news articles on special education

Articles on Special education

Displaying 1 - 20 of 40 articles.

Navigating special education labels is complex, and it matters for education equity

Laura Perez Gonzalez , Toronto Metropolitan University ; Henry Parada , Toronto Metropolitan University , and Veronica Escobar Olivo , Toronto Metropolitan University

Schools have a long way to go to offer equitable learning opportunities, especially in French immersion

Diana Burchell , University of Toronto ; Becky Xi Chen , University of Toronto ; Elizabeth Kay-Raining Bird , Dalhousie University , and Roksana Dobrin-De Grace , Toronto Metropolitan University

Daily report cards can decrease disruptions for children with ADHD

Gregory Fabiano , Florida International University

Achieving full inclusion in schools: Lessons from New Brunswick

Melissa Dockrill Garrett , University of New Brunswick and Andrea Garner , University of New Brunswick

Pandemic shut down many special education services – how parents can help their kids catch up

Mitchell Yell , University of South Carolina

Police response to 5-year -old boy who left school was problematic from the start

Elizabeth K. Anthony , Arizona State University

Decades after special education law and key ruling, updates still languish

Charles J. Russo , University of Dayton

ADHD: Medication alone doesn’t improve classroom learning for children – new research

William E. Pelham Jr. , Florida International University

Students of color in special education are less likely to get the help they need – here are 3 ways teachers can do better

Mildred Boveda , Penn State

Students with disabilities are not getting help to address lost opportunities

John McKenna , UMass Lowell

5 tips to help preschoolers with special needs during the pandemic

Michele L. Stites , University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Susan Sonnenschein , University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Children on individual education plans: What parents need to know, and 4 questions they should ask

Tori Trajanovski , York University, Canada

3 ways music educators can help students with autism develop their emotions

Dawn R. Mitchell White , University of South Florida

‘Generation C’: Why investing in early childhood is critical after  COVID-19

David Philpott , Memorial University of Newfoundland

Federal spending covers only 8% of public school budgets

David S. Knight , University of Washington

Coronavirus: Distance learning poses challenges for some families of children with disabilities

Jess Whitley , L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

How lockdown could affect South Africa’s children with special needs

Athena Pedro , University of the Western Cape ; Dr Bronwyn Mthimunye , University of the Western Cape , and Ella Bust , University of the Western Cape

5 tips to help parents navigate the unique needs of children with autism learning from home

Amanda Webster , University of Wollongong

Ontario’s high school e-learning still hasn’t addressed students with special needs

Pam Millett , York University, Canada

Excluded and refused enrolment: report shows illegal practices against students with disabilities in Australian schools

Kathy Cologon , Macquarie University

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Students with disabilities have a right to qualified teachers — but there's a shortage

Lee V. Gaines

This is the first in a two-part series on the special education teacher shortage. You can read part two here .

At the beginning of the school year, when Becky Ashcraft attended an open house at her 12-year-old daughter's school, she was surprised to find there was no teacher in her daughter's classroom – just a teacher's aide.

"They're like, 'Oh, well, she doesn't have a teacher right now. But, you know, hopefully, we'll get one soon,' " Ashcraft recalls.

Schools are struggling to hire special education teachers. Hawaii may have found a fix

Ashcraft's daughter attends a public school in northwest Indiana that exclusively serves students with disabilities. She is on the autism spectrum and doesn't speak. Without an assigned teacher, it was difficult for Ashcraft to know what her daughter did everyday.

"I wonder what actually kind of education she was receiving," Ashcraft says.

Ashcraft's daughter spent the entire fall semester without an assigned teacher. One other parent at the school told NPR they were in the same position. Ashcraft says the principal told her they were trying to hire someone, but it was difficult to find qualified candidates.

After Months Of Special Education Turmoil, Families Say Schools Owe Them

The school would not confirm to NPR that Ashcraft's daughter had no teacher, but a spokesperson did say the school has used substitutes to provide special education services amid the shortage of qualified educators.

The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act guarantees students with disabilities access to fully licensed special educators. But as Ashcraft learned, those teachers can be hard to find. In 2019, 44 states reported special education teacher shortages to the federal government. This school year, that number jumped to 48.

When schools can't find qualified teachers, federal law allows them to hire people who aren't fully qualified so long as they're actively pursuing their special education certification. Indiana, California, Virginia and Maryland are among the states that offer provisional licenses to help staff special education classrooms.

It's a practice that concerns some special education experts. They worry placing people who aren't fully trained for the job in charge of classrooms could harm some of the most vulnerable students.

But given the lack of qualified special education teachers, Ashcraft says she wouldn't mind if her daughter's teacher wasn't fully trained yet.

"Let them work towards that [license], that's wonderful," she says. "But, you know, I guess at this point, you know, we're happy to take anybody."

The case against provisional special education licenses

Jacqueline Rodriguez, with the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, is alarmed at the number of provisional licenses issued to unqualified special education teachers in recent years — even if those teachers are actively working toward full licensure.

"The band aid has been, let's put somebody who's breathing in front of kids, and hope that everybody survives," she says. Her organization focuses on teacher preparation, and has partnered with higher education institutions to improve recruitment of special educators.

She worries placing untrained people at the helm of a classroom, and in charge of Individualized Education Programs, is harmful for students.

"This to me is like telling somebody there's a dearth of doctors in neurosurgery, so we would love for you to transition into the field by giving you the opportunity to operate on people while you're taking coursework at night," Rodriguez says.

She admits it's a provocative analogy, but says teaching is a profession that requires intensive coursework, evaluation and practice. "And unless you can demonstrate competency, you have no business being a teacher."

One district is building a special education teacher pipeline

Shaleta West had zero teaching experience when she was hired as a special educator by Elkhart Community Schools, a district in northern Indiana.

She says her first couple weeks in the classroom were overwhelming.

"It was very scary because, you know, I know kids, yes. But when you're trying to teach kids it's a whole other ball game. You can't just play around with them and talk to them and chit chat. You have to teach."

The Coronavirus Crisis

Families of children with special needs are suing in several states. here's why..

Her district is helping her work toward her certification at nearby Indiana University South Bend. Elkhart Community Schools pays West's tuition and, in exchange, West has agreed to work for the district for five years.

The district also provides West with a mentor — a seasoned special educator who answers questions, offers tips and looks over the complicated paperwork that's legally required for students with disabilities.

West says she would have been lost without the mentorship and the university classes.

"To be honest, I don't even know if I would have stayed," she explains.

"I knew nothing. I came in without any prior knowledge to what I needed to do on a daily basis."

Administrator Lindsey Brander oversees the Elkhart schools program that supports West. She says the program has produced about 30 fully qualified special educators over the past four years. This year, it's serving about 10 special educators, all on provisional licenses.

"We are able to recruit our own teachers and train them specifically for our students. So the system is working," Brander explains. The challenge, she says, is that it's become increasingly difficult for the district to find people to participate in the program.

And even with a new teacher pipeline in place, the district still has 24 special education vacancies.

Brander would prefer if all the district's special education teachers were fully qualified the first day they set foot in a classroom.

"But that's not reality. That's not going to happen. Until we fix some of the structural challenges that we have in education, this is how business is done now. This is life in education," she says.

How high teacher turnover impacts students

The structural issues contributing to the special educator shortage include heavy workloads and relatively low pay. At Elkhart schools, for example, new special education teachers with bachelor's degrees receive a minimum salary of $41,000, according to district officials.

Desiree Carver-Thomas, a researcher with the Learning Policy Institute, says low compensation and long workdays can lead to high turnover, especially in schools that serve students of color and children from low-income households. And when special education teachers leave the profession, the cycle continues.

"Because when turnover rates are so high, schools and districts they're just trying to fill those positions with whomever they can find, often teachers who are not fully prepared," Carver-Thomas says.

Hiring unprepared teachers can also contribute to high turnover rates, according to Carver-Thomas' research . And it can impact student outcomes.

Schools Say They Have To Do Better For Students With Disabilities This Fall

As NPR has reported , Black students and students with disabilities are disciplined and referred to law enforcement at higher rates than students without disabilities. Black students with disabilities are especially vulnerable; federal data shows they have the highest risk for suspension among all students with disabilities.

"That may be more common when teachers don't have the tools and the experience and the training to respond appropriately," Carver-Thomas says.

Schools and families have to make do

The solution to the special educator shortage isn't simple. Carver-Thomas says it will require schools, colleges and governments to work together to boost teacher salaries and improve recruitment, preparation, working conditions and on-the-job support.

In the meantime, schools and families will have to make do.

In January, Becky Ashcraft learned her northwest Indiana school had found a teacher for her daughter's classroom.

She says she's grateful to finally have a fully licensed teacher to tell her about her daughter's school day. And she wishes the special educators that families like hers rely on were valued more.

"We've got to be thankful for the people that do this work," she says.

Nicole Cohen edited this story for broadcast and for the web.

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Teacher Voices

Now is the time for schools to invest in special-education inclusion models that benefit all students

Kimberly Berry

November 10, 2021.

Ivan was a fourth grader with big brown eyes, a wide smile and a quiet demeanor who refused to enter my classroom. “Everyone thinks I’m stupid,” he’d say. I’ve changed his name to protect his privacy.

At the time, my school employed a pull-out model for students with disabilities, meaning they were removed from their assigned classrooms to receive specialized services and supports. This left Ivan feeling embarrassed, ostracized and resistant to putting forth academic effort.

One in 8 students in U.S. public schools have an individualized education plan, or IEP, making them eligible for special education services. About 750,000 students with disabilities attend California public schools. Many, like Ivan, do not respond well to being substantially separated from their peers. Research suggests that inclusion models designed to integrate students with and without disabilities into a single learning environment can lead to stronger academic and social outcomes.

At Caliber ChangeMakers Academy — where I have been a program specialist for five of the 10 years I have worked with students with disabilities — we knew an inclusion model was best for Ivan and many others. Yet, we didn’t think we had the tools or resources to make it possible.

We were wrong.

Schools can support students like Ivan — and those of all abilities — to learn from and alongside one another in an inclusive setting without exorbitant costs if they rethink how they allocate resources and develop educators’ confidence and competence in teaching all students in a general education setting.

In 2019, we began intentionally organizing staff, time and money toward inclusion, and we did so without spending more than similar public schools do that don’t focus on inclusion.

Now, with the infusion of federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding, schools have additional resources to invest in this approach now, in service to longer-term, sustainable change.

The nonprofit Education Resource Strategies studied our school and three others in California that are doing this work without larger investments of resources. Their analysis examines the resource shifts that inclusion-focused schools employ and can be tapped by other schools considering this work, taking a “do now, build toward” approach that addresses student needs and sustains these changes even after the emergency federal funding expires. Many of their recommendations mirror the steps we took to pursue an inclusion model.

It didn’t happen overnight, but three steps were important to our efforts to adopt a more inclusive model for teaching and learning:

• Shift special education staff into general education classrooms to support targeted group sizes. At Caliber ChangeMakers Academy, special education teachers are departmentalized, each serving as a co-teacher to two general education teachers, leveraging their content expertise to share responsibility for classroom instruction. That means some special education teachers now teach students who are not part of their caseload. That means they are tracking the goals of more students, which also means that young people have more specialty educators working together to support their individual needs.
• Prioritize connected professional learning around inclusion for all teachers . We adjusted teachers’ schedules to incorporate collaborative time for general education and special education teachers to meet before, during and after lessons to plan engaging, differentiated instruction for all. On the surface, the reduction in individual planning time might be a challenge. However, our teachers have found that they now feel more prepared, effective and connected because they have a partner to turn to for feedback, suggestions and encouragement.
• Invest in social-emotional and mental health staff to narrow the scope of special education teachers. These staff members work to reduce unnecessary special education referrals and mitigate troubles facing students regardless of their disability status. They also can help address unexpected challenges, meaning special education teachers can spend more time in general education classrooms. A tradeoff we made is to slightly increase class sizes with fewer general administrative and support staff to prioritize hiring experienced social-emotional learning and mental health professionals.

For schools eager to adopt a more inclusive instructional model, now is the time. The emergency federal funding creates unprecedented opportunities for school and system leaders to build research-backed, sustainable inclusion models that can better meet the needs of all students, including students with disabilities.

I’ve seen firsthand that inclusive, diverse classrooms can provide powerful learning opportunities for all students.

As for Ivan, he’s now in eighth grade and thriving in an inclusive, co-teaching classroom. He went from completing almost no academic work independently to completing science lab reports on his own, working in collaborative groups in his English class and declaring that he loves math. Because our school invested in and normalized differentiated supports in an inclusive setting, now Ivan and many other students are getting what they need to be successful academically, socially and emotionally.

Kimberly Berry is a special education program specialist at Caliber ChangeMakers Academy in Vallejo.

The opinions in this commentary are those of the author. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our  guidelines  and  contact us .

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Karina Villalona 2 years ago 2 years ago

I speak as a mom of two kids in co-teaching collaborative classes for their 4 main academic subjects, as well as a former teacher, and a school psychologist for 19 years. I agree with much of what Ms. Berry states. Co-teaching programs can be very successful for both general and special education students if all of the appropriate supports are in place (as listed by Ms. Berry). However, it is important to clarify that this … Read More

I speak as a mom of two kids in co-teaching collaborative classes for their 4 main academic subjects, as well as a former teacher, and a school psychologist for 19 years. I agree with much of what Ms. Berry states. Co-teaching programs can be very successful for both general and special education students if all of the appropriate supports are in place (as listed by Ms. Berry).

However, it is important to clarify that this model is not a panacea. Students with cognitive skills that are far below the average range have also shared how incredibly frustrating being in co-teaching classes can be for them. Even with support from the special education teacher, the pacing for some students is way too fast. In addition, depending on what the student’s specific classification is, co-teaching on its own does not allow an opportunity for remedial instruction.

My daughters are dyslexic. They participate in co-teaching with a lot of support from the special education teacher. They have one period of direct instruction in reading via an Orton-Gillingham based program and one period of Resource Room daily which allows them to work on content from the general education classes that they might need to review, break down or preview.

So, yes, co-teaching can be great for some students when the program is well managed and staffed; however, we cannot ignore the need for small group supports and remedial instruction when necessary.

Craig 2 years ago 2 years ago

Studies cited showing benefits of inclusion model typically suffer from selection bias, and there are no significant data on the effects of inclusion models on neurotypical peers. Does the author of this piece have data showing results that support her claims? Also, what do the teachers in this program have to say about it, in the first person? If this is truly working as presented it will be a game changer.

Monica Saraiya 2 years ago 2 years ago

The inclusion model is not a one size fits all one. Students with significant learning differences do not receive the services that best meet their needs in this model. As with all practices in education, inclusion must be one, but not the only way to service students who need specialized help with their learning.

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Special Ed Shouldn’t Be Separate

Isolating kids from their peers is unjust.

In the fall of 2020, as my son and his neighborhood friends started to trickle back out into the world, my daughter, Izzy, stayed home. At the time, Izzy was 3 years old, ripe for the natural learning that comes from being with other kids. I knew by the way she hummed and flapped her hands around children at the playground—and by her frustration with me at home—that she yearned to be among them.

The question of where Izzy would attend school had been vexing me for two years. Izzy had been a happy infant, but she was small for her age and missed every developmental milestone. When she was eight months old, my husband and I learned that she had been born with a rare genetic disorder and would grow up with a range of intellectual and physical disabilities. Doctors were wary of giving us a prognosis; the families I found on Facebook who had children with similar disorders offered more definitive—and doomful—forecasts. When Izzy showed signs of some common manifestations (low muscle tone, lack of verbal communication, feeding troubles) but no signs of others (vision and hearing loss, seizures), I started to lose confidence in other people’s predictions—and to instead look to Izzy as the determinant of her own abilities.

While managing Izzy’s medical care and her therapy regimen, I also started the process of finding her a school in Oakland, California, where we lived at the time. I knew what options weren’t available to her, such as the small family-run preschool in a cozy Craftsman home that my son had attended. Private schools in general have fewer obligations to accommodate students with disabilities—they don’t directly receive government funding and aren’t covered by the federal special-education law that requires the provision of free and appropriate public education. California’s public preschools, at the time reserved largely for low-income families, weren’t an option, either, because our family exceeded the income threshold to qualify.

Read: Grieving the future I imagined for my daughter

Although kids with disabilities are spending more and more time in general classrooms, in the United States, “special” education still often means “separate.” Kids with disabilities rarely receive the same education as their peers without disabilities; commonly—or mostly, in the case of those with intellectual disabilities—they are cordoned off in separate classrooms. The one special-education preschool in Oakland I found that could accommodate Izzy would have sorted her into a siloed classroom for students with heavy support needs. The prospect of her being hidden away from other kids seemed unappealing to me—and unjust. As desperate as I was for Izzy to attend school, I didn’t want that to mean removing her at an early age from the rest of society.

Another approach—placing students with disabilities, with the support they need, into general-education classrooms—is known as inclusive education. If the goal of education is to prepare students for the real world, an inclusive approach makes a lot more sense. “Students educated in segregated settings graduate to inhabit the same society as students without disability,” writes Kate de Bruin, a senior lecturer at Monash University’s School of Curriculum, Teaching and Inclusive Education. “There is no ‘special’ universe into which they graduate.”

In her role training teachers, de Bruin promotes tiered intervention systems where all students are given a base layer of general support, and additional services (small groups, more time, more detailed or focused instruction) are added on for students who require them. (For example, when doing counting activities, my daughter’s teachers and therapists often pair her with another child and incorporate her favorite toys.) Depending on the situation, a specialist might “push in” to the general classroom, sitting alongside a student at her desk to work one-on-one or they might “pull out” and remove the student from the classroom to find a quieter separate space.

There’s a concept in disability studies called “the dilemma of difference.” The legal scholar Martha Minow coined the term in 1985, and discussed it in her book Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law . The issue of whether students with disabilities should be treated as “different” or “the same” underlies many of the mechanics of special education. In both of my kids’ schools, specialists also build relationships with students without disabilities and include them in activities as a way to normalize disability and the basic human need for help. Thoughtful inclusion reinforces a paradox of the human condition: We are all different and the same.

Read: Is the bar too low for special education?

“Inclusion is quality teaching for all kids, designed to make sure that everybody gets access to quality instruction—and then for some kids, it’s intensified,” de Bruin told me.

In 2019, de Bruin published an analysis of 40 years of research on the benefits of inclusive education. She cites more than three dozen studies showing positive outcomes when students with disabilities are included in a classroom setting designed for all children, rather than siloed off for “special” instruction. In an inclusive model, she writes, students with disabilities achieve higher test scores and grade point averages, stronger math and literacy skills, and more developed communication and social skills. Some studies suggest that Individualized Education Programs, road maps for the schooling of students with disabilities, tend to be more ambitious and academically focused in inclusive settings; separate “special” schools (or siloed classrooms within schools) can sometimes resort to a focus on “life skills” instead of curriculum-based goals. Research has indicated that for students with disabilities, an inclusive education can have positive long-term effects on almost every aspect of their lives, including their likelihood of enrolling in college and graduating, finding employment, and forming long-term relationships.

A newer meta-analysis found mixed outcomes for inclusive education. The study doesn’t specify which types of disabilities are better served by inclusion or separate education; it merely states that some children “may benefit from traditional special education in a segregated setting” and that more tailored research is needed. If nothing else, the study’s inconclusive findings serve as a reminder that in my role as Izzy’s parent and advocate, some of the most important decisions I’ll make will rest not on data alone, but also on personal and moral judgments.

We know that failing to include students with their peers when they are young can leave them with deep and lasting psychological scars. In her memoir, Easy Beauty , the author Chloé Cooper Jones reckons with the emotional armor she built up over a lifetime of being excluded due to her physical disability, a congenital sacral disorder. “I’d believed completely that it was my nature to exist at a distance, to be essentially, at my core, alone,” she writes. “My body was constantly seen, but this thing I called my ‘self’ was invisible … People make spaces I cannot enter, teaching me how forgotten I am, how excluded I am from ‘real life.’”

Assessing how many U.S. schools are inclusive of students with disabilities is challenging. Sending students with disabilities to the same schools as their peers without disabilities is not the same as inclusion, which is an added layer of services within those general-education schools that allows students with disabilities to attend the same classes. Integrated schools, at least, have become very common—the U.S. Department of Education reported that, in 2020, 95 percent of students with disabilities attended regular schools. That’s considerable progress given that 50 years ago, before Congress codified their right to an education, only one in five children with disabilities attended school, according to the Department of Education; many lived full-time in residential facilities that resembled hospitals and prisons. In one well-known example , children with disabilities were warehoused in a “school” complex notorious for filthy conditions and rampant abuse.

Changes to federal legislation propelled this shift. In 1975, a law now known as the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) made it more difficult for school districts to separate students with disabilities from their peers, which led to a massive increase in the proportion of students with disabilities attending regular schools.

But a federal law like IDEA doesn’t reach into individual classrooms. In 2020, only 66 percent of students with disabilities spent 80 percent or more of their time in general classes; 30 percent spent significant time in segregated classrooms. Inclusion rates plummet for students with intellectual disabilities, just 19 percent of whom spent 80 percent or more of their day in general classes. In 2020, students with disabilities were more than twice as likely as their peers without disabilities to drop out of high school. The lack of a high-school diploma layers on an additional disadvantage: The national employment rate for people with disabilities hovers around 20 percent.

In fairness, inclusive models require resources that not all schools have access to. An inclusive program that provides individual and small-group support for students with disabilities will require more funding to pay a larger staff—a problem, given that well-trained teachers and specialists are becoming harder to find. Since 2010, nationwide enrollment in teacher-preparation programs has decreased by 36 percent , with a handful of states facing declines of 50 percent or more. Laurie VanderPloeg, the former director of the Office of Special Education Programs at the U.S. Department of Education, told me that the pandemic hit special-education teachers and their students especially hard, given the challenges of remote learning. “We have high demand; we simply don’t have a good supply of teachers to develop the effective workforce we need,” VanderPloeg explained, referring to a recent study estimating that at least 163,000 underqualified teachers—long-term substitutes and others without appropriate training—are teaching in U.S. schools.

VanderPloeg believes the shortage could be reduced by de-specializing teacher training. In her vision, all teachers, not just special-education teachers, are equipped with techniques to handle a much wider range of abilities. “What we’ve done in the past is focus on specific disability needs, instead of the teaching practices,” VanderPloeg said. “All teachers need to be trained to address all needs. That’s good teaching.”

Whether due to the teacher shortage or other factors such as dwindling school funding , it’s clear that many families don’t feel that their children with disabilities are getting an appropriate education. During the 2020–21 school year, families in the U.S. filed more than 20,000 IDEA-related complaints against schools, less than half of which were resolved without a legal hearing. In California, the state with the most people (and students), special-education-related disputes rose 85 percent from 2007 to 2017.

But despite funding and staffing challenges, de Bruin and other experts view historical bias as the primary hurdle to inclusion. “The problem we’re dealing with is a very entrenched attitude that these children remain ineducable,” de Bruin told me.

As the pandemic raged on and Izzy’s school search grew more urgent, I began to doubt that I just hadn’t looked hard enough and that an inclusive school would pop up out of nowhere. Stuck at home, Izzy wailed with boredom.

I contacted a special-education advocate who happened to work in New York City. The advocate recommended several schools and programs in the city, including a highly rated program for autistic students, a growing movement of intentionally inclusive classrooms , and a Brooklyn preschool with a 25-year history of integrating children with disabilities into regular classrooms. In all my searching, I hadn’t found any such programs in California.

“Can you move?” the advocate asked. She was serious.

Read: The pandemic is a crisis for students with special needs

California had been the backdrop for my entire adult life. It’s where I built my career, earned a master’s degree, developed deep friendships, met my husband, got married, and had two kids. And in the summer of 2021, my husband and I packed up our Oakland bungalow, stuffed our kids into the minivan, and drove away.

Morning drop-offs at Izzy’s new school in Brooklyn are chaotic: Pedestrians maneuver around parents crouching to hug their toddlers, their goodbyes drowned out by garbage trucks. Izzy’s wheelchair appears, pushed by Alanna, Izzy’s dedicated teacher and aide, whom Izzy greets with a gentle high five. I deposit Izzy into the wheelchair; she kicks her feet in anticipation of the day ahead. She might work on her expressive language by mastering ASL signs for “ready” or “music,” or on her receptive language by learning to recognize signs for body parts—two goals specified in her Individualized Education Program. Like her classmates, Izzy is occasionally expected to perform “helper of the day” duties (sorting the attendance ledger, helping a teacher pull lunch boxes from the fridge), which Alanna modifies so Izzy can do them from her wheelchair. In photos shared by her teachers, I can see from the proud smile on Izzy’s face that she gets satisfaction from helping others.

Alanna’s role is to include Izzy by making adaptations that allow her to participate; in official-speak, this is called “accessing the curriculum.” Recently, Izzy had trouble sitting through a 20-minute art lesson. Alanna gradually increased Izzy’s time in the class by a few minutes each day, moved her materials to a quieter spot in the classroom, and found some thicker oil pastels (which require less strength to hold than standard ones). Alanna also helps other kids relate to Izzy by demystifying her disabilities and framing them in neutral and age-appropriate terms. When they call now-5-year-old Izzy a “baby,” Alanna reminds them that Izzy is their same age with a smaller body. Her friends vie for a turn joining her for collaborative games in speech therapy, or to ride with her in the elevator. During recess, Izzy’s wheelchair is a choice prop for playing “queen”—the lucky throne bearer gets to rule the playground kingdom. I recently got a text from the father of one of Izzy’s classmates, a 5-year-old girl who’d been slithering around at home on her stomach—army-crawling in the way toddlers do before they learn to walk. When her dad asked what she was doing, the girl said, “I’m strong like Izzy.”

Izzy and her friends are different and the same. They have different learning needs, but they share a love of barn animals and ukuleles. Sure, Izzy is unique, rare, one in 10,000. But in an ideal world, no child’s specialness would override their contribution to a shared humanity, or be used to justify their separation from everyone else.

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What is Special Education?

There is a system of support available for students with learning differences. 

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The majority of students with disabilities -- about two-thirds -- are male, according to data from the Pew Research Center on the 2017-18 school year.

For decades, public schools have been required by law to provide a “free and appropriate education” to children with disabilities. The system for making that happen is a complicated web of acronyms and regulations that govern services and support. We call it special education.

Special education refers to a set of federal and state laws and regulations designed to educate millions of children with disabilities and serve as a safety net for those unable to take advantage of the mainstream school curriculum without help.

“The special education laws are a recognition that students with disabilities aren’t able to access an education the way other students can without special supports,” says Ron Hager, managing attorney for education and employment at the National Disability Rights Network. “Special education gives students with disabilities what they need to be successful.”

Special Education by the Numbers

Special education in the United States is governed by the landmark Individuals with Disabilities Education Act , sometimes called IDEA. The law states that children with cognitive, physical, emotional and medical conditions are entitled to special services, supports, technologies and individualized planning and goals outside the general education curriculum.

More than 7 million students , or about 14% of those ages 3 to 21 in public schools, were entitled to special services and accommodations to help with learning in the 2019-20 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

The percentage of students in special education also varies by state, with differences likely due to inconsistencies in how states determine eligibility , as well as challenges that come with diagnosing disabilities. New York serves the largest percentage of disabled students.

Nationwide, the system helps children with disabilities gain a basic education, acquire life skills and integrate with their peers.

During the pandemic, when schooling moved online, that support continued in many cases, says Lindsay Kubatzky, director of policy and advocacy at the National Center for Learning Disabilities.

“As school systems navigated the pandemic, [special education laws] ensured that educators continued to provide high-quality, tailored education to students with disabilities, regardless of circumstances,” he wrote in an email. “In any learning setting, students are still guaranteed the accommodations and resources they need to be successful. The law protects the rights of students with disabilities even in the most challenging of times.”

However, Hager says there is still a great deal of work ahead.

“During the pandemic, no student really got what they needed,” he says. “Going forward, the special education system is going to make sure there is a closer look given so that students with disabilities are caught up.”

Who Receives Special Education Services?

Among all students receiving special education services that year, 34% had a specific learning disability, generally defined as a difference in the way they think, speak, read, write or spell. Dyslexia , a learning disorder that impacts the ability to read, is perhaps the most commonly known learning disability. But over the years, other key challenges have been identified, such as dysgraphia , which impacts writing, and dyscalculia , which impacts math and related activities.

Another 19% had a speech or language impairment. Autistic children made up about 10% of the nation’s disabled students in the 2017-18 school year, compared to about 1.5% in 2000-01, according to NCES data .

“It used to be that one in 10,000 people had autism, and now it is one in 100,” Hager says. “If you ask five different people why that is, you will get six different answers, including environmental factors. But the fact is, autism and the need for services is much more on people’s radars. And there is an understanding that autism is a spectrum, in which you can be high-functioning but also need special education services, particularly social-emotional services.”

The Special Case of ADHD

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder represents a special case when it comes to obtaining support and services at school. ADHD is not identified as one of the 13 federal disability categories that are guaranteed services, though there are ways that children with ADHD can receive help.

When the child has severe ADHD that leads to performing two grades below their level, the disability can be classified as “otherwise health impaired” and the student can be eligible for services under federal law. Less severe cases of ADHD, and other disabilities, can obtain special education services through something called a 504 Plan, which provides accommodations such as preferential seating or extended time on tests.

“Both medically and educationally, our understanding of ADHD continues to improve, but there is still tremendous confusion about what constitutes ADHD,” Elena Silva, director of PK-12 education at New America, a policy organization in Washington, D.C., wrote in an email.

Hager says that students with ADHD are often dismissed as “lazy or disorganized,” when what they actually need is special education supports and accommodations. “Students with ADHD often get shunted aside,” he says.

Obtaining Special Education Services

The first step in receiving special education services is to be identified by a school or district as a student who requires help. A teacher, parent or doctor will document a child’s challenges and make a case for services under the 13 federal disability categories.

Meetings and assessments will take place and a specialized plan known as an Individualized Education Program , or IEP, may be drafted to codify individual goals and accommodations. That plan will be revisited regularly to determine whether the disability classification is still valid and the child is still eligible for special education services.

However, Kubatzky says the system does not always align perfectly with the challenges faced by some students.

“Every student with a disability also presents a unique and individualized set of needs,” he says.

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Special Education, Inc.

Private equity sees profit in the business of educating autistic kids. Parents and teachers see diminished services and added stress.

Emily had a lot of fight in her.

The petite 7-year-old had blonde hair and blue eyes. She was also diagnosed with autism, and she had been struggling ever since her mother, Sarah, moved her and her brother hours away from their dad during the pandemic. After the move, Emily became increasingly frustrated with her inability to articulate her thoughts and began boiling over into rages that required interventions at the public school she attended.

So in August 2021, Sarah moved Emily to New Story, a private school in State College, Pennsylvania, dedicated to serving children with special needs, in the hopes that the teachers there would know how to keep her little girl calm. But at New Story, Emily seemed to be having even more meltdowns, and the school called Sarah to intervene when her daughter broke down. So Sarah left work, again and again, to comfort her daughter with bear hugs.

She would rather miss work than let New Story teachers use their preferred tactic: corralling the first grader with gym mats that Emily would fight and scratch so hard, she'd come home with foam lodged beneath her bloody fingernails.

Then one afternoon in April last year, Sarah asked a family friend to pick up Emily from New Story. When the friend arrived, the little girl was on the playground, pinned down under the weight of four adults.

That night, Sarah decided that this nightmare had to end. Emily would not return to New Story. A year later, her daughter still hasn't talked about the incident at home or in therapy. New Story calls itself a "safe, nurturing environment for our students and their families," but Emily has a different term for her old school: "the mean people."

After nearly two semesters of second grade at a public school, Sarah said her daughter has progressed faster, academically and behaviorally, than she did at New Story. When Emily has an in-class meltdown, public school staff discreetly shepherd her to a quiet sensory room to calm down.

"Now, at the very least, I know that she is safe and she can communicate that to me," said Sarah, who asked that we use pseudonyms to protect her daughter. Their identities are known to Business Insider.

Sarah didn't know it at the time, but when she enrolled Emily in New Story, she was unwittingly signing on to an experiment in American education, one that worries former staff, US senators, and special-education researchers alike: New Story is the country's first large-scale special-education-school network owned by a private-equity firm.

In 2019, the Boston-based private-equity arm of Audax Group, which manages $36 billion for investors, including the Kentucky Teachers Retirement System and the Pennsylvania State Employees' Retirement System, purchased a mid-Atlantic special-education-school network called New Story Schools for an undisclosed price. Under Audax, New Story has purchased other local school chains, like Pennsylvania's River Rock Academy, as well as various behavioral-services companies, and rolled them up under New Story's corporate umbrella. The deals have created what New Story calls one of the largest special-education companies in the US, serving children with autism, behavioral problems, and other issues.

Now, Audax is reportedly looking to flip the company . More than a quarter of private-equity-owned companies across industries are sold to other private-equity firms, so the new owners may look much like the current one.

To some, private equity's business model appears antithetical to special education. In a basic private-equity deal, a firm pools money from investors like public pensions to buy a business, improve it (or load it up with debt), and sell it. Fast expansion means the firm can sell the business, typically four to seven years after buying it, and make a profit of 15% to 20% or more. Private equity targets companies that can grow fast, often by acquiring similar businesses.

A private-equity firm also makes money well before offloading the business, including by collecting fees from its investors and charging the businesses it owns for management and advisory services.

Special-education schools bring in a reliable income stream, typically from public funds: School districts and states pay New Story anywhere from $27,000 to $95,000 per student, and some schools operate year-round. (The average public school district in Pennsylvania, where New Story operates the most schools, spends about $23,000 per child across all types of public education. Additional services, such as providing an individual aide or specialized therapy, can push those costs much higher.) And a fragmented nationwide market means that a company like New Story — which Audax grew from 15 schools to a network of 75 schools and centers across seven states — has plenty of opportunities for expansion.

This year, New Story expects to bring in $305 million in revenue, the analytics firm Mergermarket said. The company serves a few thousand students, a tiny slice of the 8 million Americans between the ages of 3 and 21 who receive special-education services each year — a 25% increase from 2011, according to government data . (In 2021-22, 2% of these children attended public or private schools dedicated to students with disabilities.)

Under Audax, New Story gutted departments focused on quality and education and struggled with turnover.

To understand how New Story changed under private-equity ownership and what private-equity takeovers could mean for the special-education landscape, Business Insider reviewed more than 3,000 pages of public records and spoke to 20 current and former New Story employees and parents. Many of them said that under Audax, New Story pushed to expand at the expense of student safety and academic progress. While parental complaints and even lawsuits alleging mistreatment are not uncommon at special-education schools, records of complaints and interviews with parents and educators show that New Story's focus on profit under private-equity ownership added an alarming layer of stress to special education.

Under Audax, New Story gutted departments focused on quality and education and struggled with turnover. The company's hiring practices grew so lax in some instances — including hiring an administrator who was fired from her previous school for failing to report suspected sexual abuse — that state regulators expressed alarm. Some parents, like Sarah, grew concerned about the inappropriate use of restraints and isolation.

Shanon Taylor, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, who studies privately run special-education schools, told BI that private equity's push to make big profits is fundamentally at odds with special education's mission. Since the schools are generally paid flat reimbursement rates by school districts or insurers, she said private-equity firms make money by cutting costs.

"They'll cut the number of employees. They'll pay employees less. They'll hire less-qualified employees so they can pay them less. They're going to defer maintenance on their facilities and not have the equipment necessary in those facilities," Taylor said, speaking about private-equity firms generally. "All of those things then are impacting the services to these vulnerable populations."

As a parent of two adults with special needs, Taylor said she would not have sent her children to a private-equity-owned school.

"Most people don't even realize that the school that you may be sending your child to — because you're looking for a specialized setting — may not be run with the best interest of your child at heart," she said.

Top policymakers are concerned, too.

"Private equity has no place in education — especially special education," Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio told BI. "From nursing homes to retail to housing, we have seen private equity kill too many jobs, dismantle too many businesses, raise prices, and hurt too many patients in our state, and I am deeply alarmed it is now working to undermine — and endanger — a student's fundamental right to a free and appropriate public education." New Story runs 12 schools and centers in Ohio.

Brown's colleague, Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, where New Story operates 27 schools, agreed. "Public education dollars should be spent ensuring that students with disabilities have their individual education needs met by qualified teachers and health professionals, not padding the pockets of wealthy private equity executives," he said. Casey chairs the Senate's Health Subcommittee on Children and Families.

'A moneymaking machine'

New Story was founded in 1997 by Paul Volosov, a certified school psychologist who created several for-profit businesses to support adults and children with special needs and other challenges.

Volosov wasn't a perfect owner. Before New Story was acquired by Audax, its schools were the focus of a handful of lawsuits alleging improper treatment of students and employees. And Volosov drew internal scrutiny for his erratic behavior and off-color remarks about women and religion, some former employees said. Volosov stayed on as New Story's CEO until January 2022, when he transitioned to chairman.

Audax filled the company's four C-suite roles with people who had no education or behavioral-health experience.

But former staffers said some of New Story's problems under Volosov were magnified with Audax's ownership. After the education and quality departments were slashed in summer 2022, staff said the disconnect between corporate objectives and the classroom widened. Audax filled the company's four C-suite roles with people who had no education or behavioral-health experience.

"Since the expansion, I think it's just a moneymaking machine," said Jim Grinnen, a former regional manager of education for New Story's central Pennsylvania region. He joined the company in 2018 and left in 2021. "Being a special educator, knowing why I got into it 25 years ago, it just makes your stomach turn when you're seeing these rich people give speeches in front of you with no clue what we're doing here."

Despite those concerns, some parents and educators have expressed satisfaction with the level of care New Story offered. For some families, New Story schools were a last resort, taking a difficult child when no one else would. In Pennsylvania Department of Education records, 11 superintendents and other public school administrators praised one arm of New Story, an 11-campus alternative-education school called River Rock Academy that enrolls disruptive students.

"It is a company that truly cares about the students and treats them as if they were their own. The company provides a high level of service," wrote the superintendent of one Pennsylvania school district in River Rock's application for relicensure.

In an October letter to BI, New Story's senior vice president of operations for Pennsylvania, Christina Spielbauer, highlighted the improvements the "deeply mission-oriented" company has made under Audax, including hiring over 221 new staff members last summer and investing $2 million last year into facilities. Spielbauer wrote that the company was "open to sharing more information" with BI.

Nathaniel Garnick, a spokesman for the company, subsequently declined to answer a list of questions or make New Story or Audax representatives available to interview. Garnick issued two statements, one on behalf of Audax and another on behalf of New Story. He wrote that the company has invested almost $50 million into New Story facilities and improved the student-teacher ratio.

"Rather than focus on the positive impact we have every day on thousands of students with severe emotional and behavioral issues, it is unfortunate that Business Insider has chosen to cherry-pick a handful of isolated incidents in an effort to sully the reputation of our hard working, dedicated team who put their hearts and souls into the work they do," Garnick wrote.

Speaking for Audax, he wrote that staff shortages mean schools are "ill-equipped to confront the escalating mental health crisis on their own."

" Our investment has enabled New Story to expand access and provide vital support to a significantly underserved population of students who often cannot attend traditional public schools," he wrote.

Trying to do more with fewer people

Craig Richards loves teaching and doesn't shy away from a challenge. The elementary-school teacher started a chess club in the Reading School District, one of Pennsylvania's poorest and worst-performing districts. He's also worked in a youth detention center, and his wife is a teacher.

Under its new owners, Richards told Business Insider, River Rock subordinated student care to profits.

In 2017, Richards joined River Rock Academy, which specializes in educating students who can't stay in their public schools because of misconduct. He said staff members at River Rock were caring and tried their best to educate a group of students who often wanted to be anywhere else. Richards left the school after two years. While he was away, New Story bought the school. When he returned for the 2022-23 academic year, he found that the tenor had shifted: Under its new owners, he told Business Insider, River Rock subordinated student care to profits.

"Now since it's New Story, they're definitely more money-driven. They're trying to do more with fewer people," Richards said.

Several former staff members in Pennsylvania said New Story schools there chronically lacked substitute teachers. When Richards missed roughly a week of work during the last academic year for the flu and another three days to take care of his daughter when she broke her foot, behavioral staff — not teachers — covered his classroom.

Asking staff to double as subs might be reasonable if New Story expanded its staff for such needs. But Richards said the school employed fewer staff under New Story than during his first stint, putting extra pressure on teachers to work no matter what.

"It definitely made you feel a little less human. You're not allowed to be sick, your daughter can't have a problem, because we don't have enough people here," he said.

Teacher and staff turnover is a perennial problem for public and private schools nationally that was exacerbated by the pandemic. The people who spoke to BI said New Story turnover is high, even at the top levels. For instance, two Pennsylvania education directors left in spring 2023, according to records obtained by BI — one after just months in the role. Neither was immediately replaced. One Ohio school had four directors, including a 25-year-old, in 2022.

Such director turnover is highly unusual, Judith McKinney, a Virginia-based special-education advocate, said. In her five years evaluating private schools with Virginia's Department of Education, she said directors typically stayed at the same school for years, sometimes decades.

Several grad students working at Green Tree School were so deeply alarmed that they registered their concerns with the Pennsylvania Department of Education

At River Rock, Richards struggled with new curriculum demands under New Story's ownership. His school previously reimbursed teachers who bought worksheets and other items on a popular online marketplace called Teachers Pay Teachers. But last year, River Rock began directing teachers to upload their own worksheets or other material to share with colleagues across River Rock's 11 schools — a closed, unpaid version of Teachers Pay Teachers.

When Richards sought other curriculum resources, he was pointed to a school closet that contained donated materials.

"One of the manuals didn't even have the first unit — it was ripped out," he said. "I'm like, 'Can we look at getting something else?' I had ideas of books we could use. They wouldn't."

Though he loved his colleagues and some aspects of the job, when a position to manage a local running store came up, Richards eagerly took it. He left in June — just two semesters after his return.

(In state paperwork, River Rock said it offers teachers "a variety of textbooks and resources including a resource bank available to them to provide appropriate course content to students based on their individual need.")

Grinnen, the former Pennsylvania administrator, told BI that his schools also struggled with curriculum resources, including having to give 12th graders textbooks written for second graders. That surprised him since the company seemed to have deep pockets to open new locations. Some schools acted more like holding pens than educational facilities, Grinnen said.

Donnell McLean, who briefly ran a New Story campus in Virginia, said the school's lack of a standardized curriculum led to some students being warehoused.

There was "not a lot of challenging work, especially for the higher-functioning students," McLean said.

Last spring, several graduate students working at Philadelphia's Green Tree School were so deeply alarmed by what they saw that they registered their concerns with the Pennsylvania Department of Education. This, along with other complaints, prompted several visits to Green Tree by PDE employees in April and June. One state employee wrote to her supervisor that her visit's "purpose is to do a walk through to determine how much instruction is actually going on based on the complaints that were received." (Subsequent communication about employees' trips was redacted in PDE records obtained by BI.)

In Ohio, New Story administrators told BI they pushed back against the company's plans to increase school enrollment and convert some schools into centers with a half day for school and a half day for therapy. Such a switch would allow New Story to make more money per student by billing insurance companies for more therapy.

While enrollment data is difficult to come by across states, Ohio offers a window into how New Story has increased enrollment without similar teacher increases. Four New Story-branded Ohio schools collectively added 106 students from 2022 to 2024 — a 52% increase — but lost 31 licensed staff, per state data. (BI did not include a recently opened New Story school in this analysis.)

Private equity has been piling into other autism services and similar behavioral-health companies.

Meanwhile, huge additions to the ranks of support staff quickly changed New Story's employee composition. In 2022, support staff comprised 41% of New Story's staff — but 87% this year. For comparison, BI examined 19 other private, secular Ohio special-education schools' data. From 2022 through 2024, those schools' rosters were, on average, made up of about half support staff and half teachers. None had more than 75% support staff, who are generally paid less than teachers and have less training.

(New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia do not track staff numbers for privately run schools.)

New Story employees questioned other corporate changes. Some staff disagreed with a plan to give bonuses to administrators based on student enrollment, something the company discussed across states, two people said.

"Our rationale was we never wanted to create a financial incentive to enroll a student that we couldn't properly serve or to keep a student that was ready to return to their public school," said one of the employees who said they pushed back on the plan.

Not all teachers take issue with New Story's approach. Natalie Stoup teaches seven autistic and intellectually and developmentally disabled students at New Story's New Cumberland, Pennsylvania, campus. Stoup, who has taught for 27 years, said she has loved her two years at the school.

"I absolutely really have a strong respect for the program," she told BI. "I think they're doing wonderful things."

Blackstone's autism bet

While New Story is the first large-scale, private equity-owned special-education school network, Audax's bet comes as private equity has been piling into other autism services and similar behavioral-health companies. Many of the biggest private-equity players have snapped up autism-services providers in the wake of state and federal changes requiring more payments for mental-health and autism services.

That shift made the industry look much more profitable and scalable, magic words for private-equity players like the industry giant Blackstone. In 2018, the firm bought a majority stake in the behavioral-therapy provider Center for Autism and Related Disorders. Blackstone then put the business into bankruptcy proceedings in June, citing labor costs and lease obligations for centers it closed. Forbes reported last year that former employees attributed the company's challenges to a "model that put profits ahead of patient care." (New Story bought CARD's Virginia locations during bankruptcy, and the bulk of the company was sold back to the founder.)

When employee costs rise quickly, companies like CARD and New Story can't pass on the costs to their customers as fast as other businesses, like a restaurant raising menu prices. Insurance reimbursement and school tuition haven't kept pace with the post-pandemic economic landscape, increasing pressure on behavioral-health companies to make money by trimming costs and expanding.

NBC News reported that CARD's staff training decreased under Blackstone's ownership and many employees left after wages stayed stagnant for three years. (Blackstone claimed that it increased training, though staff documents reviewed by NBC News showed the opposite.) Like New Story, CARD's private-equity-installed CEO had no special education or behavioral-health experience.

Other private-equity-owned healthcare companies have recently come under intense regulatory scrutiny. The Biden administration is pressing for transparency for private-equity-owned nursing homes, while the Federal Trade Commission is suing an anesthesiology company and its PE owner for creating what it calls an anticompetitive scheme. PE's special-education and autism-related companies have, so far, largely flown under the radar.

Restraining kids without uniform policies

Educational and disciplinary data about privately run schools like New Story is virtually impossible to obtain — and New Story doesn't volunteer it. The schools are not required to publicly report testing data, attendance, or other markers of school success. And because of the varied student populations, such data would be difficult to compare to public or private schools. In Pennsylvania and Virginia, state Department of Education spokespeople said their agencies don't even keep track of how many students attend private schools.

Nickie Coomer, a Colorado College education professor who has written about the privatization of special education, told BI that this data gap is a major regulatory hole, one that private-equity companies are happy to exploit.

"There's not a lot of accountability about how we're adhering to the laws we have in place to protect kids with disabilities," she said. "There's no governance, no elected school board … It's the antithesis of what schools should be."

One key metric for student safety that's reported at public schools is restraint usage. In most districts, when a student could endanger themselves or others, staff may use restraints, including physically immobilizing the student or isolating them so they can calm down. As with other data, New Story's restraint usage is not publicly reported.

Parents BI talked to had a wide array of experiences, from Sarah's ordeal to others who say New Story's restraint practices have been appropriate and effective for their children. One father of a student who graduated State College's New Story school in 2022 told BI that his young adult son, who frequently needs to be held down at home to avoid self-harm, was always appropriately restrained and the incidents were properly documented.

Interviews with multiple staff members indicate that their training on how to handle challenging student situations varied from school to school.

Donnell McLean, the former Virginia school director, said he never received any restraint training through New Story. Instead, he relied on what he knew from his prior job. In Virginia, public schools are legally required to document any restraint use and notify parents — but McLean said he didn't always receive reports from his staff after they restrained students.

In 2022, an Ohio school director at a New Story school fired an employee who restrained an 11-year-old with such force that his parents sent photos of hand-shaped bruises on the boy's shoulder.

Shyara Hill, a parent of three students at the New Story-owned Green Tree School in Philadelphia, told the Pennsylvania Department of Education that she wasn't properly notified when one of her children was placed in isolation. In emails and phone calls to the agency last spring, Hill detailed other troubling incidents at the school. She reported that one of her children was hurt in a classroom fight but wasn't examined by a nurse; one was repeatedly bullied with no staff intervention; and one came home soiled after staffing shortages prevented them from visiting the restroom.

"The school has not followed the agreement, safety protocols, [or] parent notification plan and has not responded to several communications from myself and [my] child's attorney," Hill wrote in the email, obtained in a public records request from the state Department of Education.

(Neither Hill nor her attorney responded to requests for comment.)

Documents that River Rock sent to Pennsylvania's Department of Education state that restraints "will be used as a last resort" and will be reported to the agency.

A staffer with a criminal record

BI's review of records and litigation turned up alarming lapses in New Story's vetting of new hires as Audax rapidly expanded operations.

This summer, the company hired Amy Hall Kostoff to oversee student services across seven Pennsylvania campuses and serve as the educational director for one of them.

Hall Kostoff was fired in April 2022 from her tenured job as an assistant supervisor at a Pennsylvania county special-education center for failing to properly report suspected sexual abuse involving two students, one of whom is nonverbal. In March 2023, the state's acting secretary of education assessed that Hall Kostoff was dishonest during the subsequent investigation.

A representative for the public school that fired Hall Kostoff declined to comment, including about New Story's background check.

Hall Kostoff, who was still employed at New Story as of late March, declined to comment.

Pennsylvania Department of Education records show that employees were concerned about the hiring practices at Philadelphia's Green Tree School. One department employee wrote to her colleagues in April that staff records at Green Tree were "missing a lot of information," including about background checks and teacher certifications. That employee later wrote that her background check of one Green Tree staff member turned up convictions for public intoxication, disorderly conduct, and indecent exposure — the latter of which would legally prohibit employment at a school. BI was unable to corroborate the PDE employee's claims, and it's unclear if the charges stemmed from incidents in or out of school, or if that employee continued working for Green Tree. The staff member did not respond to requests for comment.

New Story has terminated other staff members accused of wrongdoing, including an occupational therapist in Pennsylvania who was arrested in 2022 and charged with attempting to solicit a minor for sex. A company spokeswoman told a local newspaper the charges did not involve a New Story student.

In 2022, the principal of a New Story-owned school in Rochelle Park, New Jersey, told police that graduates of the school had received sexually inappropriate messages from their former gym teacher, who was still employed there. The teacher wrote to the female students about how he "was sexually attracted to students while they attended the school," and he named specific students, a police report said. (The students told police that no inappropriate behavior occurred while they attended the school.) The teacher also asked another former student if they wanted to smoke weed and gave the former student his Snapchat handle. The police report said the teacher was placed on leave pending an internal investigation; it is unclear whether further action was taken. A detective advised against pursuing charges because the former students are adults, and the messages, "though inappropriate," were not illegal, he wrote. Asked if the teacher was still employed, New Story's spokesman declined to answer and the school's principal did not respond to a request for comment.

Love, Emily

In State College, Emily is thriving in public elementary school. She splits her time between mainstream and special-education classes, spending time with her peers in a way she never did at New Story, where she was the school's only young student.

(Researchers told BI that students miss out on building key social skills when they're sequestered in special-education programs.)

This year, Emily has attended a birthday party and playdates, the kinds of childhood interactions Sarah feared she'd never experience.

"I want my children to be sound, functioning, responsible adults, but I don't want to break their spirits," Sarah said.

She said that public school employees have been kinder — a New Story staff member once said Emily had a "nasty side" — and that Emily is behaving better.

She recently asked Sarah how to sign a card with "love, Emily."

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• Published: 17 April 2024

Students with special educational needs in regular classrooms and their peer effects on learning achievement

• V. B. Salas García   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7568-3879 1 &
• José María Rentería   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6486-0032 2  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11 , Article number:  521 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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This study explores the impact of inclusive education on the educational outcomes of students without Special Educational Needs (non-SEN) in Peru, utilizing official Ministry of Education data and implementing cross-sectional regression analyses. Inclusive education is a complex issue that, without appropriate adaptations and comprehensive understanding, can present substantial challenges to the educational community. While prior research from developed nations offers diverse perspectives on the effects of inclusive education on non-SEN students, limited evidence exists regarding its impact in developing countries. Our study addresses this gap by examining inclusive education in Peru and its influence on non-SEN students, thereby contributing to the existing literature. Our findings reveal that, on average, the presence of SEN students in regular classrooms does not significantly affect their non-SEN counterparts. However, we uncover heterogeneous results contingent on the specific type of SEN and students’ academic placement. These results emphasize the importance of targeted resources and parental involvement in facilitating successful inclusive education, particularly for specific SEN types. In summary, this study underscores the need for tailored strategies and additional resources to foster the success of inclusive education and calls for further research in this field to expand our understanding and enhance educational policy.

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Introduction

Inclusive education has become a significant policy for improving access to and the quality of education for children with special educational needs (SEN), who often encounter physical and social barriers hindering their access to education and entry into the labor market, which in turn is detrimental to the economic and social progress of a country (Filmer, 2008 ; Mitra and Sambamoorthi, 2008 ). Thus, the United Nations has declared “inclusive and equitable quality education” as the fourth 2030 Sustainable Development Goal, which aims to reduce the disability gap in education. Likewise, there exist international declarations like the Salamanca Statement in 1994 (UNESCO, 1994 ) or the Declaration of the Decade of the Americas for the Rights and Dignity of Persons with Disabilities 2016–2026 (OAS, 2018 ) that incorporate the principle of inclusive education to guarantee education for all.

There are different education approaches Footnote 1 to ensure education for children with SEN, but the inclusive approach, unlike others, promotes equal participation of SEN students in regular schools by attending classes alongside same-aged non-SEN students (Dixon, 2005 ). Inclusive education goes beyond the placement of pupils; it refers to a unified system that receives all students regardless of their abilities or disabilities (Dixon, 2005 ). Under the inclusive approach, governments and schools should provide the means (i.e., physical and human resources) to reduce or eliminate physical, academic, and social hurdles faced by SEN students within regular schools (Dixon, 2005 ). Thus, inclusive education aims for social cohesion and a less discriminatory education approach that helps enhance the human capital acquisition of children with SEN (Kiuppis, 2014 ).

Despite the efforts for an inclusive education agenda worldwide, children with SEN remain behind in education indicators such as years of education, school attendance, or academic achievement (Filmer, 2008 ; Rangvid, 2022 ). This raises concerns about the impact that placement of children with SEN in regular schools may have on the educational achievement of children without SEN since these children are also involved in the inclusive education system (Rangvid, 2019 ; Ruijs and Peetsma, 2009 ). In Peru, for instance, some teachers in regular schools as well as some leaders of deaf organizations, do not support inclusive education as they think it is detrimental for both SEN and non-SEN students (Goico, 2019 ; Peruvian Ombudsman, 2019 ). Nevertheless, there is little empirical literature focused on the effects of inclusive education not only on SEN students but also on non-SEN students, especially in developing countries that shelter a high percentage of people with disabilities (Olusanya et al., 2022 ). This paper, therefore, aims to fill that gap by using information from a developing country, namely Peru. It investigates the impact of inclusive education, quantified through the presence of students with SEN in regular classrooms, on the academic performance of their non-SEN counterparts. Analyzing the peer effects of inclusive education is of utmost interest for policymakers aiming to increase the presence of SEN students in regular schools, as policy implications should consider the effects on all children.

The present work provides three main contributions to the existing literature regarding peer effects in the context of inclusive education. First, we provide new evidence using unusual and rich data from a middle-income country. To our knowledge, there is only one study focusing on a developing country. Indeed, Contreras et al. ( 2020 ) analyze the Chilean case and find that placement of children with SEN in regular classrooms negatively affects the standardized test scores in mathematics and reading of their non-SEN peers, but it is neutralized when schools receive additional resources and specialized professionals. Nevertheless, Contreras et al. ( 2020 ) use panel data for students attending primary schools in two periods, 2007 and 2011, without including types of SEN. In contrast, we study children attending primary and secondary schools using cross-section data between 2011 and 2019 and disaggregate our analysis by types of SEN Footnote 2 .

Our second contribution is to disaggregate our analysis by type of SEN. We are aware of two studies that use an overall indicator to reflect the presence of SEN students and disaggregate it by type of SEN. On one hand, Hanushek et al. ( 2002 ) examine two types of special educational needs: learning or emotional and speech; while, Ruijs ( 2017 ) examines four types: visual, hearing, physical or intellectual, and behavioral. In our case, besides evaluating the consequences of placing children with mobility, vision, hearing, and intellectual or learning disabilities in a regular classroom, we also evaluate the repercussions of placing children with autistic spectrum disorder in a regular classroom, which is a much less studied topic.

Finally, our third contribution is to explore the heterogeneous results of inclusive education on the non-SEN student population. Unlike previous studies, we explore the potential different impact of inclusive education between male and female non-SEN students. As most reproductive work has traditionally been done by women (cf. Razavi, 2012 ), it could be argued that female non-SEN students are more likely to take care of or help SEN students, which in turn may influence their educational achievement. Our heterogeneity analysis also takes into account school characteristics like classroom size as well as mother’s characteristics.

In our analysis, we take significant steps to mitigate potential biases stemming from endogenous classroom selection and the sorting of SEN students. We achieve this by focusing on schools with one class per grade level, which provides a more controlled setting for our study. Moreover, our dataset allows us to identify the class composition, which is vital for investigating educational peer effects. The classroom environment is particularly relevant, as classmates have a substantial impact on each other’s educational outcomes, given their shared classroom experience throughout the school day (Balestra et al., 2022 ; Burke and Sass, 2013 ; Lazear, 2001 ).

Our findings suggest that the inclusion of students with SEN in regular classrooms, on average, exerts a neutral influence on their non-SEN peers. A nuanced examination reveals varied results contingent upon the specific categories of SEN. This variability is consistent with the fact that SEN encompasses a broad spectrum of support requirements arising from diverse degrees and types of individual abilities, spanning physical, psychological, cognitive, and sensory domains. Hence, the influence of inclusive education would vary according to the distinct profile of the SEN student integrated into a conventional classroom setting. Furthermore, our results underscore the importance of accounting for temporal dynamics and the particular educational phase in gauging the impact of SEN students on their non-SEN counterparts. This observation aligns with the differential results discerned across academic grades.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The literature review and institutional setting are presented in the next section, followed by a description of the data and empirical strategy. After that, we discuss our results, and finally, we conclude.

This section starts with a brief literature review and then describes the main features of the Peruvian educational system as well as its public policy approach to inclusive education.

Literature review

The inclusion of students with SEN in regular schools remains a subject of debate due to the mixed findings within the empirical literature. Proponents of inclusive education argue that attending regular schools is not only a fundamental human right for children with SEN (Ainscow and César, 2006 ; Rangvid, 2022 ; Ruijs and Peetsma, 2009 ) but can also yield benefits for non-SEN students, particularly in terms of their learning development. This is attributed to the additional resources allocated to inclusive education (Keslair et al., 2012 ; Ruijs, 2017 ). Besides, inclusive education may help children without SEN to develop soft skills like kindness, tolerance, and patience, which are important to living in a diverse society (Contreras et al., 2020 ; Dixon, 2005 ). On the other hand, the main concerns regarding inclusive education are related to negative peer effects. The literature on class composition states that students’ performance is influenced by their peers’ characteristics (Ammermueller and Pischke, 2009 ; Burke and Sass, 2013 ; Lavy et al., 2012 ). Since children with SEN may require more teaching attention and show disruptive behaviors (Ahmed et al., 2021 ; Contreras et al., 2020 ; Rangvid, 2019 ; Ruijs, 2017 ), they could be considered “bad” students who could interfere with the educational development of their classmates without SEN (Lavy et al., 2012 ; Lazear, 2001 ), especially for those who are at the bottom of the ability distribution (Balestra et al., 2022 ; Lavy et al., 2012 ).

The quantitative studies that examine the peer effects of inclusive education mainly use data from developed countries. Most of them have found that inclusive education has a negative or null effect on non-SEN students’ outcomes. For instance, using data from Switzerland, Balestra et al. ( 2022 ) find that placing SEN students in regular classrooms harms not only educational outcomes but also labor market outcomes for non-SEN students. Similarly, studies from the United States (Fletcher, 2010 ) and Denmark (Kristoffersen et al., 2015 ; Rangvid, 2019 ) show that exposure to SEN students decreases reading test scores of non-SEN students. Also, for the United States, Gottfried ( 2014 ) and Gottfried et al. ( 2016 ) present evidence that inclusive education worsens the non-cognitive skills of non-SEN students. Fletcher ( 2010 ), however, points out that the negative effect of inclusive education in the United States disappears for reading when their lagged scores are considered in the analysis. Likewise, studies for Canada (Friesen et al., 2010 ), England (Keslair et al., 2012 ), and the Netherlands (Ruijs, 2017 ) also find that the presence of SEN students does not affect the academic performance of their non-SEN peers; but they point out that this result may be due to additional resources received by regular schools with SEN students. Conversely, other studies have found positive externalities of SEN students on the educational achievement of their non-SEN peers. For instance, Cole et al. ( 2004 ) point out that non-SEN students in the United States perform better at reading and mathematics tests since they may benefit from the additional resources allocated to inclusive education. Likewise, Hanushek et al. ( 2002 ) find that non-SEN students attending inclusive classrooms in the United States improve their mathematics test scores. Using data from the same country, Gottfried and McGene ( 2013 ) go beyond by showing that having a sibling with SEN helps to improve the schooling achievement of those siblings without SEN.

Several meta-analyses and systematic reviews have examined the effects of inclusive education on students with and without SEN. The coincidences lie in the varied impacts of inclusive education on non-SEN students, demonstrating a nuanced and context-dependent picture. While Dell’Anna et al. ( 2021 ) hint at positive peer attitudes in inclusive settings, the academic outcomes and the experience of non-SEN students diverge, with high achievers potentially benefiting more than low achievers (Ruijs and Peetsma, 2009 ). Kart and Kart ( 2021 ) and Szumski et al. ( 2017 ) contribute to the discussion, highlighting mixed academic effects across different grade levels. The meta-analyses by Oh-Young and Filler ( 2015 ) and Krämer et al. ( 2021 ) emphasize the overall positive impact of inclusive settings for students with SEN while still acknowledging variations in outcomes. Finally, Van Mieghem et al. ( 2020 ) emphasize the pivotal role of teacher professional development in the successful implementation of inclusive education.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that the conflicting results found in the literature may be explained by the differences in the criteria used to identify a SEN student. Most of the previous studies have used an aggregated measure to encompass all SEN students without considering the types of SEN (e.g., Contreras et al., 2020 ; Rangvid, 2019 ). On the other hand, some studies have focused on one or two types of special needs; such as emotional disturbances and mental disabilities (e.g., Cole et al., 2004 ; Fletcher, 2010 ; Hanushek et al., 2002 ; Kristoffersen et al., 2015 ), or learning and behavioral disabilities (e.g., Cole et al., 2004 ; Friesen et al., 2010 ; Hanushek et al., 2002 ). The present paper addresses these limitations found in the literature by taking into account different types of SEN and also by exploring the potential heterogeneous results of inclusive education for non-SEN students.

Institutional setting: The educational system in Peru

Primary and secondary education in Peru is compulsory and provided by the government at no cost and by the private sector with a wide tuition range. Peruvian children between 6- and 11- years old attend primary school and start secondary school by the age of 12 for a period of 5 years. The last National Population Census in 2017 reports that roughly 5.4% and 7.0% of Peruvians who are primary-school and secondary-school-aged, respectively, have at least one disability. However, according to the School Census of the same year, <1% of children attending regular schools are categorized as SEN students, which suggests that inclusive education in Peru is not well developed. Despite this low enrollment rate, the percentage of SEN students grew from 0.26% in 2007 to 0.96% in 2019.

Since primary and secondary schools in Peru must comply with a mandatory national curriculum, the same courses are taken by children who attend the same grade level across different schools. Schools may have more than one class per grade level, which are called sections , which students are assigned when they start primary school, which makes it less likely that students are sorted in a non-random fashion. Besides, every section has a specific classroom where students are instructed in most of their courses; thus, students do not need to move among different classrooms throughout the school day. At the primary school, the teacher assigned to a section is usually responsible for the majority of the courses; whereas, at the secondary school, it is often the case that there is a different teacher for each course. Another characteristic of the Peruvian education system is that it allows parents to send their children to any school, public or private, even if that school is outside their district of residence.

According to the last National Population Census in 2017, Peru has achieved almost universal coverage of education, 94.9% of the population aged 12 or over have primary education, and 74.5% aged 17 or over have secondary education. These numbers, however, mask a disability gap. Among adults aged 17 or over, 14.1% of people with at least one disability report having no education, whereas only 3.9% of people with no disabilities report the same. There is also an educational disability gap of 11.9 percentage points (p.p.) among the female population, but it decreases to 7.1 p.p. among the male population. These figures suggest that having a disability poses a larger burden for females than for males.

In this context, the Peruvian National Education Law recognized in 2003 inclusive education as the main approach to providing education to students with SEN, which should be accompanied by supplementary one-to-one attention by specialists (Congreso de la República, 2003 ). Thus, the Peruvian legal framework advocates an inclusive approach to integrating children and youth with disabilities into society. Aligned with the national inclusive policy, the state, as per the 2012 General Law of Persons with Disabilities (Law 29973), ensures access to quality inclusive education that accommodates individual needs. This entails adjustments in infrastructure, furniture, materials, curriculum, and teaching processes, all aimed at facilitating quality learning and fostering the comprehensive development of each student. It is worth noting, however, that empirical evidence indicates that many regular schools lack the necessary infrastructure, materials, and human resources to accommodate students with disabilities (Cueto et al., 2018 ; Peruvian Ombudsman, 2011 ).

The basic education system comprises three modalities: regular basic education (EBR), alternative basic education (EBA), and special basic education (EBE). EBR represents conventional formal education. EBA caters to students who lack access to EBR, emphasizing vocational and entrepreneurial skills. EBE is designated for students with SEN related to disability, talent, or giftedness. EBA and EBR schools, when admitting students with SEN, are termed inclusive schools . EBE operates in both inclusive schools and standalone EBE schools. In inclusive schools that accept students with mild disabilities and giftedness, EBE provides support and guidance through programs like Support and Advisory Services for Special Educational Needs (SAANEE). This includes personalized services and support to students, parents, teachers, and school principals through weekly visits of specialized professionals (Congreso de la República, 2006 ). Nevertheless, the evidence shows that inclusive education in Peru is far from successfully being implemented, and it is combined with an “integration approach” (Peruvian Ombudsman, 2011 ). On the other hand, dedicated EBE schools directly serve severe and multi-disabled students with needs beyond the scope of EBR or EBA schools. EBR and EBA schools are mandated to reserve at least two slots per classroom during the enrollment period for the inclusion of students with mild or moderate disabilities. However, in practice, this requirement is not systematically fulfilled (Cueto et al., 2018 ).

Data and methodology

In this study, we use three datasets that are collected by the Peruvian Ministry of Education (MINEDU). First, we utilized the Student Census Evaluation (ECE) as our primary data source, which encompasses the scores achieved by students in the national standardized tests of reading and mathematics Footnote 3 . To create our dependent variable, “learning achievement”, we transformed these scores into z -scores, standardizing them by grade level and by subject to have a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one for use in our econometric analysis. Furthermore, the ECE dataset includes additional demographic information such as gender and the primary language spoken by the students. The ECE started in 2007, with annual assessments of students in the 2nd grade of primary (2P). Subsequently, it was expanded in 2015 to encompass students in the 2nd grade of secondary (2S). In 2017, however, the ECE was not conducted. Our second dataset is the National School Census (CE) which contains information regarding school characteristics and grade composition. The CE has been yearly collected since 2004, and it covers public and private schools. We use it to measure inclusive education by identifying the presence of SEN students at the section level. These two datasets are merged at the school level through a school identifier; thus, each student is linked to section characteristics in the school he or she is attending. The last dataset is the Information System to Support the Management of the Education Institution (SG), which was implemented in 2003 but has been mandatory only since 2011. The SG contains information that is uploaded every year by teachers or school principals. This includes students’ age, mothers’ age and education, and number of siblings. The SG is merged with the other datasets by using a student identifier.

For our analysis, we focus on students attending 2P in the period dating from 2011 to 2016 (excluding 2014) Footnote 4 and students attending 2S from 2015 to 2019 (excluding 2017). Footnote 5 For both grades, 2P and 2S, we account for potential grade advancement and delay. Footnote 6 Therefore, in the case of 2P where students are usually 7 years old, we include children aged between 6 and 8 years, and for 2S where students are usually 13 years old, we include children aged between 12 and 14 years. The final number of observations for 2P comprises 55,637 students who took the reading test and 55,614 students who took the mathematics test. And, for 2S, we have 47,491 students who took the reading test and 47,484 students who took the mathematics test.

To evaluate the influence of inclusive education on non-SEN students’ learning achievement, we use the CE where the school principal reports the number of SEN students placed in each grade level every year and per type of SEN. Footnote 7 This report is based on medical certificates, psycho-pedagogical certificates, and parents’ affidavits. Thus, we can identify the presence of SEN students per section to measure inclusive education. Footnote 8 Besides, we disaggregate the presence of SEN students per type. Specifically, we distinguish, for each section, the presence of students with mobility, vision, hearing, and intellectual or learning disabilities, as well as those with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD). In the case of intellectual or learning disabilities, the CE includes those students with Down syndrome, brain injury, dyslexia, and developmental aphasia. The other SEN types considered in the CE include students with speech impairment, deaf-blindness, and hospitalized. Although gifted students are identified as SEN students in the CE, we exclude them in our measure of SEN.

There are three main challenges to estimating peer effects, as stated by Manski ( 1993 ), that could hinder proper identification of the influence of SEN students on the learning achievement of their non-SEN peers. First, students in the same cohort could face similar environmental factors or have similar unobserved characteristics that may influence their academic outcomes rather than having classmates with SEN. To disentangle the environment from peer effects, we follow the literature by using a large number of observations and fixed effects (Balestra et al., 2022 ; Burke and Sass, 2013 ).

Second, there is a potential reflection problem as classmates may influence each other and determine their outcomes simultaneously. Since we focus on SEN characteristics related to physical disabilities, health issues, and injuries determined by specialists, it is less likely that the SEN status of students was determined by the learning achievement of their non-SEN peers.

The third problem is related to self-selection. In the Peruvian school system, parents may choose to send their children to any school regardless of their district of residence; thus, specific school characteristics may attract certain types of students. To address this problem, we restrict the analysis to schools with similar characteristics. We select schools located in urban areas providing mixed-sex education that operate on the main school campus only during the morning shift and with 10–30 students per section. In the case of primary education, we select full-grade schools. Footnote 9 Besides, to address a potential sorting problem that could make it difficult to identify whether the learning outcome is due to the presence of SEN students or one’s ability, we select schools with one section per grade level. In this way, we avoid the possibility for school administrators to group students into sections based on their characteristics or for parents to choose a section without SEN students. Finally, more than 90% of non-SEN students take the standardized national tests, which suggests that school principals do not select high-performance students to take these tests.

To test the validity of our identification strategy, we perform two balancing checks for 2P and 2S, presented in Tables 1 and 2 , respectively. To perform these balancing checks, we use only students who took both reading and mathematics standardized tests, rather than separating them by subject as we do for the econometric analyses. Panels A, B, and C show that the presence of at least one SEN student does not determine the gender, language, or age of non-SEN students, respectively. We observe that coefficients are statistically not significant, and their size is smaller in comparison to those from the main analysis, except for reading test scores in 2S. In addition, panel D shows that individual characteristics do not determine the presence of at least one SEN student in the classroom. These results provide evidence against the likelihood of selection into classrooms.

To examine the impact of inclusive education on standardized test performance of non-SEN students, we estimate the following linear model:

Equation ( 1 ) is estimated separately for each grade level (2P or 2S) and subject (reading or mathematics) using a linear regression. \({{{\rm {EDC}}}}_{{i{\rm {s}}t}}\) is the learning achievement of student \(i\) in section \({s}\) at year \(t\) , measured by the z -score of the standardized test. \({{{\rm {SEN}}}}_{{{\rm {s}}}t}\) is a dichotomous variable capturing the presence of at least one SEN student in section \({s}\) at year \(t\) ; thus, \({\alpha }_{1}\) is our parameter of interest. In other specifications below, \({{{\rm {SEN}}}}_{{{s}t}}\) will be differentiated by type of SEN. \({{{\rm {STD}}}}_{{i{s}t}}\) is a vector of student-level control variables that include age in years and indicators for gender (1 = women) and spoken language (1 = indigenous). The vector \({{{\rm {SEC}}}}_{{st}}\) controls for section-level variables without student \(i\) . It includes mean age, proportion of male students, proportion of indigenous speakers, and number of students. The vector \({{{\rm {SCH}}}}_{t}\) includes number of students at the school level. \({{{\rm {HH}}}}_{{it}}\) includes the following household characteristics: mother’s age, mother’s education, and the number of siblings. We also include school-fixed effects \(\left({\gamma }_{{s}}\right)\) Footnote 10 and year-fixed effects \(\left({\gamma }_{t}\right)\) . Finally, \({\varepsilon }_{{i{s}t}}\) is an unobserved error term, and we cluster standard errors at the section level as this is the common environment shared by students (Balestra et al., 2022 ).

To assess potential heterogeneous influences, we follow recent literature Footnote 11 and estimate Eq. ( 1 ) using split samples by the characteristic of interest (Feigenberg et al., 2023 ). In particular, we evaluate the gender of the student \(i\) . For section characteristics, we evaluate the number of students. Finally, we assess the varying estimates based on the mother’s age and the mother’s education. In the case of characteristics that are represented by continuous or categorical variables, we convert them into dichotomous variables. For the number of students, we split the sample between sections that have 20 or fewer students and sections with 21 or more students. In the case of the mother’s age, we use the mean age to split the sample above and below the mean. The mean age is 41.5 for those mothers with children who attend 2P and 44.8 for those with children who attend 2S. Finally, for mothers’ education, we split the sample between those with and without tertiary education.

The descriptive statistics for our final cross-section subpopulations are presented in Table 3 . All descriptive and econometric analyses were conducted using Stata 18. In this case, we combine observations that include students who took both reading and mathematics standardized tests, as the characteristics of the separated subpopulations are similar to each other. According to Table 3 , students with SEN generally have lower reading and mathematics scores compared to their peers without SEN across both primary and secondary grades. This trend is more pronounced in 2S compared to 2P. We also observe in Table 3 that the proportions of women and indigenous language speakers are relatively consistent across SEN and non-SEN cohorts. Approximately 48% of the students are female, and the average age is 6.9 in 2P and 12.9 in 2S. However, it is interesting to note that the mean proportion of indigenous language speakers is higher in 2S (~22%) compared to 2P (~12%), indicating a potential demographic shift as students progress through the education system. A similar trend for indigenous language speakers is observed at the section level. Moreover, figures in Table 3 show that the mean age in a section is ~7.2 in 2P and 13.3 in 2S, the sample is balanced between male and female students at the section level, and there are around 20 students per section. Regarding household characteristics, the average age of mothers is 41.5 for those with children in 2P and 44.8 for those with children in 2S, around 6 out of 10 students have mothers with primary or secondary education, and the majority of students have more than two siblings. Finally, students enrolled in primary education typically attend larger schools, characterized by a pupil population exceeding 120, in contrast to those in secondary education, where schools typically accommodate fewer than 100 students.

Empirical results

Regression results from Eq. ( 1 ) are shown in Table 4 . Footnote 12 For column (1), we use ECE and CE datasets, which do not include students’ age or household characteristics. For columns (2) through (6), we add the SG dataset to incorporate students’ age and household characteristics. Columns (1) through (4) include the proportion of repeaters and the presence of at least one specialized teacher when students were 3 years old, and they were not attending school; thus, the presence of an SEN student should not influence the proportion of repeaters or presence of a specialized teacher. Columns (5) and (6) do not include those variables, and the results remain similar to those obtained in the previous columns. In addition, as a robustness check, we try different subpopulations based on students’ age (columns (2) through (4)) and schools with variation in SEN students (column (6)). For all the specifications, our results consistently show that the presence of at least one SEN student as a measure of inclusive education does not have a significant influence on the learning achievement of students who attend 2P or 2S. Our findings align with similar results from other countries such as Canada (Friesen et al., 2010 ), England (Keslair et al., 2012 ), and the Netherlands (Ruijs, 2017 ), indicating that inclusive education does not have a significant impact on the academic achievement of non-SEN students.

Nevertheless, we notice in Table 4 that, after including students’ age and household characteristics, the negative relationship between inclusive education and learning achievement (column 1) turned into a positive relationship (columns 2 through 6). Even in the case of students who attend 2S, the magnitude of the positive relationship between inclusive education and mathematics scores increased when student’s age and household characteristics were included in the regression. This suggests that the attributes of a student’s household, along with individual traits correlated with them, such as motivation, self-discipline, and parental support, may exert a positive influence on their learning environment. This influence could potentially counterbalance any adverse effects of inclusive education. An alternative explanation lies in the interaction effects between inclusive education and these supplementary factors. For instance, older students or those from more privileged households could potentially derive greater benefits from inclusive education due to their increased adaptability to the classroom environment. We further explore these issues in the Heterogeneity analysis section.

The main results, however, may mask different outcomes by type of SEN. Table 5 shows the results from Eq. ( 1 ) using the presence of at least one student with a certain type of SEN as a measure of inclusive education. Results Footnote 13 in Table 5 are estimated by gradually adding control variables in each column. Columns (1) and (6) do not include any control variable. Columns (2) and (7) add student controls. Cohort controls are added in columns (3) and (8), and school controls are added in columns (5) and (9). Finally, family controls are added in columns (5) and (10). As we can see in Table 5 , adding variables does not substantially change the estimates. We also notice that the sign of the relationship between inclusive education and learning achievement varies by type of SEN, and only vision disability (panel A) and mobility disability (panel B) have a significant positive relationship with the standardized test scores of students who attend 2P and 2S, respectively. As we can observe in Table 5 , even when we use the Romano-Wolf multiple hypothesis correction, the significance of our findings remains similar across different specifications (cf. Clarke, 2021 , Clarke et al., 2020 ). These findings confirm our main results that inclusive education would not harm the learning performance of non-SEN students, regardless of the type of SEN presented by their peers.

Results in Table 5 show that the impact of attending an inclusive classroom with at least one SEN student with a vision disability increases the reading and mathematics scores of students who attend 2P by 0.135 (adjusted p -value < 0.05) (column 5) and by 0.154 (adjusted p -value < 0.05) (column 10) of a standard deviation, respectively. In the case of students who attend 2S, the impact of the presence of at least one student with mobility disability increases the performance on reading and mathematics tests by 0.099 (adjusted p -value < 0.01) (column 5) and by 0.100 (adjusted p -value < 0.05) (column 10) of a standard deviation, respectively. Similar to our results, Ruijs ( 2017 ) found that the presence of students with vision disabilities as well as physical and intellectual disabilities in the third level of pre-vocational secondary education in the Netherlands increases standardized test scores of non-SEN students. Moreover, previous studies pointed out that non-SEN students show more positive attitudes toward their peers with physical disabilities (de Boer et al., 2012 ), which may explain the positive influence of SEN students with vision and mobility disabilities that we have found on the learning achievement on non-SEN students.

Heterogeneity analysis

We further undertake several analyses to understand the differences in the impact of inclusive education. Footnote 14 Clogg’s z -test is implemented for testing the statistical significance of the difference between the coefficients estimated separately by splitting Eq. ( 1 ) (Clogg et al., 1995 ).

Estimates of inclusive education by gender of non-SEN students are presented in Table 6 . The results show that the influence of inclusive education on learning achievement is not statistically significant for men or women, and there is no statistical difference between them.

To explore the influence of inclusive education by usage of adequate resources, we analyze the influence of the total number of students at the section level. We find that inclusive education is associated with higher scores in reading and mathematics for non-SEN students who attend classrooms with 10–20 students and with lower scores for those who attend classrooms with 21–30 students, regardless the student attends 2P or 2S. This result may reflect that small groups foster a closer interaction between students and teacher which in turn may allow the teacher to develop better teaching strategies since they know each student better. The result of inclusive education by section size, however, is statistically different only for the reading score obtained by non-SEN students who attend 2S. This result underscores the complexity of inclusive education’s effects and the importance of context-specific considerations. Authorities should pay special attention to the number of students assigned to an inclusive classroom.

To analyze the household’s characteristics, we use the mother’s age and education. In the case of reading and mathematics in 2P, it seems that older mothers help to improve the scores of non-SEN students who attend an inclusive classroom; but there is not a clear pattern in the case of 2S. The differences in the test scores by mother’s age, however, are not statistically significant in any case, 2P or 2S. We have to take this result with caution as it is possible that other family characteristics rather than the mother’s age act as a moderator that could influence the effect of inclusive education on children’s outcomes in school (Leigh and Gong, 2010 ; López Turley, 2003 ).

We also present in Table 6 the estimates of inclusive education on test scores of non-SEN students by mother’s education. We observe that the difference in inclusive education’s influence on test scores in reading and mathematics is not statistically different regardless mother’s education. Although the difference is small and not significant, we observe that among non-SEN students in 2P and 2S with well-educated mothers (i.e., tertiary education), inclusive education is associated with lower scores in reading and mathematics. This finding may suggest that well-educated mothers may dedicate fewer hours to helping their children as they are more likely to work outside the home in comparison to less-educated mothers.

The current study focused on the learning achievement of non-SEN students in Peru who attend an inclusive classroom. We use three rich administrative datasets that allow us to measure inclusive education by the presence of at least one SEN student in the classroom, which is the appropriate setting as students spend their school day mostly within the classroom. Thus, we are able to capture the influence of inclusive education on the test scores of non-SEN students on national standardized tests in reading and mathematics.

Inclusive strategies in regular classrooms are undeniably crucial, but without appropriate adaptations and a comprehensive understanding by all involved, inclusive education can pose considerable challenges for the entire educational community, including non-SEN students (Edwards et al., 2019 ; Nilsen, 2020 ). While some studies for developed countries show that the learning achievement of non-SEN students is improved by attending inclusive classrooms and others point to negative effects, there is limited evidence regarding the impact of inclusive education for developing countries. From this perspective, our study contributes to the literature by examining the case of inclusive education in Peru and its consequences on non-SEN students. To the best of our knowledge, this topic has not been previously analyzed in the Peruvian context. Further, we explore the influence of inclusive education by type of SEN and undertake a heterogeneity analysis.

Overall, this study has found that the inclusion of SEN students in regular classrooms, on average, yields no substantial implications for their non-SEN counterparts. Our results have shown consistency among the different model specifications estimated using several subpopulations with different age ranges as well as an additional sub-population restricted to schools with variation in the presence of SEN students. Nevertheless, it is worth noticing that there is a negative relationship between inclusive education and learning achievement of non-SEN students that turns into a positive relationship when the mother’s characteristics are included in the analysis. This may present an opportunity for school authorities to involve parents in the learning process of their kids to enhance inclusive education programs, as the literature suggests that the way inclusive education is implemented may lead to positive results on the academic performance of non-SEN students (Szumski et al., 2017 ).

We also found that the implications of inclusive education are contingent upon the specific type of SEN. In particular, non-SEN students benefit from attending classrooms with at least one student with a vision disability in 2P and a mobility disability in 2S. This finding underscores differential effects between lower and later grades, a phenomenon previously noted in the literature (Kart and Kart, 2021 ). Also, this result should draw attention from policymakers interested in inclusive education as schools may be more suitable to assist this type of SEN students, whereas the potential lack of resources to support other types of SEN might detrimentally affect SEN and non-SEN students (Edwards et al., 2019 ). In addition, we find that the influence of inclusive education is heterogeneous. We find that the small size of the classroom (20 or fewer students) helps to improve learning achievement in reading for non-SEN students who attend an inclusive classroom in 2S. Similar to previous literature (e.g., Szumski et al., 2017 ), this finding points to the need for educational policymakers to increase the budget for inclusive education, targeting to hire more and adequate resources. Finally, the mother’s characteristics are not relevant to explain differences in the estimates of inclusive education on academic achievement of non-SEN students.

Despite the contributions made by this study, some potential limitations could be addressed by future research. First, due to a lack of data, we are not able to incorporate a measure that reflects the diverse intensity of a disability (Oh-Young and Filler, 2015 ) that could be associated with different costs (Nicoriciu and Elliot, 2023 ). Second, the datasets employed in this analysis are unavailable for certain years, precluding our use of data from ECE before 2011. Additionally, the variable indicating the language spoken in 2S was not present in the same dataset (CE) for the years 2018 and 2019. Finally, despite our efforts to mitigate concerns related to omitted variable bias, we concede the possibility of residual biases. Specifically, we omitted socioeconomic status from our analysis due to substantial rates of missing data.

Data availability

The datasets used in this study are available from the Peruvian Ministry of Education repository upon request.

In the literature, there are three main approaches: (i) segregation, (ii) integration, and (iii) inclusive (see e.g., Dixon, 2005 ; Kiuppis, 2014 ; Madhesh, 2023 ).

It is worth noting that results from countries like Peru are not directly comparable to those previously presented by Contreras et al. ( 2020 ). Indeed, academic performance in Peru is poorer relative to Chile, as reported by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and it does not receive monetary incentives to enroll children with SEN. Furthermore, Chile displays a particular institutional framework worldwide since state-subsidized private schools (voucher schools) have around 50% of total enrollment (CEM, 2019 ). Thus, insights from the Peruvian case are valuable for other comparable countries.

Although the ECE evaluates other subjects, only mathematics and reading were evaluated in every ECE. Students attending 2nd grade of primary were evaluated from 2007 to 2016 on mathematics and reading. In the case of students attending 2nd grade of secondary, they were evaluated on mathematics and reading from 2015 to 2019 (except 2017), social sciences in 2016 and 2018, and science and technology in 2018 and 2019.

Unfortunately, information for SG was not available before 2011, and the MINEDU did not provide information for 2014.

The ECE was not conducted in 2017.

Advancement and delay in 2P (2S) are determined based on the chronological age of the students as of March 31. If a student is one year younger than the standard age of 7 (13), it would be considered advancement. Conversely, if a student is one year older than the standard age, that is, age of 8 (14), it would be considered within a delay.

Since we only include schools with one section per grade, the number of SEN students reported by grade is used to account for the presence of SEN students at the section level.

A cohort refers to the students within the same section for each grade level and year.

Full-grade refers to primary schools where teachers do not teach more than one grade in the same classroom.

Since we work with schools that have only one section, school-fixed effects can also be understood as section-fixed effects.

Feigenberg et al. ( 2023 ) state that using a split-sample approach is equivalent to a fully interacted model but avoids losing statistical power. Likewise, they state that, unlike a model with only one interaction, the split-sample approach reduces bias due to omitted variables.

Results, including all control variables, are presented in the Supplementary Information. Tables S1 and S2 for reading and mathematics in 2P, respectively. Tables S3 and S4 for reading and mathematics in 2S, respectively.

Results, including all control variables, are presented in Supplementary Information Table S5 .

Results, including all control variables, are presented in Supplementary Information from Table S6 to Table S10 .

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Acknowledgements

This paper was supported by the Peruvian Economic and Social Research Consortium (grant No. A1-PB03, CIES 2022). The authors express their gratitude to the participants of the XXXIV Annual Research Seminar 2023 hosted by the Economic and Social Research Consortium (CIES), as well as to two anonymous referees for their invaluable feedback, which contributed to the improvement of this manuscript. Special thanks to Juan Castañeda and Jonatan Amaya for their outstanding research assistance in earlier versions of this study. All remaining errors are our own.

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Salas García, V.B., Rentería, J.M. Students with special educational needs in regular classrooms and their peer effects on learning achievement. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 521 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03002-8

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Lawsuit alleges incarcerated young adults are deprived of special education services

A lawsuit filed in Middlesex Superior Court on Tuesday alleges that the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has failed to adequately provide or oversee required special education services to eligible students housed in county correctional facilities.

Incarcerated students with disabilities who have an individualized education program, or IEP, are offered "only minimal services" by DESE in county jails and are routinely under-identified as eligible for special ed services, according to the complaint .

The suit is brought by EdLaw Project Committee for Public Counsel Services — a division of the statewide Public Defenders Offices — and Mental Health Legal Advisors Committee on behalf of three incarcerated individuals ages 18, 20 and 21 who are housed in Norfolk, Plymouth and Essex County jails and identified only as "John Doe." Their IEPs indicate emotional disabilities and need for speech language therapy, among other things.

"DESE leaves it to local school districts to provide everything else set out in IEPs and does little or nothing to ensure that [houses of correction] staff and local schools actually discharge the assigned duty," the complaint states. It contends the department is running afoul of a state statute mandating it provide such instruction.

In an emailed statement late Tuesday, a spokeswoman for DESE said the agency "will review the lawsuit and is committed to seeing that all students with disabilities receive the services they deserve.”

The action as a whole seeks to represent a statewide class of young adults ages 18 to 22 who are serving time in county jails and have IEPs but are not receiving the panel of services to which they're entitled under state law. The projected class is expected to number in the hundreds.

A 2022 report by a Massachusetts' advocacy group Citizens for Juvenile Justice estimated that houses of correction under-identified close to 200 young adults who had IEPs between 2018 and 2020.

Though about half of those housed in the Department of Youth Services receive special education services, only 2% of the 18- to 22-year-olds in the county jails — or 12 students across the 15 houses of correction — received such services as of February, according to the lawsuit.

"We've been representing students in individual cases, and we have just seen that all of those efforts are not enough to make the kind of change that is necessary. That is why we have moved forward with a class action lawsuit," said Elizabeth Levitan, an attorney with the EdLaw Project Committee.

No clear system exists to identify incarcerated youths with IEPs, the complaint states, with the burden often falling on students themselves to inform correctional facility staff. Instruction that is offered to students typically consists of a "depleted" curriculum of math and reading tutoring capped at two hours a week, while a limited staff of "2.4 full-time equivalent teachers" is responsible for delivering special education across all 15 houses of correction in the state, per the lawsuit.

The denial of special education services to incarcerated young adults will reduce their chances of completing high school and limit their employment opportunities down the line, increasing exposure to poverty and mental health challenges, the suit claims.

Massachusetts law requires  special education services be available to all eligible students with disabilities up until they turn 22. In the decades following a 1981 Massachusetts' federal court injunction in a similar complaint, DESE provided direct special education services to incarcerated young adults by employees certified in the field. But in recent years, the department began turning to local school districts and contracted with a nonprofit educational service agency to provide services, according to plaintiffs' lawyers.

"They [DESE] were not providing [services] directly. And that's where sort of everything really fell apart for these students," attorney Levitan said. "They promulgated regulations that limited their responsibility and placed much of the responsibility on the school districts."

"Our position is that the language of the legislation is very clear and that it's DESE's responsibility to provide the special education services, but at a minimum they need to be making sure that they happen, and they're not doing either one of those things," Levitan added.

The complaint calls for DESE to create and implement a system to better identify incarcerated young adults with IEPs; to provide special education services consistent with their IEPs; and to provide all special education students in county jails at least 27.5 hours a week of general curriculum instruction.

In October, the state education department came under federal investigation for its oversight of special education programs, including whether it properly investigates complaints about the quality of instruction for students with disabilities in local school districts.

• Feds launch inquiry into whether Mass.' special education system fails to comply with law
• 2022: New 'sobering' review of BPS special education program highlights disparities
• For young offenders in Maine, justice varies with geography

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Iowa lawmakers address immigration, religious freedom and taxes in 2024 session

FILE - The Iowa Capitol is visible before sunrise, Jan. 12, 2024, in Des Moines, Iowa. After a marathon day that stretched into the early hours of Saturday, April 20, Iowa lawmakers wrapped up a four-month legislative session that was focused on reforming the way special education is managed and speeding up tax cuts. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)

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DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — After a marathon day that stretched into Saturday’s early hours, Iowa lawmakers wrapped up a four-month legislative session that focused on reforming the way special education is managed and speeding up tax cuts. The Republican-led General Assembly also waded into issues like immigration and religious freedom , which have proven core to the party’s 2024 campaign message.

Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, pushed many priorities through the Legislature after submitting 18 requests for bill drafts, more than any other year of her tenure and any other governor since 2006, publicly available data shows.

Here’s a look at the issues that made headlines:

REYNOLDS’ PRIORITIES DOMINATE SESSION

Education was a key issue for Reynolds this session, including one proposal to revise the state’s education system for students with disabilities that consumed lawmakers’ attention.

Reynolds wanted school districts to be able to choose how to use their special education dollars. For decades, those funds have gone directly to cooperatives known as area education agencies, or AEAs, that provide special education services.

A compromise lets schools choose, starting in 2025, how to spend 10% of their special education funding. But that approach, along with other changes in the final bill, still leaves many disability advocates and AEA staff concerned that the agencies and special education will suffer.

MORE ON EDUCATION

Lawmakers also approved an increased minimum salary for Iowa teachers. In the upcoming school year, teachers with less than 12 years of experience will earn at least $47,500, up from $33,500. The minimum salary for more experienced teachers rises to $60,000. Both figures will increase again in the following school year.

The law also addressed non-salaried teachers and staff, allocating $14 million to help schools raise supplemental teacher pay.

In the final days of the session, lawmakers passed provisions to restrict programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, at the state’s public universities, joining a wave of Republican-led states weighing in on the initiatives. The bill prohibits staff positions and offices dedicated to creating or promoting DEI policies, programming or training, except as otherwise required by federal regulations.

IMMIGRATION LAW

Iowa Republicans followed Texas’ footsteps by passing a bill making it a state crime for a person to be in Iowa if previously denied admission to or removed from the United States. Reynolds signed it into law on April 10.

In Iowa and across the country , Republican leaders have accused President Joe Biden of neglecting his responsibilities to enforce federal immigration law.

The Iowa law, which takes effect July 1, has elevated anxiety in Iowa’s immigrant communities and has prompted questions among legal experts and law enforcement on how it will be enforced. It mirrors part of a Texas law that is currently blocked in court. The Justice Department has argued that such state laws are a clear violation of federal authority.

PREGNANCY BILLS

A bill passed this year updated an existing program that funds nonprofits known as crisis pregnancy centers, typically nonmedical facilities that counsel clients against having an abortion, charging the state’s health agency with implementation after it had difficulty finding a third-party administrator.

A separate budget bill provides an additional $1 million in funding for the program.

Lawmakers, with Reynolds’ recommendation, also expanded maternity leave from 60 days to 12 months for the state’s lowest-income moms on Medicaid.

Iowa Democrats, who have proposed expanded Medicaid maternity leave in the past, said the bill would remove benefits for certain mothers who did not meet the lower income threshold.

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

Iowa joined about two dozen other states by enacting an echo of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a 1993 federal law that said government would not be able to “substantially burden” someone’s constitutional right to freedom of religion.

Republicans argued that religious freedom is under attack, so the state’s code needed to further enshrine those rights, while Democrats said it would allow some people’s religious beliefs to justify discrimination.

Republican lawmakers voted to speed up the state’s 2022 income tax cuts, instituting a 3.8% flat income tax rate beginning next year.

Republicans also took the first steps toward two tax-related constitutional amendments to put before Iowa voters. One would enshrine the state’s use of a single rate for income taxes, and the other would require a two-thirds majority of lawmakers to change the tax code. To put a constitutional amendment on the ballot, Iowa lawmakers have to approve it in two consecutive sessions, so both resolutions would have to pass again in 2025 or 2026 to make the ballot.

WHAT DIDN’T SUCCEED

Lawmakers rejected one bill that would have removed gender identity from the state’s civil right law and another that would have narrowly defined male and female. The latter, requested by Reynolds, would have required a transgender person’s assigned sex at birth to be listed alongside their gender identity on their birth certificate.

House Republicans failed to advance a Senate-approved bill proposed by chemical giant Bayer that would have given the company legal protections against claims it failed to warn that its popular pesticide Roundup causes cancer, if the company is otherwise in compliance with federal regulations. One House Republican, a farmer, said he’ll put his name on it next year to try to see it through.

Iowa lawmakers also did not put forth a ballot initiative declaring there is no constitutional right to abortion in the state — after initially advancing the measure in 2021. Reynolds has said she’ll let the issue move through the courts rather than push for a vote. Iowa’s current law banning most abortions after roughly six weeks , before many women know they are pregnant, was enacted in July but paused by a judge soon after. The state Supreme Court will weigh in on the case in June.

A bill that would have made changes to Iowa’s fetal homicide law was shelved after a Senate Republican joined Democrats in voicing concerns about the potential impact on in vitro fertilization following an Alabama court ruling that frozen embryos can be considered children. Iowa’s law currently outlines penalties for terminating or seriously injuring a “human pregnancy.” The House-approved bill would have changed that language to apply to the death of, or serious injury to, an “unborn person” from fertilization to live birth.

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How Educators Secretly Remove Students With Disabilities From School

Known as informal removals, the tactics are “off-the-book” suspensions often in violation of federal civil rights protections for those with disabilities.

Dakotah LaVigne’s tumultuous educational journey has been marked by a series of tactics, known as informal removals, that schools secretly use to remove challenging students with disabilities from class. Credit... Ricardo Nagaoka for The New York Times

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By Erica L. Green

• Feb. 9, 2023

ROSEBURG, Ore. — Jessica LaVigne was nervous but hopeful on a recent afternoon that the team managing her son’s special education plan at Roseburg High School would tell her something she had dreamed of for more than a decade: He would be able to attend a full day of school for the first time since second grade.

During her son’s elementary years, Ms. LaVigne was called almost daily to pick him up hours early because he was having “a bad day.” By middle school, he was only attending an hour a day. By high school, he was told he had to “earn” back two class periods taken off his schedule by proving he was academically and socially ready.

As she and her son, Dakotah, 15, entered the school for the meeting, Ms. LaVigne, 37, a banquet server at a local casino, felt she had run out of time. “I used to want him to go to college, but now I just want him to live a normal life in society,” she had said earlier. “If he doesn’t go to school, I don’t know how that can happen.”

Dakotah’s tumultuous educational journey has been marked by a series of tactics, known as informal removals, that schools secretly and sometimes illegally use to remove challenging students with disabilities from class. The removals — which can include repeated dismissals in the middle of the day or shortening students’ education to a few hours a week — are often in violation of federal civil rights protections for those with disabilities.

In a report last year, the National Disability Rights Network, a national nonprofit established by Congress more than four decades ago, found informal removals occurring hundreds and perhaps thousands of times per year as “off-the-book suspensions.” The report said the removals also included “transfers to nowhere,” when students are involuntarily sent to programs that do not exist.

The removals largely escape scrutiny because schools are not required to report them in the same manner as formal suspensions and expulsions , making them difficult to track and their impact hard to measure.

But interviews with families, educators and experts — as well as a New York Times review of school emails, special education records and other documents — suggest that informal removals are pernicious practices that harm some of the nation’s most vulnerable children. Students are left academically stifled and socially marginalized. Their families often end up demoralized and desperate.

“The reality is that there are children in this country who are still considered of insufficient quality to go to school,” said Diane Smith Howard, a lawyer with the National Disability Rights Network. “This would never be deemed acceptable for students without disabilities.”

Dr. Russell J. Skiba, a professor emeritus at Indiana University and an expert in special education, said informal removals reflected the “precarious balance” that school districts must strike between discipline and education for disabled students. Some children with disabilities might benefit from a different class schedule, he said, but in practice many are removed from school to solve problems.

“Until we have a method of measuring sincerity,” Dr. Skiba said, “I don’t know how we get at what percentage are for the benefit of the student, what percentage can be to the benefit for the safety of the school and what percentage are ways of maintaining our status quo.”

Educators say that informal removals underscore how they struggle to comply with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and related legislation that began requiring schools to educate students with disabilities nearly 50 years ago. Federal funding to help schools cover the extra costs of special education has always fallen short of the targets in the law, leaving many without the resources they say they need.

The Education Department warned schools last summer that informal removals — including shortened school days — could violate federal civil rights laws. The year before, the Justice Department reached a settlement with Lewiston Public Schools in Maine after the department found that the district had violated the civil rights of students with disabilities without “considering their individual needs or exploring supports to keep them in school for the full day.”

Catherine E. Lhamon, the assistant secretary for civil rights at the Education Department, said schools were often unaware of how such practices could infringe students’ civil rights.

“It is uncommon in my experience for educators to try to hurt kids,” Ms. Lhamon said in an interview. “Still, the continuation of the practice sends a terrible message to students and to school communities about which students deserve an education.”

Informal removals only increased during the coronavirus pandemic, advocates say, as students with disabilities regressed the most during prolonged school closures.

“I’ve never seen this level of incorrect management of many of our patients in the school system, kids slipping through the cracks,” said Dr. Jenny Radesky, a developmental behavioral pediatrician at the Ypsilanti Health Center, a clinic primarily serving low-income families and people of color in Ypsilanti, Mich.

In October, federal lawmakers called for the department to specifically include informal removals as a type of prohibited discrimination in revisions to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 , the landmark disability civil rights law. Ms. Lhamon called the removals “an incredibly damaging practice that we very much want to see end.”

Dakotah’s Journey

Dakotah was diagnosed as a preschooler with Chromosome 4q deletion, a rare genetic disorder that affected his vision, speech and cognitive and fine motor skills. But with minimal exceptions like a nasal voice and developmental delays, he appeared like any other child.

In Head Start, Dakotah was described as a sociable boy who showed promise. His teachers reported that he had learned the rules and routines, and although he appeared less mature than his peers, he understood what was expected of him.

In kindergarten he became eligible for special education for what school officials described at the time as a “communication disorder,” but they opted instead to place him in a regular classroom and have him pulled out for instruction in a smaller group. In school records that asked about the possible harmful effects of the plan on Dakotah, the assessor noted only one: “Not being with peers 100 percent of the time.”

By first grade Dakotah was thriving and on track academically. Although a progress report noted that he would “often exhibit inappropriate behaviors to gain attention and will mimic the bad behavior of others,” the year ended with his teacher declaring: “Anyway, great kid! We love having him.”

Things started to go awry in second grade. “His behavior gets in the way of his learning daily,” a progress report noted. “He laughs, thinks things are silly and often doesn’t respond to teachers and peers. He has more ability than he shows.”

In an interview at his grandparents’ house, Dakotah said he stopped liking school that year. He said he spent hours away from his classmates in a “safe room” because of his outbursts, which he said happened when he had to do classwork that was too hard, with no help.

“They started doing this to me,” he said, as he wrapped his arms tightly around himself and squeezed, imitating being restrained .

The disciplinary reports started to pile up in third grade, including one reporting that Dakotah had picked up a classmate and hugged him so hard that the classmate cried out in pain. He bounced around districts, causing him to miss nearly a year’s worth of school.

By middle school, he was attending class only one hour a day and was performing at a kindergarten level. School officials said he had bitten through a classmate’s shoe, made “rude finger gestures” and engaged in other behavior that made him unfit for a general education classroom.

Ms. LaVigne, who struggled to reconcile her son’s disruptive and sometimes violent behavior at school with his easy disposition at home, would pick him up embarrassed. She asked the school if they could provide him with an aide who could help him get through his classes, but school officials said they could not afford one.

“I do not like when people are mean to me,” Dakotah said when asked about his behavior at school.

During the interview, Dakotah scribbled out his name to show his progress in writing and then headed outside to show how he could throw a football. One of his dreams is to become a quarterback.

“He’s never had a friend,” Ms. LaVigne said. “I watch him throw a ball and play catch by himself.”

Jasim’s Story

School districts have faced growing pressure from advocates and the federal government in recent years to cut the high suspension rates of students with disabilities , who are estimated to lose millions of instruction hours per year. To avoid such scrutiny, experts say, schools resort to the largely undocumented informal removals as workarounds.

Some districts acknowledge that they have come up short.

Such was the case with Jasim McDonald, a Black 14-year-old eighth grader with autism at Alice Birney Waldorf School in Sacramento, Calif. Records show that the Sacramento City Unified School District has a history of disciplining students with disabilities, particularly those who are Black, at a higher rate than most other public schools in the state . The district is  facing a class-action lawsuit alleging that it “disparately subjected” Black students with disabilities “to exclusionary school discipline and other tactics that remove them from school.”

From early on Jasim exhibited the fidgeting, rocking and pacing behavior characteristic of children with autism. In his first-grade reports, his white teacher at the predominantly white Alice Birney deemed him “disruptive,” or said he “needed a day off” or “wasn’t ready to learn.”

On one occasion, the records show, Jasim was sent out of class for an outburst and returned to find that his teacher had locked the doors and closed the curtains to her window, which brought about fears among his classmates that they were on lockdown.

Jasim’s mother, LaRayvian Barnes, a longtime classroom assistant who had worked with special needs students at Alice Birney for 22 years, pleaded with Jasim’s teacher and school administrators to stop excluding him from class.

“People would say what a shame it was that she didn’t have more support,” Ms. Barnes said in an interview. “But neither did he.”

By fifth grade, when Jasim had accumulated more than 80 removals, his longtime teacher —   the same one who had been instructing him since first grade — gave the school an ultimatum: Either Jasim had to leave or she would.

Ms. Barnes, outraged, was determined that her son would not be another statistic showing that informal removals disproportionately affect Black and low-income students. “She made him the bad, scary Black kid,” Ms. Barnes recalled of the teacher. “I knew there was no coming back from that.”

She filed a formal complaint with the Sacramento school district in 2019, alleging that Jasim had been denied an equitable education because of the frequent removals, which Ms. Barnes said were based on his disability and race.

In an investigative report issued that year, district officials found that while the teacher’s actions “may not have been perfect, there is no evidence to suggest that her actions are motivated by race or disability.”

But they acknowledged that the removals occurred with “measured frequency” and were used by school principals trying to avoid on-the-book suspensions. In a statement this year,   the district said that although not all of Ms. Barnes’s complaints were substantiated, “there were clear areas for improvement identified and actions taken.”

Jasim now has a different teacher who tells him he belongs, and assures him if he gets anxious when he leaves the classroom for periods of special instruction that his classmates will not move on without him. He is for the first time testing at grade level and is working on a capstone project about being a Black male student with autism. He said he wants it to show how people of different races and with disabilities can learn.

“Everything will be fine,” he said, “if you have people who support you.”

A New School

Dakotah was cautiously optimistic as he headed with his mother at the end of the school day into the meeting at Roseburg High. If his team determined he could attend for a full day, he said, “it’ll be like going to school for the first time.”

Once everyone was settled, the team reported that Dakotah could write one paragraph and would soon move to two. He could add and subtract numbers from zero to 30. His reading level had dropped from third grade to second, but he was starting sentences with capital letters.

Dakotah’s classroom aide, who was finally assigned after Dakotah had been assaulted in the bathroom the previous winter, reported that he had just had a good day. If he had to rate his behavior, he said, he would give him 70 out of 100.

But the team said Dakotah still needed to show consistent progress and was not ready for a full day. They also said that because he had not been attending the first three hours of school for more than a year he was no longer a “morning person.”

It was all cold comfort for Dakotah. “I wanted to hear ‘full day,’” he said as he stood outside the school after the meeting. “All I heard was ‘earn, earn, earn.’”

A few weeks later, the school team emailed Ms. LaVigne to set up another meeting, offering to add one class to Dakotah’s schedule in December. “There will be a huge gap in time if Dakotah transitions to a full day at once,” a school official wrote. The team asked Ms. LaVigne to reply “agree” or “disagree.”

By then she had reached out to a lawyer. “I do NOT agree to this plan,” she wrote back. “The only thing a reduced schedule has done for him is rob him of time that could’ve been spent learning. In the last several meetings, I’ve been told how he has met his goals, or most of them.”

She added that “I’d like to be provided with prior written notice” — a legal term that sets off alarm bells among educators — if the team did not add a class to his schedule immediately.

The school gave in.

On Dec. 5, Dakotah started a full day at Roseburg. He spent most of the mornings helping out in the office. But he was there, finally, at the same start time as his peers.

But in early January Ms. LaVigne received a familiar phone call. A school principal reported that Dakotah had an altercation with his aide and an assistant principal after being called “a little boy” and was placed in a seclusion room to settle down. He was bound for an in-school suspension.

Something in Ms. LaVigne finally snapped. She told the school she would come get Dakotah and he would not return.

This time it was school administrators on the other end pleading and protesting, expressing how much they liked Dakotah, and that Roseburg was where he belonged.

But it was too late. Ms. LaVigne picked up her son and pulled away from the school, heartbroken.

Jill Weber, the Roseburg High School principal, declined to comment on Dakotah because of privacy laws, but said in a statement that “my staff and I care deeply about every single student who comes through our doors.”

“We do everything we can to build relationships with them,” she said, “so that they know our school is a safe and supportive environment where they can grow and succeed.”

In a separate statement, district officials said abbreviated school days were used sparingly, with the goal of moving students to a full day. The statement added: “We have a responsibility to ensure high quality support and instruction for all students. We need to take into account the rights of all students to be able to access and participate in school in a safe, predictable and welcoming environment.”

Last month Dakotah started in a new school, in a new district. So far he has attended a full day without issue.

This week Ms. LaVigne, who is now connected with a group of attorneys, testified to the Oregon state legislature in support of a bill that would limit the use of abbreviated school days in the state. It is one of several efforts in Oregon, including a closely watched class-action lawsuit , to curb or eliminate the practice.

“It might not help Dakotah,” Ms. LaVigne said of her testimony. “But hopefully it will do something for kids in the future.”

Erica L. Green is a correspondent in Washington covering education and education policy. More about Erica L. Green

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Special Education Funding Is ‘Fundamentally Broken,’ Researcher Says

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The system for funding special education in the United States is a complex mess that is widening inequities in access to quality services and putting many students at risk for failure in school.

That is the conclusion of Tammy Kolbe, an associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Vermont, who has conducted extensive research about the funding of special education in this country. Kolbe spoke to Education Week reporters and editors on a Zoom call Dec. 9.

To begin with, Kolbe points out that while the number of students who qualify for special education services has increased and the costs of those services have soared, federal funding for those services has stayed largely flat over the past two decades.

The complex, disjointed system for funding makes it very difficult to examine the true cost of special education and what an appropriate level of funding should look like. But Kolbe and other researchers are trying to tackle that complexity and, in turn, figure out what funding approaches might serve students with special needs more effectively.

In fact, earlier this year, Kolbe, Elizabeth Dhuey from the University of Toronto Scarborough, and Sara Menlove Doutre from WestEd, wrote a paper published by the Annenberg Center at Brown University arguing that special education funding is inequitable and funding increases alone won’t alleviate disparities across states. One of the biggest problems is that the formula the federal government uses to distribute the money to states hasn’t been updated in decades.

“The formula that the feds use to allocate the dollars is fundamentally broken,” Kolbe told Education Week during the Zoom call.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), established in 1975, requires schools to provide a free and appropriate public education to students with disabilities and authorizes the federal government to contribute money that equals 40 percent of the nation’s average K-12 spending per student. States and school districts have to make up the difference. States are also responsible for distributing the IDEA funds to their school districts.

But Kolbe said the federal government has never come close to meeting that 40 percent target. By her estimation, the federal special education grants to states during fiscal year 2017 comprised about 15 percent of the estimated additional cost of providing services for a student with an individualized education plan (IEP).

‘Different kinds of incentives and disincentives’ to identify and help students

There are many challenges with the current special education funding system, Kolbe said. For one, because cost-sharing arrangements between states and districts differ by state, not all states are “equally generous” with providing supplemental support for special education students, Kolbe said. This also means that a lot of the cost burden falls to local school districts.

And not all states and districts have the same capacity for raising revenue so they might not always be able to pay the additional costs of providing services for students with disabilities.

“[It] creates different kinds of incentives and disincentives to identify and service students,” Kolbe said. But that shouldn’t be the case. Theoretically, two students with the same disability—one living in Vermont and the other in Mississippi—should have access to the same supports and services, she said.

“My access to services should not differ whether I’m in Michigan, California, or Texas, Florida, and yet they do. This is a big deal—we’ve got to figure that out,” Kolbe added.

The good news, though, is that there are states already evaluating their funding models and looking for better solutions, Kolbe said. For example, the Ohio legislature is seeking to modernize its K-12 funding formula and examining special education funding will be part of that analysis.

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