La continuidad como elemento prioritario para el diseño de las políticas públicas

Effectively and equitably educating students with disabilities requires a school-wide effort and often some restructuring of resources (Lipsky & Gartner, 1996). Schools must undergo comprehensive changes which may include shifts in curriculum, instructional approaches, scheduling, teachers’ roles, leadership support and priorities, and cultural norms (McLeskey et al., 2014a). Because of the school wide and multi-faceted changes that are required in order to truly implement inclusion, we argue that school efforts to include students with disabilities may be beneficially conceived of as a system. Foster-Fishman and colleagues define systems as “the set of actors, activities, and settings that are directly or indirectly perceived to have influence or be affected by a given problem situation” (2007, p. 198). By this definition, the collection of

resources that schools employ in order to support SWD in general education settings can be conceived as a system. We refer to this as a school’s “system of support”.

Taking a systems perspective allows us to simultaneously attend to the different elements that influence inclusion and explore how they function together. Scott (2015), adapting the work of Nadler & Tushman (1997), suggest that exploring the goals, formal organization, informal organization, people, and work/technology may help in understanding the different elements of organizational level systems and their interaction. First, systems have specific goals, and these goals shape the nature of the other elements in the system. The work and technology of the system refers to the main tasks needed to meet these goals, and the technology and tools that help to perform the tasks. The formal organization refers to explicit rules and structures for how work is performed in a system. Informal organization refers to emergent norms, values, and relationships. Lastly, people embodies the knowledge and skills of those working within the system and their fit for the tasks (Scott, 2015).

Consider the elements involved in crafting a system to support students with disabilities at the high school level. Although schools may vary in their specific goals related to supporting SWD, all must comply with federal guidelines related to providing SWD an individualized, free and appropriate public education (FAPE) and also be accountable to state and district performance goals for SWD on standardized tests. Accountability pressures aside, simply meeting the federal guidelines for educating SWD requires the work of a complex system of support. Special education federal policy guidelines (IDEA, 2004) require that schools create an Individualized Education Program or IEP for each SWD, which is the legal document that spells out what FAPE will look like given the unique needs of each individual child (Bateman, 2011). IEPs should be tailored to each individual child and must include measurable annual goals, a

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plan for monitoring the child’s progress toward those goals, a description of the specialized supports that the student requires, and a description of the extent to which the child will participate in general education classes and activities, among other requirements (IDEA Regulations). Crafting and adhering to a child’s IEP requires careful planning and purposeful coordination and collaboration (Bray & Russell, 2018).

Imagine the complexity of developing and implementing unique IEPs for SWD en masse at the high school level. This is one of the driving goals of the “system of support”. What system elements might a high school employ to work toward this goal? The work and technology of the system of support requires planning for how students will be supported in their classrooms and how teachers will learn about their unique educational needs. The school’s formal organization will designate staff roles, responsibilities, and perhaps routines for communicating and collaborating. The informal organization encompasses teachers’ personal relationships and attitudes toward inclusion, which are important facilitators for their productive collaboration (Friend et al., 2010; Mastropieri et al., 2005; Scruggs et al., 2007). Finally, the skills and expertise of the people in the system of support, specifically general and special educators, must be harnessed productively and efficiently.

We argue that systems of support at the high school level are inherently complex. According to Opfer and Pedder (2011), complex systems exist when “relationships between elements in the system vary in scale and intensity, come together in different combinations depending on the situation, are often reciprocal, and are always nested” (p. 379). The aforementioned elements of the system of support influence one another in dynamic ways. For instance, a school may invest in professional development in co-teaching to develop teachers’ capacity (people), which may alter teachers’ classroom practices (work/technology) and

ultimately improve educators’ confidence and attitudes about supporting SWD (informal organization). Reciprocally, improved attitudes may foster greater teacher investment in collaborative planning and further strengthen classroom practices. Finally, the system of support is always nested within the existing and broader school, district, and state education systems. Therefore, analysis of complex systems requires attention to the interaction between elements or subsystems within the system as well as the nested and embedded nature of systems (Kuhn, 2008; Opfer & Pedder, 2011). Examining the interaction of elements in complex systems and the embededdness of those systems is important for understanding the ways in which the system may be enabled of constrained and how it can ultimately function to meet it’s goal (Lemke & Sabelli, 2008).