Journal of Undergraduate Research
Volume 2, Issue 3 - December 2000

Parental Satisfaction with Special Education

Jamie Childs

INTRODUCTION

Until the 1970's children with special needs received little or no education because of the common belief that people with disabilities were uneducable (Winzer, 1993). Those who did receive education were usually institutionalized, stared school at late ages, and were taught by untrained teachers. In the 1970's children with special needs began to be integrated into regular classrooms. The Supreme Court provided a legal basis for this "mainstreaming" with Brown v. Board of Education by concluding that separate education was not equal, and with Mills v. Board of Education by mandating special services to all children with disabilities. The most influential federal legislation passed was the Education For All Handicapped Children Act (PL-94-14). Passed in 1975, this act established six basic principles for educating children with special needs: universal education, least restrictive environment, nondiscriminatory evaluation, individualized education program, due process, and parental participation. This act has been modified twice and is now called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). IDEA mandated an "appropriate" education and has improved some aspects of schooling for special needs students. However, few systematic studies have been conducted to date that examine the effectiveness of special education programs.

The lack of research on outcomes of special education programs coincides with an increasing emphasis on accountability in public education. Accountability in education has recently led to significant changes in curriculum and assessment. The focus on accountability has also prompted concerns -- both within and external to the educational system -- about "consumer satisfaction." Parental satisfaction with education has played a central role in this debate because parents act as consumers of education through their children. Unfortunately, our understanding of parental perception of educational programs is limited. Although previous studies have examined several aspects of parental interaction with public school systems, such as parental involvement in educational processed (Hoover-Dempsey, Bassler, and Brissie, 1992) and parental perceptions of empowerment (Birenbaum-Carmeli, 1998), few studies have focused specifically on the social and educational factors that influence levels of parental satisfaction with the educational arrangements of their children.

The investigation conducted by Griffith (1996) represents a notable exception to this trend. In the most comprehensive study of educational satisfaction to date, Griffith (1996) found that school climate was the single greatest factor in educational satisfaction. Parents who felt informed were also more likely to express satisfaction with their children's education, while empowerment was a moderate predictor. Level of involvement was found to have a negative impact upon educational satisfaction.

While scant research exists on parental satisfaction with educational arrangements, even less has been done to explore the specific needs and concerns of parents with disabled children. Indeed, only a small fraction of funds allocated to educate children with disabilities is devoted to research on educational outcomes of these programs (Department of Education, 2000). The purpose of this research is to gather in-depth information about parental perceptions of educational arrangements of children with special needs. Since special education serves a wide spectrum of children, the focus of this study will be limited to parents of children with Down Syndrome (DS).

METHODS AND DATA

Data was gathered from participation using semi-structured in-depth interviews. The in-depth interview will consist of questions that measure parental satisfaction with their child's educational program, characteristics of the program, parental knowledge of and involvement in their child's school, and school climate. The participants also provided basic social and demographic information about herself and her children.

The participants were gathered using a snowball sampling technique of families in the Gainesville are who have school aged (5+) children with Down Syndrome who are receiving public educational services. The respondents varied in age from 35 to 42, were all working married females with at least some college education, and identified themselves as non-Hispanic whites. The ages of the children with Down Syndrome ranged from 7-13. Three of the children had other health impairments.

RESULTS

Transcripts from the interviews were analyzed for emergent themes to gauge the level of satisfaction of each of the respondents and determine which dimensions of educational arrangement affected satisfaction among parents of children with DS. The specific dimensions of educational arrangements measured in this study paralleled those examined by Griffith (1996): parental empowerment, parental involvement, communication, and school climate. The transcripts also illustrated the importance of an additional dimension, educational expectation of special needs students, in determining educational satisfaction among parents of children with DS.

The level of educational satisfaction varied with each of the five participants. Nick's Mother Jenny (all names are fictitious) represented the satisfied end of the continuum: "I can't say there is anything I dislike at this point. I am really pretty satisfied with it". Sara's Mother Maria, voiced a less satisfied viewpoint: "They certainly could do more than what they do. They just don't seem, they get caught up in their little procedures, or their money, or this and their that. They don't seem to be able to blow all that by and look at what is best for kids". Jon's Mother Patty who was happy overall with her son's education due to full empowerment, but did not consider herself satisfied because she felt the school could have done more with her son's education. "They are not up in the 8, 9,10 because it was hard to get curriculum adaptation, it was hard to get things that would have made it really, really perfect."

Parental empowerment played an important role in educational satisfaction among the parents in the study. Empowerment questions focused on how much autonomy parents had in educational decision making. Two dimensions of empowerment influenced educational satisfaction: (1) openness of the school, and (2) struggle with institutional obstacles. One satisfied parent reflected "it was 100% our decisions" when expressing her feelings of empowerment. Less satisfied parents such as Maria responded with "I would say they have an agenda and they lay out the agenda and then we tell them our agenda and then we usually come to agreement in the middle". Danielle, Ben's Mother, an unsatisfied parent, felt her level of input might improve due to a new open-minded principal: "This principal... I go the sense that she totally listens to us. I think she also respected us".

Each participant had encountered institutional obstacles and was forced to struggle to get the educational resources their child needed. Maria tells of an experience at her last Individual Education Plan (IEP) and adds later "it is the people who scream the loudest and make the most noise that get more accommodation". Danielle echoes this struggle " I know I could get Ben in an individual class with his own aide if I were very selfish. If I chose not to work with the people at the school and I choose to take so much money away from the school just to focus on my child. I think I could legally get that, and that is how people do it."

The primary mode of involvement was serving as a classroom volunteer. The respondents had mixed feelings about this subject. The four respondents who did volunteer in their child's classroom enjoyed being able to gain more information about the classroom and teacher. Maria says she "got to know the other kids in the classroom" and "I got to know the teacher a little better". Both Ann, and Patty, had to stop volunteering in the classroom because it caused their children to misbehave. Both were less satisfied after they stopped volunteering because of the decline in first hand information. The most satisfied parent, Jenny, did no volunteering at the school.

Level of communication was gauged by how much contact the parents had with their child's teachers and other members of the school. Among special education parents, regular communication was an essential component of satisfaction. The respondents all had a unique way of communicating with the teacher and school which included a daily journal home to the parents, weekly e-mail, and daily conversation while dropping off and picking up students. Patty describes her level of satisfaction as dropping when communication decreased:

I wanted to take him to school every day because that is the way I could keep in contact... The whole last year, his whole 5th grade year he took the bus to school, and then went to the after-school program, so by the time I picked him up, teachers were gone… It was tough because I was used to seeing his teachers every day.

An important aspect of satisfaction that emerged during the interviews was not examined by Griffith (1996). Among the respondents there was a strong sense that schools and teachers had lower expectations than the parents did. Expectations may play a particularly important role in shaping perceptions of parents because some educators do not accurately gauge the ability of special needs children. Patty states "Oh, it takes them forever. Only by the time he is able to finish a school year the teacher is really gaining an appreciation of how much he can learn and how much he knows". Danielle conveyed a similar message "The third day, so she knew him two days, she told me 'do you know your son is ten months old cognitively'. I knew what his testing was it was four years something. In the end of the second year she said 'I don't think he is educable'... I said he has been tested and he is on the high end of educable". Maria summarizing these feelings declaring "I think we have more expectations, we have expectations that are kids are supposed to get a decent education".

DISCUSSION

The purpose of this study was to examine the extent of satisfaction expressed by dimensions of educational arrangement and school environment affected educational satisfaction among parents of children with DS. Parental empowerment in the form of openness to the parents' ideas was found to increase the level of educational satisfaction and have a strong effect on overall satisfaction. While the second dimension of empowerment, parental struggle to overcome institutional obstacles, had a strong but decreasing effect on educational satisfaction. This strong relationship between empowerment and satisfaction for special education parents is a slight contrast to Griffith who found empowerment to only be a moderate indicator of satisfaction among regular education parents. Similar to Griffith's findings, communication between the school and parent was found to be an essential component of satisfaction. However, parents in this study needed feedback on a weekly almost daily basis in order to feel satisfied. Griffith reported that parental involvement had a negative effect on educational satisfaction for regular education parents. In this investigation, parental involvement proved to have a mixed effect on satisfaction with some parents reporting an increase in satisfaction due to involvement while other parents' satisfaction was not linked to involvement. Yet none of the special needs parents reported a decline in satisfaction due to involvement. Although all of the respondents reported feeling comfortable at the school, school climate did not lead to their ultimate satisfaction. This finding stands in contrast to the results of Griffith's study which found school climate to play a central role in educational satisfaction.

Future research needs to examine the validity of the components of satisfaction that effect Down Syndrome parents. To due this researches need to collect data from a larger sample about the two dimensions of empowerment; openness and struggle, parental involvement, communication, school climate, and expectation. Once this data is analyzed researchers will be better able to determine which aspects of educational arrangements and school environment effect educational satisfaction. Policy makers will then be able to make well-informed decisions when dealing special education particularly parents of DS children. Policy makers should then try to reduce institutional barriers such as opposition during Individual Education Plans, raise expectations of special education students by educating teachers about their student's potential and give more autonomy to the parents when making decisions about their student's education. Implementing these policies will lead to an increase in educational satisfaction not only with special education programs but all educational arrangements.

REFERENCES

Birenbaum-Carmeli D. "Parents Who Get What They Want: On the Empowerment of the Powerful." Sociological Review 47(1) (1999): 62-90.

Department of Education United States of America. "OSERS IDEA '97-An Overview of the Bill to Provide a Broad Understanding of the Changes in IDEA '97." (2000) <http://www.ed.gov/offices/OSERS/IDEA/overview.html>.

Griffith, James. "Test of a Model of the Organizational Antecedents of Parent Involvement and Satisfaction with Public Education." Human Relations 49(12) (1996): 1549-1571.

Hoover-Dempsey, Kathleen V., Otto C. Bassler, and Jane S. Brissie. "Explorations in Parent-School Relations." Journal of Educational Research 85(5) (1992): 287-294.

Winzer, Margret A. The History of Special Education from Isolation to Integration. Washington D.C.:Galluddet University Press, 1993.

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