didn’t know how to—argue against those 14 professionals in the room.

Tim Villegas
Yes. I wanted to talk a little bit about incentives to change. It seems to me that the only thing school districts are concerned about—well, most anyway—are budgets. Not only budgets, but money coming from Race to the Top, which is tied to Common Core implementation and test scores. That seems to be the major conversation. If you open up Education Week, we’re not talking about inclusion—we’re talking about test scores.

Cheryl Jorgensen
And standards. And the assessments that go with those, right? Again, I think this points to a lack of knowledge about what helps students with disabilities achieve. There’s a history of belief—and some early research—that said the only way children with disabilities can achieve high standards is if they’re taught in a separate setting with a separate curriculum and specially trained teachers.

But in the last 20 years, we really do have evidence that students with disabilities—even those with the most complex needs—can learn and achieve at higher levels within general education. But that knowledge doesn’t seem to have enough power to cause people to change. It’s more complex than just giving people knowledge. That’s what I spend a lot of my time doing, and nobody changes just for that reason.

It takes a shift in attitude. It takes a principal who is a vibrant, persuasive, and firm instructional leader who says, “This is the way we’re going to go.” It takes lots of professional development and relearning. And it takes knowledge at the local school level about how to take general ed resources—people, money, equipment—and special ed resources, and put them all in the general ed classroom to benefit all students. It’s more than just a budget issue or a concern about standards and assessments. It’s deeply rooted historical beliefs and practices that are very stubborn and difficult to unseat.

Tim Villegas
That brings up a question I hadn’t previewed with you. What often gets tied together when we talk about advocacy for people with disabilities is the parallel between the civil rights movement and the disability rights movement. A lot of people I know in the disability rights movement use that kind of language. We use the term “segregation,” which is a civil rights term.

Do you see them as the same thing or differently? The reason I’m asking is that I’ve always seen them, in principle, as the same—people with disabilities and people of different races being discriminated against simply because of those characteristics. But a person with brown skin, if they’re typically developing, is no different than anyone else in the classroom. A person with an intellectual disability is inherently different—not less, of course, but different. What do you think about that comparison between disability rights and civil rights?

Cheryl Jorgensen
I think they’re the same. The differences you pointed out are valid, but the discrimination is a matter of degree. I hate to say this, but if we surveyed everyone in the U.S. and asked them to rank racial groups by intelligence—well, I don’t need to finish that sentence.

It’s become more unpopular to admit that kind of bias, but you still hear people in urban school districts say things like, “Those kids just can’t learn as much as white kids.” So I think some of the same prejudices about competence and ability are at play. There are truly similarities in terms of prejudice against groups that historically haven’t had much power. White people have controlled people of color, and intellectually non-labeled people have controlled the lives of people with disabilities—including children—and have claimed, “My professional opinion is that this is what your life should look like.”

So yes, I see them as very similar. We’re still struggling with race in this country, even after 150 years. And it’s only been 60 years since Brown v. Board of Education. So when I say I wish we were further along with inclusive education, I also recognize that the same entrenched societal institutions that perpetuate racism are the ones that perpetuate discrimination against people with disabilities. They’re just as ingrained.

Tim Villegas
Yes, I can see that. It’s a false assumption that, given a certain 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 to say, “They’re not as intelligent.” People would say, “I’ve got scientific data here,” until we started to realize those tests were biased.

Cheryl Jorgensen
Have you ever read the book The Mismeasure of Man?

Tim Villegas
I can’t say that I have. Who wrote it?

Cheryl Jorgensen
That’s your assignment. It’s by Stephen Jay Gould, a recently deceased Harvard professor. He goes back to the early development of IQ testing in the late 1800s and early 1900s and shows how those tests—supposedly scientific and unbiased—were based on pre-existing assumptions about how different racial groups would perform. The people who conducted those tests fudged the data to support conclusions they had already drawn. IQ testing is really worthless.

Tim Villegas
Let’s talk about IQ a little longer. It’s a big determiner of our eligibility categories. Back when I was in California writing IEPs by hand, we still had the “MR” category. I remember sitting in a meeting with a parent who was irate because we still used that term. I said, “I completely agree with you, but there’s nothing I can do about that. You need to write the superintendent or your congressperson.”

Cheryl Jorgensen
Exactly.

Tim Villegas
Fortunately, I don’t have to do that here because we use “intellectual disability” now. But even still, the whole idea of IQ…

Cheryl Jorgensen
When I do workshops, I do an activity. I take a piece of painter’s tape and lay it down the middle of the room. I have people line up on either side of the line. I say, “The first person on the left side of the line, your IQ is 71. You are not mentally retarded. The first person on the right side, your IQ is 69. You are mentally retarded.” Let’s think about the logic of that.

Even if you believed intelligence could be reliably measured—which I don’t—it’s silly that we determine a child’s entire educational career based on two points of difference. It just doesn’t make educational sense. It doesn’t seem right.

Tim Villegas
So let’s say you are a benevolent dictator of a school. Let’s get rid of IQ as an eligibility determiner. How would you assign services to a student with any particular need—whether it’s a learning disability or more intensive needs?

Cheryl Jorgensen
Okay, that’s a big question, and I’m going to tell you not just my ideas, but what’s actually happening in many parts of the country right now.

Have you heard of the large national grant called the SWIFT project?

Tim Villegas
Absolutely. I’m a big fan.

Cheryl Jorgensen
Let me briefly outline it for your listeners. The U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs, issued a $25 million grant to the University of Kansas and a group of other universities to see what it would look like if a school could take all of its resources—both general education and special education—and put them into one big pot.

Then, they would do really great learning assessments for all children—not just those suspected of having disabilities. These assessments would cover math, language arts, communication, technology, and more to understand who each child is as a learner, what their strengths are, and what their needs are.

From that shared pool of money and personnel—special ed teachers, speech pathologists, Title I teachers, ELL teachers—they would disperse those people throughout the building in regular education classes to support all students. Services wouldn’t be assigned based on a label. For example, if Mary Jane needs extra support in math, the best math teacher on the fifth-grade team would work with her, regardless of whether she’s labeled as having a disability.

This process of breaking down the silos that have arisen in education—between general ed and special ed, between funding streams and personnel—is what the SWIFT grant is testing out in schools across the country. They’ll eventually produce a toolkit or guidebook for how other schools can replicate this model.

Unfortunately, what SWIFT can’t control is that the special education law still exists, and we still need to label kids. I don’t know why we need to label kids if we really had a system for describing learning characteristics well and providing whatever services they need.

Tim Villegas
The reason we even started creating eligibility categories was because there was nothing like special education before. I don’t even know the year…

Cheryl Jorgensen
1975.

Tim Villegas
Thank you. That would be the law.

Cheryl Jorgensen
Yes, there was special ed before that. Certain states began providing their own versions of special ed law back in the 1960s. But we’re getting into real history and philosophy here.

Special education has its roots in medicine. Historically, disability has been considered not an illness per se, but something that’s gone wrong in a person—something that needs to be diagnosed. That’s a medical term. Just like in medicine, where you need to know whether someone has appendicitis or gallbladder disease to treat them, early special ed folks came from the medical world and brought with them the need to label and diagnose.

Then came the idea that a certain treatment or set of treatments goes along with each label. That’s one of the reasons we’ve gotten to where we are today.

Tim Villegas
Yes, I often hear about the “medical model” versus the “social model” in education. And there’s been a pushback against the medical model. It’s interesting—the kind of mess we’ve made for ourselves, especially now that some of us want to change.

Cheryl Jorgensen
Let me add one more deeply held belief. I mentioned it earlier: the belief that people with a difference we call a disability have something wrong with them and need to be fixed.

The medical model says there’s a pill, a program, or a place that will fix this person and make them “normal.” A different view of disability is that society creates—or socially constructs—the idea that there’s a line between “normal” and “abnormal.” Parents are under terrible pressure from the moment their child is born—if that child is labeled with a disability—to do whatever they can to make their child normal. Because society tells them that being normal is the only way to have a good life.

Tim Villegas
Right. You want the best for your child.

Cheryl Jorgensen
More services, more speech therapy, more discrete trial training to eliminate that autism. And therein lies the pickle—or in my opinion, the trap—we’re in.

Tim Villegas
I share that view. I guess I haven’t always thought the way I do now. When I first got into special ed—well, into the field—I was a behavior therapist for students with autism. I kind of fell into the job because I was a psychology major, and you can’t get a whole lot of jobs with a BA in psychology. While I was deciding whether to go for a master’s degree to become a counselor or therapist, I started doing this work. And I just fell in love with kids with autism. I realized, “Oh, I think this is what I should be doing.”

I had a very different mindset when I first started. It was definitely, “How can I make this child more normal?” I wondered what the cure for autism would be. I remember parents trying all these different diets and therapies. It was very interesting. The only thing that changed my perspective was my teacher training. I had really great professors who were TASH members—little plug for TASH—and that started opening my eyes. Then I met autistic adults, and that really made me go, “Oh, they don’t want to change. They don’t want to be like me. Why haven’t I heard this before?”

It just snowballed after that. The idea and philosophy of inclusion, and the idea that disability is natural—was that Kathy Snow?

Cheryl Jorgensen
Yes, Kathy Snow.

Tim Villegas
Right. That disability is a natural part of the human experience, and it shouldn’t be looked at as something that needs to be fixed—like having cancer.

Cheryl Jorgensen
Exactly. A couple of resources for your listeners, especially if they’re parents or teachers trying to wrap their heads around this idea that autism is a natural thing: One is the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN). It’s a group of autistic adults involved in political and rights advocacy. They say, “No, thank you. Sometimes I wish my life were easier, but I wouldn’t want to not have autism.”

Another is the Autism Acceptance Project. It’s run by a mom who blogs and shares resources about the idea that we don’t need to be cured—we need to be included and supported.

Tim Villegas
Absolutely. I feel like we could talk about that for a long time. I want to go back to some of the questions we had about systems change and what people can do when they’re in less-than-inclusive situations.

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!

Tim Villegas
Yes, and it’s surprising to most people.

Cheryl Jorgensen
Talking to you, Tim? Yeah, it is!

Tim Villegas
Exactly. I’ve been a self-contained teacher for 10 years. When I got into working in schools, my training was so different from what I experienced. The job I got was as a self-contained teacher for students with autism. Now I’m in Georgia, in the same sort of situation. But now I’ve kind of “come out of the cold,” and I can’t shut up about inclusion. I know people are probably tired of hearing me talk about it—especially at my school.

But I often have this cognitive dissonance every time I go to work. So I’ve asked a few different people I’ve interviewed about this: Should I quit my job as a self-contained teacher and move to another school or district because of my beliefs about inclusion? Or should I stay in my job and try to influence the system from within?

There’s only so much I can control. I can’t control who my principal is. I can’t control who my superintendent or supervisors are. But I can control what goes on in my classroom. So what would your advice be? Because I’m not the only one. There are plenty of people who feel the same way and are in the same situation.

Cheryl Jorgensen
I think I would need to know more about you to really answer that. I’d want to know: At the end of the day, at the end of the year, what do you need to have done to feel like you’ve made the difference you want to make?

Some people would say, “If I change five little moments in my students’ lives—give them five little slices of joy during their day—then I’ve made enough of a difference to feel like I’ve held true to my beliefs.”

Another question I’d ask is: Have you tried to develop a core group of allies in your school community so that you’re not alone? Because you’ll never do it alone. Even if you convince one person—say, the principal—that person has to convince a whole bunch of other people. I don’t know what kind of effort and resources you’ve brought to bear to systematically build that group of allies. And how long are you willing to work on that before you throw in the towel?

Tim Villegas
Well, before you hang up on me, I will say that I have been systematically—including in every job I’ve had—working to include my students in general education as much as physically possible. Just a few years ago, I worked with a consultant and mentor of mine to include a student with significant disabilities in general education for the full day. It was a gradual process, but he’s now in fourth grade, pretty much all day in general ed. I work with his paraprofessional and general ed teacher to modify activities.

That’s wonderful, and I’m very happy and blessed to have been able to do that. But that in and of itself is just one story. I’d love to do more. I’m a strong inclusion advocate—everybody knows it—but I do feel like my hands are tied sometimes. I can’t do everything.

So I guess I don’t really have an answer for people in my position, except to just keep going, keep believing, keep talking. That’s part of the reason I started this website—because I couldn’t find anything out there that supported me. I couldn’t find any resources or any teacher trying to do the same thing I was doing. I needed encouragement, or someone to say, “Hey, I’m not the only one.”

That’s what I hope Think Inclusive does. That’s what I hope these podcasts do—that teachers and parents who listen can say, “Okay, 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.” And 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 when you were teaching, you couldn’t find those resources—because they’ve been around since 1985! But those of us putting them out there haven’t done a great job of it, I guess. If you—being the assertive, smart, and creative person you are—couldn’t find those resources, what a terrible job those of us in the field have done.

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

Tim Villegas
Right. That makes sense. I think the biggest barrier I run across isn’t just from my colleagues in the building. When you were talking about allies, I’ve created a nice group of allies that I talk with. We put our heads together and do what we can control.

But when I have conversations in the global sphere, people are wary about inclusion because they just don’t know how to do it. They don’t know what it looks like. That’s why I think the SWIFT schools will be a really nice way to show people. I know Dan Habib was a guest a few months ago, and I know he’s doing the filming for the SWIFT schools. I’m really excited about that—to show people what it looks like, because they just don’t believe it.

Cheryl Jorgensen
No, they don’t. And I think videos really help. But even Dan would say that one of the reasons he had success with his film Including Samuel is that it wasn’t just, “Okay, we’re showing Including Samuel from 7:30 to 8:30 Thursday night—come if you want.” That’s not the end of it. It’s the beginning of a conversation.

It needs to be a very intentional conversation with people over multiple years, with lots of professional development, attention to infrastructure in the school—like common planning time. It’s not just one or two people. It’s really about looking at what schools need in order to make a change and sustain it.

We really need to be talking about math curriculum. Any change in schools is difficult. Maybe inclusive education is a little harder than math curriculum because it gets at some basic human values about humanity. But we’re still learning how to spread the process beyond little islands of excellence.

Tim Villegas
Right. I like that visual metaphor—“islands of excellence.” That’s what it is. I’m going to put it out there: I am looking for those little islands of excellence. Please come and tell me. I will share them with the world. That’s the whole point. I want to show people what it looks like, what it feels like.

Cheryl Jorgensen
Georgia—I don’t know anyone in Georgia. Are there TASH members in Georgia?

Tim Villegas
Well, I think I might be the only one.

Cheryl Jorgensen
Holy moly!

Tim Villegas
No, that’s not true. Connie Lyle O’Brien and John O’Brien are in Georgia. I’ve connected with them, although only briefly. We keep saying we’re going to do something, but they’re very busy. We don’t have a TASH chapter. I tried to start one a few years ago, but it didn’t quite get off the ground.

Georgia isn’t the only state without a chapter. Part of the reason is that there are so many different disability rights organizations within a state. Georgia has a bunch, and they’re all kind of the same people. So adding another one doesn’t have a lot of incentive—especially when it’s not very powerful.

We have the Center for Leadership in Disability…

Cheryl Jorgensen
That’s Georgia’s Institute on Disability that I used to work with. It’s a University Center on Developmental Disabilities.

Tim Villegas
Yes, Georgia State University. That’s still up and running and a powerful advocacy group. Then there’s the Georgia Council on Developmental Disabilities, and The Arc, and various other groups. It’s like that all over the country. If we could get everyone together—but that’s so hard to do. Everyone has their own agendas.

Cheryl Jorgensen
I’ll tell you the number one thing New Hampshire did 25–30 years ago to get inclusion going: Are you familiar with Partners in Policymaking?

Tim Villegas
I’ve heard of it, but I haven’t been involved.

Cheryl Jorgensen
You can Google it—Partners in Policymaking. I think they’re based in Minnesota. Most states have it. It’s a parent leadership series that occurs over the course of a year. It teaches parents of school-aged kids with disabilities about community organizing, best practices, and legislative advocacy.

In 1987, New Hampshire had its first Partners in Policymaking series for families, and that got inclusive education off the ground. I’ll email you the contact of the woman who runs New Hampshire’s. If you could start a Partners in Policymaking series in Georgia focused on inclusive education, that could be your start. That has been the biggest pressure point in our state—bar none.

Tim Villegas
That makes sense. The change comes from parents.

Cheryl Jorgensen
Yes. You don’t know how many times I hear, “Parents get what they want around here.” Our parent leadership series has produced school board chairs, state representatives, legislators, and even our governor. These are people who found their power.

Tim Villegas
That’s great. This has been a very, very interesting conversation. I am so glad—this is the kind of conversation I wish would be recorded. And I am recording it, so this is awesome.

We’re kind of getting up to an hour here, and I just want to make sure we talk about the Common Core. It’s a very hot topic in general education. I wanted to know your thoughts about Common Core and whether special educators, in particular, should be worried about it. Believe it or not, I’ve gotten emails asking what I think about it and whether I think it’s going to leave our kids behind because of the rigor. What are your thoughts?

Cheryl Jorgensen
I don’t think it needs to, but I’m worried that it will. I have some anecdotal evidence that makes me concerned. The biggest worry is that Common Core will be used as another excuse to separate kids with disabilities from kids without disabilities.

People are saying, “Unless you’re in that 10th-grade English class to master all those regular Common Core standards, you can’t be in this English class.” That’s against special ed law, but I’m hearing that it’s happening. People are saying, “If your child is working on alternate achievement standards and taking the alternate assessment, they can’t be in general ed.” That’s really concerning.

I don’t think the Common Core standards need to leave kids with disabilities behind. If people had the right attitude, it would help raise everyone’s achievement. But only if people believe that students with disabilities can achieve at high levels and provide them with multiple means to get there.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) should go hand-in-hand with Common Core. There’s no evidence that students with disabilities in inclusive classrooms bring down anyone else’s scores. But I hear that worry all the time.

Tim Villegas
Right. I remember listening to Lou Brown a few years ago—maybe it was in his DVD—and he said something like, “If all the scores went down in the whole school district because of students with disabilities, then you’d have to say the same thing if the scores went up.” It’s the same logic.

Cheryl Jorgensen
Exactly. People have already drawn their conclusions and are just coming up with rationales to support them. There’s no evidence at all. In fact, there’s lots of evidence that universally designed instruction and inclusive classrooms help improve everyone’s achievement.

Tim Villegas
I 100% agree. In my view, I’m not as concerned about Common Core—probably because of my own attitude. I can’t control other people’s attitudes, but I can control mine.

I’ve always thought that alternate assessment made more sense when taught in the general ed setting, rather than in a self-contained setting. I’ve tried to argue that with my colleagues. What ends up happening is that people say, “Oh, we have these alternate achievement standards—great! We can go into our special rooms and teach them there.” But it doesn’t work.

It’s frustrating for me because I want to give my kids access to the general curriculum. I have students in K through 5, and they want me to teach a lesson that spans all those grades. It’s nearly impossible.

Cheryl Jorgensen
That’s so hard. And I’m not against alternate assessment either. But the way we’re doing it—especially in Georgia—is very difficult. I know other states are feeling the same way.

There are some states whose alternate assessments are very rigorous. There are two national consortia developing new alternate assessments based on the Common Core standards, and they’re very rigorous. You almost can’t tell them apart from the general ed standards. But students are taught them in a variety of ways and given a variety of ways to show what they know. That’s Universal Design.

Tim Villegas
Absolutely.

Cheryl Jorgensen
Okay.

Tim Villegas
Well, this has been a wonderful conversation, Dr. Jorgensen. Thank you so much for taking the time and really developing these topics. I wish you all the best, and I’d love to have another conversation in the future.

Cheryl Jorgensen
Great. I would look forward to it.

Tim Villegas
Excellent. Good night.

Tim Villegas
That concludes this edition of the Think Inclusive podcast. For more information about Dr. Cheryl Jorgensen, you can visit her website at http://cherylmjorgensen.com or search for her “Ask Cheryl” posts on Think Inclusive.

Remember, you can always find us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/think_inclusive or on the web at http://thinkinclusive.us. Visit our sponsor at http://brookspublishing.com and receive 25% off your order using the promo code TIMBD25.

Today’s show was produced by myself using USB headphones, a MacBook Pro, GarageBand, and a Skype account. Bumper music by José Galvez with the song “Press.” You can find it on iTunes. You can also subscribe to the podcast via the iTunes Music Store or at podomatic.com—the largest community of independent podcasters on the planet.

From Marietta, Georgia, please join us again on the Think Inclusive podcast. Thanks for your time and attention.