Educating All Students Together: How School Leaders Create Unified Systems

"A convincing conceptualization of schools as complex adaptive systems. The authors¿ recommendations that leaders must "tinker at the margins" and lead in the "zone of complexity" provide sound and practical advice for school leaders faced with creating unified educational systems that will be able to effectively support students with increasingly diverse learning needs."
David W. Peterson, Superintendent
Northern Suburban Special Education District
Highland Park, IL

"Far too long we have failed to acknowledge the large number of students relegated to parallel educational systems. This thought-provoking book provides an important first step in helping us surface the mental models we hold of the teaching and learning of diverse student populations."
Nelda Cambron-McCabe, Department of Educational Leadership
Miami University
Oxford, OH

"An insightful, informative, and thought-provoking book that deals with a topic that concerns every educator."
Kate Kinley, Director of Administrative Training and Staff Development
Clark County School District, NV

By focusing on student learning as the central goal of school administrators, Burrello, Lashley, and Beatty establish a plan for creating a truly integrated educational system, one that unifies the separate and parallel systems of special and general education.

The authors call for an end to the piecemeal strategy of including students one classroom, one grade level, or one school at a time. Instead, they demonstrate how administrators, school leaders, and the community must work together on decisions to implement personalized education plans, accountable curricular outcomes, and appropriate instructional adaptations.

Some of the key concepts include:

• Schools embracing special services personnel
• The roles of the community and other stakeholders
• Reconceptualizing schools based on learner-centered principles
• Program evaluation and incentives
• Brain and holographic design as a framework for complex adaptive systems
• Collaboration between school administrators and teachers
• Adapting curriculum and instruction

In this groundbreaking work of practical application, Burrello, Lashley, and Beatty demonstrate effective leadership strategies that will enable administrators to better manage the cultural imperative of equity and excellence for all students. They further support the plan for unified schools through case studies and a program evaluation of self-study guide. An essential resource for general and special educators, parents, and communities.

Leonard C. Burrello is Professor of Education and Chair of Educational Leadership Program and Executive Director of The Forum on Education at Indiana University. He is currently studying school improvement in rural schools within a distributive leadership framework and consulting with the Gates Initiative on Small Schools for the University of Indianapolis in the Indianapolis Public Schools.

With co-author Lauren Hoffman he completed at three organizational consultation project in Washtenaw County, Michigan where they helped create a new planning framework using the work of Robert Fritz. They are also working with the Illinois Cooperative Leadership project in Illinois to help build more learner-centered schools.

With Lynn Murray, his collaboration began in 1993 in a study of her leadership in a suburban district in Vermont and she has consulted with both authors helping to build a new organizational structure and planning process in a large urban Midwestern school district. He teaches courses on moral and distributive leadership, and organizational change at Indiana University.