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Rethinking " Those Kids " : Lessons Learned from a Novice Teacher's Induction

into In/Exclusion

Article · November 2016

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Louis Olander

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Rethinking “Those Kids”: Lessons Learned from a Novice Teacher’s Induction into In/Exclusion Louis Olander

My Own Resistance to Inclusion

I was not always a believer in inclusion; in fact, I actively resisted it initially. It seemed far-fetched idealism

at best and injurious practice at worst. Much of this resistance came from misunderstandings about

inclusion that were driven by my own teacher preparation course work and by poorly implemented

quasi-inclusion structures in schools where I worked. Admittedly, my resistance usually materialized in

the teachers’ lounge as common grumbling and probably did not amount to much in terms of actual

action. Nevertheless, my somewhat passive-aggressive stance was generally motivated by retaining

control over my students, who were often derisively branded as those kids by general education teachers

and administrators. This was largely because I felt that I could help them more that way, as I probably

overestimated my own capacity to do good in their lives.

When I returned from a yearlong combat tour as a medic in Iraq in 2005, I struggled to make sense

of my diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. I did not think the mold of a “disabled veteran” fit

me, and I resented the guys who I came home with who had reconstituted their identities around an

aggrandized sense of self-importance and sacrificial injuries. In a practical sense, though, I came to

discover that I had a poor grasp of my temper, something that would come to make my work teaching

unnecessarily difficult.

I came into teaching in 2007 through an alternative certification program in New York City and was

assigned to become a special education teacher. I was told that my medical experience would make me

a good fit for the position since I already possessed the mindframe to diagnose and treat illness. Per

the terms of my fellowship, I received subsidized tuition at a public university, and my graduate course

work followed a “clinical” model, emphasizing evidence-based practice. Inclusion was discussed solely

in terms of technical skills: collaboration, co-planning, differentiation, and classroom management. In

my teacher preparation program, reflection had one purpose—not to examine ways in which privilege

2 | Bank Street College of Education

of all sorts colored our perceptions of our kids and of schooling—only to evaluate the effectiveness

of implementation of didactic techniques. In no uncertain terms, my cohort of teacher candidates

was told that our sole mission was to make large measurable gains in student test scores; that was

why we were selected for the program. Like many others, I walked into a class in September woefully

underprepared and with my own biases unchecked.

Collaborative Team Teaching and Class 633

At the end of my summer crash course in high-impact teaching strategies for urban students, I secured

a placement position in a large middle school in central Brooklyn with some 1,500 students in grades

six through eight. I would later find out from a colleague that the principal had been reluctant to hire

me, fearful that my military service had rendered me mentally unstable. In some ways, perhaps some

of her concerns were well warranted; I had faced significant issues readjusting after returning home.

Nevertheless, it felt lousy to be labeled. I did not think of myself as unstable—just as a person who

sometimes experienced instability in certain contexts. At that point, I understood my own disability

medically, as a set of symptoms that were exacerbated by triggers in my environment. As long as I

could avoid those triggers, I thought, everything would be fine.

The first class that I taught had 38 sixth graders and was known by its number, 633. The class

employed the collaborative team teaching (CTT) model1 and had, by design, a ratio of 40% students

whose disabilities were documented in their individualized education programs (IEPs) to 60% general

education students. I was to collaboratively plan and deliver lessons in English, math, and social studies

with three different co-teachers who would rotate into the classroom where I stayed with the students

all day. Unlike most novice teachers, I was able to keep the class orderly and well behaved. However,

doing so required occasionally unleashing a rage from within me that felt good to neither me nor the

students. While my administration appreciated my ability to keep the kids in line, I felt like there was

much I was not being told about who they were and what they needed beyond being controlled.

Michael2 was a young, very dark-skinned 11-year-old boy from Jamaica who had an obvious speech

impairment and an irregular gait. Though his IEP stated that he had a learning disability, what I came

to know about him led me to believe that that label was either inaccurate, or, at best, incomplete—in

any event, the result of a poorly done evaluation of his educational needs. Not mentioned in his IEP

1 Collaborative team teaching was renamed integrated co-teaching in 2009, but the model remained the same. This paper describes events before the name change. 2 All names have been changed to pseudonyms to protect anonymity.

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at all was that he was in many respects a very strong student. He often made intelligent, insightful

comments in class, though they were difficult to understand because of his accent and a slur in his

speech.

Michael would come to my class during lunch, sneaking in from the playground, crying because he

was teased and called a “retard” by other students. His writing showed that he was not struggling

cognitively, but his handwriting made his insights tough to read. The occupational therapist and

I eventually unearthed his cumulative record file from a dusty cabinet and discovered that he was

born with hemiplegic cerebral palsy, not at all the learning disability his IEP indicated. His mother, a

hotel room cleaner who worked irregular hours, was baffled by the jargon and paperwork of special

education. She would say, “he was born this way,” but she did not know when or why he was labeled

as having a learning disability. The words “special education” were an insult to her. “He’s not a retard,”

she would say.

Kris was an incredibly intelligent, short Black 12-year-old boy with a fiery, mischievous smile. He was

placed into 633 because of his behavioral issues, which were reported to our middle school by his

elementary school. I remember the programmer telling me that she thought that it would help Kris to

have two teachers in the room. He was loud and rambunctious, but never malicious—he always tried

hard to make his friends laugh. At one point, I was trying to keep food out of the classroom (the room

was infested with roaches), and he brought a rubber sandwich to class and would pretend to sneak

bites. When I caught him with it, he threw it on the ground and it bounced up at me, eliciting laughter

from everyone, including my co-teachers and me. Later, when I had his parents in for a conference to

discuss his report card, they told me that they were afraid to let Kris play in the unsafe streets in their

neighborhood, as they were recent immigrants from Haiti. It was then that I realized that he was so

energetic in class because he did not have an outlet for his playfulness outside of school.

Kris did not have an IEP, but my mentor who was an older veteran special educator swore he should

be referred for an emotional disturbance label. Since she thought he belonged in a self-contained

class, the school’s administration requested that the parents sign a letter requesting a special education

evaluation. When I spoke to them about it, I quietly cautioned them against consenting for him to

be evaluated, sharing my worries about the possible consequences of him being classified. I thought

that his naughty behavior clearly seemed to me to be a function of his context, not of an intrinsic

“disturbance” within him. Mostly, I was worried about what would happen to him if he was put into a

system that he did not belong in—in my mind, very much like a patient taking someone else’s medicine,

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as I still saw special education as a para-medical field. Kris’s parents ultimately did not sign the pretyped

form letter requesting evaluation. In class, Kris also mellowed out quite a bit when I learned that the

best way to manage his behavior was to enjoy the humor in it and find outlets for his energy.

I first encountered Quamasia when I went to get a bookshelf from her general education class. She

was repeating sixth grade, having failed the tests for promotion, and was bigger and louder than all of

the other children. When I walked into the room, she turned her attention to me and began to catcall

me as I picked up the shelf and carried it out of the room. I contemplated yelling at her, but the crowd

was clearly hers, and her teacher was clearly unsuccessful in trying to rein her in. Three months into

the school year, in just enough time for a referral, IEP meeting, and placement, she was given an IEP

with a Learning Disability label and placed into 633. She regretted her earlier actions the second she

walked in and saw me, but I tried to be welcoming and forgiving. She sat quietly in class, ashamed of

being in “special ed.”

I came to understand that 633 was a big dumping ground for students who were unwanted, even

though it masqueraded as an inclusion setting. Michael, Kris, and Quamasia were just three of those

kids, joined by 35 other students with significant learning needs who were excluded from general

education classrooms because of disability, academic struggles, or behavior management needs. 633

was not diverse at all; in fact, it was a somewhat homogeneous group of struggling learners. In my

mind at the time, whatever benefits there were of educating students with disabilities alongside their

nondisabled peers, they were far outweighed by the challenges associated with having so many needs

in one place. Moreover, whatever advantages came with having two teachers in a class were outweighed

by the demands of not having time or resources to plan collaboratively. While I personally got along

with my co-teachers, they were weak classroom managers, which put me in the position of perennial

disciplinarian.

That was how I came to misunderstand inclusion. It did not make sense to me to lump all students with

significant—and often conflicting—learning needs together in one place. I became the disciplinarian,

and my co-teachers delivered content in an endless “one-teach, one-assist” arrangement. Nevertheless,

there were a few successful aspects of this arrangement. I was able to work closely with students,

building relationships with them and their parents; I believe I got to know the students of 633 better

than any other group I encountered over the course of my career. I still keep in touch with Quamasia

and Kris, almost 10 years later. Additionally, the arrangement was successful in the sense that it met

the administration’s most immediate demands: I was able to control 38 of the school’s most disruptive

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students at one time. When I got sick, though, I would have the security guards in the building tell me

that I was not allowed to take days off, as my students literally could not even be kept in the classroom

when I was not there. I felt that I could do better on my own.

At the end of my second year of teaching the group, I wrote my master’s degree thesis, which ended up

being an indictment of CTT and, by association, of inclusion. It seemed that the promise of inclusive

methodologies was entirely undermined by poor implementation of the critical features that would

enable inclusion to be successful: purposeful pairing of co-teachers, time for co-planning, thoughtful

selection of the general education students who would be in the class, and most significantly, a shared

and clearly articulated vision of what inclusion should actually look like. As my wife and I moved to

a new home across the city, I needed to find a new job. One of my main criteria was that I would not

have to work in a CTT setting. I ended up finding a school that did not have an inclusion program to

speak of. However, that school would prove to be an even bigger problem for me.

Convenient Segregation and the Self-Contained Model

Through a friend of a friend, I easily got an interview at a small high school with 300 students in the

Bronx. The school consistently scored at the highest levels on both New York State and New York

City accountability measures, based on its high pass rates for standardized exams.3 When I interviewed

there, I was told that they did not have any CTT programs and that students with disabilities were

mostly placed in a self-contained setting made up of one teacher, one paraprofessional, and 15

students identified as having “moderate to severe” disabilities. A small number of other students with

IEPs received special education teacher support services (SETSS) in their general education classes,

probably because those students approximated what the school considered to be normal. I strongly

preferred self-contained settings, as I enjoyed working by myself: there were no conflicts with another

teacher regarding classroom management style, no need to find time to plan how to collaborate, and

most crucially, a much smaller class size.

I was assigned to work with a tenth-grade class, teaching algebra, global history, and foreign languages—

one semester of French, one of Japanese. I was told that there would be opportunities for me to take

on a leadership role as well, even though I was only in my third year of teaching. I was also told that

the students were a bit wild and needed a teacher with strong classroom management skills to keep the

3 It is worth noting that while many students passed the exams, very few scored very high. Accountability metrics at that time tracked only pass rates, not overall scores.

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class in control. The administration was seemingly happy to hire a male with a military background to

that end.

What I was not told was that during the previous year, the students’ behavior had led their ninth-grade

teacher to quit after a few months and driven the long-term substitute to have an emotional breakdown;

she was, stories said, taken away from the school in an ambulance. This created the opening of the

position I was hired for. Given their past successes at disruption, this group of kids was emboldened to

resist my control and was in truth difficult to manage. The administration also added an English class

to my teaching load and appointed me as the transition coordinator. My supervisor, Ms. Santana, was

a brand new assistant principal. She was charged with managing everything related to special education

and oversaw all aspects of my work, most notably lesson planning and writing IEPs.

My class had its share of students who displayed distinctly troubling behaviors, but there were also a

few who were curious and eager to comply. Emily was a 15-year-old Black girl with an obvious physical

disability. She was overweight, walked with a limp, and had one immobile eye. Additionally, she wore

long sleeves and pants to cover up a skin condition, even in hot weather. Yet, she, too, was labeled as

having a learning disability. She was a dream to teach: she was curious, funny, and very supportive of

her peers’ academic and social needs. In many ways, she acted as the mother of the class. At Emily’s

IEP meeting, there was the suggestion of moving her to a general education class and providing her

with SETSS there. However, she did not want to do that. “As bad as things are here,” she said, “those

teachers don’t have the time to take care of the students who need help. I’d rather be in here.”

Barry was a 15-year-old Black boy of unremarkable height and build who had a perpetual smile on his

face and seemed kind. He was classified as having a learning disability, but the scores that the school

psychologist computed for him qualified him for a Mental Retardation label.4 He was unable to read

or write independently, but he liked sitting with his friend Juan, a thin, light-skinned boy, born in the

Dominican Republic. Juan often associated with the few notorious gang members in the school and

was frequently involved in fights in and outside of school.

Barry increasingly became a pawn in the scheming of Juan and his associates, taking orders from him

to pick fights with suspected members of rival gangs and destroy school property, so Santana decided

that it was time for Barry to transfer to a more restrictive setting. Once a placement was secured for

4 The disability category “mental retardation” was renamed “intellectual disability” in 2010 by PL 111-256, also known as “Rosa’s Law.” At the time of this story, the term mental retardation was still in use.

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Barry in a special school—which was in a more distant neighborhood that was not easily accessible by

public transportation from his house—it was put on me to convince his grandmother to approve the

move. When the grandmother resisted by not showing up at several arranged meetings, Santana and

her secretary began to phone her every day, until she eventually signed the papers.

Santana and I also began to bump heads. It started on Veteran’s Day, when others were thanking me

for my service—a popular expression of gratitude that I, like many other veterans, neither enjoy nor

welcome (Richtel, 2015). She told me that I was culpable for the deaths of innocent civilians just

because I had participated in the war. I did not control my reaction to her suggestion well, barking

aggressively back at her in front of a few other teachers in the department. From that point on,

she targeted me with unannounced observations, gave me poor ratings, and directly threatened my

career. I struggled to keep my composure, often drinking too much at the bar after school hours, and

my teaching and professionalism distinctly suffered. I was unable to keep up with a workload that

was probably unmanageable in the first place. My teaching performance deteriorated and I failed to

complete paperwork on time, which made Santana even angrier with me. One of my colleagues told

me she encouraged two ninth-grade boys to fill up paper bags with air and pop them behind me,

causing me to startle. I felt more disabled during that year than at any other point since coming home.

I complained to Principal Bullock about Santana, but he did not want to interfere. “I just want you

guys to work together and deal with those kids, so I can worry about the ones who are going to college,”

he said. He pointed at his bookshelf, full of Department of Education manuals, saying that he had

his plate full. Driven by accountability measures calculated from test scores, Bullock explained that his

vision was to create a true prep school that would send poor Bronx kids to his own Ivy League alma

mater; it was clear that my students were not part of his vision. In fact, I do not believe that he even

expected my students to graduate. On the contrary, I think the school was required to take a number

of students with disabilities and just needed a place to store them. Receiving no support from him at

the end of the year, I found work teaching elsewhere.

With Bullock and Santana at the helm, the school was successful in achieving its goals: to segregate

those kids so that they were out of the way of students who were deemed to be more capable. As a

result, the standardized test score pass rates for the school flourished, and at one point the school

was ranked among the top ten highest-achieving schools in the city. Yet, few students with IEPs ever

graduated from the school, and when they did it was because their parents fought for them to transfer

to alternative programs wherein special education did not exist.

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In 2012, Mayor Bloomberg initiated special education reforms that were targeted at placing students

with disabilities in less restrictive environments (Wheaton, 2011). On the face of it, this would seem

to be a systematic move toward inclusion. However, if we conceive of inclusion as a “principle of

practice” (Kozleski, Yu, Satter, Francis, & Haines, 2015) instead of as a concrete set of implementable

models, it is tough to maintain such an optimistic stance toward those reforms; in reality, the result was

that decisions about the placement of students with disabilities were entirely in the hands of education

professionals whose primary concerns were compliance and accountability, not accommodating

student needs. Moreover, many parents and educators understood that the impetus for this reform

was to cut costs (Wheaton, 2011). Indeed, the common practice of hiring alternatively certified special

education teachers at the bottom of collectively negotiated pay scales is probably similarly driven by

the desire to lower the cost of staffing fields with high turnover.

Systematic Exclusion

Connor and Ferri (2007) described how special education settings are used as a way to keep the peace

through removing students that overextended educators fear to be disorderly or disruptive. There is

little doubt that both of my former schools employed this rationale for exclusion, and that it enabled

them to achieve their desired ends. Thus, in these schools, “special education literally [became] a way

to ‘keep the peace’ by removing students who might disrupt the status quo of the general education

classroom” (Connor & Ferri, 2007, p. 69). In this sense, Hockenbury, Kauffman, and Hallahan’s

(2000) claim that special education is “already in most aspects well enough integrated as a sub-system”

(p. 5) seems analogous to arguments made in the late-19th and early-20th century for “separate but

equal” racial segregation. Some may consider the comparison to be a bit hyperbolic; however, Ferri

and Connor (2005) have convincingly demonstrated how the special education apparatus has in fact

contributed to resegregation since the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education in

1954. Moreover, I seriously doubt that any of my former students would agree that they were “well

enough integrated” into the fabric of school life.

Furthermore, when Mayor Bloomberg and his education chancellors instituted changes in compliance

with the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), what Danforth (2014) called “technocracy”

became the lingua franca of the entire New York City school system, including its separate and unequal

special education sub-system. Under this technocratic regime

The complexities, vagaries, and inconsistencies of everyday life are distilled into fields of

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metric regularity and schemes of statistical determination. In this view, technocracy is a mental

state, a way of thinking about, organizing, and interpreting the world that yields mechanized

symmetry, predictability, and efficiency. What most teachers would describe in terms of human

interaction and relationships is recast as a series of calculus problems. (Danforth, 2014, pp.

313–314)

There can be little doubt that this quantification of students drove Principal Bullock’s triage of my

students into the hands of the abusive and inexperienced Assistant Principal Santana and her similarly

inexperienced staff (myself included). In his quest to improve the statistical measures of student

learning, Bullock saw to it that those whose performance would not yield the desired results were

marginalized by technocratic management. It would be nice to believe that this was an isolated case

(and perhaps the more extreme aspects of it were), but I would contend that the proliferation of

technocracy is likely to be a general feature of post-NCLB American education and underlie the

marginalization of students with disabilities in a range of settings.

Tied to this phenomenon is the proliferation of so-called evidence-based practices, or instructional

methods that purport to be scientifically validated. Gallagher (2010) convincingly argued that through

dubious applications of statistical research methods in education, this paradigm contributes to the

further marginalization of students who are already conceived of as being “abnormal.” All of this

helps create a broad system of exclusion, which Slee (2011) describes as “scraps from the table for

children who, when all is said and done, are sometimes tolerated but never welcome” (p. 43). This

would surely resonate with my former students, as it resonates with me and my experiences.

My own Paradigm Shift – Inclusion as Social Justice

My understanding of inclusion has changed from a fundamentally technical definition to a much broader

and abstract understanding. Critical to this has been a shift from accepting a primarily legal definition

and rationale for inclusion, such as compliance with the least restrictive environment requirements of

the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, to a moral and ethical rationale based on the civil rights

of children with disabilities to not be segregated. The work of disability studies in education (DSE)

scholars, especially David Connor, has been crucial in changing my perspective in this way. I first met

Dr. Connor when I was seeking admission into my current doctoral program, and I remember him

explaining DSE as an alternative to the field of special education. I was confused at first, I must admit,

because I had never heard the professional, medical, and legal underpinnings of special education

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questioned. I now realize, having worked with and learned from him, that desegregation of special

education is not just a matter of compliance with the mandate of implementing accommodations

“to the maximum extent possible” or even “with all deliberate speed”; it is a moral imperative to

destigmatize disability in our schools.

Broadly, inclusion has been conceived as a way of meeting the learning needs of students with

disabilities alongside their non-disabled peers and as a way of meeting the needs of all students by

focusing pedagogical energies on the most marginalized students, with varying degrees of emphasis

on disability-specific issues (Kiuppis & Hausstätter, 2015). For my purposes, the distinctions between

groups for whom inclusion is done do not matter very much; on the contrary, I think inclusion can be

best understood in opposition to the systematic “scraps from the table” exclusion that I witnessed and

experienced as a teacher.

To this end, teacher education in inclusive practices must be grounded in a commitment to equity and

acceptance of diversity first. This needs to be articulated in a vision for inclusivity that goes beyond

technocratic notions of achievement; indeed, what I had missed in my training was the “why” of

inclusion. Without that context, it was much easier for me and for those around me to accept the

convenience of segregation. Much can and should be learned from teacher education programs that

emphasize inclusive practice, notably at Syracuse University (Ashby, 2012). In my work as a teacher

educator, I teach many of the very same technical foundations of inclusive practice that I once was

taught: collaborative co-teaching, differentiation, assessment, and classroom management. However,

though I finished my initial teacher training, my understanding was that those technical skills were to

be used specifically to teach students with disabilities or perhaps could be stretched into benefitting

“at risk” students; now I focus on framing those technical skills in a context of equity and civil

rights for individuals with disabilities. Moreover, I seek to teach a more comprehensive but abstract

concept of inclusion in order to convey that those skills need to benefit all students, from those who

are profoundly disadvantaged by prevailing pedagogical models to those who are already the most

successful in general education settings. Finally, by drawing attention to questions of who has access to

those so-called inclusion spaces, I ask my students to be critical about whether the structures that they

see in their fieldwork or in their schools are truly inclusive.

In addition to reframing inclusionary practices as pedagogy for equity, new models for inclusion need

to come into practice, particularly in urban school districts, wherein disability, race, and socioeconomic

status overlap profoundly. Slee’s (2011) claim that theories of inclusive education are too often technical

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prescriptions noted, there remains a need for practical suggestions for that can be put into practice,

given the frequent inadequacy of existing structures in these places. This problem is particularly

acute for secondary schools, as many models for inclusive practice are based on early childhood and

elementary settings (Beckman & Odom, 2002; Cross, Traub, Hutter-Pishgahi, & Shelton, 2004). In

the broader context of inclusive education, the design of structures for inclusive practice requires

some capacity for local flexibility in finding ways to address the non-negotiables, including meaningful

collaboration, accommodation for student needs, and purposeful assessment, given the real world-

fiscal and personnel problems that urban school districts face.

Finally, I am finding that working toward inclusion means coming to terms with my own disability.

I understand my own disability and relationship with society differently now. My years of teaching

changed my awareness of segregation and disability in profound ways, not least of all because the way

that I was treated when my disability came to light and paralleled how the students I worked with were

treated. For me, my “symptoms” are connected not merely to “triggers” in a direct causal relationship

but also, in complex and dynamic ways, to the broad contexts in which I work and live in complex and

intersecting ways. My awareness of how my own medical condition turned into something that was

genuinely disabling also emerged. The ecological factors that I experienced that affected the expression

of my own difference separated me from my peers, in much the same way that ecological factors

affect the academic and behavioral performance of students with perceived disabilities in segregated

classrooms. Michael, Kris, Quamasia, Emilie, Juan, and Barry’s exclusion therefore should never be

justified on the grounds that they were less “able” than others. Rather, their disabilities need to be

viewed in the context of an exclusionary system that makes whatever unique characteristics that were

intrinsic to them truly disabling.

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References

Ashby, C. (2012). Disability studies and inclusive teacher preparation: A socially just path for

teacher education. Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities, 37(2), 89.

Beckman, P. J., & Odom, S. L. (2002). Widening the circle: Including children with disabilities

in preschool programs (Vol. 83). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Connor, D. J., & Ferri, B. A. (2007). The conflict within: Resistance to inclusion and other

paradoxes in special education. Disability & Society, 22(1), 63–77.

Cross, A. F., Traub, E. K., Hutter-Pishgahi, L., & Shelton, G. (2004). Elements of successful

inclusion for children with significant disabilities. Topics in Early Childhood Special

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Ferri, B. A., & Connor, D. J. (2005). In the shadow of Brown: Special education and

overrepresentation of students of color. Remedial and Special Education, 26(2), 93–100.

Gallagher, D. (2010). Educational researchers and the making of normal people. In C.

Dudley- Marling & A. Gurn (Eds.), The myth of the normal curve (pp. 25–38). New York,

NY: Peter Lang.

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Education. Exceptionality, 8(1), 3–11. http://doi.org/10.1207/S15327035EX0801_2

Kiuppis, F., & Hausstätter, R. (2015). Inclusive education for all, and especially for some? On

different interpretations of who and what the “Salamanca Process” concerns. In F. Kiuppis

& R. Hausstätter (Eds.), Inclusive education twenty years after Salamanca (pp. 1–6).

New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Kozleski, E. B., Yu, T., Satter, A. L., Francis, G. L., & Haines, S. J. (2015). A never ending journey:

Inclusive education is a principle of practice, not an end game. Research and Practice

for Persons with Severe Disabilities, 40(3), 211–226.

Richtel, M. (2015, February 21). Please don’t thank me for my service. The New York Times.

Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/sunday-review/please-dont-thank-

me-for-my-service.html

Slee, R. (2011). The irregular school: Exclusion, schooling and inclusive education. New York,

NY: Routledge.

Wheaton, P. (2011, December 6). Walcott okays roll-out of special ed reform [Web blog post].

Retrieved from http://insideschools.org/blog/item/1000178-walcott-okays-roll-out-

of-special-ed-reform

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Louis Olander is a doctoral student in the Urban Education program at the

City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, and teaches graduate

and undergraduate students about inclusive education in the Special Educa-

tion department at Hunter College. His research interests are universal design,

appreciative inquiry, and decolonizing educational research. Olander previous-

ly taught special education in New York City. He lives in Yonkers with his wife

and two kids.

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