Preparation of Minority Leadership Personnel:
Doctoral Program in Research-Validated Interventions

Cheryl Utley, Charles R. Greenwood of the Juniper Gardens Children's Project and
Paul L. Markham and Thomas M. Skrtic of the School of Education
University of Kansas

ABSTRACT (OSEP, DOE)

Entering the year 2003, the special education community in Kansas and the Nation are facing consequential challenges:

• Culturally and linguistically diverse students are over-represented in special education and under-represented in programs for the gifted (Artiles & Zamora-Duran, 1997; Losen & Orfield, 2003; National Research Council, 2002; Utley & Obiakor, 2000)
• Implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Amendments of 1997 (IDEA '97) that mandates that special educators receive special knowledge and skills in intervention research and positive behavioral support strategies, field experiences, and research internships in order to enhance the provision of appropriate educational programs and to design, implement, and evaluate research-validated interventions (President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education)
• Concerns that special education intervention research is more difficult to conduct and less frequently practiced (Gersten, Lloyd, & Baker, 1999)
• A shortage in minority, doctoral leaders (Gilmore, Marsh, & Garza, 1999)
• Limited bridging of the gap between research and the implementation of effective teaching practices in urban classroom settings (Abbott, Walton, Tapia, & Greenwood, 1999)

Thus, it is imperative that action be taken to improve the critical and severe shortage of minority research leaders through doctoral leadership training programs that teach current special education intervention research and classroom behavior management knowledge, methods, and skills that bridge the gap between research and practice to benefit culturally and linguistically diverse students with mild disabilities. One significant barrier is the low quality and intensity of current intervention research training in special education to doctoral training programs.

In this application, we address these problems by developing a new interdisciplinary doctoral leadership training program through the collaborative efforts of a nationally recognized urban, community-based research center - the Juniper Gardens Children's Project (JGCP) (Greenwood, 1999) and two academic departments, the Departments of Special Education and Teaching and Leadership, University of Kansas. This goal will be accomplished by maximizing the use of existing resources at the University of Kansas and federal resources to support minority doctoral students who enroll in this program and faculty efforts to develop and implement an interdisciplinary special education doctoral program.

The proposed project will provide doctoral participants with a new four-year interdisciplinary training program that draws its competencies from the knowledge and research bases of the JGCP and these Departments. This program will train a cadre of minority research leaders in intervention research knowledge and methods, positive behavior support strategies, and English-as-a Second Language (ESL) knowledge and methods used by general and special educators of culturally and linguistically diverse students with mild disabilities. This collaboration will enable the translation of recent research-based findings at JGCP, theoretically and practically, integrating them with the current pedagogical knowledge and competencies to be reflected in this new doctoral leadership program. The objectives of the proposed interdisciplinary doctoral leadership project are:

Objective 1: To recruit minority general and special educators and provide them with a high quality interdisciplinary special education doctoral program focused on intervention research specifically tailored to culturally and linguistically diverse students with and without mild disabilities.

Objective 2: To develop new courses, to infuse multicultural/bilingual knowledge and skill components into existing doctoral special education coursework, and to provide research internships and field experiences for minority doctoral students so that they may acquire and apply research skills as well as implement research-validated interventions in urban classroom settings.

Objective 3: To evaluate knowledge and skill components, student competencies, and program outcomes of an interdisciplinary special education doctoral program focused on the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the pending reauthorization of IDEA 1997 requirements, multicultural/bilingual education coursework, research internships, field-experiences, and research-validated interventions.

Objective 4: To prepare minority general and special educators as doctoral-level leadership personnel and researchers for professional positions in local and state education agencies and institutions of higher education.