BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Public Consulting Group, Inc. (PCG) today released its new white paper, Getting to Effectiveness: The Special Education Transformation Approach, during the third New Jersey Special Education Annual Summit focused on teaching, learning, and leading in an inclusive world.

“Our focus in this paper is on how schools and districts can most productively build upon their compliance orientation to drive effectiveness and continuous improvement, using the three key drivers we have identified through our work: people, processes, and cultural mindset.”

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While mandated compliance indicators remain important, under the Results-Driven Accountability (RDA) framework, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) has sharpened its focus on what happens in the classroom to promote educational benefits and improve outcomes for students with disabilities. This shift, coupled with the Supreme Court’s recent Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District court ruling on the importance of establishing ambitious and challenging IEP goals, is significantly impacting special education.

PCG’s new white paper, co-authored by Dr. Jennifer Meller, Associate Manager, and Matthew Korobkin, Senior Advisor for Special Education Services, serves as a resource for schools and districts as they navigate these complex regulatory trends.

“Successfully rebalancing priorities requires time and intentional focus on the part of state departments of education and school districts, to reach an evolution that builds upon past practices and lays a foundation for future work,” said Dr. Meller. “Our focus in this paper is on how schools and districts can most productively build upon their compliance orientation to drive effectiveness and continuous improvement, using the three key drivers we have identified through our work: people, processes, and cultural mindset.”

“Based on our experiences working with schools and districts in New Jersey and thousands of others across the country, we believe the transformation of special education can be distilled into four distinct phases,” said Korobkin. “In our analysis, we hope to shed light on where school districts have been, where they are now, and where they need to be.”

In the white paper, the authors examine:

• Why the current landscape requires school districts to shift the focus of their special education programs from compliance to results
• How schools and districts can get to results-driven effectiveness by leveraging people, processes, and cultural mindset
• The four distinct phases involved in PCG’s Special Education Results-Driven Transformation Model: the paperwork phase, the efficiency phase, the compliance phase, and the effectiveness phase

The New Jersey Special Education Annual Summit, co-sponsored by PCG and the New Jersey Principals and Supervisors Association, is being held at the FEA Conference Center in Monroe Township, New Jersey on February 12, 2019. During this gathering of state leaders and national special education experts, participants will learn more about the key issues connected to the process of creating an inclusive educational setting, including: developing a climate and culture of shared responsibility; making the standards accessible to students at varying instructional levels; inclusive early childhood programs; person-centered planning; special education data-driven decision making; inclusion, leadership, and the law; and leading through multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS).

A free copy of the white paper can be downloaded here.

For more information about PCG’s New Jersey Special Education Annual Summit and sessions from the event, please visit www.njspecialedsummit.com. You can also follow along on social media using the hashtag #NJSpecialEdSummit.

About Public Consulting Group
Public Consulting Group, Inc. (PCG) is a leading public sector solutions implementation and operations improvement firm that partners with health, education, and human services agencies to improve lives. Founded in 1986 and headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, PCG has over 2,000 professionals in more than 50 offices around the US, in Canada and in Europe. PCG’s Education practice offers consulting services and technology solutions that help schools, school districts, and state education agencies/ministries of education to promote student success, improve programs and processes, and optimize financial resources. To learn more, visit http://www.publicconsultinggroup.com/education/.