Aiding Academic Achievement

Doctoral candidate Diane Smith, Ed.M.'00, Ed.M.'04, doesn't see special education students as incapable, but rather very much capable of academic success.

In the past 12 years, Smith has dedicated her career and education -- earning two HGSE master's degrees from the Risk and Prevention and Administration, Planning, and Social Policy programs -- to enhancing her understanding and practice of special education. As she begins work on her dissertation, Smith hopes to use her experience and expertise to devise ways to help special education teachers help students reach their full potentials.

While working as a special education teacher in New Jersey, Smith realized that many of her students who had emotional disabilities had reading difficulties as well.  The age of her students ranged from 9 to 12 years old with only 80 percent reading at the kindergarten level, she estimates.  Smith designed a curriculum that focused explicitly on improving their reading skills. After a year of working with Smith, students' reading levels started jumping several grades.

"Reading is the lynch pin for a lot of these kids," she says. "The older a child with a reading disability becomes without getting help, the more difficult and exasperating it becomes for them to learn."  Smith explains that in the fourth grade, many classrooms shift from focusing on learning to read to using reading to learn. "If you are still struggling to read at this stage it is likely you will fall behind," she says.

She returned to HGSE to focus her studies on school policy, learning, and teaching under the guidance of Professor Thomas Hehir, who she says provided a broader understanding of special education. "Studying under Tom has been one the best experiences I've had here at HGSE," she says.

Smith sees teaching as a means to overcome some of the challenges facing special education in today's world of standardized tests. As part of earning a Rappaport Fellowship from the Kennedy School, this past summer she interned with Carolyn Riley, Boston Public Schools' senior director of unified student services, analyzing MCAS test results. After reviewing a major quantity of raw data, Smith examined and analyzed the performance of all of Boston's special education students who took the MCAS in 2005. It was that work that ultimately determined the research Smith would conduct for her dissertation.

Beginning this year, Smith plans to conduct research in two Boston Public Schools where the majority of their special education students passed the English Language Arts portion of the MCAS. Smith wants to research the techniques that teachers with successful students are using with the hope this will provide more insight for many districts  that are working to aid the academic achievement of their special education students.  "I think the vast majority of special education students can be successful -- especially when they have strong solid reading skills," she says.