As the city expands its special education reforms across the city, the new policy has run into a few speed bumps. Families and schools are struggling to understand and meet the requirement that neighborhood schools serve almost all the students in its community even if that means adding staff and providing services the school has never provided before.

In her latest blog about teaching in a Bronx middle school, Laura Klein writes: “There’s a lot to criticize about the way special education works in this enormous system. It is cloudy and incongruous, difficult to define, and difficult to find any universal truths when you talk about it.” The failures command more notice than the successes, she said. “What I have struggled with in the last few years is to define what aspects of it specifically fail the students — what is the problem that we aren’t solving.”