David Osher

Youth with Disabilities in Juvenile Corrections: A National Survey

Improving our knowledge of the number of incarcerated youth with disabilities can assist educators, other professionals, and policymakers to develop more effective services for youth. This article reports the findings of a national survey conducted to determine the number of youth identified as having disabilities in the juvenile corrections systems in the United States. The data show that, when compared to the national average, there is an overrepresentation of students identified as having disabilities, especially emotional disturbance, in those systems.

How Can We Improve School Discipline

School discipline addresses schoolwide, classroom, and individual student needs through broad prevention, targeted intervention, and development of self-discipline. Schools often respond to disruptive students with exclusionary and punitive approaches that have limited value. This article surveys three approaches to improving school discipline practices and student behavior: ecological approaches to classroom management; schoolwide positive behavioral supports; and social and emotional learning. The article examines their epistemological and empirical roots and supporting research, suggesting ways to combine approaches.

Justifying and Explaining Disproportionality 1968—2008: A Critique of Underlying Views of Culture

Special education has made considerable advances in research, policy, and practice in its short history. However, students from historically underserved groups continue to be disproportionately identified as requiring special education. Support for color-blind practices and policies can justify racial disproportionality in special education and signal a retrenchment to deficit views about students from historically underserved groups. We respond to these emerging concerns through an analysis of arguments that justify disproportionality. We also identify explanations of the problem and critique the views of culture that underlie these explanations. We conclude with a brief discussion of implications and future directions.

The Paradigm Shift to True Collaboration with Families

Target four of the National Agenda for Achieving Better Outcomes for Children and Youth with Serious Emotional Disturbance focuses on collaborating with families to improve service delivery and results for their children. Moving toward this goal has necessitated the continuation of a paradigm shift that brought out this target as an important one in the first place, and that has highlighted the difference between family-focused and family-driven approaches. We discuss the history of the paradigm shift, the progress that has been made toward this goal of making families full collaborative partners in the care of their children, the elements and examples of effective systems of care, and the distance still to traverse toward fully realizing the goal of this strategic target.

Warning Signs of Problems in Schools: Ecological Perspectives and Effective Practices for Combating School Aggression and Violence.

SUMMARY One need not look hard to find evidence of concern related to the nature of student behavior in our schools. School violence, aggression, bullying, and harassment (e.g., racial or sexual) are often cited as challenging behaviors confronting educators and community leaders. Unfortunately, most schools address these concerns with aversive consequences delivered to individual perpetrators in a hope of reducing the future probability of undesired behavior. A growing body of literature identifies the need to explore the social context of behavior. The community, school, classroom, family, and peer group interact with student characteristics to help prevent, support the development of, and even exacerbate the display of both desired and undesired behavior. This article applies the logic of warning signs and functional behavioral assessment to schools as it explores the social context of the school and the classroom. The school-wide and classroom-based factors that have been associated with or found to support problem behaviors are discussed. Information is provided that will allow educators to assess their own schools and classrooms in an effort to promote a climate that will aid in the prevention of violence and aggression.

Creating Comprehensive and Collaborative Systems

To improve outcomes for children and youth with serious emotional disturbance and their families, we need to create comprehensive and collaborative systems to promote systems change resulting in the development of coherent services built around their individual needs. These services should be family-centered, community-based, and appropriately funded. Unfortunately, barriers to understanding and operationalizing this level of collaboration persist, which challenges the aims of parents, practitioners, policy makers, and others to provide efficient and effective services to these students. I explore the seventh strategic target of the National Agenda for Achieving Better Results for Children and Youth with Serious Emotional Disturbance; provide examples of collaboration that relate to the National Agendas other six strategic targets; and briefly discuss the present opportunities for and challenges to collaboration.

Policies Matter: For Students, for Teachers, and for Better Outcomes.

Abstract Policies mandate or prohibit behavior, reward, sanction, legitimizes and provide inducements for particular behaviors; transfer resources to enable particular types of activities; and define or transfer authority. Although administrative decentralization and poor enforcement barriers can limit the impact of policies, policies constrain school and teacher practice. This article elaborates upon current policy debates and discusses translating policy into practice. The article introduces Preventing School Failures issue and employs 3 policy issues that affect students with emotional and behavioral disorders to introduce policy analysis, identify policy issues affecting schools, describe the policy environment in which these issues are nested, and explore the impact that policies have on practice: the IDEA and its reauthorization, discipline and zero tolerance, and state and national standards based accountability.

The Integration of Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports and Social and Emotional Learning

This chapter provides an overview of two commonly-used frameworks for prevention, Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) and Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), which share the common aim of promoting a safe, supportive, and challenging school environment. We summarize the two frameworks and the evidence-base supporting them. We also describe a process and a rationale for integrating PBIS and SEL, in an effort to increase efficiency and high quality implementation. We conclude with an overview of additional research needed to demonstrate the effectiveness of an integrated approach.

Building School and Teacher Capacity to Eliminate the School-to-Prison Pipeline

The school-to-prison pipeline (STPP)—disproportionately impacting students of color— involves a set of interactions between and among children, youth, their families, school personnel, other service providers, and gatekeepers to such outcomes as incarceration or college. Educators can, through their interactions with and expectations for students, contribute significantly to negative outcomes or lead the charge toward more positive outcomes. In this article, the authors first examine four factors that amplify the pipeline to prison, which if addressed effectively by educators can reduce it while creating alternative pathways to success. They then provide concrete suggestions for bolstering educator and school capacity to eliminate the STPP and implications for teacher preparation.

School Influences on Child and Youth Development

Schools play a key role in child and youth development as both social microcosms of the broader society and reciprocally influencing people and communities. As such, schools can function as a protective factor that promotes safety, motivation, relationships, and support for positive student outcomes. However, schools may also function as a risk factor with inflexible bureaucratic structures that employ harsh and exclusionary discipline that contributes to negative outcomes. This chapter discusses schools as a social institution by examining the student-, teacher-, and building-level predictors of academic and social and emotional success, as well as schools as a locus for preventive interventions.