Ilene Schwartz

Chair and Professor, Special Education
Interim Director, Experimental Education Unit

As part of an ongoing series, the College of Education is profiling its faculty members, asking each of them the same set of questions. This interview features Ilene Schwartz. Her research interests are in the area of early childhood special education. Specifically, she is interested in understanding what instructional strategies and environmental arrangements are most effective in facilitating the learning of young children with autism and related disabilities.

Q: What moved you to become a teacher/researcher?

A: When I was in high school, I had an opportunity to work with children in disabilities as part of a school psychology program and I really enjoyed doing that. Then in college, I worked with children with autism at the University of California-Santa Barbara. I worked with researchers and became interested in the pragmatic aspect of doing problem-driven research. I saw that barriers were presented to children because of behaviors or skills they could not demonstrate, and that when they could demonstrate those skills, the barriers often went away, and that sparked my interest.

Q: What teacher had the greatest impact on your life?

A: I had a high school teacher in World History and Russian when I was a senior named Mrs. Ellison. She was an incredible woman, escaping from Eastern Europe during the Second World War and coming to the United States. She taught us that education was the key to democracy and freedom, and that the goal of education was to ensure that everyone can access the benefits of society.

Q: If you could embark now on any adequately funded research project, what would it be?

A: It would be a continuation and broadening of what I’m doing now. I look at educational programs for children with autism, and we’re always dealing with funding issues. What I would do is demonstrate that we can implement high-quality, effective programs for children with autism in public schools. I would make sure that children can access those programs and make good progress regardless of how much money their parents make.

I would also like to be able to follow children and their parents throughout their school career and understand what effect having a child with autism has on the lives of families. I would find out what kinds of publicly funded services families need. For example, if they wanted their child to go to summer camp, what kind of summer camp should they be able to access? There should be publicly funded consultants that families can call for support, not just if they can pay for it.

Q: If you knew now that you could write only one more book/article in your career, what would the title be?

A: The title would be something like, Defining Evidence the Old Fashioned Way, One Child at a Time. It would argue against the view the government holds that randomized control group studies are the only way to define truth. It would explain that we need to make sure that when we think about inclusiveness and diversity, that we include people with disabilities and people with different levels of abilities. When we say all, we have to mean all, not just those who fit into a certain mold.

Q: What qualities do you most admire in your professional colleagues?

A: I admire people who are smart. I admire people who have a good sense of humor. And I admire people who have good say/do correspondence — that means that they do what they say they’re going to do, and they’re honest. Those are the three things that I look at the most.

Q: What books should be read by all who would become teachers?

A: I think teachers should read a book called Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children by Betty Hart and Todd Risley. It describes a research study that followed children in 42 families from the time they were 3 months old to 3 years old. Everything that was said to the children during a series of monthly visits was taped, as well as what the children said. The families were split into three groups - families on welfare, middle class families, and families whose parents were professors. The study found that children heard an incredibly different amount of language, and as a result, children developed incredibly different sizes of vocabularies, with children in the professor’s families having larger vocabularies than the children in the welfare families.

The interesting thing about this book is that it came out at about the same time as The Bell Curve did, and this book showed that these differences in achievement are largely due to class, not race. The thing that’s important about the size of vocabulary at age 3 is that it’s very highly correlated to academic achievement at age 9. So the reason it’s important for all educators to read this book is to know that what happens to children early has a lasting impact that can’t be made up.

Q: What trends and ideas from the popular culture will have an impact on education over the next ten years?

A: Unfortunately, I think the fact that as a society we don’t value science and intellectual achievement is going to have a negative effect on education. When Homer Simpson wears a t-shirt that says, "I’m proud to be an underachiever" — that concerns me.

Also, I love the fact that we hear people talking about diversity and social justice, however what happens sometimes is that people use those key words as euphemisms for talking about certain groups and still excluding other groups. I am amazed at the times that I hear people talk about diversity, but exclude people with disabilities. If we’re going to talk about diversity, we need to say all means all.

Q: What recent findings or insights about education do you believe will still be significant 30 years from now?

A: Something that I’ve seen change in Special Education over my career that I hope takes hold even more in general education is the idea that children who demonstrate challenging behaviors, whether they are not doing homework or hitting someone, are engaged in challenging behaviors because they are trying to communicate something. When I first started in Special Education, we thought challenging behaviors were something that children did because they were naughty and we needed to stop them. Now we think about challenging behaviors as being communicative.

For example, if a child doesn’t know how to tell you they don’t want to do that puzzle, they throw it at you. If they don’t know how to tell you that they need someone to vent to because their life at home is crashing around them, they tear up their math paper. I hope that trend continues, meaning that we look at children’s development as more than their test scores, but that we look at the whole child. We need to look at children’s social and emotional development and really understand that it’s important to learn more at school than how to read and write. It’s important to learn how to be responsible, how to be a friend, how to have a friend, how to be trustworthy, how to be organized - all those kinds of things.

Q: What things about the current state of education give you hope?

A: One thing that gives me great hope is that people are finally interested in early childhood. On the one hand that gives me great hope, and on the other hand it worries me, because I think that people view early childhood as a gate. When our governors are making educational goals that all children will start kindergarten ready to learn, I always want to say, children do start kindergarten ready to learn. Everyone is ready to learn at every moment in their life. The issue is that schools have to be prepared to teach. If we have children who don’t have food before they come to school, they may need to feed those children. Schools need to be ready to teach all children, whether they are gifted or learning more slowly from a disability or lack of motivation.

Application Deadlines

Scholarships & Funding

Courses

At A Glance

Calendar

Giving

News & Events

Feature Stories

Faculty Spotlight

Ilene Schwartz