Top Expert Says Special Education Inclusion Evidence ‘Critically Flawed’
Fuchs’ view challenges hundreds of studies that have consistently found that inclusive educational settings have significant benefits for the cognitive and social development of children with disabilities. That study was instrumental in persuading lawmakers to increase funding to help schools accommodate students with disabilities, including hiring special education teachers for each classroom. About 15 percent of students in US public schools have been diagnosed with disabilities and receive services, according to recent data, so this debate about the placement of special education affects not only the educational prospects of students with disabilities but also the cost and structure of higher education. the entire educational system.
Paper, “Reframing the Critical Special Education Policy Debate in Fifty Years: How against Where teaching students with disabilities in America’s schools,” was co-authored by Allison Gilmour, special education researcher at the American Institutes for Research, and Jeanne Wanzek, professor of special education at Vanderbilt. Fuchs gave me a pre-publication draft and gave me permission to discuss it with other experts.
The crux of Fuchs’ criticism is that previous researchers have failed to distinguish between students with disabilities sent to segregated special education classes and students with disabilities placed in general education classes. They are fundamentally different. Children who are segregated for a significant part or most of the day often have severe disabilities and academic struggles. It should come as no surprise to anyone that high-achieving students with mild disabilities end up with higher test scores than students with low test scores and severe disabilities. That is not proof that a child with a disability is learning more in a regular education classroom. Ideally, from a research perspective, you would want to randomly assign students with disabilities to both types of classes and see where they learn more. But that is wrong, and it is not possible.
Researchers call this problem “selection bias” and have tried to overcome it with mathematical techniques. For example, they compared students with disabilities who have similar demographic characteristics, such as the same race or ethnicity, the same family income and the same type of disability. The installation is still outstanding. However, Fuchs points out that many of these studies still fail to explain two important factors: the way the student was doing academically before the disability was diagnosed and the severity of the disability.
Beginning in the late 1980s, the federal government began collecting data on these two important, confounding factors — academic achievement before diagnosis and severity of disability — so that policymakers could see how well students were doing under a 1975 federal law that mandated educational support for students. with disabilities. Fuchs and his co-authors reviewed a 1991 analysis of this data, called the National Longitudinal Transition Study, and noted that it initially reported that high school students with disabilities learned more when they were studying with their general education peers. But an appendix to the report revealed that the benefit of special education inclusion disappeared when academic gains were adjusted for students’ prior academic achievement and job skills ratings. Fuchs said there was no difference in results between the two settings when researchers compared students who started with the same test scores and had the same severity of disability.
Some more recent studies with more mathematical complexity still show that inclusion is effective. For example, in two studies of Indiana students with disabilities published in 2021 and 2023, researchers found that the more time students spent in an inclusive environment, the better they performed. However, Fuchs and his co-authors pointed out that more than half of the students were excluded from the 2021 study due to missing data and study design. They said that these studies only compared the two extreme categories of students who spent 80 percent of time or more in regular education versus 80 percent of time or more in separate classrooms, which was a very small group of students (only 75 in math and 63). in English language arts). Even adjusting for previous academic achievement statistics, it is difficult to compare these two groups. Fuchs and his co-authors concluded that the validity of the two studies is “problematic.”
It is not the first time that Fuchs has questioned the gospel that inclusion is the best. In an article published 30 years ago, Fuchs criticized the wisdom of always teaching children with disabilities in the general education classroom. In 2023, Fuchs published research showing that even districts with the highest levels of special education inclusion did not consistently improve test scores for children with disabilities. Scores dropped in some states.
Fuchs and his colleagues’ criticism of the power of depositional evidence is controversial, but they are not alone. In December 2022, the Campbell Collaboration, a highly respected international non-profit organization that reviews research evidence for public policy purposes, also concluded that the benefits of inclusion were inconsistent and inconsistent. Campbell reviewers excluded 99 percent of the 2,000 studies they found because of poor quality and study design, for reasons similar to those described by Fuchs. Only 15 subjects survived. They found that math and reading scores, as well as cognitive, emotional and behavioral measures, were not higher for children with disabilities who attended general education classes, on average, compared to children who attended separate special education classes. Advocates for disabled children contested the findings.
Lynn Newman, a researcher at SRI, a research organization in California, has worked on several years of studies of students with disabilities in the federal government. He said Fuchs’ paper makes good points, but said his argument also has “holes” because it doesn’t include other well-designed studies of recent data, where inclusion appears to be beneficial, especially among high school students with disabilities. .
Newman explained to me that there was very little support for students with disabilities in general education classrooms in the 1980s and 1990s. Coverage has since improved, he said. He cited four studies (one, two, three, four), published between 2009 and 2021, showing that students did better with inclusion.
I showed this study to Fuchs, who agreed that the methodology and quality were good, but noted that these studies did not analyze whether students learned more in one area than another. Instead, studies focus on other outcomes such as employment after high school. “The articles cited by Newman are barking up a different tree,” he said in an email.
Fuchs focuses on academic outcomes. He acknowledges that there may be other psychological or social benefits to learning with peers in general education classrooms. He didn’t read those for himself. But those benefits can be even more important to parents, along with lifelong success. (Fuchs also did not review the evidence that nondisabled students are affected by peers with disabilities in their classrooms. That’s a different body of research.)
Measuring academic outcomes for students with disabilities is difficult. Students with disabilities are more likely to fail a regular education class. The distances between these two systems – special education and general education – are not directly comparable. Test scores are often low, especially before and after changes in special education inclusion.
Some academics I spoke to said that Fuchs included all the disabled. Two experts on children with severe disabilities who need intensive support showed me recent studies that point to higher learning when these students are placed in the regular classroom, albeit rarely. However, those students represent only one percent of students with disabilities.
In many ways, this debate shows how science responds to changing circumstances. Decades ago, there weren’t many ways to help children with disabilities. Today there is a growing body of research on the best ways to teach children, especially elementary school children, who struggle with reading and math. Some of these interventions require daily instruction away from the regular education classroom.
Fuchs does not think that his argument will lead to the segregation of all children with disabilities in private classes. He envisions schools where students will be taken out of the regular education classroom every day to receive the reading and math instruction they need in a separate classroom. Some children with mild dyslexia, she said, may need only an hour a day of intensive reading instruction. Meanwhile, some high-functioning children with Down syndrome may be able to stay in a regular education classroom during school hours.
And as the quality of differentiated, special education may improve, so does the quality of inclusion in the general education classroom. Schools are getting better at supporting and catering for students with disabilities. Obviously, a good version of an installation will override a bad version of a different class. And a good version of rigorous, special education will outweigh a bad version of an inclusive classroom where the general education teacher is overwhelmed and undertrained. Often times, students don’t get the support they need.
School leaders are in a difficult position when they must decide whether to invest in improving the mainstream classroom to be inclusive or to create and refine interventions that take place outside the classroom. And yet, research can’t really tell them what works best.
