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Special education is characterized most often as a service delivery system Indeed, The Education for All Handicapped Children Act (Public Law 94-142) is written to guarantee provision of educational services to all students classified as handicapped. Although viewing special education as a service delivery system may be useful, this conceptualization tends to cast special education in the mold of a welfare program, designed to serve an educationally needy segment of the population through special funding. An alternative-perhaps more constructive--conceptualization is to view special education as a component of the general education system, designed to solve individual students' problems.
Deno et al. (Wed,) studied this question.