Abstract
Since 1966 when we began our careers in special education, we and others in our cohort have seen substantial changes in our discipline. In our personal experience, we had the opportunity to work together in situations that led us to focus on practices and procedures that produced better outcomes for our students, and better outcomes for students became our primary metric for assessing educational recommendations. Regardless of the rationale, theory, or appealing argument for them, we wanted to know whether a proposed procedure helps students with disabilities succeed. Sometimes those procedures need to be employed in special places. We explain how we came to this perspective, why we hope that perspective does not get lost amid contemporary reform efforts, and what we hope it will mean for the future.
Keywords
Although we were undergraduates in the mid-1960s, we learned about leading-edge educational thought, practices, and research for students with disabilities. Together, we cut our teeth on behavioral methods such as reinforcement procedures and token economies (e.g., Hewett, Taylor, & Artuso, 1969), Precision Teaching (Kunzelmann, Cohen, Hulten, Martin, & Mingo, 1970) and Direct Instruction (DI; for example, Engelmann, 1969). We think those methods still have a lot to offer special education today, but we fear that special education is abandoning some of these instructional elements and some other foundational concepts that are critical for special education’s existence.
After working as teaching assistants in the 1960s, we briefly helped to promote the early stages of deinstitutionalization. In a pilot program associated with a prominent state hospital, we became foster parents for four children with psychiatric disorders. As 22-year-olds, we were instant parents with a family of children from 7 to 15 years of age. Like Phillips’ (1968) teaching parents, we collected data, implemented behavioral instructional practices, and created what we hoped was a caring and habilitative environment for our foster children.
Little did we know that these varied experiences would substantially influence our careers in special education. At the time, we were reading a lot of research and theory (e.g., Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis and Science and Human Behavior, Skinner, 1953) and realizing that what we read was immediately applicable. As did many of our similar-aged colleagues, we witnessed the shaping of special education in the last half of the 20th century. We experienced substantial changes that have, on the whole, been for the better. However, these profound changes have risks associated with them, and in a subsequent section, we discuss our concerns—and our hopes—for their contributions to special education’s future.
Remembering Changes
We focus on three related changes that we consider particularly relevant for improving the lives of students with disabilities and their families: (a) deinstitutionalization, (b) provision of legal protections for individuals with disabilities, and (c) emphasis on evidence-based practices.
Deinstitutionalization
When we began our careers, many children and adults with disabilities lived in institutions. Twenty or more children lived in a “unit” or dorm with two residents sharing a bedroom and everyone using a “day room” for recreation. Some of the facilities were newer and run well, but some were not. For some residents, life in an institution probably was good, but for others, it was just what Blatt and Kaplan (1966) described: Christmas in Purgatory. Despite many workers’ good intentions, facilities were dark, deteriorating, overcrowded, and often stank of excrement. In some, residents were abused, providing ripe opportunities for exposes. After Senator Robert Kennedy called it a “snake pit,” a 1972 video by Geraldo Rivera about a school named Willowbrook pushed institutional conditions to the level of national news.
We supported deinstitutionalization. Not only were we foster parents for children from a state hospital but, later one of us (Pat) worked with residents in a small, community-based facility for adults who left a state institution to live and work in a normalized environment. These people received extraordinary amounts of support and—in our subjective assessment—experienced many successes. However, those efforts were not always sufficient. Successfully supporting people with disabilities in normalized situations, in our subjective view, requires extraordinary amounts of work.
Legal Protections
As the deinstitutionalization movement was gaining momentum, a sibling movement was also growing. People, including parents and other advocates, were increasingly concerned about students’ lack of access to schooling and appropriate educational services. When we were teaching in the late 1960s and early 1970s, children with disabilities and their families had few legal protections. Schools had special programs for only some students. When parents actually influenced the education of their children who had disabilities, it was often because they knew about appropriate services or had a personal relationship with teachers and administrators; they had no formal authority. Parents paid for their children to attend private special education schools. Other children simply were not welcome in public schools; these children stayed at home with few or no educational services.
A handful of court cases and powerful legislation changed the situation. In the United States, the signal event was the passage of PL 94-142, the Education of All Handicapped Children Act in 1975. PL 94-142 and its successors altered education. Schools had to have procedures to find and identify students with disabilities. Students with disabilities had to receive a free and appropriate education, parents had to have a say in planning that education (Bateman & Herr, 1980; Yell, Katsiyannis, & Bradley, 2012).
Evidence-Based Practices
The law, however, did not prescribe practices. The special education scene of the 1960s and early 1970s teemed with ideas about assessments and interventions. People advocated methods based on tests such as the Developmental Test of Visual Perception (Frostig, Lefever, & Whittlesey, 1964) and the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities (Kirk, McCarthy, & Kirk, 1968). Others recommended systematic, logical, behavioral practices (Hewett et al., 1969) or compassionate, caring, and considerate methods (Redl, 1966). Some championed far-fetched theories such as having children learn to creep, crawl, and sleep in very specific positions.
Given all these ardently advocated approaches, how could one choose among them? Early in our careers, we decided that the standard that really mattered was students’ outcomes. No matter what one’s personal opinion is about a method, one has to defer to whether an educational method benefits students. Depending on evidence requires one to demand trustworthy data, have standards for research methods, and aggregate results across studies—ideas we and colleagues have championed (e.g., Lloyd, Pullen, Tankersley, & Lloyd, 2006). These constructs point toward methods that are more effective than others (Lloyd, Forness, & Kavale, 1998) and are consistent with contemporary emphasis on evidence-based practices in special education (e.g., Cook et al., 2014).
The evolution away from methods driven by premature hypotheses and poorly founded theories toward those firmly grounded in empirical research is one of the most important developments in special education during our careers. It is important because special education students do not have time to waste while their teachers try methods that might work. These students need teachers to use the methods that are the most likely to work. How would teachers know which methods are most likely to work? They should consult research that has compared the benefits of different methods (cf. Lloyd et al., 1998).
Also, these students’ teachers should be evidence-based in another way. They should recognize that even the most effective practices do not work 100% of the time (these teachers are, after all, special educators; they work with the exceptions so they know there are outliers!), so they should monitor the effects of their teaching practices on their students’ outcomes and ascertain whether those teaching practices are working for individual students. Monitoring progress echoes the Precision Teaching methods on which we were raised (Kunzelmann et al., 1970), and begs that we look ahead to ask whether that progress will meet our aims and goals. Even if special educators are using practices that have an 80% to 90% effectiveness rate, they should monitor progress, so that they can catch the students who might need even more help. That’s the job of special educators!
Hoping for Changes
By reflecting on past successes, special educators will gain perspective on the future of the discipline. Special education’s legacy of legal protections, its participation in deinstitutionalization, and its emphasis on evidence-based practices are landmarks, but they have brought some risks, even some problems. What can special educators do to capitalize on that progress—and avoid problems—over the next few years or even decades?
Of course, special educators can continue to promote evidence-based practices and clarify when and where we use them (cf. Cook et al., 2014). Another track of advocacy is to be cautious about overplaying some of our ideological positions and, thus, avoid losing what we have gained.
Propagating Evidence-Based Practices
Special education students are the students who actually need special education. It is the law in the United States. By definition, special education students have a disability and “by reason thereof, need special education” (Individuals With Disabilities Education Act [IDEA] Regulations, 34 C. F. R. § 300.8(a)(1); emphasis added). Special education is not the same as general, regular, plain, garden-variety education, or early intervening services (now often called “response to intervention”). The definition is too long to present here, but one can find it in IDEA Regulations, 34 C. F. R § 300.39.
Special educators want their students to have the advantages of their non-disabled peers, but to do so, students must have accelerated instruction. Without high-powered instruction, special educators cannot teach students with disabilities the skills and knowledge those students need to succeed in general education settings. But they do not learn from Dick and Jane; they do not learn from garden-variety phonics; they are more likely to fail in discovery learning situations. For example, Morgan, Farkas, and Maczuga (2014) found that teachers who relied on only student-centered instructional practices were unlikely to help primary-grade students with mathematics difficulties.
Special educators need to be “all-in” on evidence-based practices. Special education students need evidence-based practices as a foundation, and they need more. Special education does not mean simply doing more of the same-old-same-old. It does not mean just providing ways for our students to experience general education. Special education must offer the services described by Kauffman (1996) and Zigmond (1997). Paraphrasing Zigmond (1997), special education must be much more: It must be focused on students’ individual needs, carefully planned, intensive, urgent, relentless, goal directed, empirically supported practice.
Primary and secondary prevention
Some readers know that we are advocates of DI. It has a substantial evidence base for special education (e.g., Kinder, Kubina, & Marchand-Martella, 2005; White, 1988) and superb theoretical grounding (e.g., Engelmann & Carnine, 2011). Evidence-based practices such as DI and other well-documented broad-spectrum methods such as Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (Stevens & Slavin, 1995) are what all students should receive at what is now popularly called “Tier 1.” Adding other evidence-based practices—for example, repeated readings (Strong, Wehby, Falk, & Lane, 2004)—to primary prevention programs is required to enhance their outcomes for students with disabilities or students who are at risk of disabilities at Tier 2. Those combinations create powerful Tiers 1 and 2 services, and they are important, but they are not special education. Some special education methods work better in special education settings than in general education settings (Stage & Quiroz, 1997).
Real differentiation
Special educators need to examine what practices actually differentially benefit students with disabilities. Some accommodations sometimes differentially benefit students with disabilities (Edgemon, Jablonski, & Lloyd, 2006; Fuchs & Fuchs, 2001; Thurlow, 2015), but think about this question: Do accommodations qualify as special education?
There are too few efforts to identify instructional practices that specifically improve outcomes for diagnostic subgroups of students to allow generalizations about what has resulted in success. Successful differentiation may be based on differences in how much the learner knows about what is to be learned (e.g., Gilbert, Goodwin, Compton, & Kearns, 2014) or on something more specific to the characteristics of the learner (e.g., Fuchs et al., 2013). Although there are potential directions emerging from the research (Jonassen & Grabowski, 2012), teachers will need researchers to conduct many more studies, synthesize them, and translate them into executable practices before it is possible to make recommendations about such differentiation.
For practice
How do teachers proceed in the absence of clear directions from research? Not only is more research needed but also better teacher preparation is also needed. Teachers must have a substantial set of skills. Beyond the personal-social characteristics and skills that will allow them to work with difficult learners and explain those learners’ needs, teachers of students with disabilities also need to understand the foundations of effective instruction (i.e., the basics of providing frequent opportunities to respond, prompting, reinforcing correct responses, etc.; see Pullen & Hallahan, 2015) as well as how to execute effective programs with fidelity and not get trapped in negative views about their teaching based on their misuse of basic procedures (Reinke, Herman, & Stormont, 2012). They must adopt a think-first, cautious approach to innovation and popular suggestions in education. These needs will require changes in teacher education, professional development, and people’s thinking about teaching.
Sustaining What We Have
Probably, the most difficult problem for us during our careers has been watching with disappointment as special education has abandoned what we considered foundational ideals (e.g., individualization) and embraced exaggerations of otherwise good ideas (every student with learning disabilities gets the general curriculum). Continuing these trends risks giving up much of what special education has gained.
Deinstitutionalization provides a cautionary illustration. It was a good idea in many ways, but it did not yield benefits for all those who were discharged from institutions. Too many people with substantial mental health problems no longer had the supports they needed, and many now essentially live on the streets. It was not that deinstitutionalization itself caused the problem. It was that policymakers sought to do deinstitutionalization “on the cheap” and that, given the special nature of people on the tails of distributions, no one realized we had to have plans for these individuals, with their unique needs, who would be discharged from the institutions. The failure to provide adequate supports for individuals with disabilities, mental health issues, substance abuse problems, and so forth were important contributors to the problems we now see from deinstitutionalization (Isaac & Armat, 1990; Lamb, 1984).
“Inclusion” and “full inclusion” in education are not perfect analogies to deinstitutionalization, but there are obvious parallels. Full inclusion has taken an ideological edge that cuts against a fundamental principle and a legal requirement of special education: Decisions about placement should be made according to an individual’s unique educational needs (Kauffman & Hallahan, 2005). But full inclusion as we have seen it practiced in some U.S. schools appears to be an aberration; as much as educators may like putting students with and without disabilities together, there is evidence that it may have deleterious effects on the order of 0.1 standard deviation on the academic outcomes of non-disabled peers among young children (Fletcher, 2010).
Special education has sometimes embraced easy alternatives rather than facing the more difficult tasks of effective teaching. These solutions contradict our experience, because we have seen a need for integrated, comprehensive interventions (see, for example, Barton et al., 2013). Simply having students attend classes where they are assigned to do something (e.g., wash the vials in chemistry) is not educationally defensible. Sending a child to school with an adult as a full-time assistant, so that she can be located closer to her age mates does not fit the definition of special education in 34 C. F. R. 300.39 (IDEA, 2004). We cannot just accommodate them; simply include them; just give them a co-teacher, an aide, or a computer that reads and speaks. Our students need special education.
Special education students need us to teach them well past the best teaching that they can get otherwise. Special education occurs beyond excellent Tier 1 and Tier 2 (Vaughn, Zumeta, Wanzek, Cook, & Klingner, 2014). Special educators should cheer implementation of evidence-based practices in those tiers and be prepared to go farther in their own delivery of services.
Summary
Special education has changed dramatically while we have been privileged to participate in it. We were fortunate to see practices (e.g., Precision Teaching) that were the province of a few ardent advocates refined over the years and become widely accepted (e.g., curriculum-based measurement). Special education research has been a resource for education in general, providing direction and innovation, including curriculum-based measurement, systematic instructional practices, and revelations about cognitive processes underlying academic learning (Lloyd & Hallahan, 2005), as well as school-wide systems for addressing behavioral issues (Horner, Sugai, Todd, & Lewis-Palmer, 2005). Great strides have been made in connecting assessment and instruction in useful ways (Lane & Walker, 2015).
Special educators need to continue the efforts of those who shaped our discipline. They helped us to focus on measurable student outcomes for individual learners. We should honor that legacy by focusing on the most important outcomes for individuals. Important outcomes are not just how many of our students participate in general education classes, but how many of them actually learn to read, to solve word problems, to discuss the causes of societies’ problems, to cooperate with peers. We are not referring solely to students with high-incidence disabilities, because educators are showing that students with more substantial disabilities can learn many skills (e.g., Browder, 2015). Some metrics (e.g., graduation rates) may be helpful for policy purposes, but it is more important to know whether our students can succeed in work, can live on their own, can get along with others in their adult lives.
We are not going to get those outcomes on the cheap. We have to teach academic and social competencies effectively, so that we are sure that students with disabilities achieve them. Those competencies must be based on individual students’ needs, needs that are unique to them and often different from those of the vast majority of learners in schools. Special educators must not abandon allegiance to the core principles of individualization and effective instruction. Abandoning these ideals would sacrifice the efforts of so many of our forebears, including professionals and parents. Many people worked hard to provide access to education for the students about whom we are concerned. Providing access to general education settings is insufficient. Regardless of where it happens, we need to ensure that students with disabilities receive evidence-based instruction that is based on their unique needs.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.