Episode 24: The Evolvement of Inclusive Education

On this episode, I welcome my guest Michael McSheehan. Michael is the owner and lead consultant of Evolve & Effect, a company that assists education agencies on how they can evolve their practices to increase positive effects for learners. On this, part 1 of our conversation, we discuss what changes he has seen in the world of inclusive education in his more than 30 years of working in the field, and how a specific court case in his hometown had a lasting impact on his career path.

Transcript

Arthur: This is the Inclusion Think Tank podcast brought to you by New Jersey Coalition for Inclusive Education, NJCIE, where we talk about inclusive education why it works, and how to make it happen.

On this episode, I welcome my guest Michael McSheehan. Michael is the owner and lead consultant of Evolve & Effect, a company that assists education agencies on how they can evolve their practices to increase positive effects for learners. On this, part 1 of our conversation, we discuss what changes he has seen in the world of inclusive education in his more than 30 years of working in the field, and how a specific court case in his hometown had a lasting impact on his career path.

Arthur: I would like to welcome everyone back to another episode of the Inclusion Think Tank podcast brought to you by New Jersey Coalition for Inclusive Education. I'm your host, Arthur Aston, and I'm happy to welcome my guest on the show today, Michael McShane.

And I am so happy to talk with you again and to see you virtually. So thank you for being here, Michael.

Michael: My pleasure. Thank you so much, Arthur, for inviting me.

Arthur: Yes, you and I, we met over the summer of last year at the New Jersey Coalition for Inclusive Education, had a summer conference, and you and I, we met there. So it's good to see you again, virtually, and to hear a little bit of, you know, your story and your journey and what you're doing in the world of inclusive education.

Michael: Sure. Happy to be here. Let’s do it.

Arthur: So to get started, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself? Things like how long have you been in the field of inclusive education? And also, what led you to create your company Evolve in Effect?

Michael: Okay. So all of that. Let's see. Some stuff about me that's relevant that you want to know. Born and raised in the same town as my parents. Well, my father was born someplace else, but was really raised in Rochester, New Hampshire.

Just three houses down from where my mother was born and raised, and her only brother lived in that same neighborhood. So Rochester, New Hampshire is kind of our family's hometown Most of the family is here within a few miles of each other.

It's funny, growing up in that situation when I applied to college, because I was the first person in our family to go to college, and I thought, Oh my God, I'm never coming back to this town.

I’m never coming back to this town, and lo and behold, I came back to this town. But that’s a later part of the story.

Michael: I have been working in this field for, gosh, I guess a little over 30 years now. So I've been around for a while and sequel to things. I originally was going to be a veterinarian, but I had developed severe allergies. So after several years of going down a path to become a veterinarian, I had to rethink things, and so this seemed like a logical alternative.

Michael: I looked at a lot of different options; psychology, and I did some informational interviewing with people in our Department of Communication Disorders. I did my undergraduate work at the University of New Hampshire and met with some faculty in that department and just kind of said, So what is this field about?

Speech, language, something, pathology? What do they do? And the more I learned about the field, I was really interested, and as part of my coursework, my, advisor, Dr. Stephen Calculator, who is a forerunner in the field of augmentative communication, working with people with significant disabilities.

He was my advisor and he said, there are these classes being taught by these people out of the Institute on Disability that are introductory courses to exceptionality, just special education, and you really should take their courses. So I took courses with Jan Nesbitt and Cheryl Jorgensen and got exposed to things I had just never experienced before.

I remember in Jan's class, Jan was really good at getting other people to teach her class, she had a lot of guest lecturers. And about halfway through the course, we've been, reading about people with significant disabilities and hearing from doctors and professors, and then suddenly I was coming into class and I saw this guy in a wheelchair, kind of a scooter, and he had a helper dog and he had a person helping him.

Michael: And I heard him make some sounds, but they didn't sound like words. And I thought, Oh, that's a person with a severe disability. Jan's going to talk about him today, and in fact, that guy gave the lecture.

Michael: He wheeled up to the front of the class and pulled out a communication board and started tapping away at letters and words and gave the lecture for the class. And they sat there at the back of the class just beside myself, not knowing what was going on and completely hooked. I was like, I need to understand this.

And that really became kind of the drive of my work from that moment forward was understanding communication differences for people who had limited or complicated speech and then kind of got pulled into the education arena and it just all kept going from there.

Sorry, what question was answering again? How long have I been in the field? A long time, and that's what led me to this part of the work.

What led me to start my company is when I left U Of H, I thought as an undergrad when I left and went to Syracuse to do grad work, I thought, oh, I’m never going back to New Hampshire. And it seems like every time I say that statement, it comes back around at me.

Michael: As I was wrapping up my graduate work, Jan Nesbitt, the director of the Institute on Disability, asked me to come for an interview and I ended up going back to work at the University of New Hampshire. Then I left for a little while, and did some private consulting and then came back, I think in early 2000, just came back to just do one project for four years and, stayed another 15 years.

So after 20 years, it was time to get out again from the university setting and I started the company, and I draw on lots of different people's work. And I had worked with National Technical Assistance Centers on these very targeted projects, and I just I wanted to more flexibility. I wanted to choose who I was going to work with.

I'm old and. Grumpy. So I want to find good people to work with. I wanted greater choice and control over that, over who I would serve.

Michael: And so I started the company thinking, I want to work with schools in districts who are just asking hard questions and who really want really significant change in education for all students, especially those with disabilities and those who have been historically marginalized.

And I thought this will be how I kind of just fade into the sunset. This will be my slow retirement. I'll start this little company just me consulting, and now the company, I've got, what, three-four employees. And we've got eight different subcontractors and partners that work on the right project, and I'm bringing on another full-time employee in July.

The company just keeps expanding because I think the more clear I got about the kind of work I wanted to do and the kind of people I wanted to work with, those people now, I’m finding those people more and more, and those systems more and more that are asking really hard questions and want to do good stuff.

So we're trying to put together a team of really good people to do that with them.

Michael: So I did want to go back. Just to tell you a little bit, one more thing about the company and what we're doing. Because this is just kind of evolved.

I mean, like the company's name is Evolve and Effect. I’m really interested in, as I said, like the really hard, messy stuff like that just gets me charged up. And a school district approached me, gosh, about a year ago to completely rethink how they were teaching autistic learners.

And we started a pilot in one school and they had been running this autism program that was very much driven by ABA, discrete trial training, and token economies, and it wasn't being responsive to who autistic learners actually were.

And so both undoing this program and supporting these learners to be part of the school community in small steps, we're getting there. But like, that's the kind of messy work that that the company’s involved with now, that's just so exciting, and the outcomes we get are just incredible.

Michael: At this point last year in that program, in that school, they had had by this point in the year, hundreds of behavioral incidents with these students, such that they were using restraint and seclusion.

So 250 different incidents of restraint and seclusion from the beginning of school till now. A year ago, since we've started working with them, beginning the school to now, we've had two incidents where a child needs to be restrained.

Michael: And that was really just to keep them safe in that circumstance. It's really messy. It's really hard work. And, the school just really wants to do better. And so they're asking these really hard questions.

And now the district is aiming to expand that to all of their elementary schools where they have these other kinds of very much behaviorally driven programs. They're now going to switch to being very responsive to what is autism and what do these autistic learners need, and how do we do that in a way that's centered on equity and inclusion at the same time.

Michael: And it's just. When I started the company. It's not what I thought it would be doing and I'm loving it. It's great.

Arthur: That's great. And I love that you said once you became more clear about, what it is you want to do, those people found you and you found them. And it's like it's expanding. That's really, really cool.

Arthur: For those who are not watching this on YouTube, I love the excitement I see on your face when you talk about it.

I think that's what is really important because, to me, that shows that you're in it for the right reasons and you're doing it because you believe in it and you know that there needs to be some changes made and to actually see the changes being made, as you said, you went from all of the incidences that they had before and now they're working with you and they've had two.

Michael: Yes me and a team.

Arthur: Yes, yes.

Michael: That one is actually done in partnership with a wonderful group called Autism Level Up.

My wonderful colleagues, Amy Lorent, and Jacqueline Feady, they are incredible partners in this work. So I really don't want to say, like Michael went in with a bunch of special dust, and just made a great happen.

There's a team of us and now our challenge is we need to work ourselves out of a job, right Like we need to build the capacity and get out of there. They had contracts with these behavioral agencies for six years and we're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars every year, and I look at it and it's like, well, that should come back. You all should be able to do whatever Amy and Jacqueline and I come in and do. We want to support them to do that. There's plenty of work to happen in the world. We don't need a district to be paying us forever.

Michael: Which may maybe unpopular and probably not a really great business plan on my part. But I want to work myself out of a job.

Arthur: Yes, right. Oh, wow, that's that's a good one. So I guess kind of like a follow-up question to that.

You've mentioned that you have been doing this work for 30 years or for over 30 years. What are some of the changes you have seen in those years of working? And I guess where would you say improvements still needs to be made?

Michael: Loaded questions.

Arthur: Yes!

Michael: Gosh, what's changed? We've really shifted, in the area of inclusive education, and I'm not sure that that's a helpful thing to call it anymore, but that’s probably another podcast.

But we've really shifted from this one child-at-a-time work to a more system-wide school and district and state capacity building. And I think that that's been a really important change in the field. We need to kind of look at the broader systems and structures that have maintained separateness for kiddos, and we weren't getting to some of those kinds of systemic barriers, that kind of institutionalized ableism that has played out in schools.

And there's been a shift now to attend to that much more so that if you make these changes school-wide, it can lift up many more students than just trying to do one student at a time.

That said, we still do one student at a time because each kiddo is going to need really specific supports.

Michael: Other changes in the field over time, alignment with these school-wide frameworks like Multi-Tiered System of Supports, Universal Design for Learning.

Oh my gosh. When we started this work, we didn't have Universal Design for Learning. And wow, how helpful is that in terms of thinking about curriculum design that's built for all of the learners that you have to know that that's achievable, that we have seen it happen in schools in really great ways, and when that's in place, so many barriers come down and there's still more to remove, but that's such a central one around curriculum design, and that's something that really works well.

Michael: Something that has not changed. This is going to sound weird, but research outcomes have not changed in the 30-plus years that I've been in the field, right? In my time in the field, the research outcomes have held constant. Right. It keeps showing that, yes, we should be putting kids with significant disability labels into general education classrooms.

Yes, we should be teaching them general curriculum and we can. And that's better than the alternative of being in separate settings.

So last year, I don't know, you probably did a podcast on this. I haven't listened to all your podcasts, but like last year there were a series of huge studies that came out that once again reinforced this large-scale studies looking at students with significant disabilities across 11 states. All of their outcomes, point to more time in general and results in higher scores on reading and math. Better social relationships, and better opportunities for employment, and this is for students with the most significant disabilities. So like. At some point, it's no longer about, like, do some more research. It's really about how we did this, and I think that that is a thing that's also changed in the field.

Michael: We’re thinking differently about the how piece of this work and how are we going to partner with schools and districts to do this long-term heavy lift change, right? Like you think about all the work we still have to do in the area of racism and schooling. We've got as much, if not more work to still do around ableism and schooling.

Michael: And we've got schools leaning into that conversation across the country. Sorry, I may have gone off to a shiny object. Did I answer your question?

Arthur: You answered it. Fantastic. I loved that the research hasn't changed.

I said, whoa. It’s so true.

Michael: It hasn’t, No, but, you would expect in most endeavors in education, we expect to get lots of mixed results. But if you’re 40 years into the work and all the studies that compare outcomes, tracking kids across different settings, if all of those comparative studies keep pointing in the same direction, at some point you say, okay, so maybe we should follow the research. Hmm. Like, maybe that's a good thing to do.

Arthur: Yeah, maybe it's actually saying something. Wow.

Yeah, that was a great, great answer.

Arthur So, as you mentioned, you grew up in Rochester, New Hampshire. And after we met over the summer, it was my first time meeting you and learning about the work that you do.

So I did some research and looked up some things that you've done, and I've listened to some podcasts and things that you've been on before then and since then. And something that I heard you speak about that I would like for you to discuss here as well is the court case of Timothy versus Rochester, which took place in your hometown.

So can you share with us what that court case was about and how and why it profoundly had an impact on you?

Michael: Glady, because it really has become this driving force in my life, and it's in part how the company came to be named.

So fun story or not So fun story. So Timothy W. was a student born in Rochester, New Hampshire, in December of 1975, born with multiple disabilities. Lots of things going on for him. He had attended a local child care development center in his early years, 3 to 5 years old or so.

And, we're going back now, way back when, right. Public law 94 142 had just come into effect. And here's this kiddo in Rochester, New Hampshire whose being, whose life existence will put the challenge out there for folks like did we really mean all learners with disabilities when we said public law 94 142?

So in the kind of early childhood and preschool arena, they started doing some work with him and coming to school. But when it came time for him to transition into the public school system K through 12, the school district decided that Timmy, Timothy was not educationally handicapped. Because, since his handicap was so severe and I'm using the language of the time since his disabilities were so severe, he was not, quote, capable of benefiting from an education and therefore was not entitled to one. Now. Let's just sit in for a second.

Arthur: Wow.

Michael: Here we are. We're around 1980 now, 1981, right now he’s five or six years old, about to enter the public school system. And the school system said, you are so disabled, you're not going to benefit from anything we should have to offer. Stay home.

Horrifying. And we know that this story was taking place across our country for decades, and it's still happening in some other ways. So the school district said, we're not going to provide you with any educational program.

They were back and forth with the State Department saying, yes, you really do need to provide educational programming to this student. Other programs evaluated him. Other consultants came in all saying yes, in fact. Timmy W. can learn some things.

We don't know what those are, but here's what we're seeing that lets us know this and this back and forth went on for six years. And finally, in 1988, Rochester School District appealed the decision that just kept coming back against them to the US District Court.

And again they were arguing Timmy W. was not capable of benefiting from special education and so we're not obligated to provide him with special education under that public law. So that's huge now.

Michael: Parallel lines here. Right. So at that time, I am now realizing that I am changing my field of study at the University of New Hampshire. I start taking these courses, with Jan Nesbit and Cheryl Jorgensen, and that's where I learn about the Timmy W. case.

I don't learn about it in my hometown news. I learned that this kiddo has been systematically excluded from public education by going to college. That's why I learned about it. And I was really, quite frankly, pissed off.

Like, who is this district to decide who can and can't go to school with? Who is this district to say that any child is not capable of benefiting from education? Now we've got decades have passed.

Right. So maybe there are some people now in the Rochester school system who would no longer believe that, but that's my hometown. So I know that the town put in all this effort and energy to keep a kid out, and that just continues to fuel me.

The case also came back with a huge decision that set a precedent for our field in special education. Timmy’s case raised the question of do you have to prove that you can benefit before you can get an education. And so there's this phrasing in special ed called the Zero Reject Policy, meaning you don't have to demonstrate this capacity to benefit in order to be eligible for education and special education services.

Michael: So that zero reject policy is huge and is the counterpoint to what the school system was saying. And this is where the company name comes in.

In the decision for this case, the judges wrote that educational methodologies are not static but are going to constantly be evolving and improving and that school districts, in Rochester, are responsible to avail themselves of the new approaches.

Michael: So that's part of what I want to recognize in entering this and starting this company, right?

That our educational methodologies do continue to evolve and we want to select those that have positive effects, that create a positive effect for our learners. And I'm really interested in working with the districts who want to figure out how all that comes together.

So that's why that case is so important to me. Was that more than you wanted to know?

Arthur: No, that was great. And one of the things that I wanted to point out because again, I heard you talk about that before, and looking up the case like this happened in my lifetime.

I was born in 1981.

So it really hit me hard, and I have a physical disability, I have spina bifida. But it was just like, wow, like this is not something that happens so far in the past.

I think a lot of things people like to think of as happening like, oh, that was so long ago.

That doesn't happen that much anymore. And that's just like, oh, it still happens

Michael: So not in that way. Right now It's become a little bit more covert and subtle, or not so subtle.

For ten years, we've seen no change in educational placement for kids with significant disabilities. I mean, just a flatline for ten years now across all of our states.

So clearly, we've got some work to do when we've got that high percentage of the population of students with disabilities still systematically excluded from general education settings in

general education teachers who are the content experts who can do the best teaching in reading and writing and math and science. Us special educators like I can give you something in that arena, but I'm not trained as a person who will teach the fundamentals of reading and writing and math and science.

And that's we need our general educators. Sorry, I'm on a pedestal again. I will step down here.

Arthur: You’re Fine. You're good. Again, I enjoy having these conversations because it really it's something that shows you're passionate, and the passion is what drives you to keep going when things get rough and you have a real determination and force behind you pushing you to help make these changes. So it's really, really important to talk about and to share these things.

Michael: There’s a lot of people in this work asking very similar and hard questions. And we will keep learning and we will keep doing.

Arthur: Yes. Yeah, exactly.