Reinventing Schools Research Project: Collaborative Research Project on the Merger of General and Special Education School Reforms. Final Report--Executive Summary.

This final report describes the activities of the Reinventing Schools Research Project, a project that investigated how the inclusion of students with severe and other disabilities merges with larger efforts of educators, administrators, and parents to restructure and reform schools and how to influence the direction of that merger. The project conducted case studies of an elementary and middle school in a rural community to document how school personnel blend together the reform agendas for both general and special education, and validated a set of procedures for designing curriculum/teaching, ensuring student learning outcomes, and fostering student memberships for maximally diverse groups of learners, including learners with severe disabilities. The project findings suggest that in order to enlarge the concept of inclusion, as well as encourage durable change in the core of educational practice, schools need to (1) shift from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning; (2) shift from a reliance on individual teacher practice to group practices; and (3) shift from an effort to "deliver service" to one of "providing learner supports". Attachments include sample student, educator, and parent surveys and selected articles on inclusion. (Contains 53 references.) (CR)