Jennifer Coco is the interim executive director of the Center for Learner Equity, a nonprofit that helps remove systematic barriers that exclude students with disabilities from high-quality learning opportunities.
The Government Accountability Office released a report in July on where students with disabilities spend their school days. The headline finding is positive: The number of students with disabilities educated in general education classrooms for 40% or more of the day has grown 25% since the 2012-13 school year.
Celebrate that. Then keep reading, because the real story is deeper in the report.
Progress, with an asterisk
First, some context the headlines will miss. Over that same period, the population of students with disabilities grew 21%. So while more students with disabilities are learning in inclusive settings, the pace of progress is only modestly ahead of growth in the total percentage of students with disabilities.
And the gains are uneven: Inclusion increased in 42 states and the District of Columbia, but some states actually moved backward. More than 50 years after the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act established every child's right to learn in the least restrictive environment, a student's access to their general education classroom still largely depends on their ZIP code.
With so much variation across states, advancing IDEA’s promise to 8 million children with disabilities requires a robust federal infrastructure with expertise on best practice, assistance to get better, and strong oversight to catch when schools are falling short. And yet this infrastructure is being dismantled with cuts to expert staff, technical assistance centers, annual monitoring visits, data collection, and the outsourcing of core oversight and civil rights functions to other agencies.
When the federal role weakens, the choices made in states, districts and individual school buildings matter more than ever. Which brings us to what GAO found about how those choices actually get made.
What predicts inclusion (and what doesn't)
GAO analyzed which district characteristics correlate with higher inclusion rates. The results should reframe how we talk about this issue.
One finding is intuitive once you see it: Districts without a standalone special education school had inclusion rates 5.2 percentage points higher than districts with one. If you build segregated settings, you will fill them with students. It’s that much harder to make the case for inclusion when the adults in your school community are accustomed to sending kids away.
More striking is what did not correlate with inclusion: teacher-to-student ratios, support staff-to-student ratios, or district demographics like race, ethnicity and sex. Staffing, and resources for it — the reasons we hear most often for why students are placed in separate settings — don't correlate with who gets included and who doesn't.
The contradiction that tells the truth
Here's where the report gets really interesting. GAO didn’t just rely on state and local data on inclusion; they also interviewed staff at state agencies, districts and schools across three states to get their perspectives on what drives inclusion of students with disabilities. Educators and administrators in these interviews pointed overwhelmingly to resources and staffing as the biggest drivers of inclusion.
Sit with that. The quantitative data says staffing ratios don't correlate with inclusion. The adults making placement decisions too often believe they do.
That gap between what the data shows and what educators believe is the whole ballgame. It confirms what we at the Center for Learner Equity have seen for years as the single biggest obstacle to inclusion: adult mindsets. The report itself gets at this same idea, describing how school culture and personal beliefs shape decisions about where students learn.
When adults shift their mindsets about students with disabilities, it distinguishes schools that prioritize inclusion of students with disabilities from schools that don't. Some common belief shifts we champion include:
- From “if” to "how." When educators reframe their thinking from whether a student with disabilities can achieve in a regular classroom, learn to read or graduate with their peers to how they will create the conditions to make it possible, they make inclusion the assumption, not a condition.
- From "they can't" to "they can, so we will." When educators assume a student with a disability can't succeed in the general education classroom, no staffing model will change the placement decision. In inclusive schools, the assumption runs the other way, and the schedule, staffing and supports get built to match it.
- From "someone else's students" to "every child in this building is ours." Pointing toward insufficient staffing can belie an assumption that students with disabilities aren't the responsibility of general educators. Inclusion works when every adult in the building owns every child's success.
- From "I've never seen it" to "I know what's possible." Educators who have never worked in a truly inclusive school struggle to imagine one. Exposure to meaningfully inclusive schools, designed so every student can be included, changes what people believe is possible.
One district administrator quoted in the report said: "[School culture is] the #1 issue. The [principal] is the most powerful benefit or hindrance to inclusion."
Where we go from here
This doesn’t mean resources don't matter. Inclusion done well requires real investment in training, sustained implementation of new practices and new habits, exposure to inclusion done well, and integration of staff with specialized skills. But GAO's findings tell us that resources follow belief, not the other way around.
Schools that believe in inclusion find ways to staff it and sustain it. Schools that don't will always find a reason they can't. The most powerful lever for educating students with disabilities alongside their peers doesn’t sit in a budget line. It’s found in what the adults in a building believe about the children inside it.
