Do We Segregate Students on IEPs?

Despite decades of work to desegregate American public schools, students with disabilities often find themselves separated and isolated from their peers. So, when educational researcher Yenda Prado, Ed.M.’05, walked into Future Visions Academy (FVA), a full-inclusion public elementary charter school in California, it was like nothing she had seen before. 

Prado arrived at PVA as a graduate student from University of California, Irvine. She was there to observe and support the school as part of her doctoral work, but what was supposed to be a yearlong project ended up turning into nearly three years of her life, resulting in Prado’s first book, Voices on the Margins, published by MIT Press. 

What was it about FVA that so captured Prado’s attention? “I started seeing so many interesting things happening that I felt weren’t happening at other schools, and I wanted people to know,” Prado says. “And in many ways, this is a neglected area of research. Yes, there is research on special education, and some on inclusive education, but this interdisciplinary approach of looking at inclusion through a technology lens in a fully inclusive education context, that was something unique.” 

Prado has used FVA as a case study to explore the use of technology to support inclusion and language and literacy learning. That includes digital tools like screen readability for eye tracking for students who can’t use their hands, computer-assisted instruction for decoding, and text-to-speech software that allows students to participate in class discussion. 

At FVA, Prado saw this type of technology being used collaboratively between all students, whether they needed the tools or not. That’s a far cry from most U.S. classrooms. As she writes in her book, 63% of all students with an individualized education program (IEP), spend nearly 20% of their time learning in segregated classes and their time is spent 1:1 with a device. 

“Students with IEPs who are separated from their peers are lacking access to the full diversity of socialization opportunities,” Prado says. “They are missing access to their peers and are missing access to some of the more unstructured learning opportunities that occur with those peers.” 

One example at FVA Prado cites is several minimally speaking students who used assistive devices to communicate. In many learning settings, students requiring such devices might be separated or be the only ones using them to communicate. But at FVA, students with disabilities were intentionally included. Teachers learned how to use the devices, as did classmates who didn’t need them, and then both groups engaged with students who did. 

Prado has spent her career exploring how emerging technologies and media can support classrooms so that all students, regardless of differences, can learn together. That work has taken her beyond the classroom, serving as an adviser for the PBS Kids animated series, Lyla in the Loop, and as an emerging technologies impact fellow for the U.S. Department of Education. 

But perhaps the biggest impact on Prado’s interest in inclusive learning comes from her own time as a student in the classroom. Arriving in the United States from Mexico as a 5-year-old, Prado was both an English language learner and a student with an IEP. 

“Navigating the school system very much shaped my philosophy around inclusive education,” Prado says. Ever since, she says her work has centered on equity and “really taking the things I’ve seen both professionally and academically, the things I’ve seen work for kids, and trying to minimize the things that don’t.” 

She admits that FVA is a unique environment. It features a team-teaching model, where general education and special education teachers collaborate, and students also have access to a team of paraprofessionals. But although this is a model that requires considerable resources, Prado believes that even traditional schools can still learn and implement aspects of what FVA is doing through small tweaks. 

“Using tech to make spaces more inclusive can be intimidating, which is why I wanted to include examples to show how to include kids in classroom discussions,” Prado says. One example includes teaching an entire class how to sign as opposed to just the one student who needs it. 

Ultimately, positive change is “little shifts about how to use the technology” and other tools in ways that promote inclusivity and community. “It all ties into this idea of interdependence,” Prado says. “How do we get to a place where we are all working in collaborative and interconnected ways for the broader social good?”