Changes to teacher prep to impact schools

Under the new standards, special ed teachers will be able to co-teach in ‘mainstream’ classrooms

As the pandemic has drawn more attention to the needs of students in special education, the state is moving forward with changes to teacher preparation programs intended to improve learning conditions for California’s nearly 800,000 students with special needs.

Last month, the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing approved the latest in more than a dozen changes to the requirements for credentialing aspiring special education teachers.

With a focus on co-teaching and collaboration between special education and their general education colleagues, the changes are intended to boost achievement among students of all abilities.

The changes are meant to address longstanding problems in special education, affecting more than 13% of California’s K-12 student enrollment.

Even though the landmark federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, approved by Congress 45 years ago, requires special education students to be taught in general education classes — or “mainstreamed” — whenever feasible, that has not happened to the extent that backers of the law envisioned.

In many schools, students in special education are separated from their non- special ed peers and lag academically.

According to the Learning Policy Institute, only 13% of students in special education met or exceeded the state’s math standards in 2018-19, compared to 43% of their peers, even though the majority of students in special education have conditions such as dyslexia, epilepsy, deafness or speech impairments that don’t affect their cognitive abilities.

Advocates say that with the right services and supports, these students should be able to perform at the same level as their peers who are not in special ed programs.

The new standards, slated to go into effect in 2022, are part of a series of changes the credentialing commission launched in February 2018 in the requirements to earn the “education specialist” credential needed to teach special education students. Once implemented, these reforms would cap more than five years of work by the commission.

A primary goal of the new standards is to improve working conditions for special education teachers, who have among the highest turnover rates in education. More than 20% of special education teachers in California quit over the course of a single year ( between 2015-16 and 2016-17), according to a recent report by the Learning Policy Institute.

Often special education teachers feel isolated from other teachers and students, according to the Learning Policy Institute report.

To help improve that, the new standards aim to make special education more a part of the overall campus culture in K-12 schools. Special education and general education teachers would be able to co-teach in the same classrooms, and each would receive more training in the other’s field.

For example, a special education math teacher would be able to share a classroom with a general education math teacher, providing instruction to students in both categories if they’re at about the same level academically.

The result, commissioners hope, is that students with undiagnosed or mild learning disabilities in general education classrooms would be identified and receive extra help from special education teachers, and special education students would be more academically challenged and gain social skills by learning alongside their generaleducation peers.

“It represents a big cultural shift. It’s no longer, ‘ Those are special ed kids’ and ‘ These are gen ed kids.’ It’s, ‘ These are all our students,’” said Anne Spillane, an associate dean of special education at Brandman University who sat on the commission’s special education task force. “The changes to the standards reflect that.”

The first changes were approved in 2018 but every few months the commission has fine-tuned the policy. So far, the primary changes include:

• More focus on co-teaching, using technology to help special education students in the classroom; teaching English learners with disabilities; and adapting the general curriculum for students with disabilities.