Diane Smith, Harvard University, Graduate School of Education

Special needs education

My experience working with the Boston Public Schools’ Unified Student Services (USS) has been invaluable to me because I was able to observe and understand what it takes to ensure that students with disabilities get a quality education. I learned strategies for working with others who have at heart the best interests for special education students. As a result of my internship, I was able to sharpen my dissertation research goal.  I now plan to do case studies of schools that have special education students who are performing well in English Language Arts by examining the school’s organizational structure and instructional practices. 

One of the aspects of the internship that I most treasured was attending the Institute’s weekly seminars. I would recommend to future fellows to attend all seminars because they will be able to share their knowledge with other fellows and learn about other valuable topics that effect government and society.

I am providing the Boston Public Schools with a document compiling data about the performance of students with disabilities in 2005. It will enumerate how each school performed on the MCAS, how close each school is to the state requirements in Math, ELA, attendance, and participation in the MCAS for general and special education populations. It will also detail how many students in each school took the alternative MCAS assessment.  Finally it will list which schools are in an improvement, corrective or restructuring status.  I believe such information has not been captured in a single document previously.