The Effectiveness of Special Education

Much of the current research on special education effectiveness challenges the notion that delivery of these services to handicapped children significantly improves their academic performance in schools. It is argued here that such conclusions are premature since many of these studies are based upon tests with poor technical adequacy or flawed experimental designs. It is reasoned that a more efficacious approach to investigating issues of special education effectiveness might rely on time series analysis where researchers examine the response of handicapped children to varying educational interventions. This study presents such an approach where the impact of regular and special education on 11 mildly handicapped children is studied by analyzing their slope of improvement on weekly curriculum-based measures (CBM) reading scores. The data for these pupils suggest that special education is in fact a significant educational intervention, and that time series analysis of CBM data is a useful evaluation tool. In addition, the report provides an analysis of the instructional environment of these children in their regular and special education settings.