Evaluating the Special Education of Individuals with Disabilities in America: With a Focus on Durham, North Carolina

Policy Problem Statement

The North Carolina State Legislature released a new definition of low-performing schools on October 1^st this year, labeling 514 schools and 15 districts as low-performing. Durham Public Schools (DPS) has 52 schools that were identified as low-performing and had to submit School Improvement Plans about how they were going to improve their performance. As a district, DPS has a proficiency of only 15.8% for their students with disabilities, as recorded on their state report card. Public schools in Durham are not providing their students in special education programs with instruction that allows them to meet standards for grade-level assessments, and this failure marks these schools as low-performing.

Federal funding to the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction for Race to the Top, a program designed to turn around underperforming schools, ended in 2014. Durham Public Schools does not have enough money to provide sufficient numbers of highly-trained teachers to meet the needs of their special education students. Therefore, special education teachers in Durham’s low-performing schools are not well-informed about current best practices for teaching like mnemonic strategies, and are more likely to use ineffective practices such as perceptual-motor training than these research-based approaches (Burns and Ysseldyke, 2009).

Teachers and administrators in Durham hold lower expectations of academic achievement for students with disabilities. For the most part, in DPS, students in special education are separated from their general education peers and do not receive the same level of instruction or the same content as their peers. When they are integrated into general education settings with a special education teacher for support, there is a lack of communication between the special and general education teacher in the classroom about how best to teach to these disabled students. General education teachers dealing with integrated classrooms alone let special education students flounder because they don’t know how to give them individual attention while still teaching the original curriculum. The more experienced teachers in the Durham Public School system are satisfied with special education students that they watch progress from a kindergarten reading level to a second grade level from their second grade to fifth grade year instead of pushing these students to perform at grade level.