Abstract
Dr. Douglas Fuchs is an Institute Fellow at the American Institutes for Research and a Research Professor in the Departments of Special Education and Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Fuchs has devoted his career to researching instructional interventions and assessment procedures to improve educational outcomes for students with disabilities. His work, often supported through external funding, has centered on studying the effects of literacy and math instruction that teachers can implement within existing curricula across different grade levels and assessment measures that allow teachers to quickly monitor their student’s progress. This interview explores his observations about his preparation, early career, research focus, and general perspectives on the field.
Douglas Fuchs is an Institute Fellow at the American Institutes for Research and a Research Professor in the Departments of Special Education and Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University. He is the inaugural holder of the Nicholas Hobbs Chair of Special Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt. He has been a first-grade teacher in a private school for children with behavior problems, a fourth-grade classroom teacher in a public school, and a school psychologist. Dr. Fuchs has directed 50 federal research grants with which he and colleagues have developed approaches to service delivery (e.g., pre-referral intervention, response-to-intervention); assessments (e.g., measures of student progress monitoring, dynamic assessment); and instruction (e.g., peer-mediated learning strategies). He is the author or co-author of over 500 peer-reviewed journal articles and 80 book chapters.
Dr. Fuchs was identified by Thomson Reuters as among the 250 most frequently cited researchers in the social sciences in the United States from 2000 to 2010. In 2008, he was among “100 Distinguished Alumni” in the first 100 years of the College of Education and Human Development of the University of Minnesota. In 2014, he and his wife, Dr. Lynn Fuchs, received the American Educational Research Association’s Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education Award, which “is to publicize, motivate, encourage, and suggest models for educational research at its best.” In 2021, they were awarded the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education to “celebrate innovation, inspiration, and impact in education by recognizing outstanding leaders who have devoted their careers to closing gaps and accelerating educational opportunity to all students.”
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Brooklyn, New York City, and then my family moved to Long Island, much to my regret. I preferred New York City. Maybe 10–12 years ago, Lynn (Dr. Lynn Fuchs) and I worked out a deal with Vanderbilt so we could spend a week of every month in Manhattan, and we did this for seven years. We rented a place that was affiliated with NYU, and our rent was considerably less as a result. I loved it.
How did you get interested in working in the field of disability and special education?
So my undergraduate degree was in psychology. I met Lynn in college and her undergraduate degree was in humanities with a minor in math. Neither of us was studying education. All around Lynn’s Baltimore apartment were row houses of working-class African American families. We became friendly with their kids. Often played with them in the streets. Long story short, we started a Saturday school in Lynn’s apartment, and the Saturday School became a summer school that we somehow got funded by the city of Baltimore. And that was our entry into education. At the same time, I had been volunteering at a nearby private school for kids with emotional disturbance. I didn’t know it then, but the school, The Children’s Guild, 1 was well known in Baltimore and beyond. When I graduated from college, Lynn was one year behind me, and so I got a job at The Children’s Guild for one year. At this point, I was reading a lot of books on American education and historical and sociological analyses. At the end of that year, Lynn and I decided to start our own school. We enrolled in a one-year master of sciences program at the University of Pennsylvania. We got our degrees and became certified as elementary teachers. We taught in the public schools outside Philadelphia. We became especially interested in the students who were not necessarily identified as special needs, but who needed instructional help. So, when we decided to apply to doctoral programs, we had an interest in special education. We were fortunate to find the University of Minnesota, and it went on from there.
How did you end up at The Children’s Guild?
I had friends who were volunteering there, and they said it was a really interesting place, so I volunteered a couple of days a week while I was still going to college. The school’s administration and faculty got to know me, and after I graduated, I became an assistant first-grade teacher. I really enjoyed it. One of the things I enjoyed most was every Thursday, there were “Grand Rounds.” The Children’s Guild was affiliated with The Johns Hopkins Medical School, and there were well-known child psychiatrists who did Grand Rounds. I was fascinated by how they would observe a child on the playground, would spend time looking at the child’s records, and then would meet with the teachers and staff. I was just spellbound by how they thought about these kids. Much of what they said was colored by a pretty strong Freudian ideology. But in any case, it was very enjoyable.
You and Dr. Lynn Fuchs met in undergraduate at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Would that be in the seventies?
I graduated in 1971, Lynn graduated in 1972, and 1972 was when I was at The Children’s Guild. From there we went to the University of Pennsylvania from 1972–73. I taught in a fourth-grade classroom outside of Philadelphia in 1973–74, and 1974–75 was my first year at The University of Minnesota.
Walk us through your experience at the University of Minnesota.
I was on an accelerated path and got my degree in three years, and so I graduated in 77–78. I got involved in a lot of different things. I worked really hard, did a lot of reading and writing, and interacted with smart graduate students and faculty in special education, school psychology, and education measurement. I think the thing that I appreciated most was that it was all data-based, not ideologically driven. So no one was forced to drink any “cool aid.”
At Minnesota, you were encouraged to question, question, question. To think and speak freely. To take a critical (not negative) stance. To take responsibility for your position and to understand that you would be expected to defend yourself. A takeaway message was, “Regardless of how theoretically compelling or logically correct your perspective might be, if you don’t have data, don’t waste people’s time.” Maybe it’s a bit of an exaggerated characterization, but more true than not.
You were at the University of Minnesota in the middle to late seventies, but if you went back to the ’50s and ’60s . . .
You would have some of the giants in the fields of educational, experimental, developmental and clinical psychology there. B. F. Skinner was there—an experimental psychologist. Many developed educational and psychological tests like the Metropolitan Achievement Test (Durost et al., 1970) and the Minnesota Multi-Phasic Inventory (MMPI; Hathaway & McKinley, 1943). Its Psychology program was very strong. It included important measurement and statistical people (like Paul Meehl) and so doctoral students like me took many measurement and statistics classes. We learned technical skills, and we were told, rightly, that this technical information was to prepare us for whatever we eventually would get into. To this day, Minnesota’s programs are very strong.
Who were some of the people who made an impact on your career?
Stan Deno. Bob Bruininks. Frank Wood. Jim Ysseldyke in school psychology. Maynard Reynolds in policy. Bruce Balow was my advisor—not as well known but a really smart guy. Bruininks eventually became president of the university; his interest was in intellectual disabilities, which we called “mental retardation.” I took a series of classes on research methods and writing from Wood and Bruininks. They strongly encouraged us to learn inside out and backward Campbell and Stanley’s Quasi-Experimental Design book (Campbell & Stanley, 1963), which is this very thin volume with 12 or 13 quasi-experimental designs. I really studied that little book.
And who were some of your peers in the program?
Bob Zable and Mary Kay Zabel who joined the faculty at Kansas State University. Paul Sindelar was a good friend who spent a lot of time at the University of Florida, Florida State University, and Penn State. Reece Peterson spent most of his career at the University of Nebraska. There were two or three others. Lynn entered the doctoral program a year or two later and had a larger cohort. Her cohort included students from School Psych because by then, Ysseldyke was awarded one of five Institute for Research on Learning Disability (IRLD) Centers. 2 She and I interacted with a lot of students like Gerry Tindal, Mark Shinn, Doug Marsten, and others on curriculum-based measurement (CBM) research, which was directed by Stan Deno. Ysseldyke was the IRLD Center’s principal investigator and Stan was a co-principal investigator, so they basically shared the resources. It was a fascinating time. If you look across the work of those five OSEP-funded LD centers, they really set the stage for a lot of what we’ve accomplished as a field since then.
How important has it been in your career to develop those kinds of professional networks?
It’s a good question. I can’t say that networking was really instrumental in anything I did subsequently. But I have observed at Vanderbilt how cohort after cohort of doc students going through our program have been so cohesive. They work together as students and continue to write together afterwards. As they become junior faculty, they often use each other to leverage opportunities. It’s quite something to watch; I admire them.
You and Dr. Lynn Fuchs have worked together in different ways throughout your careers. Do you have anything to share about your relationship and how it has impacted your work?
Lynn and I have worked together and we’ve done our own things. We’ve both definitely benefited from an ongoing collaboration. We’re both workaholics, and there has been an upside and downside to that, as you might imagine. What really kept us sane when we were younger was that we had a son and we agreed we would not sacrifice the quality of our parenting. And now, over the last seven or eight years, we’ve had a grandson, and he and his parents have kept us sane in the same way. Lynn and I are very close, we’re best friends. Sometimes it gets a little too intense, but the quality of our work has clearly benefited from our ongoing collaboration.
Can you talk about your research interests and how they evolved across your career?
When Lynn and I came to Nashville in 1985, after Lynn had been at Wheelock College and I had been at Clark University for the previous five years, I remember us thinking, let’s begin talking with school folks to see if there’s an interesting match between our interests and their needs. And so we started meeting with local school folks.
We participated in a series of meetings, mostly with teachers and administrators in the Nashville Public Schools. It became clear that the schools lacked resources and many classrooms needed help.
At the same time, Marty Kaufman was director of what was called the Division of Innovation and Development, the research arm of the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) in Washington, DC. Partly because Marty was a master of the “insider’s game” in Washington, DC (and partly because his wife, Linda Lewis, was as smart and savvy as he was), he had an annual budget of more than $70 million in the 1980s–1990s. (By comparison, the National Center on Special Education Research in the Institute of Education Sciences has a budget of less than $65 million.) In the mid-to-late 1980s, OSEP began issuing a large number of grants. There were many Requests for Proposals focusing on making general classrooms more instructionally accommodating of a greater diversity of children, including, of course, children with special needs.
So this was a great confluence of factors. We realized that we had a funding source to enable our work in the Metro National Public Schools and surrounding school districts. So, we were thinking, how should we do this? And at the time, Bob Slavin and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins started Success For All. He got a huge amount of money from something called the New American Schools Development Corporation, funded partly by the government and partly by corporations, to develop entirely new models of public education. Success For All was one of the accepted models. We looked at Success For All and decided that we didn’t want to do something that ambitious. We didn’t want to come into schools like Slavin did and say, we basically want to take over your school; we’d like you to run your school according to our model. We didn’t feel comfortable doing that.
Instead, we were looking for something that would hopefully have a value-added, but that wouldn’t be as comprehensive as Slavin’s program. We decided to develop a peer-mediated program that we eventually called, Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS). As we developed this strategy, we borrowed from the wonderful work at Juniper Gardens. Charlie Greenwood, Joe Delquadri, and others had developed Class-wide Peer Tutoring, and we really liked it because it wasn’t a total transformation of instruction, but was incorporated by teachers for select periods of the day. We would help teachers train their kids to work together using peer-mediated instruction around very key skills in reading and math. And we worked at PALS programs for the next 15 years, through various iterations of programs spanning preschool to high school in reading and math. And to this day we distribute thousands of copies of PALS materials across the country and in a large handful of countries.
We learned a lot from that experience. Maybe most importantly, we learned that not all kids benefited from PALS. There was always some number of kids in every PALS class who did not benefit a lick from PALS reading or PALS math. And so, as we continued to work on PALS programs, we became increasingly interested in the kids who were not responding. We became interested in non-responders at least a decade before response-to-intervention (RTI) earned national attention. We had already been thinking seriously about what we would do to try to change the curricula to make it more accommodating of these non-responders. So this really prepared us for RTI/MTSS (Multi-tiered Systems of Support).
How does assessment fit in with the bigger picture of trying to provide better quality instruction for students, and in trying to make a distinction between students who are struggling in school due to a learning disability and those students who are struggling for other reasons?
My approach and Lynn’s approach are more behavioral than cognitive. We were strongly influenced by Stan Deno. As a school psychologist in the Minneapolis public schools for three years, I became familiar with a whole array of tests—aptitude, achievement, socio-emotional, and so forth. I know they’ve changed since the time I used them regularly, but I’ve become slightly skeptical of the importance of those tests. I’m not in the camp that says do away with all IQ and aptitude tests. But in terms of payoff to instruction, I’m a skeptic. I would prefer to roll up my sleeves and start teaching, and then use a valid measure of progress monitoring to determine whether the kid is progressing, and, if so, whether she is progressing quickly enough to meet important benchmarks. And using those data like a pilot would use his instrument gauge, I’d try to determine whether the student and I are on course.
Now, do I think that there is no use whatsoever to give valid tests of cognitive development in the identification phase? No. I believe they can be useful. I think there is good reason to distinguish inadequately responsive kids who are likely to be intellectually impaired from those who have learning disabilities. I know those terms are fraught, but I believe that if you can, at the outset, get a bit clearer about why kids are not responding, it’s an advantage. So I see the value of psycho-educational assessment in helping to understand students’ strengths and weaknesses.
What we do in our research is experiment with an intensive intervention that we’re developing in reading or math, but we also try to test the children on an array of cognitive measures like working memory, verbal reasoning, processing speed, and other kinds of cognitive processes. We’ve been very serious about collecting this cognitive data because we want to be able to explore which kids are responding and not responding to the instruction. I credit Don Compton, who was a colleague of ours at Vanderbilt for helping us appreciate this cognitive dimension of the work.
What are your thoughts about the role of creating student profiles in instructional planning.
On the one hand, we’re all about individualizing. But we’re also trying to understand which students have what in common, so we can maybe address their needs in larger groups.
Can you say more about that and how profiles can be helpful in instructional planning?
I’ll try to make an important distinction. Stan Deno, a thoughtful behaviorist, wrote about how aptitude by treatment interaction (ATI) is a waste. What educators need to do is individualize instruction for children with significant learning problems. Aptitude by treatment interaction and finding group profiles is going off in the wrong direction, he would say. Well, the way that I think about it is, and let’s use the example of MTSS tiers: Tier 1 is general education classroom, Tier 2 is small group instruction, and Tier 3 is individualized instruction. So, at Tier 2, typically, you’ll get the kids who are inadequately responsive to Tier 1, and you’ll group them according to some skill-related consideration. Maybe all members of the group have deficits in word problem-solving. But it’s possible the group should be subdivided further and collecting child-level data on cognition, language, perception, etc., might help this further division of students into even more homogenous groups. The process of doing this in a responsible manner is ATI.
It’s still group instruction, but it’s more tailored instruction. If you tailor your instruction according to what you believe is contributing to the non-responsiveness, and the kid is still not responding, then you move to individualized instruction, which would be data-based individualization (DBI). DBI is qualitatively different from what I’m calling ATI.
What other research continues to be of interest to you?
Another strong interest of mine has been and continues to be intensive intervention. Our field has successful intensive intervention programs in reading, math, and writing, but I think that researchers, policy people, and practitioners need to figure out how to deliver that intensive intervention. Because let’s be honest, in most schools, private or public, there isn’t the provision of intensive instruction. And so, how do you do that? We need to think outside the box. I’ve thought for some time that schools, especially big city schools, should consider outsourcing their intensive intervention. There have been some examples of schools doing this in the past, but they’re the exception, not the rule. And so it seems to me that there are ways of thinking about intensive service delivery that we need to do more of.
And I’ll mention two additional pieces of research. One is dynamic assessment. This goes back to the work of Reuben Feuerstein and others who developed a clinical approach to testing and teaching. Dynamic instruction for Feuerstein was really an intervention, but for others it really was, and is, a form of measurement, an imaginative kind of measurement, and that’s what Lynn and I bought into. And so we developed a dynamic assessment for early reading, and a dynamic assessment of early math acquisition. It’s a very different approach to assessment than traditional psychometrics. It doesn’t negate a psychometric approach, but it potentially complements it in interesting ways. I tell people that if I had a second life to live, I would really dig into dynamic assessment, because it really explores how kids learn in the assessment situation. You present them with a problem and then you kind of help them along by giving them important clues, and you wait to see how many of those clues the kid needs before the light bulb goes off. It’s very cool.
The last area of research I’d like to mention is scaling up. I’m really intrigued by scaling up. And I think there’s just a lot of really important work that can be done in scaling up. Everyone talks about scaling up but not everyone is thoughtful about it. And, by the way, before scaling up, there’s the issue of sustainability, sustaining the use of an effective practice. I think that if researchers and policy people are interested in scaling up, researchers and program developers need to enter into a genuine partnership with school people, to permit them to modify programs in ways that don’t violate the integrity of the program, but at the same time gives them the opportunity to change it in ways that will make them feel it is their own. I’m not saying that this is an easy task—it’s not. And I don’t pretend to exactly know how to do it, but I believe there are ways to do this where you can accomplish both things, where it can be a win-win—you secure the integrity of the program, so that if it’s implemented with fidelity, it’s going to get your results, but at the same time you permit its modifications so that teachers can feel they are customizing it to their location and the needs of their students. So I think that is a largely unexplored area, and we just obtained a grant to look at that.
Can you share your perspectives on the field of special education? What events across your career have been most influential in shaping the field for the better?
Advocacy. Advocates have been extremely constructive and instrumental—IDEA would not have been passed without advocates. And all the court cases that preceded IDEA would not have been brought without advocates. I think advocates have really strengthened the field and made the field vibrant and extremely beneficial to a lot of children and youth with disabilities. And parenthetically, advocacy has been an engine not just for better education for students with disabilities, but for students considered at-risk for failure who are not in special education.
And what events have affected the field for the worse?
Full inclusion. So, while advocacy has been so crucial in the formation of our field, I think it has also had the unintended effect of focusing only on certain children or programs at the expense of others. Policy changes to accommodate specific children could have negative influences on other children. Full inclusion has been promoted by advocates of children with developmental disabilities, especially intellectual disabilities. I’ve always respected and supported their effort to get their kids included in more normal general education settings, but I have not supported their efforts to get all children in general education settings full-time. Many advocates of full inclusion seem to ignore that many children and youth with disabilities are floundering in general classrooms; they’re failing, and they’re performing abysmally. Advocates insist that if students with disabilities are not doing as well as we would hope in the general classroom, we should make general classrooms better. Well, I’ve watched full inclusion play out for 40 years. I’ve been part of serious and sustained efforts to make general education classrooms better and stronger, and I can say two things with confidence. First, mainstream classes can and should be made stronger. Second, regardless, they will never accommodate the needs, the social, emotional, academic, and behavioral needs of all students with disabilities.
One reason I find this upsetting is that not only does this ideology result in kids being misplaced in general education for all or most of the school day, but it also discourages validated beneficial, intensive programs that require intermittent separation of students from general education, for example, validated Tier 2 programs that require 45 minutes a day, 3 or 4 days a week.
Another trend that is not serving us well is the concerted effort to defund public schools. I attribute this mostly to the Republican Party in this country. Republicans control state legislatures in many states, and they are deliberately cutting off money to public schools, to ensure their failure or to fund private non-sectarian schools and private religious schools.
What is your perspective on the state of the profession today?
I’m very proud of our profession. Whether it’s people I agree with or those with whom I differ, I think that the overwhelming majority of professionals I come in contact with are well-meaning and hard-working. They have this commitment to make the world better through strengthening the lives of the children with whom they work. I never cease to be impressed.
And where do you see the profession in 20 or so years?
I think I try to adopt a deliberately short-term perspective on things that make sense. I hope we try as best we can to identify the things that are currently right with the field, the things that could be made better within our field, and work on those to make them better.
What advice would you give to special education teachers who are entering the field?
I think I would say different things to different people who are in different parts of the country. If they’re lucky enough to be working in a state that continues to fund teachers, and of course, there still are states like that, I would say one thing. If they’re in states where funding has essentially evaporated, I would say something very different. Generally, I would say, as I do say when I talk to teachers, that they should be proud of who they are and what they do on a day-to-day basis. There are good people doing good and extremely important work. I also say that good work should NOT be its own reward; that special (and general) educators should fight like hell for better wages and better work conditions. They deserve these things.
And for those entering academia, what advice would you give to them?
Don’t drink the cool aid. Think for yourself. Always.
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.
