Chapter 10: Research–Practice Partnership to Reform Special Education Service Delivery in Boston Public Schools

Historically, learners labeled with disabilities have been denied equal access to and opportunities in mainstream classrooms. Globally, the task of addressing marginalization entails two main approaches. Firstly, there is a need to prevent stigmatization, discrimination, and neglect. Secondly, efforts must be directed toward establishing structures and systems that enable complete and meaningful involvement within educational institutions and various sectors. Educational inequality is associated with various aspects of identity beyond disability status. Factors such as culture, language, race, and gender impact the classroom experiences of children. Consequently, schools must adopt an intersectional approach in their quest to deliver effective, accessible, and inclusive education to all children. Building from the work of UNESCO, we define inclusivity as a transformative process of educators ensuring that all children experience high-quality learning opportunities that respect and value multiple dimensions of diversity. This chapter describes an emerging research–practice partnership focused on organizational learning advancing inclusivity. The partnership is premised on supporting central office administrators and the school-based inclusion planning teams (IPTs) in a public school district implementing a comprehensive reform of their service delivery model for students labeled with disabilities. It involves supporting administrators in Boston Public Schools (BPS) in fine-tuning a theory of action (ToA), designing organizational learning processes to enact this ToA, and evaluating the efficacy of the initiative in advancing effective, inclusive education for students labeled with disabilities.