3 Best Practices for Improving Special Education—Even as Budgets Tighten
This post is the first of a three-part series, “Improving Special Education While Moderating Costs IS Possible. Here’s How,” which shares how school districts can effectively narrow the special education achievement gap even in times of tightening budgets using research-backed cost effective best practice approaches to delivering special education services and managing staff time more proactively.
Other posts in this series:
Talking about special education spending feels to many unseemly and uncaring, but there are important issues to tackle: despite increasing spending, students with disabilities are not thriving, the achievement gap is growing, and most have not returned to pre-pandemic levels of achievement. This uptick in special-education spending has also had adverse consequences to the rest of the school ecosystem, such as increasing general education class sizes, making raises for teachers impossible to fund, squeezing out arts programs, and hampering efforts to offer behavioral supports or courses focused on science, technology, engineering and math.
Kids with disabilities deserve better, but more spending has not helped them. The urgency to find a better approach is two-fold: the achievement gap continues to widen, and the number of students with special needs is growing. At the same time, school district budgets are tightening, resulting in tremendous pressure on both budgets and outcomes.
What Needs to Change to Improve Special Education without Increasing Costs?
So, what should we do? First, we need to get comfortable talking about special-education spending. We should not vilify the budget staff who say costs are rising, disparage board members who lament that special-ed spending is squeezing out other important needs, or malign ideas that saves money as bad for kids. We need to be able to talk about helping kids and the budget in the same conversation. We also need to focus on one overarching goal: increasing the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of serving students with special needs.
The good news is that there are research-backed best practices that actually help raise achievement for students with special needs —without raising costs. These ideas have been widely embraced by both general and special education leaders across the country. They are increasingly becoming the foundation of state-level guidance, are endorsed by many special education associations, and have been lauded by the US Department of Education.
What’s more, school districts that have shifted to these best practices have regularly seen 18-to-24 months academic growth from students with IEPs, while others have reduced the number of struggling readers by two thirds, and some have reduced students dropping out by more than half. With results like these without increasing costs, it is no wonder that enthusiasm and momentum are growing for shifting to these cost-effective best practices.
Best Practice #1: Focus on core instruction
General education matters most—this is what the research shows. Students with mild-to-moderate disabilities benefit greatly from receiving 100% of core instruction, from highly engaged classroom teachers, and from receiving additional services on top of, instead of, general education instruction. Students with disabilities, however, often receive less core instruction, and less attention from their skilled classroom teacher, than students without IEPs. This happens because, too often, students are pulled from math or reading in order to get IEP-mandated services. These services are best provided at other times during the school day.
Best Practice #2: Extra time to learn
Not all students learn at the same pace. Even with quality core instruction, some will need more time to catch up. For students struggling with prior grade-level knowledge gaps, extra time to fill in this missed learning is doubly important. Post pandemic, this need is magnified. As DuFour aptly noted, “Learning should be the constant, and time the variable.”
This extra time should be offered daily, in addition to—not instead of—core instruction. Further, this extra time should be subject-specific and grouped by area of need. If math is the challenge, then time dedicated specially for teacher-led instruction is needed, rather than generalized homework help. Focusing on student specific skill gaps such as phonics or fluency and creating flexible groups of students with similar needs supercharges instruction.
Best Practice #3: Content-strong teachers
Who is in front of the class matters greatly. Students with disabilities need teachers with deep expertise in the content they are teaching. Anything less is unlikely to close the stubborn achievement gap.
Special education teachers and special education paraprofessionals are great, but, like all of us, they aren't great at everything. Research is clear: nothing matters more in raising achievement than the skills of the teacher. For catching up academically, a commitment to content strong instructors is key. The implications are profound:
Focus on skills, not certification: Students who struggle to read need skilled reading teachers. Students who struggle in math benefit from experts in math. This includes some special educators and some general educators, but not all educators are content strong in every content area.
General educators can help. IEP services and needs can be well served by math, English and reading teachers, as well as special educators.
No teacher is strong in every subject and every task, and everyone is happier when playing to their strengths. Identifying staff strengths and matching those strengths with student areas of need has a dramatic impact on learning and on teacher satisfaction.
Best Practices Show the Way
Unfortunately, some of the most common and costly efforts in use today are in direct conflict with what works. These efforts include: pulling students out of core instruction in reading and math to provide them special-education services; undermining access to content strong staff by utilizing unskilled paraprofessionals to support reading; relying too much on “push-in,” which provides extra adults but not extra time to learn, and assigning special-education teachers and paraprofessionals to academic support, regardless of their training, skills, or aptitude in the subjects being taught.
The three best practices, Focus on Core Instruction, Extra Time to Learn, and Content-Strong Teachers, are low-cost strategies that, when implemented together, have dramatically increased outcomes for students with mild-to-moderate special needs. Many observers have commented that they are just common-sense recommendations. They are, and—to the benefit of students, teachers, and taxpayers—they are increasingly becoming more common practice.
Other posts in this series:
Nathan Levenson has spent the last 25 years working to improve the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of K-12 education and brings a unique perspective to this passion, having served as a school superintendent, school board member, researcher, and consultant to over 300 districts in more than 30 states and around the world. He is widely recognized as an expert on improving special education and has authored numerous books, including Six Shifts to Improve Special Education and Other Interventions: A Commonsense Approach for School Leaders (Harvard Education Press).