Somewhere in your district, there is a teacher doing everything right for students with disabilities. She differentiates her lessons, works closely with her co-teacher and gets results that are genuinely hard to argue with. None of what she does is expected of anyone else in the building.
That inclusion system is a bright spot in your district—but unfortunately, bright spots do not scale on their own.
Tiffany Galloway knows this well. She has spent nearly 20 years watching the divide grow between effective teachers and the systems intended to support them, even in districts that genuinely want to close it. As the Chief Partnerships and Program Officer at Blue Engine, she brings nearly two decades of experience across teaching, coaching and central office roles (including leading inclusion across all 118 DC Public Schools). Through this work, she has seen what it actually takes to scale these results.
Aisha Chappell, VP of Program Implementation at Blue Engine, has spent her career helping schools and districts translate effective practices into lasting change across classrooms, teams, and systems.
Why good programs keep failing
On every HGTV renovation show, the most dramatic moment happens when the host pulls back the drywall and finds the real problem. The homeowners wanted new countertops. Turns out there's water damage behind every wall in the kitchen. The surface looked functional, but oh boy, the structure was not.
Most districts are that kitchen. The Special Education team is doing the SPED work. The EL coordinator is doing the EL work. The curriculum team is selecting materials. Pull back the drywall, and none of those efforts connect to each other. Tiffany and Aisha's clearest picture of a misaligned district is one where everybody cares and the work doesn't land in the same place. Curriculum teams choose instructional materials without checking whether they work for students with IEPs. EL coordinators build language supports that don't map to what teachers are currently teaching. Gen ed teachers, who now have the majority of students with disabilities in their rooms, receive almost no preparation for reaching them.
Just 17% of gen ed teachers report feeling very well prepared to teach students with learning disabilities. Only 24% of K–12 teachers have received any EL-focused professional development. More than 80% of students with disabilities now spend most of their school day in general education classrooms, a share that has more than doubled over the last 35 years.
The preparation gap and the placement reality are moving in opposite directions, indicating a serious systems problem, not a classroom one.