The Measurement Gap in Six Minutes

Picture a budget meeting in March, someone asks why special education needs another speech language pathologist. Didn't we just get one last year? The director shares openly and candidly that her staff are stretched. Someone else says, "Will every department stretch?" And then the meeting moves on without a true resolution. And "we feel stretched" loses to a number. But she was not wrong. She just couldn't show it. And this lesson is about why and about what it costs the district when nobody can show with the data. I'm Eric Oxford. In 2020, for my doctoral research, I studied how 10 administrators in one Massachusetts district experienced inclusion. Five principals and five special education team chairpersons were compared based on their answers. Every one of them believed in it. They described inclusion with real conviction, of course the philosophy of inclusion is something we believe in. But every one of them described a district that could not fully deliver it. When I asked what was in the way of embracing that philosophy of inclusion, they didn't say it was the belief itself, they said capacity, support, training, resources. The barrier was capacity, not conviction. Now it's important to note that my doctoral research was 10 people in one district and I will not claim that it proves more than that. But it does point to something that every district can check. Since 1975, federal law has guaranteed students with disabilities a free appropriate public education. In the half century since, we've measured compliance with that promise in every exhaustive detail. Every IEP, every timeline, every signature compliance, compliance, compliance. But what we have almost never measured is whether the people delivering those services can do the work in the hours they are contracted to work. That is what capacity means in practice. Direct service, evaluations, IEP writing, meetings, travel, all of it, set against a contracted week. Workload against contracted time, provider by provider. Not measuring it is not free. In a study of 453 schools, speech language pathologists, how manageable the workload felt was the strongest predictor of their stress and burnout. But more and more research has continued to come out, especially as we look at a national teacher and provider shortage. Now that study was done during the pandemic in one profession, so hold it carefully. But it does point straight at the thing we do not track. When a teacher leaves a district unexpectedly, replacing them costs the district an estimated $12,000 to $25,000 depending on the size of the district. Those costs can include compensatory services that a district is obligated to provide to those students. It could include hiring, onboarding, advertising, you name it, all of those costs adding up in addition to the time that it takes the current employees of that district to spend on hiring rather than doing the work that they are set out to do, especially when we have these unexpected leaves. When a district runs out of capacity to serve a student, that student may be placed out of district where tuition runs from tens of thousands of dollars to well over $100,000 a year. In Massachusetts, where I was a special education director for about a decade, I would always share with my school committee, my superintendent, my colleagues that on average an out of district placement each year costs the district approximately $100,000 if we consider tuition plus transportation. Now we know that those costs are variable based on students' needs and different tuition numbers, transportation costs, but it's a really good nice round number to give an estimate that year after year, $100,000 per student per out of district can cost the district an exorbitant amount of money versus taking a more proactive and inclusive approach and looking at ensuring that we can build a culture of capacity within our own district so that we can not only support our staff in a more healthy, sustainable way, but at the end of the day, why are we here to support our students within their home community, within an inclusive setting? It's a win-win for our students when we're able to support them, provide them with the education that they deserve within their home community in an inclusive setting , and also save tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars every single year. Now there's always exceptions to the rules, we know that, and nothing's perfect with regard to when we think about things theoretically, right, in building programming and investing in our philosophy of inclusion, but I'm really confident that we can find more and more opportunities through data, through transparency, through that trust of looking at staff capacity to support our staff so that they can ultimately support our students in a way that we know that they want to as well. And none of those costs is labeled the workforce gap. They just show up as a turnover line, a contractor invoice or a tuition payment . You're already paying for the gap, you just never see the bill. So I offer two tools, the first is a capacity gap, it's a distance between your inclusive intent, which you document in great detail, and your workforce capacity, which you mostly do not measure. Most districts believe that they have an inclusion problem or a budget problem, but what they actually have is a measurement problem. The second is a sustainability maturity model, it has four stages. Compliant, aware, responsive, sustainable. Stage one, compliant. Plans are written and timelines are met and the capacity of the staff is invisible. Most districts live here. We look at compliance, we pulled our direct service numbers from our IEP platforms, from our staff schedules, and we as special education administrators, building principals, superintendents, may take a look at that with blinders on unintentionally and we say, wow, that direct service is the capacity that we need with regard to full-time employees, our staffing needs in our district, but what are we missing? It's that invisible work, it's that indirect work, our evaluations, our IEP meetings, writing progress notes, travel time, prep, planning, duty, collaborating with colleagues, collaborating with family members all that time that you can't pull from an IEP from that direct service grid that captures and encapsulates the entire workload of our special education, teachers, our service providers, and even many times our paraprofessionals and instructional assistants. Stage two, aware. Workload is measured, provider by provider, and the gap becomes visible for the first time we're looking at direct and indirect. Stage three, responsive. Training and budget decisions run on that measurement. And Stage four, sustainable. Capacity is managed all year, tied to student outcomes and placement decisions. Stage two is the gate. A district cannot manage what it has never measured. What this means in your role. If you're leading a district or a department, stop asking whether your staff believe in inclusion. We know that they do. Rather, I challenge you to ask whether you can see provider by provider, whether the work fits within their week. If you manage the budget, the gap is already in your number, spread across turnover, contracted services and tuition. I just wonder if you think about would we really need contracted service providers to provide direct services if we were really, if we really had our head on straight with regard to managing a fiscal, a fiscally responsible budget in a way that we are looking and capturing not only that direct service work, but we're also staffing, we're budgeting for that entire workload, that invisible work that all of our educators, especially within special education, manage every single day. Because measuring that full workload is what lets you see it as one cost and decide then what to do about it. If you're a teacher or provider, your sense that the week does not fit is information. It's information that we need to work on sharing transparently, collaboratively with our administrators so that they actually see not only your direct service caseload work, but that invisible, that entire workload that we know that you're doing every single day. Measuring workload is meant to protect the people doing the work, not to watch them, right? So this is not a surveillance tool. We really want to make sure that we are coming into the measuring of our full on workload with presuming positive intentions and really making sure that we're working collaboratively and that we are on the same team. We have a whole other course about trust and what that looks like through dimensions of trust, Rebecca Cann's work, through the trust framework and her dimensions of trust can really help leadership teams, educators and full on department wide teams to build and manage that trust in a way that's going to ensure ultimately sustainable workloads and supporting our students in the best way possible. Inclusion is delivered by people and people have a finite number of hours. We know that. If we want every student included, we have to be willing to measure, protect and keep the adults who make that possible, right? The ultimate goal for us as administrators is let's manage our staff. Let's make sure that they're living a professional life of sustainability of health because unfortunately we know that we cannot sustain what we cannot see. One question to take with you. Where would you place your district on the four stages today and what would you point to as evidence? The full edition of the white paper called the measurement gap is free on the observatory at PulseForEducation.com/observatory.