NIUSI factsheet

Our Mission:

Our mission is to work with urban communities, urban schools, and families to build a sustainable urban, inclusive education for all students. We encourage the development of powerful networks of urban districts and urban schools that embrace and implement a data-based, continuous improvement approach for inclusive practices.

We:

• Focus our energy and resources on four important goals for urban schools:
  1. Increase knowledge and understanding of continuous improvement through evaluation of current practice, change efforts and impact;
  2. Explain, expand and make available the research and inclusive practices literature;
  3. Encourage collaborative work on inclusive urban practices with leading urban districts and urban schools focusing on practices in early intervening, reading, behavior, and universal design; and
  4. Link, inform, and strengthen national networks of urban schools committed to improving educational results for children and youth with disabilities in urban schools.
• Work on the four goals with urban districts and urban schools that influence these four outcomes across the Institute’s synergy sites:
  1. Increased number of students with disabilities served effectively in general education settings in urban schools.
  2. Increased use of research validated, culturally responsive practices in early intervening, reading, behavior, and universal designs for learning.
  3. Increased numbers of inclusive urban schools with records of effective, achievement oriented, culturally responsive success with students with disabilities.
  4. Increased number of effective, improvement strategies for special and general education professional development and technical assistance that are unified and coherent across schools within large, urban school districts.
• Have produced over twenty publications, several professional development modules, and have presented at hundreds of national and international conferences and meetings.
• Work with urban school districts and urban schools to advocate nationally for inclusive urban school communities.
• Use a variety of strategies, including our website, web forums, publications, leadership academies and an interactive data website to help states and school districts examine their special education data.

Project leaders:

• Anne Smith, Ed.D.,
  Project Officer
• Elizabeth Kozleski, Ed.D.,
  Principal Investigator

The NIUSI factsheet can be downloaded in PDF format here.