Co-teaching has gained favor in many school districts as a means of mainstreaming special education (sped) students by placing them in the classroom with students without disabilities. Special education students are typically students who have a learning disability, a behavioral disability, or a combination of the two. Historically, many of these students were placed with like students on a separate campus, in a teaching lab classroom, or in the case of behavioral disabilities, a self-contained classroom so they could be provided with strict structure and prevented from disrupting a regular classroom environment.
Districts are required to abide by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and part of the act requires special education students to be placed in a least restrictive environment (LRE). The LRE means different things to different people, but the determination is made by a committee that creates the student's Individual Educational Plan (IEP). Non-educators probably find this very confusing, and it is. Teachers find it confusing because districts services vary according to the dominant education philosophy. Not surprisingly this philosophy is influenced by expense and politics.
According to an alert issued by the Division for Learning Disabilities (DLD) of the Council for Exceptional Children co-teaching does not have the scientific research to support its continued implementation and expansion. There are 5 basic models of co-teaching and I’d like to focus on one that I am personally familiar with: Team Teaching. Team Teaching consists of two full salaried teachers; in San Antonio, Texas that can amount to $130,000 in payroll, who are supposed to share instructional responsibilities in a classroom that has less than 50% special education students. Therefore, a class may have 14 sped. students and 15 regular students. To make matters more complicated, the class may have a combination of sped students, regular students, advanced students, and gifted & talented (GT) students combined. There is a plethora of research to support homogeneous grouping of students and common sense would dictate that placing a genius with a low iq student won’t bode well for either student, but with little research on co-teaching in general, there is also little research about the negative effects of the aforementioned scenario on the genius or GT student, not to mention the advanced student. It’s as though they don’t matter. Worse yet, parents are uninformed of this scenario.
Even without the research, the idea of co-teaching defies logic. For instance, a teacher is required to show a minimum competency in mathematics in order to receive certification in math. There has been a lot of concern about having uncertified teachers teach. The co-teacher in a math class usually is a sped. certified teacher, NOT math certified. Why would a non-certified math teacher be expected to teach a math class? This is accomplished because the teacher of record is certified, but true co-teaching requires both teachers to assume equal responsibility for instruction. Consequently, the teachers figure it out real quickly that one has greater competency and the co-teach model digresses to one teacher teaching and the other assisting, and this is a very expensive teaching assistant. Is this effective use of education resources or a top down driven policy based upon other motivation besides the reality of outcomes? Can districts hope this to work like some Kantian scheme where the intention is more worthy than the result?
Parents need to ask tough questions of school leaders about co-teaching; especially, parents of advanced and GT students. Some districts offer advanced classes for students and those students won’t be in a co-teach situation, they will remain in a homogeneous group. However, not all districts offer this for all classes. Your child may be in GT or advanced math, but also in a regular science class with dispersion of aptitude, learning, and behavioral disabilities. Why would any parent agree to this scheme? Maybe it’s just a well kept secret.
