The IDEAL School of Manhattan

The IDEAL School, a K-12 private school, located on Manhattan's Upper West Side, incorporates its goals of diversity and inclusion in every aspect of its program. Your blogger had the opportunity to visit IDEAL School during a recent Open House and saw these principles in action. Students and teachers alike spoke about their experiences, and it was clear that all of them valued this nurturing and accepting school community.  

The student body includes typical learners, students with some learning or other challenges, and a  number of students with significant learning or developmental disabilities, such as Down syndrome.  Individualized instruction at a foundational, standard, or even honors level, is the key to providing instruction for students with different learning needs. Small class size, embedded support and services, and a "no pull out" policy (where services are provided during elective periods so as not to remove children from the classroom) helps students at all levels build critical thinking skills and creativity. 

IDEAL has two specialized programs in addition to its standard curriculum - the Zenith Program, in which about one-third of their student body of approximately 180 participate, and the Dylan Program. The Zenith Program is designed for students needing an additional level of academic, behavioral, and related services support. The Dylan Program is for students with more significant needs, often 1:1 support, which IDEAL provides by an associate teacher. Both the Zenith and Dylan Programs may be paid for by a student's public school, using Carter or Connors funding.

The arts and technology are both important parts of the IDEAL curriculum, for all students. Drama, art, music, and dance are part of academic content through cross-curricular units. STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) classes in the middle school (continuing as electives in the high school) include robotics and film making, with tools such as a 3-D printer and a green screen to help enhance the creativity of students.

The Lower School and Upper School are located in separate buildings, a couple of blocks from one another. This year, IDEAL will graduate its first students since it was founded in 2006. A program to extend the IDEAL education for students with IEPs who are entitled to publicly funded education through age 21 and who need more time to build skills, has begun and IDEAL has also engaged a college advisor  for its 11th and 12th graders who plan to attend college. 

As we visited classrooms and saw students of all levels of ability in their classrooms, it was clear that this is a special place, where every student is learning at his or her own pace, as part of a diverse student body. For families who share its values and approach to learning, this may well be an IDEAL school option. 

The Inclusive Classrooms Project: An Excellent Resource for Teachers

The idea of inclusion makes some teachers nervous. In the education world, inclusion means placing students with special needs alongside typically developing students so that they learn together. While most would agree that this arrangement sounds great in principle, teachers are often intimidated by the demands of serving kids with a diverse range of needs in one classroom.

Teachers College’s Inclusive Classrooms Project aims to support teachers in providing effective education for all populations. The developers of the project believe that students labeled “disabled” can participate in, and benefit from, general curriculum when provided with appropriate supports.

There are several ways teachers and administrators can benefit from TCICP’s work. For example, educators in the New York City area can arrange for on-site consulting or a workshop for their school, or visit one of the TCICP Demonstration Schools to see the model at work.

For those too far from New York to learn in person, the project’s website is an excellent resource. The Practices page provides teachers with ideas for incorporating tested techniques into their classrooms; topics include culturally relevant curriculum, positive behavior supports, technology, assessment, peer support, and multi-modality. All downloads are free. The Learning Library shares recommended titles, both print and digital, that teachers can consult for even more information.

Since both students with and without disabilities have been shown to benefit from inclusion, TCICP supports teachers in creating a win-win scenario.

Research Supports Benefits of Inclusion for All Students

A recent Wall Street Journal article by Miriam Kurtzig Freedman, an attorney representing schools, raises questions about the practice called mainstreaming or inclusion, which places students with learning disabilities in mainstream classrooms along with typically-learning peers. A special education teachers works alongside a regular teacher in these classrooms to address the needs of the special education students. Here in New York City, these Collaborative Team Teaching -- CTT -- classes are quite common. Although inclusion has been generally used to refer to students with any kind of disability, Ms. Freedman focuses her analysis on students with learning issues, so we will limit our discussion to this kind of inclusion as well.

Photo: dave_mcmt

Freedman notes," Look into the research on inclusion and you will find that this policy is generally based on notions of civil rights and social justice, not on "best education practices" for all students." She goes on to state that there is no research on how inclusion impacts the academic progress of the typical learners and that parents of typical learners simply remove their children from public schools rather than complain about what Ms. Freedman describes as "simplified" teaching in inclusion settings.She notes that this impacts the goal of diversity in classrooms. "Can this be anything but very bad for America?," she asks.

Our colleagues at COPAA, the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, have fired back, in a blog post by Denise Marshall, the Executive Director of COPAA. Ms. Marshall notes: "The article by Ms. Freedman wholly disregards both the law and science. Her erroneous proposition that educating children with disabilities alongside their non-disabled peers is harmful to students without disabilities has no basis in science nor legal precedents. Not only is this claim based on stereotype, but this viewpoint disregards decades of legal and scientific developments and undercuts a quarter of a century of progress in remedying widespread discrimination against children with disabilities."

Ms. Marshall is correct; research supports the conclusion that all students do better in an inclusion setting. In fact, despite the concerns of teachers about managing a diverse classroom, there are numerous benefits -- both social and academic -- in such settings. Ms. Marshall concludes that Ms. Freedman  "is correct in stating that our schools thrive with a diverse population and engaged parents. However, the idea that removing children with disabilities from regular classrooms will promote diversity, defies comprehension. A return to segregation and exclusion of children with disabilities will hardly promote diversity and is definitely not the way forward.."

We agree.