The focus of our Learning Futures collaborative, Project Oasis, is first
we, the main question we started with is what is the future of special
education? And the more we thought about how we wanted to frame this
question and narrow in a little bit where this question led us to was,
what is the optimal school system in which labeling students with
disabilities is not necessary and even a school system in which special
education is not necessary. And all of this to say we want all students,
no matter their abilities to be able to achieve their full potential. So
this question is in no way meant to undo any of the progress that's been
made over the past 50 years of special education in the United States, but
really to work with the community members, educators, leaders across
Arizona to be thinking about the future of special education and And what
needs to be done to serve all students. So my background is I started as a
preschool teacher, then I worked as a speech language pathologist in
Arizona public schools. So I worked in special education, worked with
students of all abilities um in Arizona public schools, and then I was
elected to be Arizona State Superintendent in 2018 and served one term the
past four years, leading Arizona's Department of Education, which was the
privilege of a lifetime. And through my work as state superintendent, I
had the privilege to tour schools all across Arizona and really learn
about the ins and outs of both the challenges and opportunities within our
school systems. So coming into my new role here at ASU and Mary Lou
Fulton's Teachers College, I am so excited to be refocused. Focusing on my
passion around special education and particularly serving students with
disabilities. This work is critically important, not just here in Arizona
, but nationally, internationally, from my work, having studied Arizona in
particular, knowing our strengths and weaknesses. The data is clear, our
students with disabilities are not achieving what their peers are
achieving and particularly looking at the staffing challenges for special
education, special education teachers, specialists like the speech
language pathologists or the school psychologists, we have staffing
shortages here locally and nationally that make it very challenging for
our students with disabilities who are in special ed to to have a high
quality education, even though the people working in the system are
working so hard and are so dedicated and passionate about serving their
students, we know that these shortages and even funding challenges
contribute to the ultimate outcomes, even the employment of people with
disabilities when they go on beyond our K-12 education system. So there
should be urgency around this work, but this is a system. That is very
slow to change, that there's a lot of compliance involved, a lot of
policies and laws in place that really make it hard for our school leaders
to, to change their special education systems, and that's why it's so
important for us to create this space with the Learning Futures
collaborative to bring people to the table together from diverse
perspectives, to be having these really important conversations about
where should the system be moving to. Truthfully, this is bigger than
special education, this is a very broad systems approach and we want it to
be informed by data and research as we go forward. I started in my new
role here at ASU about 6 months ago, and from the get-go, I knew that I
wanted to launch a new learning Futures collaborative to inform my work.
So as I started to talk to staff and faculty and doctoral students here in
the teacher's college, I knew it needed to be bigger than that and so I
started reaching out to community members, to nonprofit leaders, business
leaders, parents, people with disabilities, as students to make sure that
their voices are Also at the table as we think about these really big
questions. So I'm thrilled that today we have about 90 people who are part
of our Learning Futures collaborative, um, and that just speaks to the
importance of this work and it's really affirming to me to know that there
is such an interest in talking about the future of special ed and people
realize that the time for change is now and there is urgency around this
issue. It's very important to me that we're using data and research to
inform our decisions and partnership with our schools, especially to make
sure we're collaborating with with teachers and school leaders. So as we
start our first year of the LFC, I am excited that we're establishing
partnerships or even building on existing partnerships to be looking at
both qualitative and quantitative data to be informing. Our work and also
identifying the highest performing districts and schools around the state
on who, who is showing for their data that they have the highest student
growth within their population of students with disabilities because we
also want to be highlighting where is this work already happening and
already having success and what can we learn from that to then inform what
the future of special education should look like. I'm Cathy Hoffman, the
executive director for Innovation and Special Education initiatives, and
I'm proud to be one of the leaders of Project optimizing access for
students in schools.