Three people came to the potluck and nobody checked the list. It was all dessert. One brought banana bread. Another, chocolate chip cookies. Someone else brought walnut brownies. The table looked great, but the guest with diabetes and the kid with a nut allergy had a very different evening than everyone else.
A lot of district inclusion programs work exactly like this. SPED teams do SPED work. EL coordinators do EL work. Curriculum teams do curriculum work. This system leaves three very important and distinct streams of work in silos, missing the opportunity to meet everyone’s needs with shared vision, knowledge and structures.
Tiffany Galloway, Chief Partnerships and Program Officer at Blue Engine, has watched these three tables sit in the same building for nearly 20 years without ever actually touching. She and Aisha Chappell, Blue Engine’s VP of Program Implementation, built their careers figuring out how to connect them.
Here’s what’s on the dashboard this week:
Today’s Deep Dive: 3 decisions = working inclusion system
Reading Rainbow: 5-year-olds vs. underwater robots
From Our Desk: Boots on the ground and in the field
Watch of the Week: Make it Stranger Things, but senior
3 decisions behind a working inclusion system
Picture your district's inclusion work as three different movies playing at the same multiplex. Great casting in each one. Nobody in the lobby knows the other films exist. That's a clear picture Tiffany Galloway and Aisha Chappell have of a misaligned district.
After nearly 20 years across classrooms, coaching roles and central office positions (including overseeing inclusion across all 118 DC Public Schools), Tiffany identified what the districts doing this well actually share. Aisha, VP of Program Implementation at Blue Engine, has spent her career helping schools and districts translate effective practices into lasting change across classrooms, teams and systems.
These are their ground rules that lead to a more successful program:
1. Each element of the program has to work together.
When inclusion initiatives are siloed, the work is isolated instead of implemented.
2. The work has to move through every layer.
Coaching that only reaches classroom teachers, without touching the coaches who support those teachers, stops at the classroom door.
3. Everyone needs the same materials.
At Longwood Preparatory Academy in the Bronx, the clearest shift was making SPED and EL teachers just as fluent in the core instructional materials as gen ed teachers, so every adult in a co-taught room was delivering the same rigorous content to the same students. Same bar. No exceptions.
Pull any one of these out and the other two stop working too.
That's not a coincidence.
Title I Just Got Put on a Budget: House Republicans advanced a spending bill cutting $1.6 billion from Title I and eliminating several competitive grant programs, which is a bold legislative move for a body that doesn't have to explain what Title I actually funds to a room full of parents. For schools already running on thin margins, this is less a budget adjustment and more a "have you considered doing more with less" challenge that nobody signed up for.
5-Year-Olds vs. Underwater Robots: Dove Schools, an Oklahoma charter network, starts computer science in kindergarten and has students across every grade working with aquatic robots, drones and power tools—and boasts a 100% college acceptance rate. That figure either proves something significant about what sustained STEM instruction can do, or suggests Oklahoma is producing teenagers who are simply more prepared for the apocalypse than the rest of us.
The Absenteeism Fix Nobody Tried: The Hechinger Report argues that solving chronic absenteeism starts with making school a place students genuinely want to be, backed by new national data on why students are actually missing class, and calls for more investment in counseling, support and more engaging school environments. The advice sounds simple and somehow still isn't standard practice in most places, which tells you everything about how education got here.
Turns Out Teachers Know Stuff: An Edutopia piece makes the case that teachers have a wealth of experience worth sharing with peers beyond their own building, and that the person doing the sharing benefits just as much as everyone else. The real tragedy here is how rarely schools actually build time for this, given that the most useful professional development in most buildings is already walking the hallways and eating lunch alone.
We took a field trip to Wrigley Field with district leaders from Illinois and Indiana. Sometimes the best way to get real about education is to step away from the conference room and into the field.
Our team was boots on the ground at EdCon and TALAS to connect with leaders and innovators who are shaping the future of learning.
Most EdTech contracts get signed in the fall and forgotten by January because nobody built a plan for what happens after the ink dries. We wrote about the gap between buying a tool and actually using it.
If you’re a parent or mentor of a student-athlete, our latest episode of On The Subject podcast covers how to build a career beyond the field.
We’re back on the road for conferences! Reach out to [email protected] if you’d like to connect:
July 12 - 15: GAEL Summer Conference
July 14 - 15: TX ESC 16 Connect Conference
July 14 - 16: NMCEL 2026 Summer Conference
July 19 - 21: MAEN State Conference
Our pick of the week: The Boroughs
Why We’re Obsessed: The Duffer Brothers swapped Hawkins for a retirement community, a genuinely stacked cast (Alfred Molina, Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, Bill Pullman) and a monster that steals the one thing the residents don't have: time. It's been called "Stranger Things for seniors," but it's really about what happens when society writes people off and turns out to be catastrophically wrong—which hits completely differently when you work in a building full of students everyone else already wrote off.
Recommended lesson integration:
What is a community, actually? Sam Cooper's neighbors are retirees with walkers and decades of stories who band together to fight actual monsters, which is both deeply terrifying and the best lesson in community-building since Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.
Nobody wins alone: The heroes of The Boroughs get absolutely nowhere until they stop working separately and start working together, which makes for a great conversation about what real collaboration looks like beyond just sitting at the same table.
What would alien biology actually need? The creatures in The Boroughs are decidedly not humanoid, which opens a genuinely great conversation about what life adapted to a completely different environment might require. Your students will be significantly more invested in this than in the standard water cycle diagram.
Sci-fi as a mirror: The monster in The Boroughs steals time from people who don't have much of it, which is a rich metaphor for aging, mortality and what we owe older generations. Pair with a close reading of how the show uses genre to say things realistic drama can't.
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Thank you for joining us for another edition of On The Subject. We’ll see you again in a week, with more stories from the hallways.
The Subject Team
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