01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, April 24, 2005

On a recent raw March day, I visited Boston's George Conley School to see for myself a school that met its federal targets for "Adequate Yearly Progress" when a whopping 54 percent of its students are in special education.

Using federal guidelines, each state set consistent academic targets, Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP, for all subgroups -- low-income, minorities -- in all schools. And across the nation, the most commonly missed target is the one for the special-education students.

Conley's principal, Kathleen Armstrong, tapped the table and raised her eyebrows to emphasize: "Even the self-contained kids made AYP." She's referring to those children whose intellectual or emotional challenges prevent them from attending classes with the general population. Conley has two Learning Disabled classes, two for academic remediation, an Early Intervention class for grades 3 and 4, a Primary Transitional class for children not meeting their grade-level benchmarks, and 20 new English language students.

So in the numbers-driven world of No Child Left Behind, meeting AYP under these circumstances marks the school as a howling success. And when you walk around the building and poke into calm, happy, on-task classrooms, you see that success has been accomplished within the context of a sweet, gentle culture.

In her soft Boston accent, Armstrong explains, "In 1999, the job specifications for our Student Support Team -- a teacher leader, special-ed teachers, nurse, part-time psychologist -- changed from just working with children referred to special education to working with regular education children as well.

"Kids who come to the SST are in regular education and we're trying to keep them there.

"So, for example, I believe that all [low-income] urban children have some speech and language issues. They don't have the pre-learning experience; they answer questions with a yes or no; they don't have elaborative language or descriptive language. This is not a disability, but a need for more exposure. Many kids just haven't had much conversation in their lives, and have TV and electronic devices instead. We used to have huge referrals to speech and language support when what they really needed was enriched language opportunities embedded in good literacy. Now our speech and language people work with literacy people on a collaborative, in-class model. We were mistaking a learning gap for a disability."

In 1998, Boston Public Schools embarked on an unusual initiative they call Unified Student Services, which melds special education with other student-support systems like counseling, health and after-school. The philosophy is: All students have special needs; some students have disabilities. The strategy was to build up each school's capacity to support all special needs, including disabilities, at the school itself. So Boston Public Schools considers all students to be on a continuum of needs, some of which will be temporary and of low intensity, some on-going, frequent and highly-specialized.

But no longer is special education a silo unto itself, with its own budget spent only on those kids who meet its criteria. No longer do parents have to fight like tigers to get their child into special education just to get him some help or counseling. The special education teacher along with other support staff -- social workers, psychologists -- provide services to whichever child needs it, regardless of whether she has been anointed with the special-ed label.

Before implementing Unified Student Services, 22 percent of Boston's students were in special education, including more than 900 students placed in private day or residential programs outside the system, costing between $30,000 and $100,000 per child. The average was about $45,000. Boston Public Schools administrators examined the circumstances of each of these children to figure out which of them might come back to the system. Similarly, they studied the students in tiny self-contained classrooms and began building systemic supports to help more of them be successful in a mainstream classroom. As school-level support improved, children could be moved back to the system or to less-restrictive, more-mainstream classes, which saved money that could be plowed into supporting stronger general education for everyone and building yet more support capacity.

In four years, the out-placements were cut in half, and special education is down to 17 percent. But the best news of all is that the general education -- the foundation of all students' learning -- has improved markedly with improved literacy and social supports.

In general, Boston Public Schools has an unusually large share of really high-need children just because of the services available in the area. Armstrong notes that Houston has a similar issue. People come to these areas to get help for their complicated children, but this stresses the public schools. Recently 10 deaf and blind children were relocated in Boston from Bosnia. Thirty children with post-traumatic stress syndrome just came from Somalia. These are the sort of children concentrated in Boston's 17-percent special-education population.

Armstrong says, "It used to be: he's failing; he doesn't belong here. There was a mentality that certain kids shouldn't be in my class. But when you build strong literacy-based supports, you have many fewer referrals. Now the parents don't need special education to get extra time and some extra support. We've built in capacity support for all children with our collaborative learning."

Collaborative learning means that all the teachers get the same professional training whether they are special-education teachers or not. The "cluster," which is to say a group of proximate schools, has special-education teachers meet once a week to exchange tips and tricks, but normally they train alongside the other teachers, and in the course of the day might be indistinguishable from "regular" teachers. As a result, Armstrong calls Conley an "adult learning community." She says, "We are always transferring skills to one another." The Conley teachers themselves decided to meet once a week during their lunch hour to keep fine-tuning their system. Armstrong says, "Part of being an adult learning community is reciprocal accountability." Together they are accountable as a school, but individually they are accountable to one another.

Every parent's dream school has a team of caring professionals monitoring a child's success, asking, "If the child is not succeeding, why not? And what do we do about it?" By building more general, inclusive school capacity, all kids can get a bit of tutoring, a few counseling sessions or the attention of specialists. Sometimes that's all a kid needs to get her through a bad patch or over an academic bump in the road. Schools do themselves no favor by making it so hard for parents to get help that they insist on getting the child a full-blown, extremely expensive special education. When schools quickly handle and help students with low-intensity needs, problems no longer fester into bigger, more intractable problems. Then, fewer children are competing for resources with those children who really need more intensely specialized services. It's a win-win for everyone.

Next week, we'll talk to Boston Schools Supt. Thomas Payzant about how he managed to pull off this impressive achievement.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she now consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny [at] cox.net or c/o EdWatch, Education and Employment, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, R.I. 02902.